God Eater 3

If you enjoy the Monster Hunter series, chances are you'll have some fun with Bandai Namco's take on the genre. God Eater 3 is the first game in the series to appear on a console, but it retains much of what defined its handheld predecessors. Combat's action-packed, with imaginative, scary looking beasts that players deal with by a diverse number of satisfyingly powerful attacks. The growth and evolution of weapons and gear gets pretty complicated and requires plenty of reading to fully understand -- this is the sort of game that comes with pages upon pages of optional explanatory notes explaining weapons and game systems. Players who take the time to learn it all will feel empowered as they take superhuman characters armed with wildly effective blades into battle. If you choose to jump online, you'll instantly be able to tell the serious players from the casual ones by how effective they are in combat.

But while the fighting is fast, fun, and refined, other parts of the experience still have room to grow. The non-player characters are generally likeable -- and surprisingly helpful in battle, if only to give monsters another target to focus on -- but they tend to fall into stereotypes and often don't have much interesting to say. Worse, the English acting is gratingly bad; it's better to listen to the original Japanese actors with subtitles. And though the fictional world and its visual design are interesting, it feels small and poorly fleshed out, even if you take the time to read the many lore entries buried in the archive menu that explain the backstory. A little more mythology and a larger world would've done wonders for the player's sense of immersion. Still, there's plenty to like about God Eater 3, especially if you're in it primarily for monster-slaying action.