Narratively dry, mechanically unrefined, and entirely devoid of surprises—Aphelion fails to live up to the high standards set by previous Don’t Nod hits.

The Suda51 faithful will find more of the same, wrapped in at best mediocre gameplay - no surprises to be found. And that is probably the most damning thing you can say about one of his games.

Ferocious is basically Far Cry 1 with a dinosaur skin: punchy gunplay, great scenery, some smart ideas – but it’s in such an unfinished, buggy state that it’s very hard to recommend right now.

While being just serviceable as a GT3 simulation Rennsport is a disappointment technically, content-wise and in terms of car handling.

Leaf Blower Co. feels like an early-access game that’s nowhere near ready — buggy, poorly optimized, and, maybe worst of all, shallow and painfully repetitive.

Where Winds Meet impresses with a strong Wuxia atmosphere and a vast, vibrant world. At the same time, it feels overloaded: multiple in-game currencies, cluttered menus, and bugs slow down the flow. Still, somewhere beneath it all lies a satisfying free-to-play experience.

Beneath aims to evoke nostalgia but delivers headaches instead of chills. Technically shaky, riddled with bugs, and utterly lifeless – a downright embarrassing dive into an ocean of missed opportunities.

An only seemingly amusing parody of survivor and roguelike games, which quickly runs out of steam in terms of both gameplay and content.

Beautifully wrapped but hollow inside: Bloodlines 2, dazzled by its own shine, forgets what once made the series special — depth and the courage to take risks.

Everybody's Golf Hot Shots is a faithful successor with fun multiplayer modes. The PC version in particular, though, adds technical issues to a number of unfortunate design choices und glaring oversights.

As eye-catching as the adventure may be: Its writing, platforming, exploration and combat aren't compelling enough to carry the Origami hero through the game.

Not for one second, the game's controls feel right, and the botched level structure does not help. Only dedicated Cobra fans need this one and they should get a physical copy. That way it looks good on the shelf, and they don’t have to actually play it.

A flashy and demanding character action game with challenging boss fights and plenty of combo freedom, but undermined by a generic story, shallow characters, and uneven polish. Fans of precise, skill-driven combat may enjoy its encounters — everyone else will likely struggle to look past its flaws.

In Whispers from the Star, you speak to an AI astronaut via microphone to ensure her survival - an exciting experiment that quickly turns to the banal - and collects a lot of your data.

Heartworm is a likeable homage to Silent Hill in particular. As a game, however, this declaration of love remains far too superficial.

Emotionally strong story told through a shallow game neglecting its own puzzle and world-building logic twice too often.

Even for just under three bucks, Frog Legs doesn't offer enough in terms of a game to play, let alone being an entertaining ride.

Convincing simulation at its core, but graphically extremely demanding game with a number of annoying technical issues as well as shortcomings in terms of gameplay design.

Well-made homage to the early days of gaming with an unfortunate use of AI art. Moreover, its physics system hampers movement while AI behavior can be erratic, making a lot of the puzzling a frustrating experience.

While there is some excitement to be had, neither the action nor the story would draw me in in a meaningful way – partly because contrary to what the title suggests, giant enemies are rarely part of the game.

You can make anything into LEGO, but you shouldn't always: a relatively grown-up open-world game doesn't make a good mini-level co-op kids' game. Mediocre combat, little iconic lore, there's not much here to get you through the worst version of Horizon.

The atmosphere of the rundown City of Kowlong and the disgusting depiction of the Slitterheads show potential despite the outdated technology, but the game fails to create genuine horror. What remains is a somewhat stiff action game with horror elements that never really scare or disturb you.

The bottom line is that I had to force myself to stick with this fundamentally likeable homage. Because as much as it is indeed reminiscent of Silent Hill and similar titles, I found it to be rather dull in terms of gameplay.

From a technical standpoint, there's a decent foundation here for an entertaining trip into a dark parallel world. The initial question of what happened between the two timelines alone keeps the suspense going for long enough. I therefore find it all the more regrettable that this horror trip is told like a bedtime story, written with remarkably little care and also offers little incentive to get involved for longer.

Although the technology and physics are basically right, ExoCross is a disappointingly dull series of very similar races and challenges.

NeoSprint is so much like its 40-year-old predecessors that it is hardly any fun today, despite the eight-player mode. The track editor is the highlight of an otherwise insubstantial game.

A clever glimpse into a dystopian future, but one that suffers from an extremely weak VR implementation in terms of technology and content.

Some of the short stories are nice to listen to and the driving itself feels good - but that's about it. The decisions made have no consequences worth mentioning, neither on a large nor small scale, the many repetitive races against depressingly lame opponents are potently sleep-inducing and even the protagonist's story is frighteningly irrelevant. Neither the damn good soundtrack nor the strong presentation can really do anything about this.

Broken Roads lives up to its name, as it is teeming with breaks in both gameplay and content. And of all things, the interesting morality system disrupts the role-playing instead of deepening it.

Lots of content and a great Star Wars feeling clash with bugs and a host of other problems. This could have been so much more.

Atmospheric scenario notwithstanding, this horror story is neither scary nor does it well told. The true horror lies in the atrocious combat against boring enemies.

The Inquisitor has a lot of interesting things going for it, but its shoddy execution makes it hard to recommend.

As wonderful as it was, our past, with great games like the first Flashback, we'd better think about the future of this medium. Flashbacks like these are the last thing we need.

Acoustically great, visually partly enchanting, but playfully terribly boring loop of the same twelve short levels.

On the outside, charming time travel with some nice ideas, but also a lot of boredom and some frustrating moments.

You'd be better off watching a TV test pattern from the Nineties for an hour.

Not quite finished light-simulation with notable performance problems. For occasional sightseeing, this one's just about okay.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum unfortunately didn't turn out to be "my precious" and only rarely manages to captivate. Dramatic bugs and performance problems abound.

Were this a free offer on a mobile device, maybe to tease a coming new The Dark Eye game, this would have right and reason to exist. As it is – for ten, respectively 20 bucks – it's just a deplorable exploitation of a well known name to sell people a shoddy product.

The intriguing premise and some cleverly written cast members just serve to showcase that Randal's Monday not only could have been salvageable, it could even have been a really good game.

These ingredients alone don't make a good game, just one that suggests the quality it could have had. It's almost tragic, really.

If you liked LocoCycle's acting achievements and value plain silliness over gameplay then Roundabout might be worth a look. But even then you better hold out until the next sale.

This has been done so much better so many times, the world just doesn't need Gaiabreaker.

Pixel Hunter is a prime example of how 'Indie' isn't automatically tantamount to good game design.

It's the sort of embarrassing piece of schlock nobody needs when there's games like Shovel Knight around.

Expressive design like this might get you into the MOMA, but in the end good looks aren't all that matters.

Yet another one of those licensed games no one really needs. It's a shame, really. I actually thought the Transformers games had gone beyond that.

In some weird way all of Lost Swords bad ideas remind you why you once loved the series.

There's some almost sublime moments in this, inviting you to think about the more tenderly alluded themes. But you don't really bother, you're just too bored. And if you're honest, you don't really care.

Enemy Front has some decent ideas, but ultimately wastes its energy on redundant stealth when it should have gone the all-out action route.

Conceptually, DreadOut is interesting, but it's hamstrung by weak execution.

It's charming, mind you, but it still boggles my mind how Yasuhiro Wada, the mind behind the brilliant Harvest Moon, managed to make this boring a game.

I can't think of too much reasons to honestly recommend Starlight Inception. That's a shame because Starlight Inception really had some interesting ideas going for it.

To be fair, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 nails the web-slinging. But everything else just reeks of a hastily cobbled together licensed game, the kind you had hoped the new consoles wouldn't have to put up with for a while.

You're way better off playing Penumbra, Amnesia or Outlast. And when you're through with those, I still could name a slew of other horror games way better than this dull hunt for objects in confusing corridors.

I never would have thought I'd say this about a video game, but Rollercoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile is just absolutely sickening.

The interesting and well-animated short films on the disc don't do enough to repair the damage the poor game has done or make this package as a whole a worthwhile investment.

It's a nice idea for sure, but Mercenary King's parts just don't come together in a satisfying way.

Yaiba fails miserably in everything it set out to do.

It is a short, trashy and utterly trivial punch line to one of the more amusing running gags of past games trade-shows. Still, in a drunken co-op session with a pal you could do a lot worse than this. In some ways this is the game the second and third installment of the movie franchise deserved. That doesn't make it better, but you can't help but think that there's some success in that.

As much as I appreciate that Irresponsible Games an Daedalic are trying to capture the zeitgeist and the social conflicts of an era, I can't help but be utterly frustrated to see all the promise just go to waste on a startlingly conventional cock-and-bull story.

Long story short: In its current state, X Rebirth is just a sad affair.

The horribly cumbersome interface and the refusal to ever properly explain its more obscure mechanics make Darkout a difficult game to recommend.

It's games like this that make me wish we gave out negative scores.

As it stands, Live 14 feels like something they cobbled together in about a year. Not for one second do you get the impression EA has harnessed the three-year time-out in any meaningful way. No wonder Kyrie Irving is making a grumpy face on the box of this.

The worst thing, though, is that Knack is sabotaging itself with its weak technical make-up. And between this being unfit as a showcase title for the new hardware and not being all that entertaining to play, you really have to ask yourself if Knack has a right to exist at all.

As I caught a glimpse of the one and only, the legendary and immortal Tom Savini in this, I cried a little, and those weren't tears of joy. That was three minutes into the intro and it was all downhill from there.

It's been a while since I really had to struggle to get to the end of a game because it was that much of a let-down. Had I not had to review Montague's Mount, it would not have lasted ten minutes on my hard drive.

Ultima Forever is not only an act of treason for this series. It's an act of treason for every single good concept the family of free-to-play games knows. It's so bad, it's saddening, unbelievably boring and empty and technically just on a level that in no way justifies it's shameful performance.

In this medium, you're better off knowing that your faves from the past are never really as good as your rose-tinted memories make you believe. Still, taking a look at this remake, you will be equally aware that they were rarely as bad as this.

Guillermo del Toro once said in an interview, he made the film for himself and his children, and it shows. The game, on the other hand, might just be the perfect instrument to penalize adolescent troublemakers.

So, is it trashy enough to gather a cult following, however tiny? Partly. The funnily deformed characters, gallons of bad pixel blood, choppy dialogue and the surreal scenes of arbitrary love-making do exude a certain broken brand of charm. But even these traces of unintentional hilariousness don't change the fact that actually playing Ride to Hell never is anything even remotely resembling fun.

Even though Sacred Citadel isn't an offensively bad game by any stretch, I find it hard to say anything positive about it. Sure, it can be pretty, isn't frustrating and works on a base level. But that's about it. Every mechanic is half-baked and heedlessly thrown in.

Evoland lives off your nostalgia, which, in turn, is the only reason for you to keep on playing it. After the first 30 minutes, where the evolutionary steps come in entertainingly swift succession, the game actually stops evolving much, settling for a mixture of mindless fighting and lowbrow puzzles, chucking in the occasional graphics update. Also, it promises to be a virtual history lesson of the genre, only to perpetually being stuck on A Link to the Past and Final Fantasy VII. Evoland early on just loses track of what it set out to do.

Lords of Football's problem is that there's a load of well-established games which fare much better in almost every aspect it tries to simulate. You want to test your mettle as a manager? Get Football Manager or EA's equivalent. You want to simulate the daily life of different characters? Get The Sims or even The Movies. Because, in the end, just throwing all of these elements into the same kettle doesn't automatically make for a good game.

Do yourselves a favor and continue to keep this as far away from your hard drive as possible. Even the most world-weary of trash and simulation enthusiasts should only give this a go if they're in desperate need to get rid of 20 bucks and the window is either broken or not in reach.

It's not the worst game I've ever played and I'm not even sure that, by year's end, it'll be under the worst three. It's just that, all in all, this is a version of this world that's ugly and desolate in all the wrong ways – and one that doesn't add an ounce of..., well, anything to the story or its characters. It is a mish-mash of commendable concepts and mechanisms that never really do anything for another, resulting in an experience as emaciated and lifeless as the cadaverous nemesis that haunts Kirkman's universe.

For a few bucks less, Ninja Theory should just have ditched this lackluster mini-campaign and instead have thrown Vergil into Dante's adventure and the Bloody Palace as a playable character. As it stands, I can only really recommend Vergil's Downfall to people who desperately want to burn a couple of hours time and /or types who revel into mastering a new character. So yeah, you should probably give this a miss, as long as Capcom doesn't make Vergil an option for the main story.

So what do we have? A Good presentation, a multiplayer concept which is definitely not for everybody, technical issues galore, tiny maps and recurring problems with the servers... There are irritations in the basic mechanics and some bugs that are just not acceptable. As much as I, a fan of the series, want Maxis to succeed in fixing all of this over the next months, I fear those are not the sort of problems that you can do away with a couple of patches. In this state, SimCity is a real letdown.

In Journey I bonded more with my playing partner than any virtual café ever could facilitate. Bientôt l'été feels like a few steps backward trying to mask its emptiness with pretty pictures and French language. It screams for attention, eager to appear stranger than the rest, just foundering in the process.

Half-cooked, bereft of ideas and technically despicable, this would-be triple-A production is an overblown movie tie-in to a flick you wouldn't want to see. Randy Pitchford once said 'if you've seen the film it's fan service, and if you haven't seen them it's content'. Content it is, but I doubt any fan will deem this a service to their liking. Quite the contrary: When it comes to video games, H.R. Giger's movie-monsters are done for until further notice.

Outside of its fights, Omerta is some sort of mind-numbing occupational therapy for the slowest of days, inside of them, it's often an incompetent carbon copy of much older and much better titles. It's not even that it's so bad that it's good. It's just boring and its plain existence is free of any relevance whatsoever.

People, it's great if you're making a trash-themed game. I'm all for it. Tanks vs. Gorilla-Mechs, you almost had this one in the bag. I don't even have anything against the gameplay itself being trashy. But Tank!Tank!Tank! is just garbage. It's a cheap little stinker of a buggy mini game that didn't even know what hit it, when it ended up on a retail disc.

You'd have to have some pretty unhealthy attachment to these loony hares to get enjoyment out of this one. Because everyone else sees this as what it is: A collection of minigames which are average at best, hamstrung and held together by an overly dry board game concept - alone a torture, with friends just boring. If over the years the Rabbids were one big party for you, this is their get-out dance.

When they announced a Call of Duty for Vita, people probably hoped for some kind of system seller. What they got instead is a catastrophic failure of a game that might well prompt people to stay away from Sony´s portable altogether.

Puzzlingly, it seems there are more than enough people whose standards for entertainment are low enough that companies can make a lot of money with products like The Simpsons: Tapped Out. The problem is, that this takes away resources for the development of 'real games'. Economically, it might be a sound strategy, but it's also one that could conceivably prompt me to quit this job some day.

It gives me no pleasure to dismantle a game that many people fondly grew up on. But in case of the ToeJam & Earl collection none of the two titles has aged particularly well.

Sadly, the pitch for this shoddy, ugly and conceptually uneven game probably amounted to "we need to get out a game quickly, if we're gonna keep the license". At least this uninspired actioner is playable from start to finish. I'd like to think James Bond deserves better than this.

Some of the old strengths are on display here, though. The characters are likeable, the world is still a sight to behold … But playing the stuff that normally gets visualized by a loading screen is hardly an exciting proposition. Fable: The Journey started out as a lie and now ends as an utter disappointment. What a waste of Lionhead's considerable talents.

If R.A.W. was some oldie hack and slash which I'd gotten from the bargain bin for three bucks to finish it in one miserable weekend's sitting, I could surely present you with some redeeming arguments. Like, it was only three bucks, the game's a decade old and so on. But it is neither.

Nonetheless, keep your chin up, Emobi Games. The first step has been made. 7554 brought Vietnam on the map of games developers. The next step is an actually good game. And you´ll get there. Someday.

Back to the drawing board to think about, where the fear really comes from and exchange some of the too numerous and crude puzzles for gameplay-value. In this form, it can´t even be recommended for the small price.You get better horror from Slender or the the first two Exmortis without having to pay for it.

Sony, again, proves itself as a publisher willing to treat itself to some unconventional and outright anti-commercial games. In this regard I would love offer the best of compliments to Datura and Plastic – too bad that I can´t think of a single one.

It´s understandable if your eyes tell you that this looks like a lot of fun. But after three stages at most your worn out thumbs will tell you otherwise. Trust them, they've had their fair share of real heroes.

The cheapest of leveldesigns, an impact detection from hell, a meaningless underwater gimmick, an online mode bordering on being defective, a demented storyline – badly told too. It´s just the recycling of some leftovers and a waste of your time.

Before I play Jane's Advanced Strike Fighters again, I'd rather have another go at HAWXs 2. And that is not something I say lightly.

It tries, but gets outclassed by games that have been released years ago. That´s no easy feat to accomplish.

I wanted NeverDead to be this sleeper-trash-hit, some kind of Deadly Premonition. A game which by most objective standards is bad but you can still love with devotion. Too bad, that NeverDead completely misses that essential second part. (...) What good are one or two nice ideas for a bossfight or some almost good surroundings, when the mechanics are a constant annoyance? Or, even worse: when most of the time the game seems dead set on doing its best to bore you right out of your skull?