Batman: Arkham City Game of the Year Edition ($40) puts most other comic-inspired games to shame, delivering a brilliant take on the Dark Knight and his iconic foes. Arkham City opens up the titular location for exploration, but its best moments come from memorable encounters with the likes of The Joker, Bane, and Two-Face. Plus, this expanded edition includes plenty of bonus content.

Role-playing gets a surprisingly mature layer of grit in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition ($30), which sees you guiding monster slayer Geralt of Rivia through an engaging, choice-filled adventure. Based on your decisions, you'll may see very different results from one play-through to the next, and the deep narrative and mechanics make for an enriching quest.

You've never seen (or heard) a game quite like Bastion ($15). The stunning hand-drawn visuals make an immediate impression, with the worlds being built from scratch as you wander about, but it's the incredible audio narration of each significant moment that gives the game such a powerful grip. It's a bite-sized adventure with stellar action and powerful storytelling, and it'll stick with you.

Blizzard's beloved dungeon crawling series took its sweet time pumping out another iteration, but Diablo III ($60) proved worth the wait, delivering an all-consuming action role-playing affair. Set 20 years after the previous entry, Diablo III serves up four new player classes to experiment with, but whatever your choice, it's likely that you'll find the ever-thrilling loot hunt nigh impossible to resist.

As on iOS, Telltale's The Walking Dead ($25) is one of the most shocking games of the year, and not only in its violent depiction of the zombie apocalypse. The point-and-click adventure is also an alarmingly emotional experience, forcing you to make difficult choices during its five-episode quest. How will you play, and what will it say about you? That is the game's grand, successful experiment.

It might be a couple years late on Mac, but Call of Duty: Black Ops ($50) is no less effective with the delay, delivering a huge and entertaining shooter experience. The cinematic campaign spins through fantastical Cold War missions, while the frantic Zombies mode delivers hilarious co-op shenanigans. It's the thrilling and wickedly deep online multiplayer that gives Black Ops serious legs, though.

Cargo Commander ($10) is a little game with a surprising amount of heart, delivering an interesting variation on the "roguelike" by having you dive into randomized containers in search of loot. What makes the game so compelling, aside from its consistent plunge into the unknown, is its depiction of the everyman hero as a lonely worker struggling in space, far away from his family.

Stealth, shooting, and role-playing all hold equal weight in the superb Deus Ex: Human Revolution Ultimate Edition ($50), a large and involving action game that's the latest entry in an influential series. Set in a futuristic sci-fi world, much of the fun comes from the ability to purchase and equip augmentations, which enhance your combat and stealth skills and let you hack into systems.

On a list with many brash and glossy action games, the cel-shaded world and off-beat humor of Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers ($10) might seem an anomaly, but that's exactly why this little indie stuck with us. On a quest to reclaim his late grandfather's magical underpants, Tiny can cut through the world with his splicing laser, offering up an ample selection of ways to play each level.

Borderlands 2 ($60) may not strongly deviate from the loot-fueled first-person shooter approach of the riotous original, but it didn't need to, as the co-op-centric formula still shines. Teaming up with pals, you'll explore the world of Pandora, which is filled with an array of bizarre characters and tense missions, and the endless grind for better gear and improved abilities keeps the action enthralling.