But while Rogue One succeeds in the big-picture sense of depicting a crucial moment in the rebellion’s struggle against the mighty and oppressive Empire, it fails to make us care about the individual characters who are swept up in this conflict. The film is so densely plotted, so busy advancing the particulars of its story or plowing through one of its many visually impressive action scenes, that it rarely takes the time to breathe and let us get to know the people who are doing the fighting.

So as visually impressive as they are, the film’s space battles and ground skirmishes aren’t as absorbing as they would be if we felt more of a connection to the characters. And when major characters die, you can almost feel the film straining to generate some powerful emotion that it hasn’t earned because it hasn’t taken the time to develop those characters. If you’re a Star Wars fan, some of the most effective moments in Rogue One may be those times when familiar characters from Episode IV show up, because we’ve already developed an emotional investment in those characters. Rogue One uses this to its advantage, occasionally tossing in familiar characters or visual references to Episode IV purely as a bit of fan service, rather than because it’s important to the story this film is telling.

Rogue One’s central character is Jyn Erso, a young woman with a close personal connection to the development of the Death Star, a connection the Rebellion hopes to exploit in order to deal with the Empire’s terrifying new weapon. Unfortunately, despite being at the center of the story, Jyn is the least distinctive character in the film’s core cast of heroes. She doesn’t seem like anyone in particular.

At least the people surrounding her have some defining characteristics. Diego Luna’s Cassian is a freedom fighter haunted by something in his past that makes fighting the Empire deeply personal to him. Donnie Yen plays Chirrut Imwe, a blind disciple of the Force whose connection with his gruff friend and protector Baze Malbus is the most emotionally involving relationship in the film. Even Saw Gerrera, played by an underused Forest Whitaker, is more well-defined than Jyn; Gerrera’s a former ally of the Rebellion who has been written off as too much of a militant extremist, and who now fights his own kind of resistance.

Both Cassian and Saw Gerrera are characters who have done morally questionable or reprehensible things in the name of fighting back against the Empire, and while previous Star Wars films have always presented the conflict between the Rebellion and the Empire in very stark terms of good vs. evil, Rogue One at least flirts with questioning whether it’s possible to go too far, even when your cause is just. You can see more clearly here than in any other Star Wars film how one person’s freedom fighter might be another person’s terrorist, and how desperate times may indeed call for some truly desperate measures. Still, it’s clear that Rogue One isn’t really interested in exploring these questions, and doesn’t want viewers to dwell on or even think about the tremendous loss of life that happens on the Imperial side of the conflict as star destroyers explode and stormtroopers are slaughtered.

And for all the talk from some people about how Rogue One and films like it constitute some kind of feminist propaganda, it doesn’t take much to see that this is still very much a universe of men. There are a few female pilots in the Rebellion fleet this time around, and Mon Mothma is present as the leader of the Alliance, but in the core cast, Jyn Erso is the lone woman surrounded by many, many men. So while it’s great to see characters like Jyn in Rogue One and Rey in The Force Awakens having prominent roles, it hardly indicates an end to patriarchy, either in the Star Wars universe or in the film industry.

In the end, Rogue One works well as a narrative that fills in some gaps in other, better films, explaining not just how the rebels got their hands on the Death Star plans, but also why the Death Star has such an easily exploitable weakness in the first place. But because so much of its focus is on communicating plot and not enough focus goes into developing its characters and their relationships with each other, the all-important human element gets a bit lost in all the sound and fury of war.

It’s been 15 years since the events of Dishonored, and the young Emily Kaldwin, daughter of the murdered Empress, is now a reluctant Empress herself, doubtful of her own abilities as leader and weary of the superficial traditions of courtly life. She has little time to lament her plight, though, as the witch Delilah organizes a new plot to usurp the throne, launching a coup that casts Emily from power. At this point, you can choose to play either as Emily or as her father and protector Corvo, and your choice has a significant impact both on the abilities you have at your disposal and on the way the story plays out.

In fact, Dishonored 2’s greatest strength may be the versatility it offers you as a player, and the way the world adapts in response to your actions. I opted to play as Emily, of course, and embraced a high-chaos approach, getting plenty of blood on my hands as I cut down the many guards who got in my way. However you approach the game, the action is tight, precise, and satisfying, though if you do take the lethal approach, the violence is disturbingly, often unnecessarily graphic. Still, I appreciated that people view you and treat you differently depending on your actions; if you’re ruthless, people are less inclined to trust you, and some feel betrayed to see you using the very methods of violence and brutality that your mother refused to employ when she was empress.

More enticing than the game’s narrative flexibility is its gameplay flexibility. Because each mission can be tackled in such a diverse assortment of ways and the level design encourages experimentation, this is the rare game that actually left me feeling eager to play through it again, wanting to try different paths and approaches to each mission, going for non-lethal solutions instead of brutal ones.

While the original Dishonored allowed you to take a nonlethal approach as well, the powers at your disposal were heavily skewed toward the murderous. Dishonored 2 improves on its predecessor in this regard, letting you choose from a wider assortment of abilities tailored to a nonlethal approach. And as you progress from mission to mission, new wrinkles are introduced that change up the gameplay. In one area, for instance, you can shift between the past and the present, using this to find new pathways and to get the drop on unsuspecting enemies. Concepts like this are hardly new to video games, but the way they’re implemented here keeps you on your toes and prevents missions from feeling standard or predictable.

You’ll also want to return to Dishonored 2’s world because the wonderful richness and diversity of its environments makes them a joy to explore. From the storm-ridden dilapidation of the Dust District to the mechanical elegance of the Clockwork Mansion, this is a world that feels dense with history, and I actually found myself wanting to examine every painting and rummage in every drawer to uncover its secrets.

So Dishonored 2 excels at worldbuilding, incredibly so, but unfortunately, it’s considerably less successful at crafting a compelling story. There are some great moments in Emily’s character arc as the story progresses, and she recognizes that, by ruling as an empress who was detached from the real concerns of her people, she sometimes unwittingly perpetuated oppression by allowing unjust rulers to remain in power. But the quality of the dialogue and voice acting are inconsistent, and at times become bad enough to pull you out of the world. Meanwhile, the overarching plot is entirely the stuff of typically mediocre video game storytelling, populated with cliche character types we’ve encountered a dozen times before. But letters and other scraps of writing scattered throughout the world can enrich your understanding of your allies and your enemies, lending them a bit of humanity and complexity that the game’s story otherwise fails to convey.

The world of Dishonored 2 is also far better for women than that of the original game, and not just because you can play as Emily. In the first game, women existed largely as victims, servants, and sex workers, who communicated to the player that the misogyny and patriarchy they lived under was bad, but by failing to resist or challenge it, they also reinforced the idea that it was inevitable. Dishonored 2 is filled with women as both allies and enemy combatants, as well as women in positions of leadership and political power.

For the most part, this is great. But unfortunately, the villain Delilah is the weakest aspect of the game, embodying the trope of the sinister seductress to a T, with her sultry speech and her sexualized clothing and animations. However, Dishonored 2 manages to be excellent in spite of its disappointing antagonist and a narrative that often falls back on video game storytelling conventions. It’s easier to forgive these flaws when you consider just how captivating a world this game creates, a world that allows for so much freedom and versatility, a world with such a rich sense of history, a world filled with women virtuous and evil, kind and cunning, poor and powerful.

Nearly every main story mission has you infiltrating some heavily guarded facility or another in order to steal something or hack something, and once you find a strategy that works for you, it’s very easy to fall into a pattern of approaching all of these missions in more or less the same way. Your character, Marcus Holloway, can’t take much punishment, and the environments are filled with enemies who will immediately call for more reinforcements at any sign of trouble, so you’re discouraged from relying on the all-out, guns-blazing approach.

This makes sense in a game that wants you to use your hacker abilities to tackle the situations you’re faced with, but because failure in this game can be so punishing and send you back so far, I tended to complete most missions using the same tactic. The core of my strategy was hanging back, hacking into the building’s security systems, and picking off the enemies who could call for reinforcements one by one by forging criminal records and having the police come in and arrest or kill them. It was passive and often tedious, but it got the job done.

Of course, sometimes it’s a strength when a game punishes you for failure. In games with precise combat, the prospect of a significant setback can raise the stakes, encouraging you to master the mechanics and making your victories all the more rewarding. But Watch Dogs 2 is no such game. This is no Dark Souls. This is a by-the-numbers open-world game with mediocre gunplay and systems that interact so erratically that all you can do is try to manage them well enough to complete your objective and get out alive.

As shabby as the mission design is, the game deserves some credit for its obviously well-intentioned efforts to acknowledge the existence of structural racism. At one point, the young black protagonist Marcus discusses the racial profiling tactics that tagged him as a criminal risk, and his brother-in-arms Horatio, whose day job is at the Google stand-in Nudle, comments frankly on the racism and condescension he experiences as one of the only people of color in an overwhelmingly white company. The presence of Miranda, a black trans councilwoman who does what she can to help Marcus and his colleagues in the hacker collective known as DedSec, is also welcome. On the other hand, Latinx people in Watch Dogs 2 are primarily represented as the most cliche kinds of gang members imaginable.

As important as it is that games give us heroes and supporting characters who break from the long-established molds, there’s more to great characterization than simply ticking off a few boxes on a diversity checklist, and Watch Dogs 2 falls short here. Its characters relate to each other more in geek sci-fi references and cheesy one-liners than in anything that actually reveals to us who they are and what makes them tick, so it’s hard to get invested in their struggle and their relationships with each other.

Watch Dogs 2’s San Francisco setting is recognizable but doesn’t feel authentic, despite being packed with landmarks and familiar locations, including San Francisco’s greatest treasure: the sea lions down at pier 39. It’s great to see Pride flags flying in certain spots around the city, and Watch Dogs 2 makes no effort to minimize or deny the existence of SF’s queer community. But for all that, the game’s concerns feel oddly detached from the real issues that face San Francisco today. Graffiti that reads “Artists used to live here” poignantly speaks to the fact that entire communities are being driven out of the city as tech companies make life here unsustainable for so many, and the occasional passerby may make mention of the gentrification that’s taking place. So why isn’t DedSec using its power to stand up for marginalized communities? Why isn’t DedSec fighting for affordable housing, and fighting against the police injustice that specifically targets people of color? Why not confront the things that are really happening here, the things that really matter to the people who call San Francisco home?

Perhaps the strangest thing of all about Watch Dogs 2, though, is its uneasy relationship with power. Ostensibly DedSec is all about waking up the populace, getting them to understand how power is abused by politicians, tech companies, and government agencies to limit people’s freedom to think and act for themselves. But what DedSec never does is turn that questioning lens on its own use and abuse of power. It was never lost on me that, playing as a young black man who had been profiled as a likely criminal because of his race, I then harnessed the power of technology to forge criminal records for dozens and dozens of innocent people and watched them get marched off by the cops themselves. But hey, what was I gonna do? I had a mission to complete.

Gears 4 gets off to a promising start, suggesting that the COG, the Coalition of Ordered Governments that fought so valiantly for humanity in the original games, has become an oppressive, authoritarian force in a post-Locust world. The press conference that begins the game shows us how the government-controlled media glorifies the COG and its de-facto leader, First Minister Jinn, presenting her as a noble figure with humanity’s best interests at heart. The reality of Jinn’s politics turn out to be more complicated, however, as people are required by law to live in fabricated cities, and women are required to participate in post-war repopulation efforts. Kait, the squad’s one female member, understandably takes issue with this, and I hoped the game might explore this idea some more, but it’s quickly dropped and never mentioned again.

The gameplay also starts off strong, before becoming more conventional and expected. As “outsiders,” humans who have chosen to defy the government and live in their own settlements, the protagonists face off against the COG’s robot army in the early sections of the game. During these encounters, the combat feels simultaneously swift and hefty. Spherical enemies called trackers can be kicked away like soccer balls, lending the combat a playful physicality, and the spectacle of robots being dropped into the environment by massive planes flying overhead makes these battles feel dramatic and desperate. It’s also during these first few acts that we see far more of Sera’s natural beauty than we ever have before.

But soon the game retreats into more standard and familiar territory. All the interesting early concerns about how the COG is misusing its military and industrial power go out the window when the game once again pits you against the Locust in the sorts of grimy industrial environments that were so common in the original Gears games. The Locust continue to be an enemy with all the nuance of J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs; they’re seemingly an inherently hostile, aggressive species that we can feel justified in slaughtering without any moral qualms whatsoever.

Still, the interpersonal dynamics within your squad set Gears 4 apart a bit from its predecessors. The central character, Marcus Fenix’s son JD, isn’t terribly interesting. He’s the sort of blandly likable protagonist who might have been played by Chris Pratt if this had been a movie. And not the funny, quirky Chris Pratt; more like the Jurassic World Chris Pratt. But what is interesting is the difference between Marcus and the younger members of the squad. Marcus is as gruff, grizzled and crusty as ever, but JD, Kait and Del bring a different kind of energy to Gears. They’re a bit more lighthearted than the men of Delta Squad were, joking and making wisecracks, suggesting that they’ve grown up in a more peaceful time than the previous generation did. Unfortunately, Del, the squad’s one black member, doesn’t get to do much of anything but joke and make wisecracks. JD, Marcus, and Kait all have the suggestion of lives that extend beyond the battlefield, but Del’s character arc begins and ends with being JD’s warm, wisecracking buddy. Meanwhile Oscar, Kait’s uncle, is presented as reckless and drunk, teetering over into being a racial stereotype.

It’s also frustrating that the game employs a standard damsel-in-distress device, with Kait’s mother Reina, who is introduced as a strong leader, being reduced to a plot mechanism when she’s taken by the Locust early on. Sure, Marcus is also captured for a brief period of time, but it’s not the same sort of overarching plot motivator that Reina’s capture is. On the other hand, Kait is presented as a capable and competent member of the team, with Marcus and everyone else treating her with respect and a sense of solidarity. Of course, not treating a female character terribly is hardly something we should celebrate; it’s simply something we should expect.

And ultimately, Gears of War 4 is all about giving us exactly what we expect; nothing less and nothing more. It’s a solidly built machine that, ten years after the release of the original game, wants to convince us that this franchise can still be relevant. But if it’s going to be relevant, it needs to take some chances. Gears 4 starts off suggesting that it might take us to new places but then shies away from that, and in the end, it’s yet another cover shooter that centers the experiences of its white male characters and has us fighting the same straightforward battles we’ve fought before. It could have been fun and surprising and special, but in the end, it’s content to just be fun and familiar and predictable.

But before we dive too deep into the game’s themes of oppression and discrimination, let’s talk about the experience of playing Mankind Divided. Much of the game takes place in Prague, and despite the tensions in the air between police and augmented people, the streets of the city have their charms. There’s a subdued beauty to the architecture, and the advertising and street art lends the city some life as you make your way around, talking to characters to complete side quests and advance the story.

However, the core stealth action of Mankind Divided actually feels like a step back from that of Human Revolution. In Mankind Divided, you have even more augmentations to choose from, but that doesn’t translate to a greater, more enjoyable sense of freedom in gameplay. You only have so many points to spend activating and upgrading your augmentations, and you may find that you don’t get many opportunities to put the ones you choose to good use. Where Human Revolution was focused on letting you use its more limited assortment of powers effectively, Mankind Divided is spread a little too thin, trying to accommodate too many abilities and as a result, most of them don’t end up feeling as useful as you’d hope.

On top of that, the game doesn’t always function that well. Enemy AI sometimes doesn’t react appropriately, waypoints don’t always clearly tell you where to go, and if you ever agree to knock a particular person unconscious and deliver him to a storage locker, let’s just say you may run into a few problems.

Issues like this, though, can be altered or fixed with a patch. The issues with Mankind Divided’s story run much deeper. Adam Jensen’s flat, one-note delivery in every situation is tiresome; this guy sounds so grim and grizzled, it’s as if just cracking a smile would be enough to shatter his cybernetic sunglasses. A story like this, that acts as if it’s interested in exploring real issues of humanity, would have benefited from a protagonist who shows a little more humanity himself.

Additionally, the game’s plot just doesn’t work on the basic level of being an engaging story with a clear beginning, middle and end. Rather, it’s an incoherent mess of shadowy conspiracies that feels incredibly unresolved when it arrives at its abrupt ending. Ultimately, Mankind Divided’s story feels entirely like setup for the next game, rather than a story that’s worth telling on its own.

However, the most significant problem with Mankind Divided’s narrative is the way in which it fails to take a stand on very clear issues of moral principle. The big question looming over humanity in the game is whether or not the UN should pass the Human Restoration Act, a piece of legislation which would lead to the global segregation of augmented people. Some countries have already started relocating augmented people into ghettos, and those that remain in cities like Prague are now asked to show their papers, while cops can be heard talking openly about their desire to kill augs on sight. The game is explicit, even heavy handed, in its attempts to link the oppression faced by augmented people in its fictional setting to the oppression and violence that some populations have faced in the 20th and 21st centuries. But these parallels are tremendously misguided, for a number of reasons.

Within the world of Deus Ex, augmented people are feared by many of their fellow human beings because of the Aug Incident. The Aug Incident occurred when Hugh Darrow, the antagonist of Human Revolution, broadcast a signal that forced augmented people around the world to lose control and attack others, resulting in the deaths of 50 million people. So on one hand, Mankind Divided wants us to consider a scenario about a fictional population of cybernetically augmented people who actually do represent a threat to the safety and well-being of all of humanity. Within the confines of this fictional scenario, one might reasonably ask how humanity should confront that danger.

But then, on the other hand, it wants us to see echoes of the treatment of actual oppressed populations in the plight of the augs, populations whose humanity is stripped from them not because they chose to undergo some procedure or because they represent a threat to others but because of their race or religion or sexuality or gender identity. And there is absolutely no moral ambiguity with regard to the treatment of any of these real-world populations.

Emblematic of the game’s unwillingness to take a stand is the way it positions a group called ARC, or the Augmented Rights Coalition. Posters in the game that include the words “Augmented Lives Matter” explicitly link ARC to the contemporary American civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, which arose in response to the very real, widespread, systematic dehumanization and murder of black people by police. It is simply outrageous for Mankind Divided to appropriate the language of this vital and necessary social justice movement for its own narrative, which has no moral backbone whatsoever, and to apply that language to a fictional organization that, like everything else in the world of Deus Ex, is neither just nor unjust, but resides somewhere in between.

ARC presents itself as an organization that strives to push back against systematic oppression and assert the basic human rights of augmented people. But is ARC really a nonviolent human rights group, or is it a terrorist organization? Of course in Deus Ex, it’s both, or neither. The game raises real-world issues about which there are very clear things to say, and then it refuses to say anything about them. It has to take place in an entire world of moral ambiguity, where everything is painted in shades of gray, where the oppressors and the oppressed are all bad and neither side is entirely wrong or right.

To be clear, the problem here is not the fact that the story incorporates issues of systematic oppression. Some of the best science fiction ever written engages in serious explorations of sociopolitical issues that have a real impact on how people live their lives. Games can do the same. The problem is that Mankind Divided layers these concerns onto its surface, presenting a grim, gritty sci-fi world in which these issues exist, but rather than actually exploring them and coming to the conclusions that doing so would demand, the only response it can muster is a shrug.

She needs that core of strength and stability because the universe around her seems so unstable. The game’s whole world appears to be in a constant state of flux, platforms materializing and disappearing, the ground shifting and undulating like the surface of the ocean. It’s a wonderful visual effect that lends the experience of playing Bound a feeling of venturing into uncertainty. Unfortunately, this effect also contributes to times when you’re unclear about whether the game is even functioning as intended. You might make a jump, for instance, only to see the platform disappear from under your feet and send you plummeting to your death. Although these moments are rare, they were kinda frustrating and occasionally I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not.

Interestingly, there is no combat in the game, only defense. As you move through the environments, you encounter hazards that try to bind you and restrict your movement. You protect and liberate yourself from these dangers by dancing. Like the environmental instability, this works well on a metaphorical level, suggesting that the character is finding the strength within herself to persevere on her quest. It’s rare to come across a game in which the mechanics and the narrative complement each other as naturally as they do in Bound. The gameplay feels as if it was designed specifically to support the themes of the story, and as a result, it pulls you deeper into the main character’s journey.

But despite serving the story well, these mechanics aren’t robust enough to make for a satisfying experience. You can just sort of randomly press buttons to dance and shield yourself from dangers, and while the freedom of movement and creative expression that this suggests is great, the fact that you can always fumble your way through these encounters also makes them a bit unfulfilling.

At the end of each area, you encounter a memory from the main character’s past. At first, these memories are in a million little pieces and can’t be clearly seen, but as you move the camera and explore the space, the image comes together. Like many aspects of Bound, there’s a powerful symbolism here that may strongly resonate with players who have had to confront painful or traumatic memories from their own past. It reflects the ways in which those memories are often fractured, and how sometimes all that remains are images of moments that left some lingering imprint on us.

With its focus on painful childhood memories, Bound is reminiscent of Minority Media’s excellent game Papo & Yo. But where that game had a clear narrative with a strong resolution, Bound leaves things more open to interpretation. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and oftentimes in life there aren’t clear resolutions and easy answers. But still, Bound’s ending feels like it arrives prematurely, as if you haven’t really gotten to the heart of what you’ve been exploring and investigating all along.

Still, even if Bound feels incomplete in the end, the journey is striking and memorable thanks to the game’s mesmerizing visuals and animations. Its psychological explorations are missing that bit of soul they needed to leave you feeling fulfilled, but there’s something beautiful and inspiring in its images of a woman confronting her own memories and liberating herself from the painful restrictions of her past.

The basic premise is this: Nathan’s brother Sam, long thought dead, appears out of the blue with a price on his head and convinces Nathan to come back into the treasure-hunting game to help him find the legendary pirate loot that will let him buy his freedom. But it’s not the events of the plot that are especially interesting in Uncharted 4. Rather, it’s the way the game tells its story, with a real focus on the characters and their motivations. The dialogue and acting are excellent; often it’s what the characters don’t say that tells us the most, and sometimes they can speak volumes with just a look.

The plot itself, on the other hand, can be cliche and frustrating, and because the storytelling is so great, this leaves us wishing the characters were in a better story. The first time we see Nathan and his wife Elena together, it’s a delightful and surprising scene that suggests the two share a wonderful level of closeness and trust. Their conversation is serious and playful and honest all at once. It’s so disappointing, then, that Nathan does what men in these stories so often do when he sets out for adventure: he lies to his wife about what he’s doing.

Having Nate do something so foolish is an easy and predictable way for the story to generate conflict that also relegates Elena to representing the dull, domestic existence Nate leaves behind while he’s off gallivanting around with Sam and Sully. As players, of course we want Nathan to “seek his fortune”–that’s where all the fun and excitement comes in–and this tired plot device only makes Elena seem like an obstacle to that excitement. She’s a great character when she’s given the chance and Uncharted 4 does eventually give her the chance. But it would have been refreshing if, instead of relying on formulaic plot points, the game had given us a portrait of a marriage between two people who really do trust each other and who face challenges together as equal partners.

Uncharted 4 also stumbles with its portrayals of people of color. The only prominent person of color in the cast is Nadine Ross, the tough and cunning owner of a private army called Shoreline, which, weirdly, despite being run by a woman, doesn’t seem to employ any. Still, she’s a decent character, and a better brawler than Nathan. But she is a villain, and aside from her, people of color in Uncharted 4 are often depicted as threatening stereotypes, like the tattooed thugs you fight in a Panamanian prison or the sadistic drug lord who threatens to end Sam’s life if he doesn’t find the legendary pirate treasure. The fact that the heroes of the game are a bunch of very privileged white people makes it a little uncomfortable that the game treats a town in Madagascar as their personal playground, with parts of it left damaged and destroyed in the wake of a massive action setpiece.

At times, internal tension arises between the human story that Uncharted 4 is trying to tell and the inhuman actions that the game makes its heroes perform. Nathan and Sam sometimes reflect on the morality of the pirates whose treasure they’re hunting but never really pause and question the morality of their own actions. And in one scene, the psychopathic antagonist Rafe Adler states that Nathan and Sam don’t have it in them to kill Nadine, even though they’ve literally killed hundreds of people by that point in the game.

It’s in moments like this that Uncharted 4 feels most constrained by the fact that, as an action adventure game, it is seemingly required to force you into situations where you have to kill a dozen or so guys. But to its credit, Uncharted 4 also tries to rise above the standard expectations of the action adventure game. In some ways, it’s clearly building on Left Behind, developer Naughty Dog’s wonderful DLC for The Last of Us which placed more emphasis on storytelling and character development than on action and violence.

This is a game that’s willing to really take its time using gameplay to enhance our understanding of its characters, as in an early scene where you explore Nathan’s house, finding mementos of his past adventures. There is a wonderful density of detail to its environments that makes you feel grounded in these places as you just walk around, examining objects and getting a richer idea of who these people are. There’s also a terrific confidence to the game’s pacing. Even more so than in earlier Uncharted games, long, compelling stretches are devoted to just traversing its beautiful levels and solving puzzles, with combat feeling like a periodic punctuation to the action rather than something the game relies on constantly.

Uncharted 4 is frustrating when it is exploring really conventional and (ahem) well-charted territory. But there are a number of beautiful and surprising moments in it which I’m not going to talk about here, and the excellent environmental design, writing and voice acting often lift the characters above the conventions of the story they’re stuck in. In the end, it’s the relationships, not the pirate booty, that matter most in Uncharted 4. And while the game sometimes goes through the motions of being a standard action adventure, it also simultaneously demonstrates that there’s still room for AAA games to challenge our expectations and really surprise us, and that’s something I want to see a lot more of in the future.

Sadly, Quantum Break’s story is just a mess. Because of reasons, time is fractured, stuttering with increasing frequency and possibly approaching a point at which it just breaks down completely. Different men have different ideas about how to deal with this problem, and they fight with each other while uttering standard lines of dialogue like “It doesn’t have to end like this.” There are very few clear rules established in Quantum Break about how time works. It just behaves in whatever way it needs to behave to throw the characters into another complication or to give the main character new powers. Things just happen because they’re convenient for the story, so there’s nothing clearly at stake.

You might argue that the quality of the story in a game like this isn’t all that important, but the thing is that Quantum Break really wants you to care about its story. You see, Quantum Break is one part game, one part live action TV show, and a good chunk of your time is spent watching the four live-action episodes that play out over the course of the game. And they’re just such generically bad TV, filled with cliché dialogue and cookie cutter characters, right down to the comic relief tech geek hacker type that seems to be a necessity these days in every mediocre crime drama. There are a few fine actors here, including Lance Reddick, who proves he can bring gravitas to even the goofiest material. But the most that decent acting can do here is serve as a smokescreen to distract us from just how bad the story actually is.

Quantum Break is, at its core, a tale of three men. You play as Jack Joyce, a man who comes away from a time travel mishap with the ability to manipulate time in specific ways. It’s sort of like last year’s adventure game Life Is Strange, only instead of using its concept to explore relationships and serious, real-life issues like bullying and suicide, Quantum Break just uses it as a source for spectacle. Jack’s brother Will is an eccentric genius, and the villain, Paul Serene, is a powerful CEO of a massive corporation named Monarch. Both Will and Paul’s characters are just recycled archetypes without any new flavouring. Quantum Break doesn’t even try to break from traditional male-dominated convention here.

The TV show portion of this game also spends a lot of time on a supporting character named Liam Burke. Burke gets into weird escalator kick fights! Burke unleashes manly screams while strangling someone to death in a hospital as a bunch of people just stand around and watch! Burke has a pregnant wife who he would do anything—ANYTHING—to protect. Games and other mainstream media often reinforce the notion of women as fragile and men as protectors whose role and responsibility requires them to do anything to either protect or avenge their families—Max Payne was definitely in this mold, too—but Burke is a particularly bland and formulaic take on this character type, and that’s really saying something.

In Quantum Break, men are the prime actors and doers. Men are the ones with vision and ambition, who set things in motion and who then do whatever they can to make things go their way. The only female character who gets any real development is Beth Wilder, who helps Jack for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. In one of the game’s only moments that even come close to generating actual interest in its characters, we do eventually get to know Beth’s history and her motivations. Her main purpose here, though, is to serve as a love interest for Jack, and she’s ultimately more important for the emotional impact she has on him than she is as an individual in her own right.

It’s also worth noting that like most of the enemies, Beth works security for the Monarch corporation. She must be the only woman on a team otherwise made up of hundreds of men, because there are no female combatants in the game. As for the combat, there’s a certain novelty for a little while to the spectacle of Quantum Break’s action. Seeing environments shatter in slow motion and seeing people get stuck in time looks pretty cool. But that’s all it does. Quantum Break’s structure feels overly familiar and predictable, from the heavy enemies it introduces with the weak points on their backs to the checkpoints near the end in which it throws so many enemies at you that you just want it all to be over.

It’s unfortunate that Quantum Break’s ambition to tell video game stories in a new way is wasted on a story that doesn’t do anything new. The game doesn’t seem to care if it makes any sense or if its story actually tries to say anything. All it cares about is being “awesome” in the most insubstantial way possible, in the sense that it’s “awesome” to watch a locomotive crash again and again and again. There’s nothing underneath. Maybe, maybe in 2001 when Max Payne came out, a flashy gimmick was enough to make the mere act of filling hundreds of dudes with bullets more than a hollow exercise. But not now. We’re not actually stuck in time. But playing Quantum Break, it sure feels like we are.

The game starts with a flashback section that serves as both a tutorial and an introduction to the mysterious Agent 47 for players who might not be familiar with him from earlier games. But the thing about Agent 47 is that there’s not much to know. He’s as unsure about his past as we are. In this new Hitman, he’s not ruthless. He’s not vengeful. He doesn’t seem haunted by his past or by the things he does. He just seems dispassionate and detached in the extreme. And the Hitman games are supposed to be a kind of assassination fantasy, a chance to play out the kind of perfectly executed hit that we see glorified in movies, pulled off by a killer for whom it’s all just business. But it’s worth asking ourselves, if extreme emotional detachment is part of that fantasy, why is that something that we admire? Why do we want to step into the shoes of a character who seemingly can’t feel much of anything?

Hitman’s two training scenarios serve to familiarize you with the game’s mechanics, but the most interesting thing about them is the way that they’re presented. They both take place on a large staging area in the Agency headquarters; they’re not supposed to be real. The ocean water is just the ground painted blue, the helicopter is made of wood. All the artifice in these scenarios makes it much easier to accept the quirks of the AI behavior. They’re all just actors playing a part in your training exercise, they’re not real people in real situations. But when you move on to Paris, currently the game’s only chapter that’s presented as a real event and not a training exercise, it’s harder to accept some of the strange things that happen.

One time, I served my target a poison cocktail, which made him sick. He rushed to the bathroom but stationed his personal guard right outside. However, that guard let me walk right into the private bathroom, drown his boss in the toilet, and then walk away scot free. Later, I tried to kill another target by dropping a chandelier on her. I missed, with the chandelier landing a few feet away. But nobody reacted to this extremely alarming thing that had just happened. Nobody came after me, even though I was standing a few feet away right by the chandelier winch.

And of course, games don’t need to be realistic. Games can create all kinds of worlds and situations. But the more effort a game puts into presenting itself as realistic, the more jarring it is when it becomes clear that the other people aren’t people at all, but just robots following very simple programming who often don’t know how to react in a situation. It’s difficult to get invested in a world that so desperately wants to look and feel human but is obviously just an elaborate clockwork mechanism with so many moving parts, some of which don’t always work very well.

For all of its seriousness and shadowy political intrigue, Hitman is still a pretty goofy game. In one training scenario, you can pull off the hit by sabotaging the ejector seat in a jet, then having your mark launch himself into the sky. It’s kind of hilarious, and really, the Hitman games have always tried to appeal both to those who like the idea of the elegant, stealthy kill and those who just want to see what crazy stuff they can get away with, and the game encourages you to try some pretty wild stuff via its challenges.

One challenge requires you to drop one target onto another from a few stories up. Another requires you to plant a bomb inside a camera and have it go off during an interview. As you complete challenges, you earn points that let you start the mission in different locations and in different disguises, and that let you smuggle weapons into the palace, which makes it easier to complete still more challenges. The sheer number of ways you can pull off the mission is impressive, and there is an appealing puzzle-like aspect to figuring out how to accomplish some of the more outlandish challenges.

The new Hitman makes the dichotomy between elegance and zaniness clear with its Contracts system, which enables players to create their own missions and upload them for other players.

The Contracts tutorial guides players to think about creating both Skillful Assassin contracts, which “focus on achieving the cleanest possible kill in the best possible way,” and Playful Assassin contracts, which “require accidents, explosives, or other creative ways to kill the targets, sometimes in a funny disguise.” So there’s no “wrong” way to play Hitman; its mechanics exist to be tested and interacted with, and the Contracts system encourages players to make the most of those mechanics when designing missions.

Disguises play a big role in Hitman, determining which areas you can walk around in openly. At one point, I was dressed as a stylist at a fashion gala, and one of the guards who blocked my way called Agent 47’s masculinity into question. And while perhaps we’re “meant” to think that the guard is a jerk and that his attitudes are wrong, it doesn’t really work as a critique of those attitudes because Hitman as a whole is a glorification of traditional, violent masculinity. So players who share the guard’s viewpoint won’t hear it as a critique at all, but as something that fits in with everything else the game is doing.

Unlike some earlier entries in the series, The new Hitman doesn’t turn women into sexual objects as a gameplay mechanic, which is good. But while its storyline presents Agent 47’s targets as people who are contributing to violence and global unrest and therefore suggests that his deeds are good or necessary, he’s actually just participating in, profiting on, and perpetuating the cycle of violence in his work. With several episodes yet to come, maybe we’ll see some exploration of this idea. For now, Hitman is an awkward game that aims to be both elegant and goofy, both human and mechanical, and in trying to do so many things, it doesn’t fully succeed at any of them.

That Dragon, Cancer feels something like a dream. Real places and events that actually happened often give way to imagery that reflects the emotional and psychological lives of Amy and Ryan. This dreamlike imagery gives the game a deeper kind of truth. It’s not just a literal narrative about a family with a terminally ill child. It’s a journey through the doubts and struggles of the soul.

The game reveals how living with Joel’s cancer for years was simultaneously a source of tremendous difficulty and exhaustion and pain for the Greens, and how, when you live with something like that for so long, it becomes woven into your normal, everyday lives. We hear a voicemail from Amy as she’s on her way back from the hospital in which she tells Ryan to preheat the oven for the lasagna they’re making for dinner. Life doesn’t stop. You have to keep on living, doing all the things you’d normally do. But when your life is full of hospital visits and impossible conversations with doctors, you also learn to hate some of the “normal” little specific things that become part of the texture of your life. At one point, Ryan mentions how he has come to hate the way the vinyl of hospital chairs sticks to his skin. Precise details like this put you in the day-to-day lives of the Greens.

The animation in That Dragon, Cancer is minimal, and while the visual design supports the often abstract and dreamlike narrative, it’s through the sound that the story comes to life. In one scene, Ryan is with Joel at the hospital, and we hear Joel crying out of thirst or exhaustion or pain, and all Ryan wants to do is comfort Joel, but he can’t. And as you hear Joel crying, you understand some tiny fraction of what Ryan feels, listening to his son’s anguish and being powerless to ease it. The sound of Joel’s crying gnaws at you, too; you also hate that he’s suffering, you wish you could do something to make him better. But you can’t.

I was constantly surprised by the candor with which the Greens let us in on the doubts and questions that living with Joel raises in their hearts. Early in the game, Ryan wonders just what it is he means to Joel. How does Joel, who has so few words in his vocabulary, understand or conceive of Ryan, his own father? It’s such a different kind of connection than the one a father might typically form with his child. As people of faith, Ryan and Amy seek strength and comfort in their relationship with God but also find questions in this aspect of their lives. All of these things are so specific to the Greens but these personal truths are also exactly what make this game so relatable. It’s in their moments of confusion, anger, and self-doubt that we can see our own imperfect humanity in the face of grief and loss reflected.

It’s not all moments of anguish and suffering and doubt, though. On the contrary; there is so much joy and laughter here, too, and the game becomes a profound meditation on the mysteries of love and the ways in which joy and pain are so often intermingled. Joel may not be able to communicate with his parents the way children his age usually can but as Ryan observes at one point, he is still good at so many things. Eating and laughing and showing people what he loves. There is doubt and fear, anger and resentment and strife and grief beyond words. But above all, there is love. And to me, anyway, the game seems to arrive at the incredibly hard-earned but beautiful conclusion that love is its own gift.

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• “Our Star Wars Holiday Special” by Aaron Bady, The New Inquiry
• “”Star Wars” Female Fighter Pilots Cut From Final Films” by Donna Dickens, Buzzfeed

Back in May of 1980, Darth Vader revealed a shocking secret and left moviegoers to ponder its implications for three long years: He was Luke Skywalker’s father. The truth is that I have a deep, dark secret of my own: I’m not a Star Wars fan. Not having grown up with them, I first watched the original three movies sometime in my early twenties, then again a few years later. Both times I had the same reaction: They were fine. Clearly, they were an important part of cinematic history. But I wasn’t converted to Star Wars fandom the way millions of other viewers had been. So during Christmas, when a friend asked me if I wanted to go see it, I agreed, but was skeptical that I would enjoy myself. Much to my surprise, I did. It’s a fun movie and, unlike the tedious and lifeless prequels, it’s a solid Star Wars film, a spirited and exciting sci-fi adventure.

By far what I found most appealing about The Force Awakens, one of the most anticipated films of the decade in one of the most universally beloved film franchises of all time, is that its two main characters are a white woman and a black man. This is meaningful not only because it moves Star Wars into a space that better reflects its audience, but because the franchise is huge enough to influence the larger filmic landscape, and potentially nudge Hollywood toward consistently telling more inclusive stories. I also appreciated that women were widely present in this film as military commanders, tavern owners, and fighter pilots. (Female pilots were actually filmed for the climactic space battle in Return of the Jedi, but sadly they were cut from the final film.)

Rey, the young woman at the center of The Force Awakens, is immediately compelling. She isn’t stoic or emotionless or hardened by violence, and her humanity keeps her from being another example of the tired “strong female character” type we’ve seen too much of these past few decades. She’s resilient and has learned to fend for herself, but she isn’t a loner. She’s competent and capable but also recognizes that she has so much to learn, and she welcomes friendship and support on her adventure. The Force Awakens seems to establish that this trilogy will focus on Rey’s journey in much the same way that the original trilogy focused on Luke’s. From King Arthur to Luke Skywalker, we’ve been taught to associate the traditional hero’s journey with male figures; for a franchise as massive as Star Wars to demonstrate that it doesn’t always have to be this way is hugely significant.

And because Rey is such a winning hero, as the film progressed from one explosion to another and from one massacre to another, I just went with it. Star Wars has previously relegated tremendous slaughter and suffering to the background; in the original film, the entire planet of Alderaan is obliterated but little heed is paid to the incomprehensible loss. In The Force Awakens, too, genocide on an unspeakable scale is just a bump in the road for the only people who really matter–Rey, Finn, and their ragtag bunch of Republic pals. The movies don’t give the audience time to process the actual scale of the war, the actual loss of life, the actual morality or lack thereof on either side of the conflict, and that’s how they keep us enthralled. As one critic points out in this brutally accurate piece, “everything that puts you in the moment, when you’re watching it, falls apart as soon as you turn your brain back on.” However, my job is to always think about these things.

I don’t watch or play anything without thinking about and analyzing the content. And I’m okay with that. Thinking and critiquing and analyzing is what gives us better stories, so as enjoyable as the film was, it’s still just so Star Wars. The relationships were held together by wiring that’s as flimsy as the inner workings of the Millennium Falcon. Rey and Finn care deeply about each other almost immediately? Rey thinks of Han as a father figure after spending a few minutes flying the Falcon together? The film wasn’t the least bit concerned with actually developing its relationships, but rather expected us to fill in the gaping holes. But the portrayal of interpersonal relationships and character development is where film excels. It’s through witnessing connections form, deepen, become strained and renewed that a film can open itself up to us as viewers and let us relate to the incredible, emotional, human experiences the characters are having on their journeys.

Along with flimsily established relationships, The Force Awakens also faithfully duplicates another aspect of the earlier films, and it’s the main reason why I will probably never be a huge Star Wars fan: The binary nature of its depiction of good and evil is really reductive. The Rebellion vs. the Empire in the original trilogy, the Republic vs. the First Order in The Force Awakens–it’s all so simplistic that it inevitably becomes a very regressive, deeply conservative narrative.

In Star Wars, people have fates for which they are destined. With a few notable exceptions, good people are inherently good and evil people are inherently evil. When a person does change sides, it occurs completely, without any complexity or ambiguity. History seems destined to repeat itself in this galaxy far, far away: There will always be a Rebellion or a Republic fighting for freedom, and every crushed Empire will be replaced by a new First Order. Narratives like this work to reinforce the mythology that good and evil are clear absolutes that are in constant struggle, and in such a universe, lasting, systemic change is not possible.

The Force Awakens had opportunities to subvert, complicate, or at least play with this good vs. evil binary, but didn’t seize on them. I was intrigued by Finn’s resistance to his lifelong conditioning, and his obvious horror at acts of violence and torture. But it took all of a few moments until he was more then fine killing “the bad guys,” even though he had just been one of them. Weren’t they raised from childhood to be cogs in a military machine just like him? Don’t they have the same potential for good that he does? Are their lives so expendable? I was reminded of the cult favourite sci-fi show Farscape and the long process that Aeryn Sun went through to emotionally heal from her from military indoctrination and understand the horror of what she was trained to become. Of course, storytelling in cinema has to be more economical than on television, but The Force Awakens acts as if these moral concerns don’t even exist.

As I’ve said about a trillion times, we can love media and be critical of it at the same time, and I think this film is a grand test of this very mantra. As I watched the film, I was thinking about how fun it would be to cosplay as Rey with my own BB-8 rolling around by my side. But once the ride is over and I’m left to contemplate the substance of what The Force Awakens offers, it all falls apart. Rey’s journey isn’t over yet, though, and there’s opportunity for the next two films to develop the characters in more substantial ways and to complicate the simplistic lens through which the series has always framed notions of good and evil. If they do that, I just might become a Star Wars fan, after all.

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The first teaser trailer for the sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, showed a seemingly troubled Lara in a therapist’s office, so I hoped that this game might be that rare blockbuster action adventure that at least takes violence somewhat seriously. I hoped it might acknowledge that even if you were in a situation where you absolutely had to kill hundreds of really, really bad people to survive, doing so would probably leave you a little traumatized. But Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t do that. I won’t spoil exactly how the therapist actually figures into the story, but I will say that it’s not in a way that suggests Lara might actually benefit from therapy after everything she’s been through. 

In fact, there’s a remarkable dissonance between Lara’s attitudes in the story and the experience of playing the game. When she’s asked about it, Lara asserts that she did not enjoy all the killing she did in the first game, she did it because she had no choice. But she also doesn’t seem troubled about it. And of course, a ton of games put their protagonists in similarly absurd kill-or-be-killed situations that provide an excuse for lots of gunplay. Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games, for instance.

But the seriousness with which Lara is portrayed makes Tomb Raider different. Lara is not a happy-go-lucky Nathan Drake type. Drake shoots his way through his adventures with a wink and a smile and he has a wisecrack for every occasion. We’re meant to see Lara as a survivor, a person with deep, real emotions who doesn’t relish violence but does what needs to be done. But meanwhile, the game revels in violence. It celebrates your marksmanship every time you shoot someone in the head. Blasts from your shotgun can send enemies flying. It all feels powerful and satisfying. Playing as Lara, you don’t feel like someone desperately fighting just to survive. You feel like someone who is very, very good at killing people and doesn’t hesitate to do it.

The game just doesn’t want to acknowledge that Lara clearly enjoys it, and the disconnect between the narrative’s portrayal of Lara as someone who feels things deeply and doesn’t enjoy violence at all and the gameplay’s attempts to make violence as fun and explosive as possible is really jarring. Despite what she says, Lara does have a choice and she chooses to put herself in this position. The game expects us to believe that she views her actions as some sort of grim necessity, all the while wanting us to have a blast, as it continually introduces new tools and new skills that give us exciting new ways to kill people.

The people you’re killing in this game are an ancient, violent sect called Trinity with designs on controlling humanity. The story is predictable and derivative. Lara’s late father was obsessed with a source of eternal life associated with an ancient prophet, sort of like how Indiana Jones’ father was obsessed with the Holy Grail. Lara becomes obsessed with finding this divine source of immortality, too. It’s all very familiar, standard adventure story stuff.

Trinity has big evil helicopters and lots of mercenary dudes. (No mercenary ladies, though, sadly.) Like Lara, Trinity will stop at nothing to find the divine source, but Lara’s obsessive quest for it is good because she’s a good person and Trinity’s obsessive quest for it is bad because they’re bad people. I really wanted a villain at some point to say to Lara, “We’re not so different, you and I,” because in this case, it’s absolutely true.

The game encourages us to hate Trinity by showing them killing innocent people, which in turn makes us feel good about killing them, but the game never encourages us to consider the morality of what Lara is doing by choosing to be here and kill all these people herself. And that’s too bad. The new Tomb Raider games clearly want to humanize Lara, and exploring the emotional and psychological cost of what she’s putting herself through would have made her seem more human.

Still, there are some improvements in the way Lara is presented in Rise of the Tomb Raider. By default, she now wears clothing that’s much more appropriate for the harsh elements that she finds herself in than she did in the previous game. And while Tomb Raider seemed to take an almost sadistic pleasure in making Lara suffer and putting that suffering on display with grisly death animations and excruciating injuries she sustains, Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t delight in torturing Lara or impaling her on things.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is exactly what you expect it to be. It’s competent and thoroughly unsurprising. There are plenty of environmental puzzles, and plenty of sequences in which everything is collapsing all around you as you run, jump, or climb for your life. Lara is crafty and resourceful, able to whip up Molotov cocktails, shrapnel bombs and other deadly devices from junk she finds lying around. Enemies are smart enough to try to flank you and flush you out when you’re hiding, and you can try to be sneaky or just go in guns blazing. Oh, and the camera really doesn’t deal well with close combat in tight spots.

The world of Rise of the Tomb Raider is beautiful, and I enjoyed those moments in which I felt like I was just exploring and discovering the world for the sheer beauty and enjoyment of it. I love the experience of coming around corners or climbing up ledges to behold some breathtaking new landscape. But that beautiful world is constantly reduced to being just a source of stuff to collect. There’s just soooo much stuff to collect in this game. You switch to Survival Instincts, look for the things that glow, and grab them; suddenly the world isn’t this majestic, wondrous place anymore. Rather, it’s a place full of little golden things you can snag for your own personal gain. The world exists just for you to plunder.

There are moments in Rise of the Tomb Raider when you’re solving a puzzle involving some ancient contraption, or studying ancient murals, or traversing the environment, or taking in the view. And in these moments, I admired Lara’s skill and resolve. I’d like to go on more adventures with her. I just think she has a few issues she needs to deal with first.