Of the two, I give the tip to the first Revelations, as that boat setting really is up there with the original Resident Evil’s mansion, and Resident Evil 0’s train as a distinctive and brilliantly designed environment. Otherwise I find these games to be unremarkable. Entertaining, but unremarkable.

I hate to be the guy railing against a lack of content in a game, but while Riki 8Bit Game Collection was clearly a labour of love, I have to question why this wasn’t released as a music CD or music download instead, because 99% of the experience is in those music players and the Switch is not the ideal place for a music player. There’s less than ten minutes worth of gameplay in this collection, and as good as that music is, I can’t add it to my Apple playlists for working out or enjoying while I’d reading a book. The end result is, sadly, a conceptual misfire.

Having "unlimited replay value" means nothing when it results in such a grind, and I can't help but think that Rico would have been so much better if it was over and done in a couple of hours, but that bombastic action really had a chance to fly thanks to carefully designed levels arranged to help boost that experience.

The biggest pity is that the developers were so modest in their scope. Perhaps this little experiment is just to test the waters and get some money together for a more ambitious second project. I hope so, because Toree 3D has a lot of potential to be a more full-featured homage to B-tier platformers. As it stands here, though, it's a moment or two of fun. Nothing more, nothing less.

Urban Trials Tricky ends far earlier than I thought it would – there’s only a handful of levels and I breezed through them all in a matter of hours, but perhaps it was because of the exploit I’d discovered for all of the Trick stages. I would have wanted further spaces to play around in, since the real strength of this game was just letting players ride and bounce around the creative and incredibly vertical zones. The physics and level design stand out here, considering that Tate Multimedia has had a few games in the series under its belt already. I would hope that future games in the series have better events and scoring systems which effectively test the player’s understanding of the mechanics. What is available here is a fun game, and I certainly didn’t hate the time I spent with it. But it could also have been so much more.

The game is still very playable, and that same old loop around farming up some veggies in order to afford the adorably cute animals is as entertaining as always.

Crazy Strike Bowling is a fun little game but with a lack of features and online play, it's hard to recommend.

Unfortunately, too-simple presentation, an absence of personality, and just seven events also means there’s next to no long-term value to this. You’ll be done with it in about the time it takes for an Olympic event to finish, so it’s up to you whether you consider that’s worth a couple of dollars or not.

End of Serenity is proficient as an homage to the genre’s earlier days, even if it lacks standout qualities and often feels like it’s going through the motions.

I wanted Replica to say a lot more than it did. We're living in a time where governments are becoming more aggressive in snooping into people's lives and for the first time since McCarthy, being branded as a "communist" is shifting from being someone who the right-wing impotently laugh at to someone who could be in some real danger. Replica does the right things in many ways, name-dropping real-world events and giving it enough context that the game is clearly anti-fascist in tone. Unfortunately, it lacks the intelligence and emotional resonance to be the interactive Orwellian experience that it wants to be.

Horror is an intensely difficult genre to get right. You need to draw players in and immerse them in the experience to the point that they have an emotional connection to the game, and then hit them with things that are not just grotesque, but also deeply unsettling. Horror needs to engage the brain as it engages the more visceral reactions, and that's very hard to do. Infliction: Extended Cut doesn't get there. It's simply too pedestrian and rote to really work.

Despite its lack of content, SpiritSphere is still a blast for the first few rounds of play. If you’ve got friends who don’t have much time for a long haul multiplayer game, but still want some fast paced action, SpiritSphere has you covered. It’s an interesting look at how nostalgic and culturally significant footnotes in gaming can be remixed and re-appropriated into completely new experiences.

Between the lack of personality, inconsistent aesthetics, physics that, accurate or not, look broken, and cynical always online requirements, EA Sports PGA Tour gets just about everything wrong. I found myself jumping right back to Easy Come, Easy Golf almost immediately. Sure, it’s not the most realistic golf game out there, but at least it has fun with the sport and I’m not booted from the game after every other hole. EA’s dour, miserable effort is the “you must be fun at parties” joke/insult manifested as a sports game.

Gundam Versus is mechanically solid, though the melee side of the game still needs work. But that only takes this game so far. A lack of narrative or context for any of the action leaves this as a dry, multiplayer-focused game that fails to capitalise on the IP nearly as well as we might have hoped.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 is in an odd spot where only diehard comic book fans will really appreciate all of its references, but those that already care about these characters will want to see them interact in more meaningful ways. Instead of giving players an interesting original story, it’s just yet another by-the-numbers LEGO title that will leave players occasionally laughing between bouts of frustration between its dull combat and often counterintuitive puzzles. Ultimately, this is one brick that doesn’t have to be collected.

It's a super-short indie project, so it almost feels unfair to throw a score onto Red Bow. It's just not a game to put on the same kind of scale as major blockbusters from Nintendo. But, then again, the game is a commercial project and sits on the same virtual store shelf as Nintendo's games. The reality is that Red Bow struggles to understand how horror game stories are told, and adventure games are designed. There are some ideas buried in there, and when the developer is more experienced it would be great to see him revisit this but Red Bow itself its a bit too hollow for its own good.

As a completely free game on PlayStation Plus, Woah Dave! is brief, throwaway fun. There's nothing wrong with it, but its sheer lack of content means I wouldn't want to spend anything on it.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with homages. Vampire’s Fall is a little on the nose with its love of Diablo at times, but there’s a lot of merit to Diablo, and a turn-based open world RPG with that aesthetic and tone is certainly worth paying attention to. It’s just unfortunate that the developers were unable to elevate this beyond being a shallow grind, with more misfired attempts at humour than a narrative that’s actually worth following. Vampire’s Fall is lengthy and content-rich, but it will be quickly forgotten.

Sadly there just isn't much more to Dengeki Bunko than this. It is an exceedingly limited, albeit pretty 2D anime fighting game, with very little appeal beyond the fact you can have the little sister from Oreimo beat up the Sword Art characters. While a fun concept, the modern fighting game needs much more than that.

It was certainly compelling enough for me to want to finish the game. There are also plenty of challenges to help hone platforming skills which ultimately do help in finishing the regular levels. As a game that is clearly supposed to appease Mega Man fans who will likely never get a new game in the series ever again, it falls spectacularly short of their expectations, particularly those that assisted in the crowdfunding campaign.

J-Stars Victory VS is very playable. But, when you consider that the entire purpose of this game's existence is to act as fan service, the fact that it fails to offer the kind of fan service that would have had fans clamouring for it is incredibly disappointing.

Soulslayer is an impressively ambitious indie visual novel. There's a great concept in there, and it's designed well. Unfortunately the shaky localisation effort, and the irritating guesswork that is sometimes thrown at the player also makes the game an experience that doesn't quite live up to its ambition.

It has all the presentational and gameplay elements it needs to be really great. But this developer's track record isn't there, so what we’ve got here is a game with a translation bad enough that it effectively breaks the game.

While the loot grind is generally enjoyable, and the randomised missions help keep the missions from becoming rote, Sky Rogue does struggle to give you a reason to care about any of it.

On the whole, Nitroplus Blasterz Heroines Infinite Duel is a quality 2D fighter, even if it lacks the narrative in needed and the characterisation that would have made it more effective as fanservice. All I can recommend is that you give the game a chance until you've managed to topple the boss, because from that point on you'll probably find yourself with a game that has a combat system you'll quite enjoy.

If the developers had been content to just play to the game’s strengths as an adventure game, Uncanny Valley could have been something really good. Sadly, the shoehorning in of dull “survival horror” pulls the rug out from under that potential.

For fans of the Blair Witch franchise, this game is an interesting vignette which fleshes out the universe a little more. But for those looking for a horror game filled with good scares, this is probably one to pass on.

Unless you really love the music of BlazBlue (and you might be better off purchasing a soundtrack if that’s the case), it’s pretty difficult to recommend Eat Beat DeadSpike-san. It’s a polished rhythm game with a really enjoyable look to it, but there’s just little replayability for a genre that is built upon that principle. This certainly won’t give anyone their Elite Beat Agents fix, but it does show that the touch-based rhythm games are right at home on the portable.