I thought going in that it would be something special. I think it still probably is something special. But with the console and television set up that I've got, and no apparent way to make the text and font more legible, I wasn't able to experience what makes this game the stand-out horror experience that the other reviews suggest that it is (and I've got no reason to believe that those reviews are in any way inaccurate). Unfortunately for me Darkwood is unintelligible, and I'm genuinely sad that I wasn't able to appreciate the many merits of a game because I simply had no way of actually making sense of it.

Even if you can overlook the troublesome philosophies that permeate Detroit, you still won’t find much interesting here. The story loses a lot of its charm once it goes from dealing with day-to-day android life to trying to tell a huge event that will change the shape of civilization. It falls into a common trap of video game writing, as it forces the player into life or death situations constantly. These mostly fall flat and players are left with a game that really doesn’t have much to say that wasn’t already incredibly obvious from the start.

It does what it promises in offering a fast runner-style game, and it's nice that the developers went as far as to offer completely new level layouts each day, but ultimately this is as shallow as the likes of Doodle Jump or Temple Run, and costs an order of magnitude more money.

What Flinthook does do well is keep the variety of enemies, rooms, and environments strong from start to finish, and, generally speaking, the difficulty curve is reasonable. There’s always the risk that random elements means a game will take massive momentary spikes in difficulty when you get unlucky and the algorithms work against you. Flinthook avoids that, and progress through the game does feel good, but it struggles to be compelling.

Taking a shallow sub-mode from other games, and presenting it in a no-frills manner, might make for a competent and reliable shooter, But Killing Floor 2 also fails to be anything more than a diversion from other, better shooters as a result. It's utterly useless in singleplayer, and for multiplayer hijinks there are more creative examples out there.

There is nothing inspiring about Starships. It's an insipid and undercooked strategy game that seems so desperate to appeal to a broad audience that it seems to lost sight of the fact that strategy games are best when they involve some kind of strategy. It's pretty, sure, but it's hard to think of a game more vapid than this one.

I suspect that because I refuse to pay $500 for a digital dress, my interest in Infinity Nikki will disappear the moment I miss out on getting a particularly attractive costume from one of the limited events. But then I’d be better off just waiting for a Nikki figure to come out with my favourite dress on it instead anyway. I can see myself becoming a big-time collector of Nikki figures, and I love the character and what Nikki represents outside of the monetisation. However, the monetisation is inexcusable, even by the standard of exploitative gatcha games. No video game about collecting dresses is worth more than it would cost to buy the actual dresses in the real world. What’s more, when you let the monetisation undermine everything that the creative side of the game is aiming to achieve and suck the joy out of the fundamental mechanics, you’ve just broken your project.

What Mario Maker on the 3DS has forgotten is that one of the key reasons to make games is to have other people play them.

Kingdom Rush isn’t even that great by tower defence standards. The towers are generic and bland, and enemy hordes are entirely predictable.

Had the game been a tiny part of a greater whole it would have worked. But as it is, and particularly on the Wii U, Cosmophony ends up playing like a demo, stripped of its powers to sustain by its confused design, lack of content and its impossible level of difficulty.

Futuridium is a game for those who can invest in the grind of simply 'getting the job done'. Taken on those terms, Futuridium becomes a challenge to be completed, retro looking enough to be in vogue, yet with mechanics that inhibit a broader mainstream appeal.

My disappointment with Egglia is its capitulation to free-to-play mobile game conventions, that simply weren't necessary. Priced at the relatively premium price that it's set at, I expected Egglia to be something bolder; something willing to do away with the timers and endless grind. I expected something to take advantage of the gorgeous art style to tell a compelling story. I expected a game that was closer to what I might expect to play on my PlayStation 4 than something I download to my iPad, noodle around with for a while, but ultimately forget. Sadly, Egglia is not that game.

Born of Bread looks like a game that will be easy to love. The art in screenshots looks lovely, and Paper Mario-inspired titles are always welcome. It’s a lovely formula that lends itself to a lot of joy. But the developers completely misfired on this one. It comes across as a flat fan project that had original art assets dropped in at the last moment, rather than a cohesive creative work with its own identity, and, sadly, it’s one of the dullest games I’ve played this year.

Sometimes, when I review a game, I expect to be an outlier. And my gut tells me that will be the case when this review is published, and I feel free to check out other review scores. But I cannot in good faith give a game that I want to like a good score; I have to rate what’s in front of me. And what I see is a lack of character growth, a lack of accessibility, and a lack of clear graphics. An interesting narrative only carries so much weight. It quickly makes one exhausted.

I love the classic Dragon Quest titles with a passion, but there is nothing that redeems these poor ports. They fail as an archive of classics, since the redesign fundamentally changes them. They fail as pieces of entertainment, because they're so ugly and poorly made. Finally, they fail as Dragon Quest, because Dragon Quest fans will be insulted by this trash being passed off as their memories.

I appreciate the vision and the concept behind it, and I love noir, but the execution is sorely lacking.

You’ll find nothing ground breaking in LEGO Jurassic World, but it is so rushed that I can only recommend looking at one of the many other LEGO games out there unless you're a massive fan of Jurassic Park.

We live in a world where very serious questions are being asked of western interventionism and imperialism, colonialist attitudes, and the nationalism of western powers. With ISIS and Syria, we’re finally starting to realise that over a century of meddling, king making, and warring in places like the Middle East and South America has left many of those places in a state of endless humanitarian disaster. And in this context Ubisoft decided it was the right time to release a game that outright celebrates all of these things that we need to question about western – and particularly American – foreign policy. Wildlands is repugnant for the way it blindly celebrates the many evils wrought on the innocent in these places. It’s utterly unforgivable trash, and that’s tragic, because there is a decent – albeit derivative - game underneath all its posturing.

At roughly ten times the price that these kinds of games usually ask over in the mobile world, it's difficult to see where the developers have justified the premium price, because what we have with Pokémon Link: Battle is a nice, but ultimately unremarkable match-3 game with much less content (yes, even with 700 critters to catch) than its immediate rivals.

There was no reason Story Mode couldn’t be a wonderful extension of the Minecraft world, but instead all it succeeds at is pushing me away. After this experience, my desire to play any other Telltale game has gone from high to non-existent.

The enemy’s AI is non-existent; it will spawn slowly strengthening hordes of soldiers, but otherwise it won’t do anything. If you can get a multiplayer game going there’s a bit more strategy involved, I guess, but there isn’t much of a community wrapped around this one, leaving Korix feeling like a game that had a good idea buried away in there, but fails to give people the VR strategy experience that they’ll be looking for.

Assuming concentration is a problem worth solving (an assumption lacking the solidest of foundations), I will argue there are better, significantly more efficient, ways to address it than through another game from a device that's otherwise a regular dopamine provider by its own rights.

The Game Bakers, the developer of Squids Odyssey, has created a game that largely misses everything that makes the RPG genre great. As such, it quickly becomes tedious, and while I do think it would work as a free iOS game as a time waster, it doesn't work as a sit down experience on a home console.

There's a lot of content in Blackguards, but memorable moments are few and far between. This is a game that feels like it has a lot of ambition, but it's held back sharply but budgetary constraints and, perhaps, an engine so unfamiliar to the development team that they couldn't compensate for its inherent flaws.

I admire a game that is willing to take a risk, and certainly trolling the people who believe that games should be mindless content that doesn’t challenge their intelligence with a “political idea,” is a creative risk I can admire. But beyond the initial amusement that I took from knowing that somewhere out there someone is absolutely fuming about this game on a forum or in a tweet, there’s actually very little intelligence in Dustborn. It’s also an experience that is so culturally specific that it probably shouldn’t have been a global release.

As a paid product, The Charnel House Trilogy fails to deliver on its promised horror.

Ultimately, it’s fun but probably more of a tablet experience. The issue comes from the fear that there is a lack of imagination in some segments of the developer community.

Legrand Legacy is, in the end, a very playable JRPG. Sadly it's also one of marginal appeal, even to those who grew up playing old JRPGs back in the 32-bit era.

If only the rest of the game could live up to those visuals. Crossing Souls works just fine as a vessel for rose-tinted '80s nostalgia, but shallow storytelling and gameplay that shifts from uninteresting to outright frustrating ensures that it never gets to be anything more than that.

Unfortunately a lack of personality and gameplay that doesn't live up to its promises have left Ironclad Tactics dead in the water.

Chaos Code just doesn't offer anything.

With a very short completion time and no replay value there really isn’t much to keep you playing and whilst the lack of challenge may be appealing to those looking for a short game to pick up and play it becomes tedious very quickly.

I know it's a tough gig being a game developer when hours played is a key metric and the pundits bleat on about content rather than things that are actually important, like thematic intensity or narrative depth. Taking something that could have been something special and diluting it to give those pundits something to throw onto their backlog isn't going to help video games develop as an art form, though. The Red Lantern upset me more than most; most games aren't made by people with the vaguest understanding of art. The Red Lantern, however, clearly is the concept of artists and the vision is compelling. Next time they should try delivering a game that supports the vision, rather than what they think will boost the Metacritic score.

Despite being a cheap downloadable title, I feel like the developers could have done so much more with this mini-game, such as trying some different rhythm notations to mix up the gameplay.

It's a horribly generic platformer that tries hard to be some kind of homage to the genre's greats, and ends up being a pale imitation of them all. Sure it's cheap as chips on the Nintendo 3DS, but that doesn't mean its worth the time investment.

A limited game that fails to do justice to its source material. That’s not to say that the game has no value, because it is decent fun in multiplayer for short sessions, but lacking the atmosphere and narrative as it is, as well as any kind of balance to make it viable for single player play, means it’s one that is going to be forgotten within months.

In theory, a roguelike FPS could work, however, there needs to be a very specific reason to even try. Nightmare Reaper never gives us that reason. It comes across like a game that’s a roguelike purely because that was how an indie developer should shove 100 levels of grind into it. There’s no narrative nor thematic value to it being a roguelike, and in all that randomness, it loses the soul of what makes those games it pays homage to so special.

My Time at Sandrock’s issues are due to its ambition and sheer density of what you can do. I would expect a Yakuza title to have similar issues on Switch. But then the developers aren’t putting Yakuza games on the console. I am quite sure that this game is a fine experience on other platforms. However, the developer decided to release it on Switch, and therefore this version needs to be assessed in isolation. In short, it is just not a good game on this specific platform, and the developers should have made a judgment call to pull this version when it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. That way we wouldn’t have been subjected to it.

Frankly, being competently made isn’t enough. Not for a genre as loaded as this boomer shooter one. The original Painkiller had an identity and personality. It wasn’t meaningfully different in how it played compared to its peers at the time, but it had something about it that allowed it to stand out for itself. This Painkiller is a generic multiplayer shooter with a generic Christian horror-themed setting and aesthetics, and none of it is memorable.

The game itself can be fun in fleeting moments. And there aren't really any alternatives to what this offers, in this form, so that's a plus for it. However, the campaign is short and the visuals are just terrible.

A new NBA arcade game will always be something to get excited about. Many of us have fond memories of dropping coins into those arcade cabinets back in the day. A game that can capture that raw sense of fun, while modernising the more archaic elements would instantly become one of the most entertaining games of the year. I’m sure the developers went into NBA Playgrounds with the most noble of intentions, but this game is not the NBA I remembered. This game is one that young me would never have considered to be worth my allowance.

For now this game is little more than a noble, albeit misguided attempt to make a MOBA ideally suited to mobile platforms.

The story as a whole is predictable and underwhelming. It treads a lot of well-worn horror cliches without really doing anything to stand out, and it tries to take you on an emotional journey without giving you a reason to care.

I love the classic Dragon Quest titles with a passion, but there is nothing that redeems these poor ports. They fail as an archive of classics, since the redesign fundamentally changes them. They fail as pieces of entertainment, because they're so ugly and poorly made. Finally, they fail as Dragon Quest, because Dragon Quest fans will be insulted by this trash being passed off as their memories.

At this present point in time, Goat Simulator is simply not worth it, even for the novelty value.

As a longtime fan of the series, I feel compelled to find redeeming qualities in this release, but as a critic, I can’t recommend it. The challenges are more basic than those found in Paw Patrol games, the replay value is virtually nonexistent, and the core concept feels more rough than many indie titles made with minimal resources and no major publisher backing. This isn’t the Survival Kids revival fans deserved, and it’s unlikely to attract new players to a franchise that deserved so much better.

Mario Sports Superstars does nothing to help the series make its case. In fact, it’s quite possibly the most aggressively simplistic game I’ve ever played from Nintendo.

I don't think I've ever played a game as soulless of Jett Rocket 2.

More than anything, it's the crushing lack of originally that really does let down Baseball Riot.

Mutant Football League is a cheap and poorly executed arcade sports game. I think the developers went in with all the right intents, because there really aren't enough sports games being made for people who aren't willing to put a major commitment into the game in order to be able to appreciate it on any level. But for all the good intentions this game needs so much refinement, polish, and a complete graphical overhaul that I can't see myself busting this game out the next time I've got guests looking to play a game, either.

Now, rereleased and unmodified from its original gameplay, it is beyond archaic and outdated.

What beggared my belief is the question of why this “buy once play forever” game utilises all the cheap and nasty tricks from the freemium books. I can only conclude there is a core design problem with Subdivision Infinity, perhaps to do with it originally being conceived as freemium but then turned into premium due to rival releases. Regardless, the end result is a very mechanical affair of short dog fighting followed by lots of tediousness for the sole sake of getting a slightly better ship with which to fight slightly superior enemies in the next round. In the year of our Goddess 2017, this - Subdivision Infinity - is simply not good enough.

While the puzzle genre has certainly seen improvements over the many years, Chuck's Challenge is content with slapping on a coat of paint onto a 25 year old game, covering up what little charm the series and instead replacing it with tired level design wrapped in an uninspired package.

I began Detective Gallo feeling quite peckish for some good point-and-click action. Unfortunately, though, the game has me migrating elsewhere, as Detective Gallo’s cockiness as a character was very grating, and I found myself beginning to moult as a result.

Nothing redeems Asphalt 9. It's shallow, inferior game that has been built with the exclusive purpose of getting suckers to throw more money at it. This stuff should be left on mobile platforms or, better yet, never made.

To say that the final product is possibly one of the most disappointing games I’ve ever experienced is not an exaggeration, this is coming from a guy who has had to review some pretty disappointing ones over the years.

I love the classic Dragon Quest titles with a passion, but there is nothing that redeems these poor ports. They fail as an archive of classics, since the redesign fundamentally changes them. They fail as pieces of entertainment, because they're so ugly and poorly made. Finally, they fail as Dragon Quest, because Dragon Quest fans will be insulted by this trash being passed off as their memories.

The sense of shallowness is impossible to shake, and over the course of a reasonably long brawler/RPG gets tiring. Dusk Diver 2, much like its predecessor, has all the potential in the world, and most of its individual elements are really competently made. It just doesn’t come together in execution, and while I was willing to give the developers the benefit of the doubt the first time, I’m just not certain they have a good grasp of how they want to execute on their ambition with this series. I don’t know if a third would be a good idea at this stage.

It's pretty in a generic manner, and has enough content that it will satisfy people that don't much care for creativity. But there is a point where a homage becomes a flat-out copy, and sadly, Tanzia simply doesn't seem to care that it's so brazen in its "influences."

I just did not care enough about anything that I was seeing or doing to enjoy Edge of Eternity. The narrative lacks thought and insight, the characters are bland, and each new location simply means more fetch quests and slightly higher level enemies to go through the motions to fight. Edge of Eternity is undoubtedly beautiful and the art team deserves kudos, but it is a hollow, empty, and shallow kind of beauty, and with no intelligence nor soul to back it up, the talents of the artists are largely wasted on this one.

So this is a very short review, but since the developer doesn't have enough respect for players or the source material to include a core part of the original experience, I'm going to show them as much respect in return.

Mato Anomalies had picked the right kind of experience to ape. The Persona series is consistently the most intelligent and thought-provoking in the JRPG genre. The developers have also done a decent effort to understand the thematic basis of those games, and at least attempt their own spin on it. Unfortunately, whether for a lack of resources or an inability to bring the creative elements together cohesively enough, Mato Anomalies’ greatest achievement is simply demonstrating just how hard it really is to make a game like Persona 3, 4 and 5.

This is a game by Peter Molyneux who, for all his misfires in recent years, remains a guy who is fiercely intelligent and deeply committed to creative game development. The fact that he allowed this game to fall into such a cynical monetisation model shows just how enslaved developers and publishers have become to free-to-play games, and that makes Godus a symbol, but for reasons that Molyneux probably didn't anticipate; it's a symbol for just how infuriating free-to-play has become.

I can appreciate why a developer would want to try its hand at a Souls-like. It's a hugely popular genre that doesn't have that many entries at this point in time, and there's a veritable goldmine of unique settings and concepts to explore. A horror-themed Souls on an abandoned space station, circling a black hole, is appealing on every level. Unfortunately, this genre is also incredibly demanding, technically and creatively, and while I admire the ambition of Cradle Games, with Hellpoint they've shot for the stars but well missed the mark.

With nothing to do other than explore and combat enemies, the fact that both systems are insultingly simple means that Fairune has no value, whatsoever.

This is a console that does not need lesser local multiplayer experiences to bolster it up.

A game with much unmet potential. After clearing out the same area for the twentieth time, players will realise just how little effect they have on the gaming environment.

Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game is such a great idea, but it becomes way too apparent, far too quickly, that the developers either didn’t have the budget to fully explore their idea, or simply had no idea how to turn the great idea into a compelling game. It’ll leave such a warm impression on you, but once that’s worn off, the game sours more quickly than a poorly cooked rhubarb pie. Hobbits like that for some reason. I do not.

The environments are detailed and beautiful, replete with pops of colour. Unfortunately, navigating them through a haze of lag destroys your enjoyment quite quickly. Pathways are dotted with doors, and the slightest glance in their direction pops you into places that you don’t want to be.

While I appreciate that multiplayer is always going to be the core of the Mario Tennis experience, the complete absence of any kind of single player meat to go with the local and online multiplayer is another blow against it.

It’s just a shame that the gameplay is so generic.

If Matchpoint Tennis had just thrown the occasional loss at me, or even let me fight back from behind at times, I would have spent so much more time playing the game. It’s unfortunate to think that here we have a tennis game that developers should be paying close attention to, because it gets so much right, and we know that won’t happen because one critical error means I have no choice but to score it the way I have. If, down the track, there’s a patch to improve the difficulty in an interesting way, then Matchpoint would be the best tennis game currently available, purely because the on-court gameplay actually gets it.

All that I Am Bread has achieved is to be a mildly frustrating but mildly attractive game that will disappoint any Kafka fan that is baited into giving it a go based on its title.

In fact, it’s almost like a tech demo where the development team has come up with a brilliant combat system and has released that as a commercial project in the hope that a publisher will take note and throw them the money they need to make a real game next.

I actually feel terrible that I haven’t enjoyed WitchSpring3 more. In isolation it has a lot going for it – I love pastel aesthetics, I love cute witches. I love the CG art. I really love alchemy JRPGs. Unfortunately, WitchSpring3 is a little too obviously a “mobile JRPG best practices” game, so a lot of its potential is let down by less-than-enthusiastic storytelling and a mechanical approach to gameplay systems that left me feeling very cold.

I left the game feeling frustrated more than anything else. With arbitrary, esoteric puzzles and a wildly inconsistent tone exacerbated by technical issues, I found it hard to get sucked into the game’s atmosphere. The clever plot twists and unique setting were all but drowned out by errant jokes about office politics.

So with New Star Manager you get poor on-field football action, and poor off-field management. Throw in the cheap "typical mobile game" aesthetics and design, and it's hard to understand who would want to play this. People who simply like football would go for FIFA. People who want a management simulator would go for the densely rewarding Football Manager. Both of which are already available on Switch.

Hiragana Pixel Party is a game with an identity crisis – it’s too shallow to be a serious learning tool but it’s too serious about learning to be just fun. It’s on a console with more than a few proper rhythm games which feel more intuitive to play, and honestly you’ll pick up about as much Japanese from this game as you would while playing Project Diva with dual language subtitles on. I would have loved it to be more ambitious, and to find more ways to be a useful language acquisition tool, but as of now it’s only useful to players who want to learn just hiragana and katakana.

The console can do much better than Drive.Club Unlimited 2. This is just unacceptable.

In theory I would love a game like Fossil Fighters, but while I was willing to forgive the original on the Nintendo DS as a good-but-flawed new IP, by now the game should have a far more refined identity by now. There's still potential in Fossil Fighters, but the series needs to head back to the drawing board for a thorough rethink.

The House of the Dead is a classic and monumentally important video game. I didn’t even bat an eyelid when this popped up on the eShop. Even knowing that as a Forever Entertainment project it probably wasn’t going to be all that, my fierce loyalty to the brand caused me to buy this instantly. As I wrote in the introduction to this review, however, The House of the Dead Remake makes Uwe Boll’s film seem like a masterpiece by comparison. At least Boll had the good sense to put gratuitous B-genre exploitation nudity and unintentionally hilarious directing in his film. His film was a thing you could enjoy drunk. You play this game and you’ll just jump straight to the hangover.

While I do admire the attempt to give players the power fantasy of playing as a guy so utterly, brutally powerful that he can calmly walk through a bullet ballet, Gungrave G.O.R.E burns its goodwill far too quickly and from there it’s too exhausting to bother with.

I just didn’t expect it could be this bad. Dark Alliance is a functionally broken product. When enemies simply ignore you as you carve their health down to zero, when there’s so little to the game that that’s all you’re doing, and when the multiplayer experience is only superior because it’s a chance to share the misery with someone else, some passable graphics and one neat checkpointing system aren't anywhere near enough to redeem this game. This is the poorest handling of a license since Superman 64.

Kemco produces JRPGs on a budget that are designed to give people a momentary throwback to the 16-bit era of the genre, and while I don't expect anything mind blowing when I do go into these games, I find things this soulless and unimaginative very, very trying indeed.

Its simplistic combat and dull mission structures mean it quickly runs out of steam for anything other than quick bursts of play, and the Switch has plenty of games that can fill that need in a far more compelling way.

So we’ve got a game that has zero respect for aesthetic traditions, gameplay that is no more than a shallow grind, and a game about Japanese demons that somehow fails to be interesting to a guy that has a library shelf filled with books about yokai, yurei, oni and the rest. What an intolerable disgrace this is to video games as an art form.

In the end, Perfect Universe is a multiplayer party game that lets itself down by throwing mechanics at the player that are far too complex for their own good.

It’s probably just as well Sony gave this thing away for free with PSPlus memberships. It’s the only hope the game has of actually keeping an audience (because it’s a multiplayer-only game, it needs a large and sustained community). But if David Jaffe genuinely wants to make a transgressive game, next time he should pay some attention to how actual transgressive artists like Goichi Suda and Yoko Taro do it.

The appeal of Date Night Bowling is incredibly limited. It's for people that want to play a game with their romantic partner, and need something that both can enjoy equally, regardless of their gaming experience. At the same time, it's for those that don't want to become too competitive or heated. And both people also need to be old enough to enjoy the 80's and 90's vibes and aesthetics. It's inoffensive enough in fulfilling that very narrow role, but its concepts fall down badly when you're playing single-player, or with anyone other than your significant other. Throw in a dearth of depth and character, and even when you are playing it in its optimal environment, you're going to wish that you decided to take date night to a real bowling alley instead.

There’s a premise with a lot of potential in enigma, but it’s squandered on cliche characters, uneven pacing, and rough localisation.

Run Like Hell! wants to be a good runner, and I can certainly see where Mass Creation was coming from with this one. The execution just isn’t there, microtransactions mar the experience, and the game does little to keep the player engaged.

Empyre: Lords of the Sea Gates has a lot of potential but unfortunately it's made so clumsily that it is just painful to actually play. I wanted to love it because of some of its unique ideas, especially in the premise, but I just couldn’t get past the mechanical issues. Being a PC game and all perhaps community feedback will lead to this game being revised. I hope so, so I can come back and give it another spin.

Something about the survival genre has taken all those brilliant ingredients and spat out a failure of a meal, however, and that's an depressing reflection on the entire genre.

This is clearly one of those times the developers couldn’t be bothered to put enough time and effort into the PC version to make it function properly at a basic level.

I wanted a game that was like Muramasa: The Demon Blade; a game that would take the aesthetics of classical Japan and really do something with it. Instead, Sadame proves itself to be vapid and uninspired in the extreme, and so very disappointing as a result.

Under Par: Golf Architect is charming and very welcoming, and that first golf course you create will be a truly fun process. After that, though, you’ll realise that Under Par has nothing else to offer and is such a disappointing missed opportunity. It’s all the more strange that the developers would do this because the same team previously created Hundred Days, a vineyard business simulation, and that one was genuinely interesting and engaging, and had proper tycoon simulation challenges built into it.

There's nothing overtly wrong with it, but the 2D platformer isn't exactly one that is underserviced on the 3DS, and it's hard to see value in buying this game over some of the other options out there.

I’m glad that I played SkateBIRD, and it hurts that I’ve had to give it this score. I firmly believe that as games are an art form, game developers should be trying things, even if they don’t ultimately succeed. SkateBIRD is a brilliant idea and it takes a big, heaving swing at it. Sadly, though, it’s a strikeout. However, with that being said, if the developers get another innings, I would play a SkateBIRD 2 without a moment's hesitation, and I would fully expect that the developers would deliver having had this experience.