My time with Tales of the Shire has been a frustrating mix of small dopamine hits when progressing each morning, to dragging myself to the finish line of a day after exhausting everything I need to do. The constant crashes and lack of an autosave have put me in quite an anxious state for a cozy game, as I make sure to save before doing anything. While I feel the game has made its way 'there', it's not quite ‘back again’ and needs a bit more time before it’s really ready for an adventure.

The Caligula Effect has some of the coolest systems ever found on the Vita. The game seems to push what the system is capable of and perhaps that was asking too much. With some frame rate drops during battles and unnecessarily confusing dungeons, the game might get passed up by the more casual RPG players. However in the end, the side stories, characters, and awesome soundtrack saved the game and made me want to see it through to till the end.

Sadly, One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows lands a glancing smack instead of a one-hit knockout.

Of Ash and Steel is a truly fascinating world and experience that absolutely has merit. The sheer amount of content the game contains (there's even an 'Arena Master' mode outside of the main story that allows you to enjoy more combat challenges) is remarkable for an indie studio that's just now getting its feet wet. It checks a whole lot of boxes for what a love letter to classic 2000s open-world RPGs should contain, and the care and attention to these details is abundantly clear. That said, it does try to differentiate itself in ways that it doesn't need to, such as the lack of navigation UI elements and skill requirements. It also needs a bit more polish on other fronts, such as its dialogue mechanics, and the cutscenes can feel a bit awkward to watch at times. With a bit more time in the "forge" as it were (or just constructive update patches), this game could truly be one to remember.

Clive 'N' Wrench might take inspiration from classic 3D platformers, but it doesn't take the best practices, resulting in a dated and at times frustrating gameplay experience.

Jump Force is a tremendous disappointment that almost completely wastes the potential of its vast cast of characters.

Deadly Premonition 2 just wants to tell its story, tell it well, and be its own weird, little self. Your ability to either live with that or not will determine how deeply you fall in love with the citizens of Le Carre.

David Jaffe and co. have created something wildly novel, moderately fun, and slightly frustrating with Drawn to Death. In the finished product lies a blueprint for a great game, but mediocre shooting mechanics and a slightly shallow level of content holds back Drawn to Death in the end.

Cooking Mama: Sweet Shop is by no means a broken game. It just wholly lacks any soul or incentive to be better than any previous game in the series. With shoddy systems, repetitive gameplay, annoying sound design and better iterations of the game elsewhere, dessert diversity wasn’t enough to keep me interested.

Old Time Hockey by and large was a disappointing experience. On paper, it had potential to be a good game. But as a finished product it is disappointingly held back by wads of jank and unpolish, and a few too many half-baked features.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s greatest selling point is the fact that players can dictate their own experience.

In the end, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 feels like an amalgamation of gameplay elements that were thrown together simply to check some boxes.

Bright Memory is a profoundly bland experience riddled with hints that the game was never meant to be played anywhere but PC.

While it might be true that Akiba’s Beat presents an interesting premise with clever writing and a fun cast of characters, the game ends up failing at everything fans may want out of an action RPG.

The developers made it clear that the game was meant to be intentionally uncomplicated, but I expected more from a game that aimed to be a spiritual successor to the Sun Haven games. Despite all of its shortcomings, however, it is still a reasonably enjoyable experience, and there's still a lot of potential in the game. If the developers decide to address its major issues, then Sugardew Island could easily evolve into a much more enjoyable experience for a wider audience. For now, though, it remains a quaint, if relatively flawed, addition to the cozy farming game landscape, offering a taste of island life that doesn’t quite live up to its full potential.

The Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia manages to disappoint in just about every category.

Unfortunately, all the new things Crisis of the Planet of the Apes introduced are overlooked when you factor in its short length, repetition, and lack of exploration plague the title.

The attempt to make everyone happy resulted in a a battle system hindered by its duality.

Circuit Breakers is a decent arcade shooter with a nice retro style aesthetic. I wish there was more variety and more extras, considering there are a good amount of titles similar to this already available on consoles and PC, and because of this it becomes hard to fully recommend as a purchase.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is the first new game in the franchise since 2003's Defiance. It really misses the mark on quite a few things, not the least of which is its story, which tries valiantly but just doesn't succeed in a meaningful way. In many ways, it's a step backwards and makes the franchise's most defining feature feel like a throwaway. It also just feels so bad to play, and if you were even a casual fan of Legacy of Kain back in the day, there's not much here I can really recommend outside of hearing Michael Bell and Simon Templeman again.

Managing inventory is especially tedious with a console controller and the systems in place don’t make the control options intuitive making the process of navigating a simple menu a gigantic chore.

Smashbox Arena could have been a great competitive game to play on PS VR, instead it’s just another generic VR shooter with an underpopulated online community.

There are elements here that could make an interesting spiritual sequel to ActRaiser, but they never realize the potential.

We have seen this formula done before time and time again and while this isn’t a bad thing per se, it’d be nice to see new features and things to do that could make the pet sim subgenre more exciting. Little Friends brings back great gaming memories and is definitely a good game for children, which is likely what its main audience is. This is a game I will likely find myself returning to every now and then just because I can turn off my brain and not have to think about much of anything which makes for a simplistic and relaxing time.

If you've played the original Biped, you've played Biped 2, and I truly mean that. This is sadly one of the lowest effort sequels I've ever encountered, down to even the game's Tutorial being a direct copy/paste from the OG. There are numerous examples of blatant and unabashed rip-offs consistently throughout the experience, to the point that it feels like self-plagiarism. If you want to try out the new 4-player co-op, that's about the only different thing worth checking this game out for, especially because there's an actual game-breaking bug near the end as well. As cute as the game can be, you've quite literally done all of this before.

Redfall is an open-world shooter where you can creep through a spooky mansion alone at night, then link up with some friends to take on a giga-vampire in another dimension. It's weird, and it's the right kind of weird.

Claws of Fury might be a little more entertaining to play with a group of friends, but if you don’t have any friends to play with, you might take a pass on this one.

The only saving grace is that The Grand Tour Game has a strong fun element that keeps it in line with the show’s humor and that on its own should be enough to keep me playing, but unfortunately, it doesn’t. I feel like the game lets itself down after a few episodes and ends up not having any replayability. For Amazon Game Studios’ first console title, it’s not half bad, but it’s certainly not enough to entice me to pick up Amazon Prime to watch the show outside of the game.