I have seen every, even the smallest, feature of Follia’s horror somewhere else before. And usually each of these features was executed much better than here. [07/2020, p.58]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 Shooting works fine but the enemy AI sadly doesn't and Source engine delivers outdated visuals.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]

The Walking Dead license was wasted on an ugly game that plays crudely, offers little content and trails behind a decade-old Left 4 Dead. [01/2019, p.56]

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]

We would have missed nothing at all if Mutants in Manhattan had never peeked out of their shells. The game is mediocre in every aspect, boring and rather ugly. The only advantage I can think of is that it’s only 5 hours long. [08/2016, p.54]

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]

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]

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]

The Inquisitor has some decent moments, but as a whole it doesn’t work at all. The adventure elements are passable, but the rest, from action sequences to technical aspects, leaves a lot to be desired. I can’t praise this game, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the developers to come back with a better-designed and more skillfully-executed sequel.

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]

Cool idea, terrible execution. In the long run, LEGO Brawls is simply boring, very often chaotic and not varied enough in terms of gameplay. Yes, there are tons of bricks to unlock and some neat special skills, but it doesn’t save the game. If you feel you need to check it out, I recommend you play locally with your kids.

I would turn a blind eye to a non-existing level of challenge posed by Yaiba and to excessively simplified combat system, but why is the hero such a yokel?! [06/2014, p.50]

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]

Everything here is fake and stilted which results in story being not engaging – though it keeps trying to get our attention by serving a never-ending sequence of cutscenes. It gets to a point where for every fifteen minutes of watching lacklustre animations we get five minutes of walking and one uninteresting fight. [12/2019, p.62]

You can spend an hour with Mighty Micros and have a pretty good time, but then you will uninstall it without a second thought. [05/2016, p.75]

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]

You often have to turn a blind eye to independent games’ shortcomings to enjoy the gameplay, but Darkout is so sloppy that the only reasonable thing to do is deleting the local content. How about a tutorial that can permanently block your progress even if you closely follow the onscreen instructions? [02/2014, p.61]

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]

Remothered: Broken Porcelain is a frustrating, bug-ridden and rather ugly mess. However, it does offer an intriguing narrative and a palpable sense of insecurity, and I wish the same story was retold by another studio with more resources at its disposal. [13/2020, p.47]

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]

If Gothic's evolution is to look like this, we're better off without the next entry in the series. [April 2012, p.75]

I do appreciate the large diversity of challenges A Rite from the Stars has up its sleeve, but their quality is very uneven and some of the ideas should have been scrapped mercilessly. The gameplay is not very intuitive and the dark, obscure visuals are a trip back to the year 2000. [09/2018, p.64]

Shallow gameplay makes you slash and break possessed chairs, pots and other home appliances in a primitive turn-based minigame. [02/2014, p.69]

Three new maps and no gameplay additions. Expedition is just not worth buying. [Sept 2014, p.69]