

Tend the farm, feed the animals, make some socks - just connect to the Internet later to save your progress.

It’s the first FarmVille game that can be played offline. There are timers, but there’s always something to do while waiting. There is no waiting for a well to fill to water crops. It does not feature quests that force you to ask an entire Facebook friend list for pieces of wood. Rather than simply moving FarmVille 2 to mobile devices, Zynga built Country Escape with the mobile gamer in mind. Zynga brings out the best in the game with FarmVille 2: Country Escape. Somewhere behind the frustrating timers and friend-bothering quests of FarmVille 2, there’s a lovely little farming and craft simulator. But while it is often beautifully and slickly constructed, it remains a sliver of a larger, more complete game. Ground Zeroes is surely the most mechanically sound, fluidly designed Metal Gear Solid installment yet made. The game also frequently conjures the brutality of Abu Ghraib, with so-called enemy combatants kept in animal cages with black bags over their heads, their lives reduced to a horrific and seemingly endless ordeal. At every turn, the developers evoke the cages and high walls of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay the rain-speckled searchlights the United States military guards in billowing green ponchos.

Omega may be Cold War fiction, but there are shades of the modern war on terror here. Great joy can be found in poking and prodding at its interlocking systems, just to see how they react. This intricately designed, fun-to-explore military compound is loaded with guards, watchtowers and roving vehicles. Snake must head to Cuba, infiltrate a black-site military prison called Camp Omega, where they’re being held, and get them out. Two of the main characters, a young woman named Paz and a little boy named Chico, have been taken prisoner by a shadowy group.
