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.