It’s nearly impossible to escape the superhero craze that’s taken over Hollywood. With movies slated until 2020, and more television shows on the air than ever, it’s clear we’ll be in drenched in hero lore for many years to come.

As wonderful as this superhero renaissance has been, we still have a long way to go when it comes to the representation of our female heroes.

Things have gotten better. Just a few years ago we wouldn’t have heard as much of an outcry for Black Widow merchandise, and we’ve finally moved past the hurdle of just greenlighting a Wonder Woman movie. But despite that progress, we still receive trailers like the recent reveal of Supergirl, CBS’s new show about the struggles of Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin, who also escaped to Earth during the fall of Kypton.

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Hello! Welcome to our latest Game of Thrones show. This week, Roth Cornet is joined by Joshua Yehl to discuss the events of Game of Thrones, Season 5, Episode 6, Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.

We open up with our thoughts on the episode and an initial response to that final, controversial scene. We talk about the episode as a whole, though. Including: Arya's evolution and whether or not the Dorne storyline is paying off.

Download Game of Thrones: 'Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken' - Dragons on the Wall HERE!

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At several different points during Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, you encounter spots where B.J. Blazkowicz can fall asleep, prompting dream sequences that stick the modern, polygon-constructed B.J. into various levels of Wolfenstein 3D, complete with low-resolution graphics and flat sprites. Functionally, it plays almost identically to the original, but vestigial bits from the modern day, like vertical aiming, stand out, especially if you clearly remember experiencing Wolfenstein 3D for the first time. Also, the game's use of sprites gives it a similar feel to a shooting gallery where you get to walk around and explore. It's a stark reminder of how far the series--and games in general--have come. The same can be said of The Old Blood as a whole, and although it stumbles attempting to reconcile old and new thematically, its varied encounters deliver the primitive thrill of clearing a room in a hail of bullets and blood.

If this sounds familiar, it's because Wolfenstein: The New Order did the same thing by juxtaposing B.J., an old-school shooter protagonist out of time, with modern first-person shooter design sensibilities. The Old Blood is a lot less subtle about it, though by necessity. Set before B.J. gets his head injury and goes into the coma that leads to his involvement in The New Order, The Old Blood reunites him with the setting that made him famous: Castle Wolfenstein itself. The first part of the game involves infiltrating the castle in order to find the location of the Nazi headquarters. B.J. is more in his element in the World War II setting, and though there's still advanced technology, it's more in line with what you'd expect from pulp Nazi superscience for the era--much like Wolfenstein 3D's level of technology, in fact. The game practically hits you over the head with parallels to the past: the attack dogs, the giant robot you face right at the beginning of the third chapter, the secret areas you find.

And yet we still see the same thoughtful modern design implemented in last year's The New Order interlaced with the callbacks to days past. Firing guns feels both effortless and flexible, with each weapon boasting distinct modes for different situations (such as the assault rifle's automatic and semi-automatic modes), as well as dual-wielding options. Instead of just setting you loose in a sprawling level as you shoot at flat enemies, The Old Blood ebbs and flows as it constantly changes up each encounter's focus, creating an excellent sense of pacing. Action-packed shooting sequences couched in open, cover-laden levels alternate with more freeform stealth sections that don't object to you taking a more direct approach. There are even portions where you're encouraged to run rather than fight. Tying the level design together is some seriously great enemy AI, who intelligently flank you and take cover, yet are not so smart that you can't use cover to outmaneuver them. Everything about the way The Old Blood plays exemplifies the diversity of modern FPS design, and the game does so in a way that's on point and fun.

The Old Blood also illustrates where we're going in games and what we're leaving behind. Yes, you still have to fight past dogs, but they also happen to be wearing dog-sized body armor that you can harvest, and instead of coming at you at a crawl, they realistically rocket towards you and tackle you as they try to shred your meat to bits. Yes, you still fight a giant armored super soldier in the third chapter, but when you do defeat it, more troops come pouring out and you're forced to weave in and out of the foyer you just fought in, giving the level new dimensions. And those secret areas? You no longer have to press up against every wall in a level, mashing the confirm button hoping to reveal a sliding wall. Instead, there really are secret areas that can be found through normal exploration. It's amazing to see how design has become both more simplified and more complicated over the years.

We also see shades of a somewhat self-aware industry attempting to look at the past through a different lens. B.J.'s local contact, Kessler, is a stark contrast to the burly protagonist. Ever-defiant in the face of a Nazi-ruled future, Kessler and his late love fight for a Germany that rises up against the hateful regime, with his weapon of choice being leaflets rather than guns. He's also acutely sympathetic towards human life: in one memorable exchange he implores B.J. to avoid killing as many people as he can, which B.J. then willfully misinterprets to mean that he should kill as many Nazis as he can, a sentiment he emphasizes every chance he gets. We also see more fleshed-out versions of enemy combatants, albeit only through memos and a scene where you walk through a bar crowded with Nazi soldiers. We get glimpses of soldiers who still display care and affection for their families at home, even as they become upset because their lovers are dismayed at how the war has changed them, feel fear at the many occult studies and phenomenon they're being focused on, and buy into all the propaganda that litters this world. Even Helga Von Schabbs, the antagonist of the game, is granted some character development in her lifelong fascination with adventure and her potentially royal lineage.

Even so, B.J. still sees them as the same flat characters as he sees in his dreams, good for only one thing: killing. The game's mechanics almost never encourage you to leave any Nazis alive. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the end, this is a blunt, muscular, bare-chested romp through levels full of deadly moving targets, even during its subtle moments. As a dumb action game, The Old Blood has the chops. But it fumbles when it attempts to introduce gray areas into the game. Whether it's Kessler's empathy or the supplementary notes you find, The Old Blood seems to have something to say about the evolution of games, but never arrives at a solid point. The sledgehammer that is B.J.'s philosophy always wins out, stranding the gray areas in a game that clearly won't give them the time of day.

Then again, maybe games haven't changed as much as we like to think. The second half of The New Blood changes up enemy types by replacing fully functional Nazis, the default enemy type of the old era, with zombies, the go-to foe of the modern one. It's initially a nice change of pace from the terse shooting arenas that came before, but it's hard not to think of them as a downgrade, turning a mechanically-smart dumb action game into a brain dead one. Don't get me wrong: mowing down zombies with a sawed-off shotgun is a classic scenario, but the waves and waves of corpses pouring at you can't help but feel disappointing after you've experienced the smart design of part one.

Clearly MachineGames has big ambitions and understands the nuance that can be evoked in the medium. And The Old Blood certainly displays intelligent action FPS design that's fun and effortless to play. Just don't expect the deep examination the game hints at to go anywhere. Here, the gloriously dumb (yet smartly designed) reigns. Progress can wait. Long live The Old Blood.

It's difficult to wrap your head around how large the universe is. It's one thing to say that the distance from the here to the moon is ten times the circumference of the Earth, but that figure is incomprehensible. It's hard enough to wrap our tiny minds around the notion that our planet, our home, is finite, much less the preposterous distances between the stars. Galactic Civilizations III understands and fluently wields those disparate perspectives--the mundane and human as well as the astronomical--to craft a game that manages to bring the tiniest shuttlecraft, the mightiest quasar, and all the distant mysteries that lie between into a single coherent vision.

As you might suspect from the name, Galactic Civilizations is a game that, while inspired by Sid Meier's seminal masterpiece, Civilization, opts for the cosmos as its stage. Matching the stellar scope is the potential to have up to 128 additional players. That alone should give any fan of the strategy game genre pause. For most games of its type, such massive games would bog themselves down in micromanagement, construction, and empire maintenance. But Galactic Civilization III's greatest strength is its ability to manage its momentum. Play starts quickly, with everyone having enough resources at the outset to begin crafting a basic strategy. There's no waiting around for your first few workers here; instead, you can buy up some colony ships, kick-start your military, or roll out some research labs to start cranking out PhDs.

After that initial burn, it's a couple dozen more turns before you have quite so many decisions to make. You can use that down time to secure what you have and develop your territory, design some custom ships, or fine-tune your government to suit your most pressing goals. After a bit, you have another burst brought on by a new technology allowing your ships greater range from their home planet or a new pile of credits to be spent on supercharging development.

Galactic Civilizations follows this pattern of punctuated equilibrium until the end of the game--regardless of which specific strategy or victory condition you're seeking. It helps guide and reinforce the infamous "one more turn"-style play that 4X games are known for, as well, as you never know when that next burst will hit. You could find some special resource that, if tapped, could unlock a new prototype hyperdrive. That, in turn, can get your colonists to the next star system over, where a new planet and new resources lie waiting. As soon as you've mastered what you own and what you know, you'll face a fresh batch of challenges.

The burst-secure-develop-burst loop also solves one of the genre’s longest-running problems--militaristic powers. As with any proper 4X game, Galactic Civilizations has a variety of win conditions. You can be elected the leader of the galaxy, you can ascend to a new plane of existence, or you can steam-roll your opponents with the biggest, baddest ships around. The caveat here is that it's rare that you'll encounter someone whose war machines completely outclass your own. Expansion requires a great deal of investment in engineering and supply chains. Supporting dreadnoughts far from any habitable planets requires chains of star bases or advanced life support systems--both of which can take resources away from a massive military campaign. Military victories are still possible, but blocking off large chunks of the map to the people with the most advanced technology or those that can daisy-chain supply lines keeps anyone's fun from ending prematurely or without proper warning.

In creating this cycle, Galactic Civilizations encourages careful, directed thinking. You always want to be in control of your next boon, ready to capitalize on the next step out, no matter where that leads. Thought and investment are rewarded. When you colonize a new planet, the order and placement of the buildings and projects you undertake will determine their effectiveness. Placing factories adjacent to a refinery will boost both their output. Tourism centers next to ports will yield dividends. It's not about doing everything you can but about efficient use of the space you have. The production of new ships and star bases is also decoupled from planetary improvements. Instead, you can assign several planets to support a shipyard. Any manufacturing output dedicated to military development will go to building new weapons. Colony ships and troop transports for invasions will pull population from contributing planets as well. This too emphasizes the cyclic pace. Hooking a few planets up to a dry dock won't net you much until they've been built up with appropriate factories, academies, and the like. But in a few short turns, you'll have a mega factory that can turn out battlecruisers with ease, and then you're ready for your next expansion.

If it sounds like I'm placing a lot of emphasis on that loop, it's because Galactic Civilizations forces you to view it through that narrow lens. This is strange, indeed, in no small part because it is a game about the bigness of galactic warfare, about the farthest reaches of the stars, and yet it comes down to a long series of manageable steps. When you're first starting a round, space, as it does here in the world, is incomprehensibly vast. Instead of letting your first few explorers wander to the ends of the map, you're given a small starting area. This, the game says, is as far as you can go. When you've conquered or at least explored that sector, you're trusted with more. These steps helped me develop relationships, memories even, with each new area. I remembered which regions I saw after I developed my first prototype warp drives or when I built a deep space station so I could see what was on the other side of a black hole. It's odd, but it's sentimental.

Toward the end of my first game, I remember the map all the way out, astonished by how far my people had come. It was a special feeling, one I've since come to cherish, because I've realized that it's one that no other game has given me. Not even Civilization brought me this close to the progress of my empire without letting me get lost in the grandeur of it all.

I have to attribute that, at least in part, to the fact that Galactic Civilizations not only lets you craft your own alien species and their technology but incentivizes you to do so. No matter what race you pick or which one you create, you'll have a few basic ships to choose from. Each is there to fill a specific role, but you won't get anything particularly special there. However, if you want to take the schematics for the latest and greatest antimatter missile launcher and use them for an otherwise vulnerable cargo ship, you can do that. You can also make a mega-carrier holding dozens of assault drones that can sweep through any defense around. These creations will usually cost a little more than the usual fare, but the degree of control you have over them is worth the time and the money, especially when paired with a well-crafted strategy playing to the strengths of a custom-made race. It ties micro- and macromanagement together in a way that pushes you to win with your own creations and your own ideas.

That's also where Galactic Civilizations begins to break down. Much as Elder Scrolls games are expected to have a lot of bugs because they are so open, Galactic Civilizations has a lot of rough edges. I played a final build of the game, and there were still some missing textures, odd graphical glitches, poorly edited music, and one missing technology description. They were all cosmetic, but they were common enough to be distracting.

The bigger problems come from how unrefined some of the ancillary features are. One of the biggest additions is the ideology system. As you make choices about how the shape of your civilization progresses, you'll build up points in Benevolence, Pragmatism, or Malevolence. This is intended to be a morality system, but in practice, its effects are loose and intangible. Picking a new step on one of the three trees will usually grant you a one-time bonus, but they aren't substantial, and they don't represent play style. In my second game, I was ruthless and declared war on everyone, but I was able to maintain a façade of altruism by picking certain dialogue options. As a method of embodying the kind of civilization you want to be, the Ideology system doesn't work.

Taken as a whole, Galactic Civilization's failings are minor. For most games, a few major pieces that don’t quite fit together would be a death knell. Galactic Civilizations keeps its focus right where it needs to--on excellent fundamentals. Progressive pacing makes the enormity of space amenable and paradoxically personal, while the sheer number and variety of tools and options at your disposal allow you to succeed and win if you can out-think everyone else.

In Last Word’s prim and proper world, words speak louder than actions, and combat is fueled by discourse, shifting the momentum of a conversation. This might sound dull in theory, but in practice, the numerous tactics and systems at play lead to an enjoyably varied, if initially confounding system. Combining tact, power, and a healthy dose of subtlety leaves your discussion partner susceptible to your every whim--providing little more than a deflated ellipsis in response to your last word. Despite its elementary presentation, Last Word stands out as a witty, novel venture carried by clever writing and a creative form of combat.

To buy into Last Word’s concept, you need to suspend your disbelief and accept the bizarre power of the spoken word within this otherwise realistic society. The courtly, cultured characters have the gift of gab, constantly spouting long-winded tales of their family names and the distinguished natures of their storied houses. Their words carry unique weight, though, as whoever speaks the last word and “wins” an argument leaves his or her counterpart powerless. You’ll often see NPCs at a door endlessly trading polite “after yous” or “I insists” in fear of letting someone else finish the conversation.

This strange societal wrinkle produces plenty of silly moments, but when it comes to actually engaging in longer conversations, the “Discourse” mechanism is anything but simplistic. Think of it as a basic RPG battle, but instead of swinging a blade or blasting enemies with a fireball, you leverage disruptive, submissive, and aggressive forms of banter to push the conversation in your favor. You often open with a disruptive phrase in order to fill up your power meter, followed by something more submissive that spends power to gain tact. Aggressive phrases, which consume stored tact, effect the most change in the conversation bar, so you need to parlay your power into tact before the opportunity to really push the dialogue arises.

More and more systems are stacked atop this foundation. A character’s composure changes from collected, to irritated, and eventually to uncivilized, based on a sort of rock-paper-scissors system. Certain actions serve as counters to others, and if you continue to correctly rebut your foil’s last assertion, their composure cracks and eventually shatters. This adds a bit more venom to your aggressive moves, lowering your opponent’s defense and more quickly swaying the conversation meter in your favor. Purchased skills and attributes continue to add bite to your bark, but it takes practice to sharpen your conversational steel and become a true threat.

Even with a tutorial that helps you navigate through the dense schemes, Last Word’s Discourse feature is far too opaque early on. All the different tones and meters take time and effort to both understand and intelligently utilize, so you have to bang your head against the systems and fail a few times before the flow of conversations becomes clear. After you learn the ropes, this unique take on turn-based action begins to shine, and the fair-yet-steep difficulty curve gives you ample opportunity to test your tongue.

Outside of the conversational duels, the regular discussions you have with the cast are brainy and nimble. Last Word never falls too in love with its aristocratic tone, staying on the right side of "tongue-in-cheek" through its intentional pretentiousness. There’s a deep well of text to draw from, too, since the other major mechanism at play surrounds gossiping with your peers about specific hot-button topics. Leveling up these topics by talking to the right person at the right time opens up new narrative avenues, and if you manage to examine each corner of your environment and learn everything you can from its guests, a few interesting wrinkles are added to the last few story sequences. For a game trapped in windowed mode and focused on a single location, Last Word is rich in subsidiary content.

On the surface, the characters appear as little more than colored silhouettes, their different hues based on each house of origin. But once you enter a conversation, hand-drawn caricatures appear, sporting expressions and audible squawks that pair well with their personalities. Each member of the small cast has a name as fanciful as their persona--from Whitty Gawship to Professor Chet Chatters. It’s a peculiar world with far too much one-upmanship for anyone to want to live in, but for a four-hour visit, it’s a treat.

It isn’t exactly easy to pick up, but the layered Discourse system in Last Word is worth the few verbal jabs and hooks needed in order to master it. The turn-based structure succeeds at supplying a fun alternative to the cavalcade of fantasy RPGs on the market, and while it can be easy to roll your eyes at all the patterned bow ties and discussions of fine wines, the posh tenor never tips so far that it becomes pretentious. Last Word shows that you don’t need a towering sword or a 15-minute summoning sequence to create an exciting battle system--sometimes it just takes a sharp script and an even sharper tongue.

When I was growing up, I always found myself surrounded by kids who wanted to be James Bond. Being at that age where you start to recognize things as being cool right around the time The Living Daylights and License To Kill happened probably had a little to do with that, but, really, shooting bad guys, playing high stakes card games, quaffing martinis, beautiful women going in and out of the bedroom's revolving doors--all of this has a universal, immortal appeal.

While I'm not made of stone, and certainly know suave and seductive when I see it, I never wanted to be Bond. I wanted to be M. I wanted to be the guy who had been doing the dirt, and doing it well for so long that he got to order dudes like Bond around, moving conspirators, double agents, and sensitive information around the globe as if he were engaged in a game of chess. I always imagined being the guy to scream into a microphone, "You've got the files, now get the hell out of there."

For that reason alone, Invisible, Inc. now owns a tiny piece of my heart. It's a tactical, turn-based stealth espionage game where I am the eyes of God, looking down on the isometric, randomly generated playing field. There's infinite time to plot out my spies' every move and observe the guards' reactions before completing the mission, ordering the spies to make a beeline for an extraction point, and beaming them out. The game recalls XCOM in in the way a fallen spy succumbs to permanent death, and in its randomly generated levels; few stealth games are this slick, and even fewer are unwilling to sacrifice any opportunity for tension or raised stakes to make its hero look cooler. Here, the silent, invisible completion of the mission is all that matters, and the stakes are too high to waste time grandstanding.

The situation: It's the distant future, and after years of digging up serious dirt on the megacorporations of the new world, the titular spy agency is raided, forcing the chief, her two best agents, and Incognita--their all-encompassing JARVIS.-style AI--to go on the run. You start off with just the two agents, with a maximum of four active at a time (10 total are coming as downloadable content down the road), and your overall mission is to gather enough expendable resources to strike back at your enemies within 72 hours. This is the point where the portable version of Incognita loses power.

Sadly, the telling of the story is reduced to well-written but sparse lip service after the fully-animated intro, but it's less of a problem once you realize how carefully considered your actions in every subsequent mission have to be. From your jet, you have to infiltrate various corporations around the globe. Sometimes it's to get new confidential info out of a corporate facility; sometimes you have to hack into an executive's mind and fend off his private security while waiting to download the goods; sometimes it's just to get your hands on some brand new spy toys. The thing is, virtually everything is a resource. Aside from the expected mechanics of a tactical role-playing game--moving around and carrying objects are governed by quantifiable stats (movement points and inventory space) you must wisely invest in--you also have a security level that rises steadily with every turn, and each trip around the wheel, an obstacle appears to make your life a little harder, be it new armored guards, or a security protocol that makes hacking a greater danger.

Until much later in the game, ambushing and knocking out a guard typically involves using electrical, non-lethal means which, because you're not operating out of an agency, have limited uses. Guns make things easier, but while guards and robot drones are always packing heat, ammo is a seriously rare commodity. There's a shot you can buy to Pulp Fiction a fallen agent back from the dead, and a very limited option to rewind a bad move (an option that becomes negligible at higher difficulties); otherwise, a dead agent is a dead agent. Occasionally, agents survive, and the enemy takes them hostage. You can potentially set out on rescue missions, which appear later in the game, but that involves hours you don't necessarily have, because jetsetting around the planet costs more time than you think, depending on the distance to your mission. If Incognita goes bye-bye, or if all your agents are dead, guess what? Game over. You're starting from the beginning.

The upshot is that this isn't so tricky a proposition, since a player comfortable with the relatively simple setup can blow through the game, good ending or bad, in about four to five hours. But this isn't a game like many role-playing games of its ilk where there are pawns to sacrifice for the sake of letting someone charge some special maneuver, or to absorb a bullet while other soldiers move around. If you move a spy around, you have to consider every possible outcome of both your move and the reactions of the guards around the facility, because being wrong will cost time and life. Taking your time and playing smarter, not harder, grants missions a pleasant clockwork precision, with every agent in the field working in tandem towards a common goal--and that goal is "attack" far less often than in a typical spy game.

The flaws are all in the execution. The facilities your agents infiltrate are busy enough, with movement grids, wireframe scans that Incognita can hack, and vision cones from all the cameras and guards in the vicinity. Add in the random industrial trash scattered around, and the never-quite-right camera angles, and there are times when the screen is just total chaos. Enemy AI is rather typical for a stealth game, where the same guard can range from implausibly obtuse (why didn't that guard open fire the second he saw me duck into a hiding spot instead of announcing to nobody, "I'm gonna investigate"?) to trigger-happy sharpshooters who can shoot the hair off your eyebrows from two rooms away in a matter of minutes. Like many stealth games, Invisible Inc.'s systems--several types of vision cones, night-vision goggles, and so forth--provide explanations for highly game-ish behaviors, but those behaviors don't necessarily adhere to the logic of human nature.

The biggest problem is the simple fact that while the ticking clocks in and out of the actual espionage provide a nice anxious framework for the game, the story in between is a letdown. Missions are often interchangeable, with the same briefing used for multiple stages with the same objective across the board; the between-stage dialogue, while sharp, doesn't exactly tell the same escalating story as the gameplay.

Luckily, the gameplay sings, making for a game that's not as powerful as it could be, but undeniably accessible. The random levels contribute to the joy, meaning no experience is ever truly repeated, and each stage's relative brevity and array of objective types makes it rather light and breezy while still maintaining a measure of depth. It's not quite the patient MI6 power fantasy I had in mind as a kid, but it's close. It's a fine, unique, strategic experience that has occasional frustrating glimmers of the possibly of being something more. Then again, every great spy story is contingent on people not letting people know or care about "something more," isn't it?

It's election season. How will you campaign for mayor? Will you promise better schools? Guarantee that you'll fix all those potholes? Perhaps you'll run on the more straightforward assurance that you will "shoot criminals in the face"? That last one might not be the most humane of political platforms, but it makes for an entertaining 2D action game.

In Not a Hero, you are a hired gun for a politician named Bunnylord, an anthropomorphic purple rabbit who has come from the future to, presumably, save the world. He is convinced that to prevent the disastrous future he has seen, he needs to be elected as mayor by the end of the month.

In theory, this would make you, his employee, a hero. But true to the title of the game, you do a lot of things that aren't very heroic. Sure, you might take down a drug lord and save some hostages, but along the way, you murder a lot of people. Bunnylord himself isn't a big believer of things like court trials. He has open disdain for religious people, hates children, and throws around a word that disrespects the mentally handicapped. It's odd to think that he's supposedly on a mission to save the world, considering that he doesn't seem like a very nice man (or rabbit ... whatever).

The violence in Not a Hero might be disturbing if it weren't for the absurdity wrapped around it.

To help Bunnylord get elected, you mostly shoot people and blow things up. Even mundane tasks like putting up campaign posters or collecting wind chimes (which is very important for, well, reasons) involve leaving a trail of bodies, most of which die in a comically over-the-top fashion.

For the most part, you can run left and right, slide and shoot. Not a Hero's shooting is "cover based," but you don't actually need to be behind any cover--just kind of near it. Hitting the cover button often makes you just sort of hug the wall, shrouding you in shadow for protection and, if you haven't been spotted by nearby enemies, keeping you out of sight. Hitting the fire button while in cover pops you out long enough to take a shot, and you're relatively safe unless an enemy gets close enough to punch you.

The moment-to-moment action, including running, shooting, sliding into cover, and shooting some more is great … most of the time. Occasional hiccups occur when the game forces you to aim right when you're trying to aim left. Or you might try to take cover where you are, but, because the "cover" button is the same as the "slide" button, you suddenly find yourself sliding right towards the barrel of a criminal’s shotgun. When you start the game, the temptation is to run in guns blazing, Contra style. But until you get a good grasp of Not a Hero's quirks, it can be better to take it slow.

Your health regenerates, but you can go down quickly in a hailstorm of bullets. Sometimes the better course of action is to be methodical, watching and listening for cues telling you that an enemy's clip is empty before you pop out of cover. It's also smart to use the game's executions--brutal kills you can perform on a stunned enemy after sliding into them.

Beyond those basics, each of the game's nine characters have different traits that affect how you control them. For example, when playing as most of the characters, you have to be very careful when you choose to reload because you can't move or cancel out of the reload animation once it starts. One character can move while reloading, however, while another can shoot to cancel the reload. One character is very fast but has very little ammo, while another has lots of ammo but moves slowly. My personal favorite character, Clive, can run fast while shooting two guns straight in front, like he jumped straight out of a John Woo movie.

The violence in Not a Hero might be disturbing if it weren't for the absurdity wrapped around it. Bunnylord might order you to shoot someone in the face, but he also brags about how he's reduced the city's amount of "illegal dry-humping." One problem with the game's humor, though, is that it tends to try too hard. Every mission begins with a lengthy briefing and ends with a debriefing, each of which are primarily vehicles in which the writers cram as many attempts as humor as possible. Every line reads as an attempt to elicit a laugh, but most are only good enough for a chuckle at best--especially since you never get a break from the insanity. Before long, I wanted to skip all the dialogue (which, thankfully, is an option) rather than sit through a lot of dumb jokes.

Every line reads as an attempt to elicit a laugh, but most are only good enough for a chuckle at best.

It's to the gameplay’s credit that I usually wanted to get through the story beats quickly and jump into the next mission. Each of the game's 21 levels (24 if you count a few secret ones) are short and relatively straightforward--kill enemies, maybe collect a few things, find the exit--but each stage's layout is well-designed, often offering a few different paths to the goal (maybe, for example, you crash through a window instead of entering a room from the door on the opposite side). A few different enemy types also help mix things up because several of the bad guys you come across are immune to certain attacks, like slide tackles. Occasionally, the longer levels in the game can be frustrating thanks to enemies that have a tendency to kill you in one hit (forcing you to go back to the beginning), but their size and complexity is still welcome.

The plain "kill all enemies" mission structure is also broken up with extra challenges to complete in each level, such as ... well, "kill all enemies." Other than that, you might be asked to find a hidden item, defeat a certain number of enemies without getting hit, or complete a level without using a certain number of bullets. You can reach the game's credits without completing any of these objectives, but they usually add challenge and variety to what might otherwise be a bland mission.

If you don't try to complete all these challenges, you can easily blast your way through Not a Hero in a handful of hours, unlocking most or all of the characters along the way. You can extend your time in the game by completing levels with all the different characters, but the game doesn't do a good job of incentivizing you to do so. Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in this explosive quest for political domination. Not a Hero's humor may not always hit the mark, but the action makes up for it.

Cowled craziness. That’s on tap with Magicka: Wizard Wars, a free-to-play multiplayer take on the action-first franchise that features those iconic wizards who have always reminded me of Star Wars' Jawas--only fancier. Despite this frenzied focus, much of the appeal of the core series has been maintained, due to the continued emphasis on slick player skill over gimmicks, and a genial, if bloody, sense of humor. There are a few rough edges here, however, thanks to some design miscues, a slightly buggy client, and a level grind that kicks in long before you get bored with incinerating enemy Gandalfs. Yet even with these issues, the game’s pace and light-hearted take on everything (how could I stay mad at a game that uses a corny Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator to call the action?) keep you coming back for more, even while the flaws try to nudge you away.

Basic gameplay breaks standard Magicka down to online battle arenas where mages duel to the death. The general feel is similar to the earlier games in the franchise, albeit without any single-player campaign or any sort of cooperative multiplayer. Here, you create one of the franchise’s trademark spunky magic users at the start of play and then head into one-off battle arenas. Over time, your spell-slinger develops by gaining experience points, leveling up, and acquiring gear and special magical attacks that let you become a more efficient mystical killing machine. Two forms of currency are used in the game. Mastery tokens earned with every level up allow you to purchase special gear, spells, outfits, and the like, while crowns awarded at the end of every match can be used in the in-game store to buy similar weapons, magic rings, and so forth. Real money can be used to buy gear directly and load up on both tokens and crowns, in case you want to cut some corners.

The game deals with primary magical talents that are performed by pressing the Q-W-E-R and A-S-D-F keys. Each one represents a particular arcane skill--fire, healing, death magic, lightning, and beyond--all of which can be called up via a quick key-press or three and then put into play through a click of the mouse. Those special magicks are one-off spells that are slotted in the 1-4 keys for occasional use. They are best when you need to go nuclear on enemies by using the likes of a meteor shower that covers the battlefield, a thunderstorm that calls up devastating lightning, or something a little more subtle, like haste (to run away) or midsummer’s blessing (to heal everyone simultaneously).

None of this is easy. While you can lean on simple presses, and you can of course deploy the big-gun magicks as needed, key combos are required for the best spells and the best blocks. So, hello there, steep learning curve and a whole lot of experimentation (although the game thankfully gives you tips for fending off specific attacks every time you’re killed). It took a long time for me to even start to become comfortable with the controls, and I was still routinely schooled by opponents the entire time I played.

I was never smacked around so hard that I became overly frustrated, though. Whether I was toasted by flames, blown up by a meteor strike, or even perforated by an enemy imp familiar when I wasn’t paying enough attention, I was able to laugh it off and dive right back in for more. Speed is the primary element staving off annoyance. It’s tough to stay mad for long when you’re respawning in seconds. The tactical layer of the game is another successful factor, too. A huge importance is placed on spell defenses, so I looked at the game as something of a strategic puzzle, and constantly went into new matches to test new possibilities.

The color palette is almost unrelentingly bright, with mages apparently costumed by Crayola, and spells going off like huge displays of the very best in modern fireworks technology.

But while the core structure of Magicka: Wizard Wars works well due to its reliance on strong core mechanics, there isn’t a lot of depth here. There are just three modes of play, and the only one worth playing is Wizard Warfare. This is a pick-up-and-play mode, with simple rules that see two teams of four duking it out over stone circles that serve as control and spawn points. It moves quickly, due to small maps and teleportation rings that let the teams get into each other’s hood-hidden faces. I found that the zippy speed kept things likeably nuts and even helped emphasize teamwork, as the team must stick close together, help heal one another, and assault control points as a unit in order to survive.

Soul Harvest is the other headline mode of play, but it plays much slower and as a result isn’t nearly as exciting. It features a more involved structure that has you slaughter monsters for souls in kind of a battle of attrition, with the final goal of demolishing the enemy home-base effigy. None of this jibes with the game’s strengths as a battle royal at warp speed. Teams patrol the map, kill wimpy respawning monsters over and over, and attempt to avoid one another. Duel is even flimsier, albeit for the opposite reasons. It is fast, with cramped battlefields that allow no leeway. There doesn’t seem to be room here for much more than toe-to-toe magical slugfests.

All three modes of play are made more entertaining by colorful visuals and bombastic sound. This isn’t a game to take seriously, even with wizards regularly exploding into bloody chunks. The color palette is almost unrelentingly bright, with mages apparently costumed by Crayola, and spells going off like huge displays of the very best in modern fireworks technology. Sound is also compellingly boomy and whooshy, and the aforementioned Schwarzenegger soundalike is hilariously understated. I never got tired of hearing him tell my team that a spawn point had been stolen by the enemy and that I needed to “steal it baaack!”

The free-to-play structure causes problems, however. Both the mastery tokens and crowns are slow to accumulate and the prices for items are through the roof. The 25 tokens you might earn per level don’t go very far when the average mastery upgrade costs 50 or more. Making matters even worse, all mastery gear is nested in locked trees that force you to buy three or four items you don’t want, just to get one that you do. The same goes for the store: the average match brings in only a few hundred crowns, while even the lamest gear has a price tag of at least 5,000 or 10,000. After the first five or six levels, the game feels like a grind.

The temptation, of course, is to spend real money on upgrades such as the heavily promoted experience boosters and wizard starting packs (which seem reasonably priced, as far as these things go). But with that said, you can’t buy your way to success. Although picking up some extra goodies with cash can put you over the top, the game is all about player skill and speed. No matter how cool a robe you have, no matter how powerful your magic items and special spells, you can still be killed by a rival player with basic gear and faster fingers. So there really is a balance here, even with the grind providing ongoing temptation to whip out your credit card.

More options need to be provided. I really wanted the ability to trick out Wizard Warfare matches. Just being able to play best two out of three would have helped keep the momentum flowing, as the one-off games that generally last just four or five minutes are the only ones currently available. I spent way too much time on the matchmaking screen, waiting for the same four or five minutes on average (much longer later at night) to get a game. I’m not sure if these waits mean that there aren’t very many players online or if this is some shortcoming of the software. Regardless, I spent about as much time waiting for matches to be made than I did actually battling mages.

Another shortcoming is the inability to boot players. Although I didn’t have a ton of trouble with griefers, I did encounter at least a few idiots who just ran around maps killing anyone and everyone indiscriminately and still clocking high scores. There needs to be a way to kick these people out, or at least to stop rewarding them for killing allies.

On occasion, bugs interfere with setting up matches. I encountered frame-rate glitches, stutters in the main menus, and the odd crash to the desktop. I also encountered a “Code Marlin” error that made it impossible to start a game. Whenever this would occur, the game would refuse to register that there was a full complement of eight players logged in, even though everyone was apparently ready to go on the starting screen. Since this error seemed to take place in bunches, this got frustrating real fast, as it would block matches from starting for 10-minute stretches.

As entertaining as Magicka: Wizard Wars can be, the game has yet to achieve greatness. The quick-paced and skill-driven combat system casts a charm on you in the beginning, but the delights wear off over time due to the presence of only a single good mode of play, grinding, and a few irritating bugs. The game's heart beats strongly, strengthened by great control mechanics and colorful warfare. But Wizard Wars needs work if it is going to realize its full potential.

At the beginning of Windward, you're presented with four factions to choose from. In Tasharen Entertainment's maritime action/exploration game, these factions represent the four styles of play Windward nominally offers: exploration, combat, trading, and diplomacy (read: questing). In the game's yawn-inducing first hour, that may seem like an apt description for the potential in the procedurally generated world set in front of you. But as you sink more time into Windward, its similarities to Sid Meier's Pirates! reveal themselves to be a masquerade--yet it still finds more time for the yawns, for good measure.

Windward presents itself as a "chart your own adventure" high-seas simulator promising great ocean expanses, complex economic trading, diplomatic engagement, and high-octane sea battles for whoever wishes to find their inner Magellan or Admiral Horatio Nelson. You sail your ship (and the small fleet you gather at the beginning of the game) around procedurally generated seas trading goods, hunting pirates, laying siege to cities, and building diplomatic relationships with towns and opposing alliances. But every mode features the depth of a freshman-level philosophy course, and if you want to engage in any of the non-combat options the game offers, you must deal with rote, padding-fueled combat for extended stretches.

For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out. The best way (honestly, it's the only reliable way) to gain money in Windward is through trading. You enter a town (through a bland menu) and either buy goods the residents have too much of or sell them goods they are short on. That's it. It never becomes more complicated than that. The aggravating, time-consuming portion of the system is that for the first few hours of the game, you’re stuck with ships with a two-slot cargo hold, which means you can only sell two trade goods at a time. So you're forced to waste time sailing around these large-ish maps unloading your cargo rather than taking care of a significant amount of business at once.

To further that aggravation, the questing/diplomacy systems--which feed into experience you get to make your ship better (read: survivable)--also take up space in your cargo hold. So, if you're ferrying passengers for a quest, you can only carry one trade good. That creates an interesting incentive to make sure you're maximizing your time, but it mostly creates an incentive to never quest (and therefore rarely engage in direct relationship-building services) because it never pays half as well as the more rote side of trading.

For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out.

But, wait! Exploration! I love exploration! I will spend hours just walking around The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and not fighting anyone (if I can help it), or questing, or doing anything because I just want to take in the gorgeously realized environments. I will happily get lost in a part of Brooklyn I have never visited before because I will be overcome by the stunning Victorian houses, the trees that seem to be more than just streetside window dressing, and the innumerable churches that are genuine architectural wonders. Exploration in Windward never achieves a fraction of that pleasure, because exploration is fun and intoxicating only when you're presented with a space worth exploring. Gone Home is literally a walk through your house, but every nook and cranny of the Greenbriar abode offers a glimpse into the lives of that family. Eidolon drops you into a massive forest and invites you to get lost and engage in exceptionally subtle environmental storytelling. Windward gives you bland chains of islets and an ocean, and you're never without a handy course direction effect telling you where to go. An entire faction of the game has no reason to exist because it represents a meaningless portion of the Windward experience.

Combat exists to break up the monotony of the other three core mechanical loops in the game, but it gets stuck in its own rote monotony. It takes a couple of hours for your ship to get any combat capabilities beyond circling around your enemy, auto-firing, and waiting for the cooldown on your volley shot to refresh. That's dull but fair for the singular ships you encounter at the beginning of the game, but once you encounter more ships in the game's second area--Windward's admittedly massive world maps are broken down into significantly smaller chunks--success in ship combat becomes an arbitrary question of "will the game send more ships at me than I can possibly handle" until you get more upgrades. Conquering towns involves dropping anchor in a circle outside a port for a nominal period of time.

That feeds into Windward's most perfidious sin. Even if you decide you're really into Windward's exploration, trading, or questing, you can't properly engage in them without sinking a lot of time into combat once you reach the second area. Trading is totally blocked off until you've kicked all the pirates out of any given region. And pirates spawn rapidly in Windward, and they’ll take over towns if you lose your vigilance for even a second. Windward doesn’t give you the necessary tools to properly defend regions you've secured from pirates, leading to a constant hit and run. Even if you don’t engage in the game's combat, it still becomes the only element of the game you can interact with.

The opening portions of Winward have you falling asleep at your computer; later areas have you cursing angrily as every small victory you win is erased by the overzealous enemy AI (aided by utterly complacent allies content to watch town after town fall to pirates). The promise of exploring Windward's world as you see fit is a false one, and Windward never earns its sea legs.

Color Guardians is a beautiful headache. The idea is simple enough: you're a colorful mascot, running mostly from left to right and dodging back and forth along three lanes to avoid upcoming hazards while you collect glowing orbs to boost your score. The experience could have been delightful, but instead wavers between monotonous and infuriating.

As the game begins, most of the color is sucked out of a magical world and replaced with darkness. You, a red guardian, and your two friends--blue and yellow--are the only ones who possess the ability to restore the vibrant hues that otherwise will be gone forever. The setup is reminiscent of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse or de Blob, only this game is populated by generic characters you've never seen before and probably won't care much about now.

If making everything right only required you to gather the orbs strewn about the three lanes, Color Guardians wouldn't offer much to challenge you, even with the addition of the environmental hazards. However, as a guardian you possess the ability to change between the three primary tones, and must utilize that gift in order to make real headway. If you pass over orbs while appropriately colored, you gain rewards. You do better still if you press one of three buttons as you find yourself in position. This is a neat idea on paper but tedious in practice. Imagine if your score in an old Sonic or Mario game were dependent on your willingness to press a button each time you passed over a ring or coin.

Earning the best possible ranking in a stage is difficult, since you must manage a nearly perfect run to do it. A two-star rank is essentially the default. If you mess up badly enough that you're in line for a lesser accolade, you seldom survive the effort, at least during the first half of the game. After that, it sometimes seems the only way you ever reach a goal is by the skin of your teeth. Fortunately, you can resume as often as you like from a checkpoint, once you pass one. The downside is that these are in rather short supply as the game wears on, and thus you have to retread a lot of hostile ground.

Early on, the challenge isn't severe, but that changes with the introduction of new mechanics. You eventually find oversized parasols that you collect automatically as you pass over them, and these carry you into the air for a while, after which you can either descend slowly or discard them to initiate a quick dive. Elsewhere, your path is blocked by color-coded barriers that recede only when you approach them with the proper hue applied. There are mushrooms and giant fans that allow you to quickly gain elevation, but your color must match theirs, or they're useless.

None of that may sound especially taxing, but it comes together in some truly exasperating ways. The developer did a commendable job of taking full advantage of each new gameplay wrinkle. Less admirably, it produced a lot of seemingly simple scenarios where you must do the opposite of what feels natural or face the consequences. Because of the particular button layout, it's easy to associate each color with a particular lane, but any color can require your interaction at any time, often in a rapid-fire sequence and with all manner of distractions. This dynamic is of course exploited frequently. Likewise, the game eventually trains you to switch hues so that you can gather trinkets and spring triumphantly from color-coded mushrooms. You then tackle a level that forces you to do precisely the opposite, lest you launch into inky spirits flying overhead. In the third world and elsewhere thereafter, you ride in mine carts that only switch lanes if you press a button corresponding to the desired lane. Such areas force your brain to adjust yet again, especially when segments of track are interrupted by ledges for a brief time. The net effect of the game's design is that you spend your time racing through one level after another, failing frequently until you memorize every danger that lies between one checkpoint and the next. Each stumble is punishment for your lack of a crystal ball that might allow you to divine what obstacle comes next. Successes don't feel like proof of skill; they merely attest to your ability to memorize another sequence.

The irksome platforming is exacerbated by a number of related issues. You frequently find yourself floating over wide gaps, forced to land briefly on small islands and launch from pads. Sometimes, you must drop your parasol and quickly switch colors and spring into the air again before changing to another lane. Then, as you tumble into an abyss, you realize that you actually needed to switch two lanes at once, which wasn't immediately apparent. An on-screen indicator lets you know where you will land, but it's mostly only useful to explain your mysterious death so that you can do things differently the next time around. Another problem is that sometimes the game hangs for a split-second without warning, which murders your timing, or indicators pop up as you pass score thresholds and ruin your concentration.

Whatever its other issues are, Color Guardians at least nails its presentation. Its visual design in particular is quite appealing. Regions start out draped in shadow, but everything comes to vibrant life as paint washes over it. There's lots of activity most of the time, as well, from floating spirits to mischievous goblins and dancing light and shadows. The music and sound effects set the stage nicely, being both mystical and energetic in just the right proportion.

If you find yourself enjoying the game despite its excessively punishing design, or perhaps even because of it, there's good news: the five worlds possess around ten stages apiece, along with boss encounters (though each of these offers increasingly challenging variations on a theme, rather than wholly distinct confrontations). When you defeat the recurring baddie at the end of an area, you can backtrack and search for hidden sprites and unlock additional stages, or just revisit your familiar stomping grounds in search of better scores. Leaderboards let you know how you rank compared to other players, which should be a nice incentive once the game has been in the wild long enough.

Color Guardians features a concept that's still new enough to feel fresh, and makes the most of it. All too often, though, the stages are designed in such a way that you're tricked into failing, and any technical issues stand out more than they might elsewhere because precise timing and concentration are so vital to success. You can always rebound after failure, but sometimes it's difficult to muster the energy to do so when part of you knows there's bound to be another trick of some sort waiting just a few screens away. It's all very pretty, sure. It's just not worth it.