Battling zombies should be an exciting and frightening experience, but instead turns into a farce with laughable AI and linear gameplay.

Progressing through the levels felt way too slow, finding collectible candles frustrated me, and I wasn’t particularly fond of the camera. The story failed to grab my attention due to the bland protagonist and the boring narrative. The gameplay mechanics stay somewhat interesting throughout, but the level design, platforming, and puzzles hold it back from greatness. Candleman is a decent experience, but it’s not a game I’d recommend without a few warnings.

I can't say enough how disappointed I was with the final results of Kengo: Legend of the 9. There is so much potential for a realistic samurai title that it's hard to see something going much worse than this.

The PS4 version of Uno is an average offering that doesn’t take advantage of the fact that it’s a digital game.

Nether: The Untold Chapter isn’t a bad game by any means, but it's also not perfect. I’m glad to find, however, that updates are constantly being made available that will hopefully entice new players to join and keep playing. Best case scenario, they add in a mechanic that means you don't have to start over each time you die, whether it's a box to save some gear, or the option to respawn. Worst case, they fix the hit box on enemies, making them fiendishly difficult to kill, make them spawn a lot closer together to overrun the player, or even add a new, never before seen Nether.

I honestly believe a video game where you play as the eagle that eats Prometheus’ liver would be more exciting than Theseus. Everything about Forge Reply’s game is superficial. It’s pretty to look at, but the gameplay is terribly hollow and lacks variety. Adding to that, it fails to do anything meaningful with VR, using it only to create tension through a series of fixed camera angles whose transition are jarring and disorienting. It pains me to say that this is one game that should have been sacrificed to Hades.

Where The Bees Make Honey has some interesting ideas with presentation and puzzles. However, the persistent high level of frustration I felt with trying to navigate the majority of the adventure because of issues out of my control completely overshadowed any of the good stuff.

I do love the direction that the developers were going for, but without an entertaining storyline and exciting gameplay, there isn’t much of a reason to pick up the game at all.

The PS4 version just isn’t up to the challenge and doesn’t deserve to be played as the PC version is clearly better in every way.

Exile’s End is a game full of ideas that have already been done before. From a narrative standpoint this leaves the game feeling predictable, shallow and uninspired. While from a gameplay standpoint, it captures the feeling of a classic 2D action side scroller that is a blast to play. If your entering this game for a thought provoking story with interesting twist and turns, you will be disappointed. If you go into expecting a classic gameplay style that feels great to return to, then you will be pleased.

Unless you are a diehard Dynasty Warriors fan, I can't promise you intriguing gameplay, but there is a fun story locked behind all the repetitiveness. Maybe one day we'll see the One Piece game that this story deserves. Until then, I think I might just search out some episodes of the anime and see how they stack up.

Boost Beast is an underwhelming take on the established match three formula. The few attempts Arzest make to set it apart backfire, making much of the game dependent on luck. You either lack the correct colors to defeat the zombies or you score ridiculously big boosts with very little effort, making even victory unsatisfying. Unless you absolutely must have your match three fix on the Switch, there are better puzzle games out there.

If you’re a fan of Ubisoft’s open-world design, then you’ll enjoy this game to an extent, but there’s little done here that Watch Dogs 2 didn’t do as well or more so in 2016. It’s a fun stealth-action open-world hacking game, but it’s one that falls under its own weight in many ways. So please, do not play the Xbox One S version. Like the first Watch Dogs, it over promises, under preforms, and this soon-to-be previous-generation version will be forgotten quickly.

Bringing the casino experience to the handheld remains an elusive dream, as this is just a lazy compilation of simplistic parlor games.

The Mooseman has an amazing musical composition that had me listening to folk music of the Komi for the first time. In addition to what I heard, the game also illustrated a history and mythology I had no prior knowledge of. Unfortunately, the game fell short in delivering a worthwhile gaming experience because it lacks actual gameplay design. After finishing the game, I felt that the Finno-Ugric mythology would have been better served by watching a cinema-quality short which The Mooseman essentially was.

Everything feels so shallow because of this, nothing hooks the player in for hours on end, instead serving as a timewaster for a few minutes before finding something else to do. Seeing as this game is available on mobile phones that would be the ideal platform to play while waiting for a flight or bus.

On paper, there’s a lot to like in Redeemer: melee combos, counter attacks, various weapons, environmental interaction, stealth kills, fun gore, and co-op. In practice, however, there’s little to get excited about. Redeemer – enhanced or not – feels painfully uninspired. All of its mechanics work, yet they do very little to enthuse. It’s the epitome of a game with few glaring issues but similarly no high points to prop it up. If, for whatever reason, you’re starved for top-down action games, it’s worth looking into. For the rest of us, it’s very much a “been there, done that” affair.

It's too bad that a game that allows you to play both as a stealth experience or a action game doesn't manage to do either of them very well.

This collection just feels like a quick cash grab aimed at people who have never played a Splinter Cell game before. This collection may appeal to the hardcore Splinter Cell fans but outside of pleasing diehard fans, these games could be completely unmissed.

At the end of the day, Marvel’s Avengers is two very different experiences. The campaign is great, and Kamala is an absolute superstar that I can’t wait to see get recognized for more outside of the comics. The multiplayer end game, on the other hand, is bereft of purpose and content, serving only as a poor conduit towards a loot grind that feels meaningless beyond “making this number bigger.” There is promise here, and maybe in a year, Avengers will be a great game. But if you don’t feel like waiting a year, if you need to know if you should buy this now, don’t bother. There needs to come a point where we stop paying full price now for the promise of a good game later. Let this be it.

Road Not Taken’s roguelike structure works against the rest of the game’s design and ultimately makes playing into a tedious, repetitive experience. On the surface there’s a lot to love in the game’s charming presentation, but repeated playthroughs reveal a failure to implement the variation and unpredictability that make rougelikes great.

The game has a solid storyline, and some interesting ideas, but fails to really do much with it at all.

As far as licensed products go, you could do a lot worse then How to Train Your Dragon 2. There are good bones here, a nice foundation built on a satisfying flying mechanic, and some excellent work to capture the sights and sounds of the movie and its characters. It, like most other movie games, falls apart where that license meets the tight structure of a modern game under the strictures of a tight turn around. While you apparently can train a dragon, no amount of training can save this game from itself.

Needless to say, I found Power of Illusion to be an incredibly disappointing game. There's nothing fun about the experience and any warm, fuzzy feelings of nostalgia brought upon by the design, soundtrack and concept are ruined by clunky and infuriating gameplay. Instead of spending the money on this game, my advice is to go pick up a Sega Genesis from eBay and a copy of Castle of Illusion. You'll have a lot more fun.

Although some may have fun with Rabbids: Alive and Kicking, the overall package is far from optimal. When your load times last longer then your mini games that poses a major issue. If you were looking at buying this game because you enjoyed the Rabbids games that are on the Wii, Alive and Kicking kicking doesn't live up to the bar set out before it.

Papo & Yo is a title of binary worth; not worth ignoring its issues, but still worth seeing through. While the trip it takes to reach the emotional highs of the story's payoff is indefensibly turbulent, there's no denying that they are indeed dizzying.

You don’t have to dig too deeply to find that Golem, for all its inane faults, has some really interesting mechanical ideas for VR gaming. It’s one of the very few adventures that give you a sword to swing around in real-time and makes a concerted effort to make melee duels look and feel meaningful. And like I said before, it’s cool when it works correctly. The technical problems and physical discomfort were just too hard to ignore because of how actively they work against you, causing me to stop playing. From the needless complexity of the game’s pathfinding and a boring world to its physically bothersome movement mechanics, too often does Golem feel like a beast of burden.

If this was the first game I'd seen with this control scheme I might have more glowing words, but in the shadow of Brothers, it's more difficult to recommend this one. Unlike Brothers, Semispheres does very little to show what interesting things can be done with this control scheme. It's an inoffensive game – it's not bad in the moment, but does nothing to make itself memorable.