Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture claims to be something more than a game, but that claim is completely groundless. [10/2015, p.50]

Instead of engaging interactions, great animations or wonderfully crafted characters The Beginner’s Guide offers empty, amateurish, uninteresting environments and a story about two immature game developers. [01/2016, p.54]

Super Mario Run looks and sounds like New Super Mario Bros., but unfortunately it does not play like it. It’s a runner that constantly annoyed me with its lack of precise controls I enjoyed so much in real Mario games. [02/2017, p.36]

Phogs! reminds me of many games based on physics, such as Human: Fall Flat, and I can’t deny that it is full of very funny moments. It is a shame that so many elements are botched (from poor responsiveness to flawed controls) and the whole thing is crawling with various bugs. [02/2021, p.36]

If this is how the rest of Telltale’s Game of Thrones is going to look like, I want nothing to do with it. Too many dialogues that lead nowhere, too much nonsense inconsistent with the source material, and the visuals are simply laughable. [01/2015, p.59]

How did such an attractive subject turn out so boring? The tactical component is almost as basic as it gets and the studio management has the depth of a mobile game. [07/2015, p.62]

I honestly don’t know who was the intended target group for Sorcerer King. There’s almost nothing fresh in this game to attract those who avoided 4X strategies and the genre’s veterans will snarl with disgust and return to much more complex Age of Wonders III. [10/2015, p.66]

A poorly animated, unbalanced game that I didn’t enjoy at all. Although it does offer a lot of different punches, kicks and throws, its gameplay resembles a long, boring QTE. [13/2013, p.74]

After having spent over 80 hours with Inquisition I was tired of it and Jaws of Hakkon did absolutely nothing to reignite the flame. [06/2015, p.57]

11-11 is neither an example of good impressionist art, nor a good war movie or a good video game. It’s unbearably pretentious and so shallow it does not reach beyond simple platitudes (“not all Germans were evil”, “global conflicts affect ordinary people too”). It’s sad that brushing against a mature subject and going for an artsy feel is enough to make many people overlook obvious flaws of a game (in this case poor gameplay, among other things) and the fact that games as a medium are light years behind movies in terms of storytelling. [01/2019, p.74]

If you’re really hungry for a metroidvania but you expect something more than “some indie jam stuff” go for a much better Axiom Verge. [09/2015, p.69]

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition is a great game, but only on Xbox One. The PC edition is troublesome beyond belief. I had to face failing Windows Store download, abysmal performance (so much for the Full HD, not to mention 4K...) and lots of different technical issues ranging from missing textures to game quitting unexpectedly. [05/2016, p.45]

A great example of an eyesore spit out by indie devs convinced that only the story matters. The worst part is that they had no idea how to write the story to avoid it being a cliché running with the pack of sad, moving indie games. [08/2014, p.69]

They say size isn't important but clearly 9mm is not enough. A major failure by Gameloft – the game is mediocre at best and laughable at worst. [August 2011, p.74]

I was fed up with Steel Empire after 15 minutes. The game is too easy, weapons lack punch, action sequences are anemic. [03/2016, p.73]

Mocap team, the dancer and the choreographer did a great job, and it’s a pity their effort was wasted on such a mediocre game. [11/2016, p.58]

How to design an indie game to have it published on Sony’s platforms? It’s easy. The game just has to look nice and there may be some crumbs of gameplay in there somewhere. But not necessarily. If there’s no gameplay, you just call it ‘an experience’, not a game, and everything’s fine. [Nov 2014, p.73]

Beat Cop’s gameplay foundations are very interesting, but the initial tension fades quickly, the game becomes repetitive and its humor is crude to the point of being embarrassing. [06/2017, p.42]

Huge disappointment. Undisputed is a much, much worse boxing game than Fight Night Champion, which premiered over 13 years ago.

The Sims 4 is just a foundation of a game. How would you react if you bought a new Elder Scrolls game and realized that half of the cities are unavailable (because TES6: World Adventures is around the corner), there are only 4 weapons (TES6: Accessories), you can’t ride horses (TES6: Pets), there are only 12 quests (TES6: Careers), 2 guilds (TES6: Friends) and 3 spells (TES6: Supernatural)? [Nov 2014, p.50]

The Callisto Protocol is a strange game in which high production values contrast with serious problems that stem from the very basis of its outdated gameplay design. It looks awesome and sounds great but it is botched in so many ways. Clunky combat, bland weapons, awful boss encounters, heavy scripting, unintuitive interface and run-of-the-mill story built around boring characters with no personalities – it all adds up and amounts to a chore rarely interrupted by some enjoyable moments. What’s more, it’s not even a good horror game, as the designers went for annoying jump scares instead of trying to create real tension.

Captain Tsubasa’s biggest strength is its touching story about friendship, rivalry, and the love of football. Unfortunately, I’m not talking about the game. The narratives of both story campaigns in Rise of New Champions are boring, full of clichés and poorly written dialogues. That’s not the biggest problem though. As soon as a match starts, the abysmal gameplay turns the game from okayish to awful. [11/2020, p.32]

Shadows of Doubt has the potential to become a highly engaging detective immersive sim, but in order to achieve that, a lot needs to be done about technical flaws and clarity of gameplay mechanics. Right now the game can be summed up as a great concept with awful execution.

Resident Evil 0 was the weakest game in the series when it was originally released in 2002 and still is in 2016. [03/2016, p.43]

A perfect example of why things that could have worked fifteen years ago, have no place today. Especially if you sell them as a premium game. [05/2020, p.78]

New Tales from the Borderlands impressed me with its graphics and pleased me with settings that let you customize QTE’s or even turn them off completely. It’s a shame that the game didn’t inherit its predecessor’s cool writing and kept annoying me with cringe-making attempts at humor. What’s worse, it simply bored me.

Isn’t it high time to stop resurrecting this stale series? [07/2014, p.60]

The problem with Neverending Nightmares is that to understand it you need the developer’s sidenotes or your own experiences with depression. Otherwise it’s just a poorly designed, boring horror game. [01/2015, p.76]

It’s extremely good at scare jumps but the point is that scare jumps are an awfully primitive tool. [07/2015, p.54]

It's been ages since I wasted 5 hours so pointlessly. I felt like a victim of an exceptionally malicious prank. [1/2013, p.67]

Creating your own robots is cool, but pointless due to their terrible AI. Why invest a fortune in upgrades if your dumb metal buddy will probably get stuck on a first rock he encounters? [06/2016, p.55]

In every possible aspect Turok aged as gracefully as Donatella Versace and I honestly don’t see much sense in digging it out. [02/2016, p.43]

I wish I could call NBA 2K21 derivative but still good. It looks great as ever, but gameplay balance was ruined completely by the new shooting system, there are no new features, the MyTeam mode is going downhill plagued by microtransactions, and the game as a whole lacks even a tiniest spark of passion. [12/2020, p.67]

You spend your petrol on 30 seconds of racing and then wait a couple of hours for your tank to be refilled. “No Limits”? Is the title supposed to be a joke? [12/2015, p.74]

Train Simulator 2014 is very boring – you spend most of your time looking out for the next semaphore and missing GTA V. [12/2013, p.70]

Expansion packs should expand, damn it, not reduce. Jokes and dialogues are not funny in Gat out of Hell, satire is off the mark, visuals are ugly, gameplay is crude and the city uninteresting. [03/2014, p.64]

The game is so amateurish that I’m not sure whether its few good moments were intentional or incidental. [08/2015, p.53]

A very simple jRPG that answers the question what would happen if Tales series was done with even less money. [08/2015, p.67]

Clearly some people think that it's enough to hop on the indie bandwagon to make a buck. Don't waste your time on Colour Bind. [12/2012, p.88]

It spawns enemies behind your back, fails to improve lame AI and contains a range of bugs (e.g. enemies hitting you through a closed gate). BioWare failed to convince me that they are capable of learning from their mistakes. [Sept 2011, p.65]

Instead of bothering with problems of characters in this not so deep and not so ambitious game, you should go and talk to real people you care about. [02/2014 2014, p.66]

It would have been a decent game in 2010, but in 2017 it seems completely unnecessary. It’s better than its leprous predecessor, but on the other hand almost everything is. [05/2017, p.72]

The last time I saw such a bad game was... damn, I don't even remember when it was. It's boring, ugly, suffers of bad programming and violates your ears with abysmal music. [October, p.80]

When I read that Crusader is slowly becoming the game the developers wanted it to be, I can’t hold back laughter. What are they going to do in Crusader III? Strip the visuals of distinctiveness even more? Simplify the economy further? Remove some more units? [Dec 2014, p.81]

People who gave us the excellent Slender: The Eight Pages suddenly ceased to understand what makes a good horror. [CD-Action 06/2013, p.69]

The style of poorly executed visuals is in discord with the atmosphere that Pendulo Studios tried to create. Yesterday is also too easy and generally just not worth spending 4 hours with it. [May 2012, p.78]

Boring and lazily made, Phantom Fury desperately tries to be an homage to FPS games of the second half of the 90s but in reality is only a faded copy of them. You can find shooters that are much better in every respect, so don’t waste your life on this one.

Call of Duty series is undergoing a serious crisis, and the new installment of Black Ops, instead of helping it get out of trouble, only exacerbates existing problems and adds many new ones.

In terms of gameplay, Space Assault has nothing in common with the solid 2016 futuristic racer Redout. It’s a rough port of a heavily automated, primitive on-rails shooter developed originally for iOS and disappointing even as a simple mobile game. [03/2021, p.55]

Frogwares proved with The Devil’s Daughter that they understand neither Sherlock Holmes nor adventure games and the logic of detective novels. I say we unleash the hound of the Baskervilles on them. [08/2016, p.63]

There’s a decent game in there somewhere, but it’s hard to notice it under all those bugs and shortcomings. [06/2015, p.75]

The problems of this game are rooted deep within and were caused by the developers’ self-admiration, their overambitiousness and poor sense of the whole medium. [03/2019, p.53]

Achieving success in Farming Simulator 15 comes down to repeating a couple of actions mindlessly and pertinaciously. [13/2014, p.53]

The game draws its inspirations from Hotline Miami but fails miserably. [10/2017, p.75]

The idea behind Gods Will Be Watching is not bad at all, the prototype was promising, the Kickstarter campaign was successful, but after 15 minutes of playing I was furious. Gods might be watching, but whether you live or die is decided by a random number generator, not them. [10/2014, p.60]

Aragami 2 was released in an abysmal state. Tons of bugs and lame AI made it pretty much impossible for me to enjoy the two main improvements over the original game – increased focus on the co-op mode and enhanced character mobility. I was also disappointed by boring mission design, as the tasks I had to tackle made the impression as if RNG worked on them. [12/2021, p.56]

The only reason people paid attention to this mediocre game was its top-notch marketing which convinced us that Strafe is a worthy heir to the best shooters of the 90s. The truth is that its developers simply misunderstand their inspirations. [07/2017, p.52]

The Town of Light reminded me of similarly short and unpleasant Neverending Nightmares. Both games tried to tackle the subject of mental illnesses and both failed utterly. [07/2016, p.51]

It’s just Clash of Clans redone to make some easy money. [11/2016, p.75]

When Wheels of Aurelia pretends to be a driving game, it’s an unwitting parody with awful collision detection. When it tries to be an adventure game, the choices it offers are too limited and shallow to be meaningful. [13/2016, p.65]

Simply put, Bethesda showed us how not to port mobile games to big platforms. Fallout Shelter formula just does not fit PC gaming. [10/2016, p.53]

If Bloodlines 2 had changed its title, been shortened by half, and had its combat cut down, I might have looked at it more favorably. Unfortunately, we got a game that was disappointing in every way and simply insulting to the legendary original.

In my opinion only masochists could possibly enjoy this game with its horrible AI, annoying micromanagement, chaotic battles and absurd difficulty level. [12/2016, p.60]

The developers said out loud that Goat Simulator is not worth buying unless you come across their game on some sale. And they are right. [05/2014, p.69]

Not only is Brawl boring and tedious, but a sudden difficulty spike almost made me smash the controller against the wall. [08/2015, p.63]

There are some outstanding stealth games like Metal Gear Solid 2. There are some very good ones like Deus Ex: Human Revolution. There are some decent ones like the new Thief. There are some weak ones like The Dark. And then there’s Neon Struck. [07/2015, p.65]

Concord is a bland, personality-less hero shooter that was a good few years late to the party, yet failed to build on the achievements of its predecessors and insisted on doing everything its own way, with very poor results.

Yet another sorry first-person walker with a convoluted, rubbish story pretending to be something deep and valuable. [02/2015, p.53]

Repetitive, boring and pretentious. It’s not how you make an ambitious game. [03/2014, p.59]

Nazi Zombie Army is bland, not very original and unpleasant to play. The best thing about this game is the title. [CD-Action 05/2013, p.81]

How long can you stare at birds and globes traveling across the sky? [CD-Action 06/2013, p.79]

Deadline is worse than its predecessor in every aspect and finally it wore mi down with its insubordinate camera and terrible interface. [10/2015, p.61]

The worst thing about Into the Stars is overwhelming boredom that makes you look for something more interesting on the ceiling. You’ll have much more fun playing FTL once again or hunting pirates in Elite Dangerous. [05/2016, p.67]

Gameplay-wise Fahrenheit aged awfully and Aspyr did next to nothing to at least make it look decently. No one in our office could tell the difference between the original game and the remastered version (apart from widescreen modes). [04/2015, p.64]

It seems that the vision of a perfect, expansive game merging features of an FPS and a nonlinear RPG just outgrew the capabilities of a small studio. To start the adventure you'll first have to face one of the most inconvenient and ugly user interfaces I've ever seen. Then you have to create a character without a decent explanation of the game's RPG system, so you can end up with one that doesn't suite the playing style that E.Y.E quickly forces you to adopt. You can easily lose track of the story because the game fails to present it properly. Shooting works fine but the enemy AI sadly doesn't and Source engine delivers outdated visuals. [Sept 2011, p.70]

It looks and plays like a poor free game but you have to pay for it. [13/2015, p.73]

I marveled at the beauty of some new landscapes, but I will remember Curse of Osiris as a string of disappointments. Dumb story, few new features, endless grind, poorly balanced difficulty, awfully lame final encounter. [02/2018, p.49]

It treats players like drooling idiots that expect games to play themselves. [13/2014, p.62]

If you’re not arguing with your friends over whether Naruto would beat Goku and you’re not praying for the fourth season of “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” there’s absolutely no reason for you to care about this really weak fighting game. [09/2015, p.63]

I could go on for ages pointing out this game’s shortcomings, but what’s the point? It’s a fairly competent shmup, but so underdeveloped, that it’s not worth your time. [03/2014, p.81]

Scathe is a mess. Constant lack of ammo forces you to use the base weapon (which is painful the more so that some guns are really fun), heavy backtracking is extremely frustrating, enemies respawning in previously cleared areas are annoying, and the overall repetitiveness will wear you down unless the soundtrack will put you to sleep first.

For me Need for Speed is dead and buried as a franchise. Yes, Payback offers a large and varied open world and 70 licensed cars, but the driving model is decent at best, microtransactions system resembles free-to-play games, randomized upgrades force you to grind and the story (along with the dialogues) is simply embarrassing. [01/2018, p.44]

The most interesting bad game of this generation and the ugliest I’ve seen on PS3 in last couple of years. Only for Nier and Drakengard fans. [08/2014, p.70]

The developers from Gaming Corps don’t even try to hide the fact that they are shamelessly copying from Telltale. What’s more, The Descendant is a highly imperfect counterfeit – poorly written, not engaging, sometimes unintentionally funny and technically flawed. [02/2017, p.43]

Like all those Goat/Rock/Grass Simulators this nonsense is amusing for half an hour maybe. [06/2015, p.65]

Beyond Eyes is a weak story and an even worse game – completely linear and in my opinion painfully boring. [11/2015, p.37]

An ugly postcard from 2006 which someone decided to resend. I have no idea why. [13/2017, p.56]

The puzzles are decent sometimes and David has a very nice coat, but that’s about all Black Mirror’s advantages I can think of. [02/2018, p.38]

The only thing that distinguishes this game from other endless runners is Sonic. [09/2015, p.68]

It should have been a remaster but it actually is just polishing an old junk. Ineptly. [03/2020, p.76]

Boss battles are tedious and companion's AI is disastrous (which might explain why the puzzles are so basic and repetitive – that dumb rabbit probably wouldn't handle anything more elaborate). And it's not really a game for kids because on occasion it's rather difficult (partly due to abysmal jumping mechanics). Each time I put the controller aside after playing this painfully generic game, I was tired and bored. And I hated my job a little. [1/2013, p.60]

Snoopy’s Grand Adventure is not grand in any way. It’s a slightly amateurish, sluggish and rather boring platformer that might perhaps appeal to those kids who haven’t played better games yet. [01/2016, p.73]

Awfully designed and poorly executed game that could and should have been much better. [09/2017, p.71]

Calling a game with a gameplay based on shadows a shadow of what it could’ve been is a cheap trick. So is joking that Contrast contrasts with the vision of itself depicted in the previews and press releases. Still I couldn’t resist to do both because what we got is a half-baked mediocrity that has too little good moments but loads of wasted potential. [02/2014, p.62]

There’s nothing in Reforged that keeps me hooked in. I was sad playing it. Sad that it ultimately failed. That there are so many things that could have been done better – boldly and with more polish. [03/2020, p.48]

A really pretty game that gets boring after a couple of minutes. [01/2016, p.75]

All the fights against generic enemies look the same and get boring even faster than the shallow plot and repetitive quests. If you're looking for sleeping pills that also induce nausea I can recommend Faery. [July 2011, p.75]

A disappointment developed by amateurs who were unable to utilize capabilities of Unreal Engine 4 and I presume chose the dream setting to avoid writing a coherent story. [11/2015, p.41]