Even the visuals seem disinterested with everything looking lifeless and devoid of any real colour or identifiable landmarks, outside of a few fan service cameos. Bland is probably the only word to describe how the game looks.

There’s an upgrade system to offer up replayability and variation, but there’s just not enough about the world, characters, and story to elevate it above anything more than a fun tech demo to put your new GPU through its paces.

Hidden within Travis Strikes Again there are a few fun, unexpected, and outlandish moments. Some of the dialogue in the text adventure story sequences can be amusing, as are reading the fake classic game reviews you can collect. But even these are limited to only a handful of moments when you’re not in direct control of either Travis or Badman, and even they quickly begin to exhibit the same dual-traits of boring and over-played. In a game where you use toilets to save, fight with a lightsaber-like weapon, assassinate strange and odd characters in a world chock-full of pop culture references and absurdism – that’s strike three and four.

With no real championship mode, and a limited number of tracks, the appeal begins to wear thin after a couple of hours. Perhaps the biggest mistake that World Series makes is with re-imagining a classic party and same-room multiplayer experience into a game with a focus on online competition. Some types of games just don’t work all that well when forced into the mould of a character-driven, loot box collecting, quick match system. Playing Micro Machines World Series with four players in the same room is undoubtedly fun, but this option is relegated to a secondary mode with no customisation or incentive to come back when all you have are limited options, and unbalanced vehicles.

What many had hoped would be a glorious trip down memory lane, is a muddled affair that lacks spit and polish across the board. Hail to the king, baby? No. Sadly, it's more akin to, 'Fail to the king, baby.' And I'm genuinely disappointed that I couldn't love the game more.

Part ‘80s love letter, part Trials game, part mash-up of new and mostly terrible play styles.

Crash Bandicoot can still be fun – but is far from essential. A visually impressive remake full of detail and polish for what is for the most part a painfully average platformer.

It's about a gazillion times better than Rugby World Cup 2015, but it's just not able to compete in the big leagues against well made, polished titles like FIFA 16, NBA 2K16 and Madden 16.

Seems to be an expansion in name only. If anything, it makes the already overplayed sections of the core game feel smaller. And for a grand sci-fi universe, that’s a bad thing.

This sort of baffling design is not a new thing but as game narratives improve these dated examples can’t help but feel just that – dated.

Cities XL 2012 is even less of a complete title than its predecessor was. When the removal of a core gameplay feature isn't replaced with an effective replacement, what you're left with is a broken game. No effort has been taken to bring C:XL to "2012" standards in the way of a graphics overhaul, and it still runs like a dog with 3 legs to boot.

Bugs are aplenty. The voice system barely works, crashes happen regularly and pings fluctuate from game to game.

Developer Nihilistic seems settled on the idea that bringing Resistance to the Vita is an inherently bold and innovative move, and that doing anything truly interesting beyond that is unnecessary. It's not a strictly bad FPS, but it's so damn perfunctory, so set on ticking the absolute minimum number of boxes and moving on, it's largely boring and forgettable.

There isn't even an opportunity to crack some skulls, as the Red Skull himself plays a brief scripted cameo, giving way to other lacklustre character steroetypes to flesh out the basic "evil guys take over the world" style storyline.

Babel Rising is an unfortunate mix of interesting mechanics and poor design. It's fun in fits and starts, but finishing a level yields a sense of relief rather than achievement. Count us among the non-believers.

If you're absolutely desperate for a Move game you could do worse, but Sorcery is really nothing more than a relatively irritating, disappointing curio.

EA Sports UFC is form over function. It's all show, no go, a pretty fighter without the know-how to back it up in the octagon. The Ignite engine successfully delivers a game which makes casual observers double-take as they attempt to work out if they're watching the real thing or not, but anyone with the controller in their hand will know something is wrong.

The major flaw is not only that it removes the most exciting possibilities of playing Spider-Man, it doesn't offer anything in replacement. The arcade element of upgrading attacks gives you nothing of consequence, and how can it when Spider-Man already has his skill set locked in? It's a dead concept.

All in all, Outriders falls short of Anthem in the launch-period stability stakes. Having to combat the game to be able to combat enemies and then combat the game to be able to combat enemies and then combat the… well, it’s just not worth it.

It’s a shame that Explore the Dungeon, despite its adherence to maintaining the characters’ personalities and its clear admiration of the source material, misses the point of what makes Adventure Time work. It’s a lazy piece of design, one that has no business carrying a $60 price tag when it feels like it could have been ripped straight from a browser.

007 Legends absolutely reeks of a rush job. It may have the look (loosely) but carries with it none of the heart, soul or charm of the world's greatest secret agent.

Disjointed, numbing, vexing, joyless, and dull, Thor: God of Thunder is the quintessential action movie video game adaptation.

Datura reeks of under-utilised and squandered potential, making the end result even more disappointing. If you're looking for a moving and immersive title to add to your collection Datura isn't it. Spend your money on Journey instead.

Sure, there are some minor kicks to be had in three player co-op, but they're very short-lived and fraught with frustration. Call of Juarez should have stuck to its guns and remained an Old Wild Western. Avoid this like you would the real po-lice.

It just feels generic. It feels like they took what the original developers made and added a shiny gloss to it, ignoring what made it special to the time period it originally existed in. There's nothing that feels special about Nexiuz, neither changes that make it feel comfortable on its new home, nor any additional features to warrant a special purchase.

Sadly the story of Sergeant Powers will be seen as a failure, which it is, but certainly only of execution.

Fuse is what happens when someone had a great idea that got greenlighted in a meeting 4 years ago, before executives and VPs stripped it down during development until there was nothing left but a shell. It’s what happens when a developer, full of creativity, showmanship and excitement, feels like they need to play it safe because humour and wit aren’t apparently marketable properties in an industry that no longer feels comfortable taking risks.

Could it be a hilarious addition to a boozy Friday night gaming session with mates? You betcha. Would I want to rip my hair out in frustration more than half the time? Sure would. It is still seriously flawed and bound to infuriate a lot of gamers out there. For those who are more of a glass half full kind of guy (or gal), can let niggling flaws slide, and like minimum exposition, this will be right up your alley. Just know exactly what you're in for.

The real lesson here is to stop releasing unfinished games, whether that’s server woes, optimisation issues, immersion-shattering bugs or, as is additionally the case with Battlefield 2042, an undercooked core gameplay offering that would have benefited from at least another year in the oven.

The game shows conceptual promise – you unlock some mild security manipulation powers that will hopefully be pushed further in future episodes – but conceptual promise isn’t worth much until it has been delivered upon.

If you scare easily, the low asking price may entice you into a purchase but, for everyone else, Daylight represents a dull and missed opportunity for effective horror.

Even if it ran beautifully, Gotham Knights still feels pretty much unsalvageable. There’s a lot of game to be found in Gotham Knights, a lot of by-the-numbers repetition, and many meaningless tasks that make you think the project began as a live service game like Marvel’s Avengers. And simply shifted focus to become a co-op thing sometime during development. But then again, that’s adding justification to mechanics and progression systems in a game that doesn’t care to explain why you need to craft new gear all the time. There’s no “endgame” or persistent world to support the repetition either. The good news is that there’s quite a bit of story to dig into, and you do get to go head-to-head with several notable villains. But you’ll need to overcome a lot more than the death of Batman to see it through.

RaiderZ feels unpolished and unfinished, plagued with a stagnant, passionless player base and a stack of now obsolete design tropes around questing, story, player progression and crafting.

Add to this a less-than-likeable Frey who barely manages to endear herself upon the player, and even less likeable NPCs and a bland, bland game-world I have no desire to learn more about, let alone live in (take me back to New York and my real-world troubles there, please), and you have a game that just… lacks.

Riptide brings absolutely nothing new to the experience of the first game. If anything, it just piles on new frustrations.

There are a few extremely brief moments of promise in Warfighter – clearing a village from the side of a little bird with a sniper rifle and a high speed chase through Dubai are two areas that almost managed to be exciting. Unfortunately they're surrounded by too many moments of bog-standard room clearing to matter, and the entire package is let down by one of the clunkiest online modes in recent memory.

Floaty imprecise controls, a lack of depth, random spikes in difficulty due to bad design, random frustration, a mini-game for the sake of a mini-game, and a protagonist with the all the charisma of a shiny blue block.

Even die-hard Resi fans (of which I am actually one), ought to steer clear. None of the game's promises are met, and while you might have thought a Resi co-op experience was a dream come true, you're better off waiting until someone internally pitches it at Capcom in Japan and it's handled by the series' parents, and not their snot-nosed, annoying neighbour's kids (sorry Slant Six, but this effort is inexcusable).

Construction Simulator 2 is so unrelentingly strict in its stringent adherence to following set tasks, there is absolutely no chance for imagination or creative outlet. Put simply, failure to follow the precise steps laid out for any particular task results in a breakdown that negates the contract or job, resulting in lost time, revenue, and any potential for enjoyment.

It’s simply not worth exploring, even if you own shrink-wrapped copies of every TV season plus a signed, framed first edition of the graphic novel.

Dark Alliance’s problems go beyond enemies zipping around arenas and ragdolling randomly at breakneck speed into walls. Though, a lot of that can be quite funny. It fails to do basic things like scale difficulty for solo and group play, or do the normal thing of not giving ranged mage-like enemies drastically higher physical-defence ratings than large hulking brutes. There are so many things half-baked, broken, glitchy, or simply baffling it’s almost commendable.

David Cage may have succeeded at making his most cinematic game yet, but if I’d paid $8 to see Beyond on the cinema’s cheap day I would have walked out well before the credits rolled.

It's banal and tedious and if your narrative focused do-nothing game wouldn't work as a halfway interesting short story, then it won't be better just because you force people to walk slowly around a wholly un-interactive game space while you drip-feed them unconnected plot points.