You get the impression the only person who cares about Kain's legacy any more is the writer. The turgid battling lets an average game down. [Jan 2004, p.107]

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]

The game effectively highlights the difference between a sandbox which facilitates player experimentation, and a game environment that only allows prescribed actions. [May 2009, p.95]

The Precinct may boil policing down to a numbers game, but they never add up to much. [Issue#412, p.116]

MicroBot is a technically accomplished but sterile experience. As the game settles into a rut, its stylistic strengths lose more and more ground to the sluggish combat, uninspiring upgrades and repetitive stages.

Ditching the self-aware snuff-movie set-up for an unsubtle conspiracy story, Manhunt 2 lacks the redemption of a smart commentary on violence as entertainment. [Christmas 2008, p.98]

Sluggish menus, clumsy controls, and an intrusive, atmosphere-scuppering soundtrack mar each excursion, while excessive weather effects will have you straining to see as you awkwardly bump up against objects to find out if they can be ransacked. [Aug 2017, p.122]

By turns astonishing and insufferable, there is as much here to make your eyes roll as widen. Even the moments when Hellblade II delivers nigh-unparalleled visual spectacle (see 'Giant steps') are soured by the fact that our involvement in these set-pieces so often feels incidental. For long stretches, it's akin to watching someone else play, only occasionally - and always unwillingly - handing back the controller. We can't help but return to that old chestnut about the interactive experience being a conversation between designer and player; there is an irony that in this, of all games, we're scarcely able to get a word in edgeways. [Issue#399, p.104]

Sparsely scattered save points, un-skippable animations and cutscenes, and repeated locations and boss fights are anachronisms that will frustrate and alienate all but the most ardent traditionalist.

Firefights become more surreal than menacing when the worst-case scenario is of your fellow GIs having to catch their breath for a few seconds after being riddled with bullets. [Aug 2004, p.96]

In a world where games such as Hades, Slay The Spire and Into The Breach have found ways to elevate the Roguelike to new heights, PixelJunk Raiders sadly fails to make a mark. [Issue#357, p.118]

It's yet another curiously half-hearted side project from Supermassive that, appropriately, won't linger long in the memory. [Apr 2018, p.120]

Sonic games, and platformers in general, have always been about memorising the lay of the land, but rarely have mistakes been so costly or heavily punished, and it says much that one retailer’s preorder bonus consists solely of 25 additional lives.

It’s just not accurate or tangible enough to be rewarding, handling with the same kind of wool as Sonic’s 3D platformers. [Apr 2006, p.93]

Ends up feeling like it's been built by PC game developers obsessed with quick saves. There's absolutely no creative latitude; it's a case of remembering where enemies appear and getting them before they get you. [May 2005, p.86]

It's just not accurate or tangible enough to be rewarding, handling with the same kind of wool as Sonic's 3D platformers. [Apr 2006, p.93]

By keeping it real, the game retains many of the things that make navigating the real city more of a pain than a pleasure: countless faceless skyscrapers don't make for memorable landmarks, and facing the wrong way down a jammed one-way street when you're in a hurry to get somewhere is the sort of challenge few will relish. [Jan 2005, p.91]

You wonder if players will have wanted to spend this amount of time loafing around the Homestar Runner universe, or whether their interaction with it is best limited to ten-minute bursts via their web browser. [Oct 2008, p.101]

It is especially abhorrent that this should happen in a game with almost unrivalled massmarket appeal...No doubt EA and its trio of development studios will fix this mess eventually, but the fact they deemed it fit for purpose in the first place is unavoidable, and damning in the extreme. Whatever happens next, we're afraid we don't patch review scores. [Issue#314, p.104]

Age of Resistance Tactics would merely be tolerably mundane, were it not brought low by a UI as cumbersome as the game's title. [Issue#343, p.116]

GORE might have worked had it followed the remit of the original PS2 Gungrave to deliver an intense couple of hours, before focusing on polish and score-chasing replay value. As it is, the moments when you gorge on the excesses of Grave's ordnance are spread thinly between slabs of frustration and tedium. [Issue#380, p.116]

Star Trek has more bugs crawling on it than a Fear Factor contestant. Sometimes the results are amusing, as in the turbolift example, but frequently they just make life a drag.

Astonishia ultimately proves to be little more than a charming catalogue of decade-old foibles and cliché. [Aug 2006, p.93]

A larger problem: the sense that The Suicide of Rachel Foster is messing around with borrowed ideas it never quite understands. [Issue#343, p.118]

Lacking the tools to really upset her enemies or cope with them when she does, Summer relies on a wafer-thin playbook of obvious traps and distractions. [July 2009, p.96]

In Agents of Mayhem, the limits are all around you, all of the time - from the moment you start playing to the minute you stop, it feels permanently imprisoned by its own lack of imagination. The result is a game that carries the weight of a litany of sins - a saint that has fallen far, far from grace. [Issue#311, p.116]

A soulless videogame that stands as a grave indictment of how stale a series can become if it loses its spark of creativity and imagination. [March 2005, p.93]

Infinity is extremely limited, both in terms of what little content it offers and your ability to access it. [Aug 2014, p.119]