A couple years ago, a developer called Trion Worlds, made up of a bunch of industry veterans with $100 million in investment capital from China, put out a fantasy MMO called RIFT. RIFT was actually really good. It had a wonderfully flexible class system, a highly fleshed-out world that emphasized exploration in interesting ways, and dynamic content in the form of, well, rifts.

This context is important, because despite the solid shooting action in Trion’s most recent title, Defiance has in large part forgone what made RIFT great.

When the title of a game references both Nazis and the undead, and sees fit to also verify that it’s an army of them rather than just one or two, you can be sure of one thing: it’s either going to be a fun, tongue-in-cheek romp, or it needed to trick you into thinking it was going to be a fun, tongue-in-cheek romp because it’s not very good.

In this case, it’s the latter.

Crysis 3 is like that friend you had in high-school who topped every class, was on a bunch of sports teams, and yet still had time to hang out with you. It fills you with awe and envy all at once, and then you find out that he has a weird thing for poodles, or he won’t eat anything with the letter L in its name, and that super-human shimmer dulls a little.

Crytek are historically known for pushing the graphical boundaries with their games. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that a good portion of Crytek’s game sales come solely from people who want to use the latest title as a graphical benchmark for their machine. It helps that the games have been pretty good, and Crysis 3 is no exception…

Special Forces: Team X might as well be called “A Video Game” for all the good a title that generic does, especially because it’s not entirely generic. Certainly, Special Forces isn’t the most original game around –- it’s a third-person cover-based shooter, for crying out loud -– but it has some new elements, and its execution is pretty darn solid.

Know what makes a great party game? Action RPGs like Diablo. You get to run around with friends, blowing up monsters and collecting sweet loot. They can be really hard, but often they reward you so frequently that every little roadblock gives you the chance to pick up some amazing new mace or helmet.

Know what else works well with some pals? Those LEGO movie-themed games. They’re simple, colourful, easy, and relatively brainless.

Where the two meet, you’ll find Dungeonland, a co-operative hack-n-slash that feels a little like Diablo burst through the seven layers of Hell and found only the colourful, simplified world of the LEGO games. Except things aren’t made of blocks, and… well, it’s not actually anywhere near as fun as that sounds.

The old chocolate-and-peanut butter adage states that two good things can sometimes combine to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. FORGE, a Kickstarter failure but Steam Greenlight alumnus is banking on this premise.

FORGE is an online multiplayer class-based shooter in the same vein as games like Team Fortress 2, but with a little twist — it uses mechanics and tropes pulled from fantasy MMOs.

Reviewing an MMO expansion is sort of like giving a game a physical. It’s an opportunity to look at the new content that the expansion has added to the game (which, for a World of Warcraft expansion, is never a small amount), but also to look at the state of the MMO as a whole. Because, as more and more content is added to the same product, there’s always a risk that a game might lose its direction or momentum, or make older content completely irrelevant. A really good expansion will find a way to not only make advancement fun, but create a new experience for players who want to go back to their roots.

Does Mists of Pandaria pull this off? Nick Kolan comes back from the level cap to give us the final verdict.

Let’s just get this out of the way now: the Pet Battle System introduced in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is a massive Pokemon ripoff. And that’s totally fine by me. For years, fans of the Pokemon franchise have cried out for a Pokemon MMO. The thought of an open world filled with hundreds of adorable little monsters to find, battle, collect and train is tantalizing at the very least and yet Nintendo has never capitalized on it.

Well, you snooze you lose, Nintendo. Blizzard stepped up to the plate and has mimicked the Pokemon model, or at least the core elements of it, to a tee.

Mists of Pandaria marks the fourth expansion for World of Warcraft, a game that has been around for close to eight years. Despite World of Warcraft‘s long reign as the most popular subscription-based MMO, it’s tough to ignore the shifting trends of its slowly shrinking audience. These first days in Pandaria have shown, quite starkly, the effects that other high-profile MMO launches have on World of Warcraft since it reached its launch-peak with Cataclysm.

In case you haven’t been paying any attention in the last year or so, Blizzard has another World of Warcraft expansion on the way. World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria is due out in a matter of weeks (the 25th to be precise), and with it comes the introduction of the first new class since the Death Knight, and the first new class that is immediately playable regardless of your progress. The class? The Monk.

The crafting system in Guild Wars 2, while pretty simple, is tuned in such a way that actually leveling it up at the same rate as your character takes some planning and a little discipline on your part. Nick Kolan walks you through the best way to stay on top of your crafting and make sure you’re always at peak efficiency.

A lot of really excellent games have come out since World of Warcraft‘s last expansion, Cataclysm. One of those games was even from Blizzard themselves. So even if you, like I, have not really involved yourself in World of Warcraft since seeing what Deathwing did to Azeroth, there’s still time to catch up before checking out World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.

Time away from an MMO can make it difficult to get back in. Stat gaps form, players change, and sometimes entire systems undergo revamps. World of Warcraft also features an actively evolving world and storyline, which can make it even tougher to know where you stand. Here’s the absolute basics to ensure you’re not totally lost come September 25.