Overall Garden Warfare is a game that takes the core strengths of shooters and makes them accessible to all. Its presentation is fantastic and infects the game with charm at every turn. If you're looking for a fun time, PopCap gives it to you in spades. By ratcheting up the fun and lowering the seriousness, Garden Warfare gives its players what everyone wants from a video game: A good time.
Thief is a disappointment. However, laying beyond its shortcomings with movement mechanics, combat and narrative, is a satisfying core of theft and stealth that can, at times, still have you feeling like a master thief. If you're looking for something to waste hours collecting digital trinkets on, and feeling like a total bad ass thief while doing so, then this may be for you. For anyone looking for a story-driven, combat-focused, narrative-based experience you'd be better off looking elsewhere.
The overall sci-fi themes are interesting and might lead somewhere, but without tighter mechanics and a broader set of outcomes, Consortium just sits as a wannabe Mass Effect that doesn't quite understand the difference between a game of Guess Who? and a video game.
Ryse falls short in almost every area in which a game can. Pretty and polished though it may be, it is not an essential title.
With its large scale warfare simulator simultaneously at its most accessible and long-term-fan pleasing level for years, and with CoD: Ghosts looking a little tired, it may just be the year of Battlefield.