Was it worth the effort? That ultimately depends on how much fun you had in performing these basic, repetitious open-world activities.

Wow, generic platform games have reached a new pinnacle of dull and cliche. [Feb 2005, p.113]

Goblet of Fire is the best console Harry Potter action game yet, but it's still a far cry from good. [Dec 2005, p.161]

Pikmin could work in 2D, but Hey Pikmin isn’t the game to make it happen. Nintendo’s low-impact blend of strategy and action flounders between relaxing and boring. I sometimes felt compelled to replay Hey Pikmin’s levels to find the treasures I’d missed the first time around, but I never found what I was hoping to: a richer strategy experience.

Once you’ve heard all the dialogue, you won’t have much reason to come back to Poker Night 2. It features Texas Hold ‘em and Omaha varieties, but the poker isn’t polished enough to stand on its own. After you’ve unlocked everything, there isn’t any reason to come back.

The most painful and obvious flaw is the camera. It hangs up on walls, drifts inside your character, and is otherwise difficult to handle. [Sept 2004, p.109]

If you already like the series, not enough has changed to stop you from enjoying it. And that's exactly the reason why new players may as well just stay away. [July 2006, p.106]

As the third and final installment in the Final Fantasy XIII saga, Lightning Returns tries to distance itself from its predecessors and get back into gamers’ good graces. This results in some bold and unconventional decisions, but they don’t save this entry from being the bottom of Final Fantasy XIII’s downward spiral.

The biggest issue I encountered was the out of control load times. [Jan 2005, p.132]

There are a lot of nice touches...Too bad the gameplay is so damn mediocre and dull. [August 2002, p.79]

Graphically, it's uglier than a backwoods beauty pageant... On the default difficulty setting, the missions offer little challenge and quickly grow boring. The plot doesn't help any either. [Nov 2003, p.166]

The only laughs come from knowing your friends are suffering the same punishment you are...They're cursing this to anyone within earshot, just like you. [Dec 2003, p.154]

Practice makes perfect, though. When you get the hang of the vine system, neat control tricks develop, but the overall gameplay remains basic and boring for far too long.

Blazing Angels is definitely a sight for sore eyes. Its visuals will leave you gazing in wonder, but at the same time, the gameplay will have you fighting back tars. [May 2006, p.94]

Probably doesn't have the depth to give it the long legs of other titles in the genre. [Dec 2006, p.130]

Poorly spaced checkpoints, dank too-similar environments, and magical teleporting allies are a few other annoying and strange traits that cause this game to fall down a few notches.

If your blood pressure can withstand the beatings that may seem unfair, there's a lot to like about Conan's combat system and adventure. [Nov 2007, p.140]

I Am Alive's desperate scenarios and inventive gameplay should not be missed by masochistic gamers interested in entering a world of unrelenting dread.

The Bureau tries to be many things, and succeeds only moderately at most of them. Even so, I’m happy this long-in-gestation project has finally seen the light of day.

I was ready to love WrestleQuest, and some enjoyment can be found for those with the patience and fandom to fireman carry them along. But the imaginative ideas die by a thousand cuts that hold Muchacho Man and his friends back from world title contention. The game has cool ideas; it just needs more refinement and a serious reexamination of certain systems before it’s ready for the big time

A mixed bag from beginning to end. [Dec 2005, p.161]

The most interesting addition is the ability to create your own AI in Arena mode. [July 2003, p.107]

What starts out as a promising romp through a demented Wonderland devolves into a few good ideas stretched across redundant gameplay.

While it's not the next evolution of competitive FPS by any stretch of the imagination, a clean frontend with good party support and matchmaking at least lets those players who can forgive its faults an easy way to play the game the way it was meant to be.

Multiplayer is amusing in that hanging out with your friends is fun anyway, but the single-player content is truly terrible. A series of boring one-off challenges punctuated by simplistic exploration and the occasional full game makes up Mario’s quest to foil Bowser Jr. via baseball. Yes, it’s as insipid as it sounds.

Without spoiling the ending, I enjoyed how the team reminisced on some of the major plotlines of the series. I had fun remembering the team's adventures over the last 11 months, but I wish the story had spent a little more time on the events in this episode. Despite some awesome action scenes, the events of the episode feel rushed and the overall conclusion ends abruptly, leaving me unsatisfied with how everything plays out.

Even though you are the coach in this game, you're still little more than a bystander. [Aug 2006, p.84]

All the monsters look like cold-blooded killers that just crawled out of hell. [Aug 2004, p.75]