Unfortunately, my opinion of this game is that if you’ve ever played any side-scrolling shoot-’em-up platformer in the past, say, fifteen years, then you’ve pretty much experienced what Guns, Gore and Cannoli has to offer when it’s at its best.

Not all games that focus on a few, selected mechanics are bad, of course, but any game that narrows its focus to such a small set of moves had better make sure those are brilliant or that there are other, supporting pleasures, like an interesting narrative to fill out the experience. The developers seem to think that minimalist presentation, limited mechanics and high, often unfair difficulty and repetitive combat are enough to distinguish Ling: A Road Alone from other hack-and-slash games. Come to think of it, they’re right.

60 days was more then enough time for me to determine that I would rather spend my time elsewhere.

ChromaGun is a fine enough puzzler, though it feels like it's missing things you might want from games of the same ilk. The puzzles don't particularly evolve much and neither does the looks, making the game feel rather static and simple most of the way through. Despite some odd difficulty spikes, the game is something you can mostly breeze through without too much issues. If you're looking for a quick puzzle fix something in the vein of Portal, it's gonna scratch that itch decently enough.

The Bradwell Conspiracy runs terribly, the visuals are nothing special and the narrative is silly at best but that doesn’t stop Amber and the dialogue from standing out. I’d love to see what the developers, A Brave Plan, could do with more focus on the characters rather than plot, and a bigger budget for art and QA. There are the seeds of a great studio visible within the game but the fruit is not currently evident. I look forward to what A Brave Plan makes next but I can’t recommend The Bradwell Conspiracy.

The repetition inherent in the gameplay means that existing fans will merely be burned out by the story’s end, and the unnecessary subtractive design makes the first game a better starting point for newcomers.

As good as this fairy tale themed game seemed to be, Road Not Taken didn’t feel quite right.

In the exhaust fumes of recent and quite brilliant F1 2020, NASCAR Heat 5 is left biting a bitter dust. The game simply lacks any thrill and excitement of its namesake, not to mention its presentation and overall vibes that cry about a budget title. Alas, it’s not such but sold at fifty bucks. I guess if you are truly and desperately in a need of a stock car racing fix, NASCAR Heat 5 could suffice as an emergency measure. Just wait for the sale and you will be much happier with your purchase.

Its a shame to say that FaceBreaker really was a disappointment.

Plus R is a fine tune-up of one of the most technical fighting games around, but its skeletal packaging makes it all but impossible for non-fans to get excited. There are untold hours of value here that will be all but impenetrable to most. Unless you know the game and have a local community of like-minded opponents ready to go, I can’t recommend it.

Cathedral lacks vision where it counts. The title is focused on appealing to the hardcore with its retro presentation and difficulty that borders on irritating. The visuals and audio are certainly reminiscent of titles from the past, however, they lack that special polish that would elevate them beyond the superficial way they ape how games looked and sounded back then. Level design lacked care in checkpoint placement and enemy locations as well as quality of life features, which stacked tedium upon tedium. Overall, I have trouble recommending Cathedral; though it certainly has a niche appeal, its faults made the experience less than satisfactory.

It would be a gamble to recommend it to most people, but for some who might find the concept intriguing and might find the elements I found frustrating simply a challenge, it might still be worth a look.

Snow Moto Racing Freedom is not a bad game but it's hopelessly mediocre in every aspect. The major problem with the game is it's all too grounded. The developers should have made it sexier by adding a flight of fantasy to it. Have fireworks and flair, an option to race around in unrealistic settings and reward players with gratuitous things such as different racer skins and soundtracks. As it is, the game is like a grumpy hermit in the Northern Scandinavian wilds, living in his little hunting cottage and settled with his bleak surroundings, baltic herring meal and the radio with one channel for weather forecasts. It's snowing everyday.

As it stands, Monster Bag is an amazing cartoon if you can painstakingly make your way through the lesser parts.

Overall, it’s a nice game to play a few times.

Although some of the sequences can be pretty over the top, for the most part the game doesn't really pick up any steam.

It needed a little more tightness and guidance in some way that it just didn’t have in the end.

And while Sym isn’t bad in that regard – it’s got decent puzzles and atmosphere, plus ambition to spare – it’s outshined by the very games that seemingly inspired it.

It's about time the iconic Pac-Man gets his own cart racing game, but we're hard done by the game's generic racing action and bland tracks.

Postal 2: Paradise Lost isn’t a disaster, but it is a fairly hard game to recommend in the end. Unless you have a lot of affection for the original game and you have been eagerly awaiting more content, it is an expansion pack that you should probably skip.

Demolish and Build has its heart in the right place but could also use another passthrough so that its expectations and instructions are clear and concise. A game that gives you reign to blow a bulldozer into the side of a building should be fun but the tedium, wishy-washy controls, and poor guidance turn the game into a test of patience.

The title could make for a thrilling spy game, but instead of Splinter Cell-style action, we get sub-par stealth, poor controls and dull plot.

Visually striking, yet mechanically dull, Spirit of the North is all style and no substance. Tied with a minimalist story and no spoken words, the journey tries to be meaningful, but its self-imposed limitations make it hard to understand. It is loaded with vast, beautiful environments, which end up functioning as a double-edged sword as many areas felt labyrinthine in design. Often, the game felt pretentious to the detriment of the gameplay. Ultimately, Spirit of the North has its appeal, but I would only recommend it to players drawn in by either the visuals or the concept.

The fun runs out after a few levels of beating up enemies and mid-air combos.

For a game built on such a solid mix of exploration and combat, to have both systems feel so broken is almost criminal, especially when a different, better version of the same game exists on another platform.

Selma and the Wisp has an interesting premise, having you control a character who, in turn, leads another character. Unfortunately, the indirect playstyle leads to frustration in hazardous areas as you are forced to escort a girl and hope she doesn’t die by accident. At least it’s a short adventure, with ten levels that only run about two or three hours, for those curious to try it out. The idea of this “guiding light simulator” remains intriguing, but the experience is hard to fully recommend.

I guess if you really want to play a true to source retro game that does nothing to stand out, then I guess you will be just fine, you will most likely have fun and remember all the fun you used to have when you were a child. But for those who want games to evolve, to get better as time goes on, well, Cursed Castilla (Maldita Castilla EX) is just too lukewarm to really recommend.

Rugby Would Cup 2011 is a poor game. Poorly made, poorly executed, and lackluster title, that causes an insatiable need to cleanse oneself after being played. It's not a top tier game, and shouldn't be regarded as one, so just leave it be and no one will get hurt.

Super Rocket Shootout wants to be a good game, and it certainly has its moments. However, it’s held back by so many problems that kept me from fully enjoying it. Even for $10, it’s hard to recommend this game when you can spend a couple more dollars on Duck Game and have a similar experience with the addition of online multiplayer. Only get this game if you have friends to play local multiplayer with.

At the end of the day, Game and Wario is a compilation of a few good and a lot of mediocre experiences. You can see a ton of potential in a great Wario game for the Wii U but Game and Wario is not that game.

It is an addictive game, but some people may not enjoy doing the same things over and over, and for that reason I can see it becoming too tedious for a lot of players. But as a fun, casual, couch co-op game, I think Monster Couch did a great job.

Okay, so, when I said that Smite should be free, I didn’t mean to say that it is terrible. What I meant is that the game honestly just isn’t all that good. But I can play as the main character from Conker’s Bad Fur Day, though… so that’s something, at least.

Namco's foray into the PSP platform hits a huge snag, as Reckoning's overly simple and repetitive gameplay takes the skill (and fun) away.

There’s occasionally some fun to be had but in the long run, the gameplay is so rigid and repetitive that despite seemingly big amount of content to play, the game’s appeal wears thin pretty quickly. Even the multiplayer lacks further enthusiasm for the very same reason and micro transactions that are practically force-fed are the last straw. Given the game’s rather modest production values, it feels like it should have benefited from being a free-to-play title and then paying for more content would have been completely plausible. As it is now, WWE 2K Battlegrounds simply lacks lasting fun, challenge and creativity to fill the void of not having a main entry in the WWE 2K series this year.

Tons of potentials here, but spoiled by overly simplistic controls and horribly sluggish frame rates.

It could have been a really well-made puzzle-platformer but somehow, the developer decided to settle with less, even though the console version is a second take on the game. There are obvious improvements over the PC original but the core issues of inaccurate controls and shifty physics still remain. Sad, really, as I so wanted to love this game.

What started as an original take on war turns into your standard run of the mill action game, and at that point, well, there is no point. Super Trench Attack ends up as a casualty of its own war.

There's a lot to love here, given the obvious indication of how much love and passion was put into the development of the game, but I can't help but feel it just isn't all that enjoyable beyond the nostalgic novelties. While it's cool to see references to your favorite kung-fu movies from back in the day, and while the plot is just as cheesy as the time period it's attempting to recreate, the core design of the game feels small in scale and ultimately boring after an hour or so of playing.

Deer God makes an interesting attempt at dealing with spiritual questions in a videogame, but it ultimately detracts from the fun of the game. Crescent Moon Games did an admirable job to add the depth that is so often lacking in platforming games, but it was never enough to overcome their own ambitions. The RPG elements aren’t quite deep enough to become truly invested, and the repeating platforming sections make the game feel smaller than it really is. Deer God puts a lot of interesting ideas into play, but they never coalesce into the rewarding experience its potential hinted at. The fun is fast but fleeting like a deer in the woods.

If the combat was more fun and parts of it didn’t feel so cheap, this series could have some legs, but for the third entry in the franchise, it still feels like it has a long way to go.

It's not flat-out bad, but it is frustrating, questionably designed, and more than a little boring.

Unsatisfying, under-developed gameplay mechanics and a ridiculously short length, Light is anything but the name suggests.

Edge of Time is all around an extremely mediocre brawler.

Urban Trial Freestyle 2's great mistake is putting the scoring system where the challenge is at its weakest. You can get through a gauntlet of obstacles unscathed, but you won't be rewarded at all. And while a track creation system does allow you to create amusing challenges for yourself, don't expect to find anyone else's. The effort put into the presentation is commendable, but Urban Trial Freestyle 2 is best described as fleeting, faltering fun.

The celebrated comic series makes a jump to the Xbox, but the sub par gameplay and weak visuals in this budget game doesn't do it any justice.

Unsurprisingly, The Dark Eye: Book of Shadows has some technical issues with crashes and mission-killing bugs, but those pale in comparison with the game’s biggest flaw: its lack of imagination or originality. I don’t think it’s a cynical cash-grab. I think that the source material might be part of the problem, coupled with the developers being satisfied with minimal presentation and coloring obsessively inside the lines. There are so many outstanding action-RPGs — both based on D&D and not — that this game is hard to recommend unless you are already steeped in the lore and culture of The Dark Eye series.

Three years in the making, Mind: Path to Thalamus is a valiant effort on the part of Carlos Coronado. There are moments that impress, but the parts all add up to a mediocre story shoe-horned into a mediocre first person puzzler. I encourage the development team to keep it up, but I can’t really recommend this one as a must see.

Redeemer's great peculiarity is that it starts with strong gameplay and a weak story, and then the two switch entirely. Combat that was once challenging, varied, and rewarding gives way to enemy numbers and attack patterns that bottleneck the player into a constant dodge-fest that feels like breaking the rules of a broken game. Whether you succeed or fail, too little of what you do after the first chapter is based on any amount of skill. As monotony settles in, the captivating story proves not enough to pick up the slack. In its first four hours, Redeemer is great. Afterwards? Far from it.

Ultimately, if you’re bored for a couple of hours on a weekend then Skydive will give you something to do. But once you’ve done a few races and some of the challenges, there is very little to keep all but the most dedicated completionists from coming back for more.

After so many years of anticipation, I was ready to love Stranger's Wrath. The world Oddworld Inhabitants created here is worthy of that love but the actual game set in it is a throwback in all the wrong ways. While I wish there were more to it, there's just not much of interest here. With so many great games from the past getting a second chance on the Switch, there's no real need to meet this stranger.

When it comes down to it, Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition is an ambitious game that failed to ultimately capture me. Early on it discouraged me from continuous play, and while I eventually got into a rhythm, the barriers of entry still gated off levels of enjoyment. The lack of a tutorial is a major flaw, as a game with this much original language needs to provide a strong opening to capture attention. The spots that shine bright really stand out, and for those looking for a detailed and captivating story-based game, you could do worse. If you’re ready to read a lot, this is an adventure I can recommend you to embark on. If you aren’t, you’ll find yourself drowning in this zee of words.

It’s just such a shame that the game is such a shame to play, then. I even wound up looking up a video of a puzzle solution because I thought the game was broken, and it was a guy playing the PC version and I was so envious about how it looked. Frame rates! Smooth camera control! Foliage that isn’t popping in and out at random! It was lovely, I mean, seriously, I’ve already harped on it but if you can play another version of Q.U.B.E. 2, then go play that instead. It’s a great puzzle game, it just needs to play better.

Eliosi’s Hunt is only $5. At such a cheap price, it’s worth picking up if you’re a hardcore fan of top-down shooters, you’re into speedrunning, or you just want a difficult game to play. But between mediocre shooting, mediocre platforming, and occasionally frustrating level design, there are certainly better options out there.

Predator: Hunting Grounds is an asymmetric game with an interesting premise, yet it ultimately fails to deliver its full potential. There are thrilling moments but they are too few and far between. With enough time spent on polishing the game, it could become a top-tier title in its genre. As it is now, it is a tough game to recommend even to the most diehard Predator fans.

Party Hard presents some interesting ideas and has a promising start, but it sours quickly due to repetitive game design and a frustrating inconsistency in difficulty.

There’s enough here for folks who have come this far to finish the journey, but it’s certainly no place to start, and a sad note to end on.

Kingdom Hearts fans will want to see the new story content and there’s likely enough content here to make them feel they got their money’s worth. Everyone else will be able to find a rhythm game more worthy of their time.

Battle Princess Madelyn had all the makings of a charmer (there are never enough games featuring a warrior princess!) but it turned out to be a downer. Given ill-defined looks and sloppy level design, sprawling here and there for no other purpose than to pester you, the game is too committed to the gaming of bygone days. The best bet for retro-inclined developers would be fitting their games into modern conventions, and not fall into same old pitfalls that used to plague the genre. Even though your friend Frankie doesn’t realize it, there has been remarkable evolutionary steps in the gaming.

You fight bugs until the credits roll, and if that doesn’t hook you at the beginning, then you’re especially not going to love it by the time you’ve played the game for its 4 hour run time.

Hidden Dragon Legend’s cover art should appear in any search engine’s results for mixed bag. The combat it offers is challenging and genuinely fun, but the traversal that comes between it is far too often broken and unfair. As you run through Imperial China, you’ll be enchanted by the mood, only to be brought right back out by stiff cutscenes and terribly compressed weapon sounds. Upon reflection, I truly believe that MegaFun Games put real passion into this project, though; even the elements that don't work are laid out in a way where they'd be very enjoyable if they did. It's just a shame that the finished project is so deeply flawed.

As a labor of love to design that’s long gone by, Spuds Quest serves as a reminder that sometimes it’s best not to revisit your memories; you may not like what you think of them now.

Trekkies praying for a half decent Star Trek game can look away now, as Bethesda releases a seriously dull simulation, filled with uneventful encounters and dire visuals.

Koei tries to revive the Winback franchise, but with limited success, thanks to a bare-boned story, simplistic gameplay and the lack of a challenging AI.

Killing Room certainly has some interesting surprises up its sleeve when it comes to gameplay innovation, the enemies are creative and the item descriptions are usually funny yet the rest of the game just feels average in comparison and does little to nothing else to stand out from the crowd.

In the end, RemiLore is a collection of nice programming routines – smooth scrolling, nifty animation and neatly moving objects from monsters to projectiles – but they alone don’t make a very good game when everything else is mostly lacking. Manga girls don’t always equal great entertainment. Lesson learned!

Call of Duty: Strike Team is an compelling experiment but held back by the touch controls. If this was made for a controller it could be more impressive. They packed a console-like game into Strike Team with leaderboards and challenge maps but it ultimately feels held back by its lackluster controls.

Taxi Chaos is like the usual knock-off. At first, it might look and feel the same as the quality product it was fashioned after, but when you get to know it better, it turns out to be just a cheap copy of the original (cheap not in the way of its price because this costs a whopping 30 bucks, mind you). ”But wait”, I hear you cry. ”What if I have never played Crazy Taxi, could I enjoy Taxi Chaos then?” I’m afraid I can’t answer that question because I simply can’t turn off my sweet memory of Crazy Taxi (that I can return to any day, thanks to the backwards compatible X360 version of the game!).

Although beautifully designed and well-written, The Almost Gone is kept from greatness by the nature of its game elements and UI. If you can overlook that or are willing to take advantage of the innumerable walkthroughs that will invariably pop up, you may enjoy this entry in the puzzle adventure game genre.

Imagine Soviet Union in the dark 1980’s, home computers being a scarce luxury. Maybe, just maybe, DreamBreak is a pastiche of those old Commodore 64 games that were pirated to behind the iron curtain. Due to a language barrier and lack of manuals, such classic games as Impossible Mission and Project Firestart - another obvious inspirations behind DreamBreak - must have felt exotic but strange and clumsy. DreamBreak mimics those nostalgic sentiments with its awkward gameplay married to a thin narrative. Nah, that would be just a bad excuse. The transient Russo-retro experience isn’t enough to carry the game and the final verdict is that DreamBreak just isn’t very good.

I wasn't the biggest fan of this one. It's a simple game that quickly left me bored and never got much better. The game is alright in some areas but it suffers from being mindless and simple, which isn't what I look for in a game. Phantom Breaker serves a purpose, though the Switch is so loaded down with games at this point that space on the console is better off being used for something else.

Don't be fooled with this brawler's budget pricetag, as its attrocious camera angle, repetitive gameplay and dated visuals makes it a complete waste of your money.

At the very least, Gun Gale Online could have been a world worth exploring. But no, Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet offers nothing to keep you but freely gives more than enough to make you wish you had the time you spent playing it back.

It's very important to understand what Hydrophobia: Prophecy is; literally, the third version of the same game with major technical and creative modifications made based on user feedback. With this iteration of Hydrophobia being riddled with issues, I have to wonder about the quality of the initial release and am curious about whether or not Dark Energy Digital will continue to modify it in the future.

There’s a reason scope management is taught in game design schools. Overflow Games’ underestimation of its own limitations is the source of almost all of the faults in Cornerstone: The Song of Tyrim.

The Cave isn’t completely without merit, but it is unquestionably a subpar game in more than a few respects, and one of its developer’s weakest outings. It has a great look and an interesting setup, but it just loses too much of its potential to middling mechanics. I wouldn’t recommend spending your fifteen bucks on it.

Dream Alone makes a valiant effort to live up to its inspirations, Limbo and Inside. However, it falls short of creating an immersive world that would cleverly combine fun platforming and crafty puzzles. What’s left are awkward, frustrating platforming and forced puzzles. Combined with an overly dark display and cheap level design, this is a tough recommendation for even the biggest dreamers.

Even if the game’s challenge or the appeal of having a shiny new toy tempt you to acquire this game though, you are better off leaving it alone.

The RPG genre has just started to bloom on the DS, but not helped by Konami's outdated title and hampered by its frustrating touch controls.

Its a shame that the core basketball game still feels like it needs another couple of years of polish to even come close to its competitors. For now we are left with a solid lineup of features and a game of basketball thats just not worth anyones time.

Another disappointment in the turtle's world. I can still see all the potential the series could have but unfortunately this year Konami took a step in the wrong direction.

Toy Soldiers: War Chest feels like a game that was rushed through without care or polish. Nostalgia can’t save this game from being an absolute disappointment.

Sega has jumped the shark with their Sonic franchise, as this release massively disappoints with frustrating controls and useless camera.

A more ambitious script, combined with a few memorable levels, would have made for a pretty good game. Instead, Star Trek: The Game, is a boring experience that you will forget about soon after you are done with it.

You won’t find the fast-paced action of Diablo, or the tactical challenge of Dragon Age: Origins or Pillars of Eternity. Whatever you are looking for, you will probably find it somewhere else in a better game that you already own.

Amazing Spider-Man on Vita, while impressive in scope, is more disappointing than broken.

With the street racing genre having done to death already, this copycat is a lazy port of the poor Dreamcast racer. If you're looking for a quality title, look elsewhere.

Off-Road Drive is a good example of a game trying too hard to imitate reality when the technology behind it is simply not there and is unbalanced.

Inside My Radio is a brief, interesting romp that never lives up to the potential it enters with.

It’s a shame that Team17 have found it hard to strike a balance between complicating things enough to keep Mugsters interesting but not too much to make it tedious and frustrating. The first few levels are a fantastic hook into the game, showing off its terrific abstract graphical style and some fun, yet simple puzzle mechanics, but the more you play, the more it gets bogged down by the burden of adding more. The multiplayer does add some fun novelty, but ultimately Mugsters probably isn’t a game you’ll feel like completing.

No Man’s Sky is a missed opportunity to do something truly epic, and while the final game, when measured moment by moment, showed glimpses of something more than merely ordinary, the final result, was far less than. Promises aside, there’s just not enough to this universe to make it worth exploring.

Montague’s Mount really tries to aspire to their level only to fall quite short.

Soda Drinker Pro has all the joy of a flat, lukewarm Pepsi.

Yup, there’s no online mode in Ninja Shodown. This means that as enjoyable as multiplayer is, it’s only playable locally in a living room. Combine this with the simple truth that Versus Mode is the only good part of the game, and you’re left with a product I just can’t recommend. If the performance issues were cleaned up and the price slashed down drastically, my verdict might look very different. That’s because, again, the game is surprisingly engaging when played competitively. Games aren’t necessarily outright bad when they’re too hard or even broken; it’s when they effectively don’t give you anything to do that they truly fall apart. And because it lacks an online multiplayer mode, Ninja Shodown fits that description for many players.

The story is pretty OK despite its heavy lean on worn mafia movie stereotypes and tropes. However, this remaster of Mafia II is hurt by its poor showing on the PlayStation 4 because of numerous and frequent problems within the most vital portions of the game. This is the kind of show I’d expect from something that was rushed out to the market and the results are pretty disappointing. You’re almost better off tracking down the original PC copy of the game until Hanger 13 and d3t Ltd. make the fixes that are so desperately needed.

There just isn’t enough within R.B.I Baseball 16 to recommend buying it unless you’re an absolute diehard fan that needs to own every game in the series.

Mario Party 7 has a minigame, Tile and Error, in which players must ground pound tiles to claim territory. The fact that Flip Wars can so easily be compared to a 30-second minigame from over a decade ago should say a lot about what you’re getting yourself into if you purchase this. Some of the hip dropping, tile-flipping mechanics are genuinely interesting, but Flip Wars is essentially a $10 minigame and a rather average one at that.

If you’re looking for a game with good music and not much else than Beatbuddy is your jam. Otherwise, look for the soundtrack and skip the frustration.

Fictorum, to me, feels like a game that has a single focus, its destruction mechanic, and everything else was slapped on after that was nailed down. It feels like the kind of game that is acting more as a business pitch to bigger companies, a way for the developers to say look at this cool thing we did instead of hey gamers, check out our awesome game. There is a great mechanic here that is fun to play with, but Fictorum lacks any kind of soul beyond that. It’s worth checking out for a weekend or two, but I can’t recommend much more than that.