Charles Onyett

Last time we played a finished Remedy game Max Payne and Mona Sax were machine-gunning their way through hoodlums while exchanging whiskey-soaked comments dripping with an overblown Raymond Chandler wit. That was 2003, and in the years since the Finnish studio that gave us bullet time has been cobbling together Alan Wake. It moves away from the crime rings and nighttime streets of New York City to a fictional small town called Bright Falls with great results.

Bethesda's open world role-playing game is finally here. Check in for our opinion of one of the biggest games of 2011.

Creating a sequel without playing all the same notes and making it feel like Portal: The Longer Version is a tough task. For Valve, it's apparently no problem.

Take a moment to consider how bizarre this game world really is. It's set in an underwater sprawl of surface-style skyscrapers, a city called Rapture. Filling the pressurized space is a society founded by an industrialist named Andrew Ryan with the notion that there'd be no limits on what the individual could accomplish. It was all a spectacular failure as the civilization that developed on the ocean floor turned to genetic modification. Gradually their sanity was devoured by their unrestricted