Bioshock

Simply excellent. My penchant for melee weapons is well satisfied in this game - wrench is wonderful - and gameplay is excellent to - the hacking minigame is tremendous fun. This is one of the very few games i know that really immerses you - you can feel your heart beating at the same rate as Jacks. The modification aspect is good. On top of this, although this is not necessarily a good indicator of a good game, i could not find a single flaw with bioshock. One part in which i did get stuck, did not put me off - i played it again and again, looking around for the code for the next level, and never got bored. Darkly beautiful. 

10

Max Payne 3

This game delivers its single player campaign in amazingly gritty, smooth and polished game play that I have come to expect from Rockstar Games. The campaign is fast-paced, its brutal, its everything you would ever want from a Max Payne game. Maximum Pain at every corner, behind every closed door.

While the storyline may seem confusing in the beginning (switches in timeline), everything will make sense as you fight your way through bleak city streets, urban guerrilla favelas and high rise apartments. This game takes you seamlessly from environment to environment without making it feel weird or without flow.

The game has no loading times if played in one sitting from start to finish, it is like playing an amazingly awesome action movie. I had no issue with the constant cut-scenes and dialogue, it keeps you on the edge of your seat at all times and you are waiting with baited breath to dive back into the unrelenting action.

Rockstar means it when they say they delayed this game to make it good, they have made it great. They have redefined the Max Payne franchise and taken the storyline and gameplay to a whole new level. This is without a doubt the BEST Max Payne game I have played since the franchise started.

10

Super Meat Boy

Simply put, the best true platforming game to come out in YEARS. As you can immediately notice, the user scores are quite polarized, and I believe this is true to the nature of the game. If you find joy in surmounting difficult (But FAIR) platforming challenges, this game is the PERFECT game for you. Let me also state that the 10 I assigned this game was not some knee-jerk reaction to a merely clever indie game. This game is fantastic by ANY standard, it is perfectly executed. There is nothing in the game where I have ever said, man, I wish X existed. In a time where games like Fallout New Vegas and Civ 5 release with the swath of glitches and bugs in the game, it is refreshing to have a game ship out that is immensely bug free, it is absolutely precise. You may even grow to treat this precision as a foe, as there is a razor thin edge between success and death in each level, there is no "give", if you touch a deadly obstacle with any part of your hit-box, you can count on dying. However, this consistency gives rise to the games greatest achievement, the overall fairness of the game. I am astounded that I read other user reviews that actually complained about the controls, they are absolutely astounding. To be fair, I do use a Xbox360 controller, I could see that without one it may take longer to "pick up" but the controls are nevertheless, precise. The character becomes an extension of your will, you'll find sometimes that when an unexpected hazard appears, you react quickly and ably within fractions of a second, as if you were acting out of instinct. I am also disturbed to read some people claiming that this game's difficulty is just a mechanism to lengthen the game. I find it hard to believe we even played the same game. The levels are difficult to be sure, but they are absolutely fair, if you die, it is your fault, there are no invisible traps, your character will not move if you don't tell him to. And even if you die, the levels each can be completed in under a minute, so if you do die (and you will die, often) almost no progress is lost. You will not be spending 5 minutes just to get a chance to practice the spot you died at last time. The other reason I find this explanation difficult to believe is that there are over 300 levels. The game is already massive, it wouldn't need to be lengthened by unnecessary difficulty.

In short: A difficult platformer, but an absolute masterpiece if you are willing to take up the challenge.

10