Ammonite

Hotline Miami has a unique, depressing, ominous atmosphere structured by trippy. dated visuals, and solid music. In saying that, the repetitive game play does begin to drag after a few chapters. Some frustrating bugs, on top of ridiculous boss levels that seem purposefully built to annoy, take the overall shine off of the game.

Charming. beautiful graphics and awesome game play, this is an addictive and appealing game all around. I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy it at first but I keep going back to it, last time I was this attached to an app was Angry Birds.

City Sandbox is a weird city sim. It feels more like creative construction game and its very fun destroying buildings. The graphics are quirky and odd and the game has a silly sort of dry humor throughout. Its really easy to play because you don't need any goals or settings, and it has a cool save load system so you can have 3 cities. If you want a challenge like Simcity its not the same, City Sandbox is much more simple and less about city management, but its really cool for town design and playing around with building.

The Sims is an iconic piece of gaming history. Though its isometric fake-3D world may not appeal to gamers today, its charm lives on and its playability remains in tact.

Over hyped and designed carelessly, Minecraft may be an icon to the indie gaming industry, but it is not gaming perfection by any means. Part sandbox game. Part strategy. Part... clicking over and over until your mouse button is worn and your finger hurts. As more Minecraft clones appear, to bank in on the game's success, we see copy-cat developers actually better certain aspects of the game in their own redesigns. Even now, the developers behind Minecraft seem to be blindly throwing in new ideas hoping to improve the game by adding to the pile of so-so concepts. Minecraft certainly wasn't the first block-building indie game, and still not the best. But its combination of monsters, mining, and crafting seems to have hooked a hit with the gaming crowd, in a burst of luck and overexposure through social media. Minecraft has its moments of fun, but is a complete bore without multiplayer interaction. The construction system is reasonably lack-luster and the mining system very much feels like a mind-rotting chore than a fun gaming experience. The crafting system redeems the game, barely holding game play together. The visuals, though cute, also feel too basic. Is the pixel style an intentional design, or just a half-baked cover up for cheap 3D graphics? Its too expensive for what it is, and as a sandbox game is reasonably lackluster. Exploration and crafting seem to be the best aspects of Minecraft. Everything in between is a fragile experience.

Portal 2, though lacking the initial 'modest charm' and mysteriousness of the original, offers a much more polished and cinematic experience with content equally if not more engaging than the first. Brand new puzzle challenges, a captivating story, new characters and world concepts to explore, consistently good voice acting (including a surprising role by Stephen Merchant) and lashes of humor come together in a must-have game that can be played even without knowledge of the prior game. Additional features, like the community-focused level editor, add a new dimension. It was easy to screw up here, but Portal 2 is not a lazy sequel by any means. It feels like a solid, richer, classier progression of its predecessor. Its a do-not-miss kind of game.

Inappropriately branded under the Sim City franchise, Societies looks fun and innovative but lacks engaging game play. Even those who have never heard of Sim City before will find themselves tire of this poorly designed game, that poses very little challenge or purpose. The graphics seem promising and the concept seems good, but ultimately there is very little to do here. It feels too limited for a sandbox game, and lacks any consistent challenge to be a strategy game. Its neither here nor there, and ends up feeling more like a not-so-successful beta ****. Sandbox mode can provide a moment of creative amusement, but the replay value is almost dead. Given its stodgy size and questionable performance, its hard to justify keeping this installed.