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.

Technical competence aside, Adventure Time: The Secret of the Nameless Kingdom should not have been a full-retail title. The game is far too short. It's over in around 10 hours, and isn't the most difficult 10 hours you'll ever experience.

The best part of Mini-Games Madness Volume #1 is its menu screen, which features psychedelic colours and effects underscored by a fish-eye lens.

Ten-pin bowling works as a little minigame, aimed at a social and party environment. It’s a simple, easy-to-grasp sport, and the consistency with the rules makes it ideal for pick-up-and-play fun. However, PBA Bowling 2023 aims to be more than that. This wants to be a serious simulation of a sport where the skill involved cannot be adequately abstracted into button presses. As a result, while PBA Bowling 2023 is a perfectly well-made game that is free of bugs and glitches (sadly a rarity among niche sports titles), it is also an intensely boring, shallow game. You’re better off sticking to the light and frivolous take in Wii Sports.

Joe’s Diner could have been a good game. It has a lot of the pieces for a heart-attack inducing horror game, with its eerie setting and mechanics that force you to make your sense vulnerable. If it did something – anything – with its burial ground plot, it could have told a noteworthy story, or at least an interesting one. Instead, all it does is exploit stereotypes to deliver the weakest Twitch scares I’ve ever seen.

Timberman Vs is such a confused and poorly thought out game, I wouldn't recommend it if it was free (and it is free on the iPhone anyway).

My Farm is so painfully bland and poorly structured that it doesn't work on any level, for any purpose.

The most disappointing thing for me, though, is what’s probably the least of Space Overlords' worries: it just doesn't feel right, on that primal level that action games generally tap into. Despite the title, playing the game made me feel small and weak – not just because of the mechanical hindrances, but because of the lack of any sort of feedback.

Rugby 15 squanders an opportunity to build on the popularity of a sport that is slowly gaining ground in the US, and won't be pulling anyone away from their annual Madden games.

Even if Bloober Team manages to fix every single issue in the game, it's still a conceptual mess that just doesn't work.

Tenkai Knights: Brave Battle is not broken. But it lacks even the slightest hint of creativity or effort within it. To say corners were cut to quickly cash in on the license is an understatement, and by extension this is nothing short of sheer exploitation. That's offensive.

The unfortunate thing about Battalion Commander is that if it was one of those free-to-play mobile games, I’d probably have fun with it I could see some others even enjoying it enough to toss it a couple of coins in support. Sitting on trains or in doctor's waiting rooms, or standing in queues, I often go to my phone to keep me occupied and this kind of game would have fit the bill perfectly. But if I am to sit in front of my PlayStation 4, I’m not going to want to play something that requires minimal effort, no narrative and five minutes of my time. Simple as that.

Yes, this kind of game is better in multiplayer, but if you’ve got any sense, you’d grab Brut@l for an action-roguelike experience, or Gauntlet or Diablo 3 for multiplayer heroics. Even for groups that are willing to go into Dungeon Bros with the right spirit, I seriously struggle to imagine a scenario in which this game has any longevity to it.

The Dresden Files: Cooperative Card Game is such a fundamentally flawed concept, and the execution is so lacking, that it offers nothing whatsoever of value.

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.

Handball 17's problem is that the developers might be fans of the sport, but they haven't got a clue how to do the sport justice as a game. Last year I was willing to give the franchise a chance, hoping against hope that, it being the first game, future editions would be better. I am under no such illusions this time around.

Silent World is, mercifully, over quite quickly. It's a real pity that the game hasn't turned out better - there's a nice art style in there and aside from the monsters, the sound effects and ambiance shows what the game might have been. Unfortunately there was no clear vision driving this game and without the vision all that's left is a bunch of elements thrown together without any cohesiveness.

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.

Neither the competent structure nor reasonable aesthetics are enough to save Beach Bounce Remastered. Once again: fan service is great, when it's in service of something. A game like Max's Bigger Bust, despite being all-in with the fan service, writes in plenty of excellently Australian humour to contextualise it. Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation is one of my favourite visual novels of all time, and it, too, is very heavily focused on fan service, while still giving me a reason to actually want to see the girl's skirts blow up (I heart you Tohka). Beach Bounce Remastered has absolutely nothing going for it, other than those spread legs. It's utterly boring.

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.

Concealed is visually impressive and borrows intelligently from the aesthetic of manga books. I also know from piecing the narrative together that in its native language, the story is both chilling and effective horror. This game therefore could have been great in English too, and it’s such a tragedy that the single most important quality of a visual novel was overlooked in the way that it has been.

There's simply no reason to play something so utterly bereft of thought as Narcos.

I never thought I’d see Cricket Captain on the Switch. Cricket Captain 2023 should have stayed on platforms where I wouldn’t have been tempted to pay for it. What a waste of money.

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.

Concave have made a game which, while it isn't broken by any means, just barely meets the tenets of its genre and rarely aims to go past that. In being no-nonsense, Pulstar also throws away its sense of individuality and its lasting appeal, making it a hard sell unless more content is added in the future.

This is by far the worst anime/ manga game I've ever played, and a real tragedy, because it manages to look appealing from start to finish, and could well have been a definitive Dragon Ball experience.

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.

In other words, it’s a RTS game without any strategy, and a town building simulator with endless timers to deal with.