Rising Sun begins in Pearl Harbor with a bang, but drags on to finish with a whimper.

TC is an OK fighting game with a snappy plotline, and some unfortunately crappy driving segments thrown in for good measure. It would have been much better if they had been able to get the camera under control.

If you’re offended or annoyed by Carl Douglas’ Kung Fu Fighting song, stay away. For others with a more open mind, this is worth a look, even if it’s a rental.

Bethesda says Operation Anchorage takes 3-4 hours to complete. I’d put that number at more like 2-3, but for only $10 it represents moderate gaming bang for your buck. I’m hoping future DLC will be much better.

I'd argue that Shoot Many Robots would've done better as a straightforward, linear shooter with regular acquisition of new weapons, rather than having you buy everything, but it's a relatively minor complaint. The rest of the game's fast, funny, and incredibly well-designed.

Something went terribly, horribly wrong here. UFO: Aftermath isn’t a good tactical strategy game, and it’s not even a good action game by mistake. It’s a game you should avoid, even if you liked the X-COM series.

A damned scary game, and it's one of the better survival horror titles out there because of that. It's good to see its designers taking risks and experimenting with the formula. This time, however, it's kind of a misfire. It's by no means a failure, but it's not a success, either.

Despite the varied modes, the gameplay is the same and the lack of sophisticated AI play means you'll be entertained for one or two rounds until the races become too long (and too easy) to bear.

While MediEvil has a couple of rough edges, the core game is more fun than ever before thanks to an extensive reworking of the original mechanics.

Never Die Alone needed a lot more playtesting by actual humans before it should've been released. There's a lot here to like, but there's also a lot here that seems like any reasonable person would've said something a lot sooner than this.

Overall, Gravel is Milestone’s finest game to date. It combines a surprisingly high amount of racing types together and does an exceptional job with all of them. The handling is far better than most of their prior work, and the level of on-screen excitement is at its highest point yet as well. There are some rough edges when it comes to the overall presentation, and the FMV-laden story mode of sorts is somewhat of a groaner, but it doesn’t take away from how fun the core racing action is. It uses rumble better than most games on the market today as well – at least for Xbox One controller users, and is a solid pickup for anyone craving some off-road racing.

Being one of the first strategy titles based on Tolkien's locus classicus, War of the Ring should introduce a good many movie fans to the strategy genre -- and most likely, no greater percentage of Ring fans exists than amongst the gaming demographic -- but veteran real-time strategy players might want to look elsewhere if depth is what they're seeking.

If nothing else, Automatron succeeded in dragging me away from the world of XCOM2 and back into the world of Fallout 4, which in itself is no small feat.

In the time spent playing this, I really wanted to enjoy NIER as an intricate game but it suffers largely from an identity crisis

Technical merits aside, there are a couple of hiccups that complicate the game. The first, and perhaps greatest issue, is why the hell are the deaths censored as much as they are in this game?

The degradation of graphics and gameplay diminishes how great this game truly is.

It’s creepy and it’s involving, but it has some annoying technical problems (the game must have locked up on me over a dozen times while I was playing it), the engine isn’t very sophisticated, and the puzzles are hit and miss.

I didn’t enjoy The Council particularly much. It has some good stuff to it — the premise is great, and it’s fun sparring with (sometimes fictional) historical characters — but for me there were too many design issues, there was too much potion hunting, and the twist at the midway point just ruined everything.

All in all, if you’re one of the lucky ones that avoided the first version due to low scores or bad word-of-mouth, then this one might just do it for you.

Ultimately the brevity of PaRappa the Rapper is what makes it such a tough game to recommend.

There are no unique units, no improved visuals and all of the sound effects remain the same. Warlords of the Wasteland also lacks a map editor and multiplayer options. The replay value plummets for fans of Heroes of Might and Magic and even newcomers to the series.

A brainteaser with some action thrown in, Prisoner of Azkaban is similar to games like "The Lost Vikings." Only this time it's 3D and the level of difficulty is a few notches lower to cater to a general audience.

One of those hit-and-miss games. It gives you some things to think about and the tactical missions work well enough, but those missions are too similar, and they just go on and on and on, well past the point of tedium.

I commend the developers for trying something new with the first-person viewpoint and for giving Wii owners a decent firefighting game. Unfortunately, it's not an exceptional one, and while this is a well-made game in a lot of ways, it is hurt by its very sterile look, poor graphics, and control issues.

NASCAR 14 improves on past iterations mostly by creating an on-track racing experience that feels much more authentic and engaging that any NASCAR game to date.

It’s a great-looking and sounding game, but one that definitely needs some fine-tuning with the loading and quality of life issues that hamper the experience. Still, the good far outweighs the bad, and Marvel’s Avengers ends up being one of the best superhero experiences ever put in a video game.

If you’re a fan of the franchise, and if you really want to play Heroes VII, then I’d recommend waiting for another month or two, until some more patches have come out and maybe the price has dropped down. If you don’t know anything about the franchise, then Heroes VII definitely isn’t the right version for you to use as your introduction. For you I’d recommend trying out just about any other version of the game, since most of them can be purchased for very little money these days.

My early assertion that Skyshine’s Bedlam is a lot like The Banner Saga with a sci-fi setting is pretty close. The story in Bedlam is far thinner, but they’ve tweaked the combat and added some resources to balance and I think they’ve ended up with a better game.