Bodycount's lack of consistent game design, flitting between arcadey action and a sub-par story-driven campaign, ultimately causes the game to misfire. The lesser parts of Bodycount's gameplay ultimately shout the loudest, drowning out its charms and distracting from the flourishes of inspired ideas.

Where B-Boy crucially disappoints is in the execution of its gameplay. The turn-based nature of its stages is interminably frustrating. [Oct 2006, p.94]

Describing the game at all is simply to tick off a litany of annoyances punctuated by one minor triumph, namely that the Transformers themselves look pretty good. [Sept 2007, p.90]

It's a long, repetitive grind that fails to reward your efforts. [Sept 2012, p.100]

Yes, you really do feel in chargeof steering, but when the amount of speed put into a tight bend is dictated by the game, not the player, that feeling only delivers so much. [Christmas 2010, p.98]

Your main objective is the bane of the modern FPS: follow a little blue arrow while shooting things, with the odd escort or protect responsibility thrown in to make you turn around occasionally. It's average justice dished out to the licence, but nothing more. [Christmas 2003, p.121]

This may not suffer the indignity of being delisted, but it's highly unlikely anyone will remember it in a decade's time. [Issue#395, p.122]

With the exceptions of deplorably bad cutscenes and haphazard signposting, there are few significant flaws here that a steadier gestation couldn’t have resolved. [Aug 2006, p.90]

The dialogue is belief-defyingly bad, the characters who deliver it lazy, one-dimensional caricatures. [Oct 2006, p.94]

An unrewarding trudge that doesn’t have any ideas beyond the most primitive. [Feb 2008, p.97]

Sure, the production values are high and the narrative is updated with humour, but this is barely a game... it's all smoke and mirrors. You may win every battle, but underneath you know you're no hero. [June 2004, p.110]

Slant Six Games cut its teeth on handheld SOCOM games, but no tactical subtlety has filtered down to this title. Operation Raccoon City is a gory duck shoot in a series that's already produced the definitive action game, and letting you experience its gore-soaked trudge with friends is its only genuine appeal.

This is very much Inafune by numbers, a Mega Man game in all but name, and not a particularly good one. [Issue#296, p.118]

The overall impression is of a game that's both bravely and badly designed, and weighted towards the latter. [July 2006, p.84]

Had The Official Game provided a consistent overall challenge, it would have been bearable, if unexciting. But it hasn’t, and it isn’t. [July 2006, p.88]

That it largely fails to deliver does not quite snuff out its allure – not, at least, for devotees of the fiction. For those yet to be tempted by Martin's work, however, the blunderous combat, mangled dialoguing and profoundly unlovely looks will make it seem, as a Westerosi idiom goes, a mummer's farce.

The reality, inevitably, is that you want Fallout 76 to play like a Fallout game, and on those terms it fails to satisfy. After all, how could you not want that from it? [Jan 2019, p.110]

Had The Official Game provided a consistent overall challenge, it would have been bearable, if unexciting. But it hasn’t, and it isn’t. [July 2006, p.88]

Had The Official Game provided a consistent overall challenge, it would have been bearable, if unexciting. But it hasn’t, and it isn’t. [July 2006, p.88]

NeverDead's heart is in the right place: committed to entertaining you, no matter the cost - even if it means losing your head a few too many times along the way. [March 2012, p.120]

Fundamentally, combat feels feeble and insubstantial - partly out of aesthetic failure to convey power, but mostly out of a design choice to limit the effectivness of your weaponry (see 'Gun Damn'). [Mar 2008, p.95]

Sadly, encounters with enemy AI - particularly in combat - are by far the weakest link in an otherwise enjoyable effort. [Apr 2005, p.98]

This nonsensical sequel in Capcom's mediocre survival horror spin-off fails in practically every sense, from fine detail to basic tenets. A catastrophe. [Sept 2003]

For all its wit and swagger, Truckers is inescapably safety-conscious, rewarding the maintenance of a planned route and steady trajectory while more arresting notions - spontaneous risk, for example - fall from the back like poorly fastened cases of moonshine. [Sept 2005, p.99]

HTTC’s easy relationship with the subject matter results in some of the finest political animals you’ll see and, what is perhaps even more remarkable, a videogame that is genuinely funny. [Sept 2008, p.97]

Yes, Beat Down revives the warped charisma of Capcom's beat'em up heyday, but that's the only area where it actually triumphs. [Oct 2005, p.90]

Inspired moments, such as the vehicles' mulitple weapons systems, are forced from the mind by the relentless slogs across the levels... In the end, you're likely to discover that the real battle is to continue playing. [May 2004, p.100]

By even the lowest expectations Superman Returns is a staggering shortfall. [Jan 2007, p.86]