Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a hearty appetizer for Hundred Heroes. I think Natsume Atari accomplished its mission of giving players a taste of what the world of Hundred Heroes has to offer, and I’ve gotten less enjoyment out of much more expensive games. You can’t ask for much more for a budget title that was created as a stretch goal for a Kickstarter project. However, some players just aren’t going to find enough meat here to pique their interest. The gameplay does get repetitive, and none of the various systems has much depth. If you aren’t interested in Hundred Heroes and don’t find yourself invested in New Neveah and its inhabitants, you might want to skip this one. [Provisional Score = 80]

“Disjunction” sounds like a made-up word, but it is used to describe something that has a “lack of correspondence or consistency,” according to the dictionary. And that is an apt description of this game that wears this word as its name. It attempts to blend two diametrically opposed gameplay systems — a novel concept — but does so sloppily, resulting in a disjointed, discordant, and disappointing experience that substitutes repetition for depth. Hotline Miami and Metal Gear deserve to be fused together to form some sort of upgraded cyborg, but the two have just been haphazardly fused into a mass of bloody flesh and rusty metal that’s better off left in either a biohazardous waste bag or the scrap heap.

Beyond Light is the first note in a dirge for Destiny 2, and major steps need to be taken by Bungie to fix the issues caused by sunsetting and content vaulting. But regardless of what Bungie’s next steps are at this point, it’s difficult to feel excitement for any future expansions given the direction Destiny 2 is headed in.

If the game is patched extensively, there are hints of an interesting enough story to make it worth a playthrough. However, at launch, the amount of game-breaking bugs present makes Broken Porcelain practically unplayable. It’s only because I had the duty to review it that I got as far in as I did, and I doubt the typical gamer will have the patience to get past the first hour.

Sadly, we instead have a game that is largely built around wasting the player’s time, with half-baked RPG mechanics doing little to enhance the experience, ultimately hindering the better parts and drawing attention to the lost potential.

Speaking Simulator is a fun idea that remained best on paper. It’s another “simulation” game that takes a joke and wears it thin, leaving not much room for enjoyment past the initial chuckle.

Above all, Heat feels like subscription filler, another driving game to add value to EA’s Access bundles.

Linear takes on roguelikes often feature lots of variety and plenty of unique hooks. The world of Sparklite feels drab in comparison. It feels like you’ve been here a hundred times before in a hundred other games.

It’s difficult to fault a game for dreaming big as it still enjoyable to hunt for secrets under Stonehenge. However, that might be because these types of forward-thinking gameplay ideas are almost always alluring. We need to see games with a sense of humanity in its characters and games that can teach the socially awkward in the same way that action games teach reflexes. Perhaps that’s too much to put on a small scale first-person experience. And perhaps it is not, but given how The Bradwell Conspiracy executed its ideas, it might actually be too much to ask for in this case.

An unfortunately hollow universe is troublesome but ultimately a low-priority concern in the grand scheme of The Surge 2’s more pressing matters. Its multiple failings are almost bewildering because of how closely it copies much of its identity from its spiritual predecessors. But those similarities to much better games just point out how little imagination The Surge 2 has and how inadequately it has attempted to implement those popular mechanics.

For every spark of a neuron, there’s a cluster of dead cells threatening to snuff it out. The entire enterprise feels like a bundle of great ideas that mix together into something that’s less than the sum of its parts.

This is one gigantic miss and perhaps one of the worst games of the year.

Senran Kagura: Peach Ball is briefly enjoyable, but is bogged down by a lack of things to do aside from skipping through tedious dialogue. Senran fans may find themselves content with the ways you can, ahem, interact with its cast, but for the rest of us this is a passably decent pinball game and little else.

Unlike Nintendogs, Little Friends isn’t a meditative game in which you joyfully play with and e-cuddle a bunch of adorbs animals. Instead, it’s a laborious slog in which strengthening your bond with your virtual pets takes too long, and the end results aren’t worth the time invested.

This was a poor attempt at reviving the franchise, and Front Mission deserves better.

Not even the basic shooting of Moss Destruction can hang, even in the best case scenario. And when the core is a bit rotten, that’s not a good sign.

The little issues stack up so high that it’s hard to really recommend playing this over any other game in the genre. Especially on Switch, where the portable mode is beyond broken. If you were hoping to have a fun time on the go with some Nazi tactics, I just have one phrase for you: Next time Charlie. Next time.

The fighting is repetitive and dull, the infrastructure is more annoying than entertaining, and it’s a gigantic disappointment from start to finish. Not only do the franchises represented deserve better than this, but it’s an awful way to celebrate the manga giant’s 50th anniversary.

It’s odd that Capcom has done so little to the hibernating series and let this beloved game wither away under the harsh sands of time.

Double Cross is an up and down ride, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s another dimension out there.

It’s envious of better games like Dark Souls and Devil May Cry, lustful of the relevance those titles have, sloth-like in its combat, and too proud to delay itself in order to fix its glut of technical shortcomings. A better game is hidden somewhere within its depths, beneath its glaring issues that beg for more development time. But as it stands, it’s a hobbled, confused mess of a game that’s a victim of a lot of the sins it proclaims to be against.

Unfortunately, a recipe is only as good as its ingredients. Narcosis’ voice acting and writing might hold water but the outdated visuals, laughable horror, and poor gameplay weigh the game down and cause it to sink faster than a corpse with cinder block shoes.

Rather than spend time with this frustrating game, do yourself a favor and just import Gundam Breaker 3.

Dragon Ball FighterZ is an accomplished fighting game with a clear appreciation for its source material, providing frenetic action between larger-than-life characters ripped straight from the anime/manga series. Though its combo system may be simple on the surface, with many of its moves being universal across its characters, there's a great deal of complexity when it comes to successfully breaking out of a combo string, with timing being the key to victory.

This game has found a way to take traditional FPS game modes and deliver them in a way that doesn't feel derivative. For example, Turf War is essentially a capture mode, but points are immediately awarded upon capture rather than your team being given these values over time. This promotes mobility and progression.

The Caligula Effect is full of promising ideas that are bogged down by poor execution and lackluster presentation. The game tries too hard to do too many things all at once, resulting in obvious compromise.

The good part about being overwhelmed in Planescape: Torment is the sheer amount of quests you can take on without making too much physical progress. You can walk for what would normally take five minutes and stop 10 times along the way and pick up 12 quests. I had picked up 10 quests before I even completed two. It's great that a game like this doesn't feel linear, like its holding your hand.

I truly pity anyone who actually spent money to get this.

Klang’s good ideas are upstaged by their own poor execution. Neither the rhythm or the platforming are good enough to stand on their own, with the sum of their parts still failing to add up to a complete experience. I wanted to like Klang, but this hybrid is less of a chimera and more of an abomination. At least the music was good.

Obduction feels like a game that belongs in the 1990s with a modern-day coat of paint. If you haven't played an adventure game since then, you might be pleasantly surprised, but I'd have rather spent my time replaying Firewatch, Oxenfree, or any number of other quality adventure titles instead of this buggy mess.

Perhaps Necropolis’s worst sin is that it doesn’t motivate you to keep going. Sloppy mechanics can often be forgiven if the game has something compelling going for it; just ask Deadly Premonition. Here, however, players have no incentive to continue. The unfunny humor exists solely to mock the player. Every twist and turn, you’re greeted with another joke that undermines your quest and the importance of it. Your quest never feels purposeful or epic. Instead, it just feels like an insignificant afterthought.

If Mobile Suit Gundam Extreme Vs-Force intends to be the resurgence of the franchise here in the West, it could not start on a more wrong foot. This game is not a primer; it is only for the Gundam devout.

Even diehard Resident Evil fans should save their money, as I can't think of a single reason anyone should buy this.

Mighty No. 9 tries to hold onto its legacy, resting on its laurels while the rest of gaming world has left town a long time ago.

The developers of OmniBus decided to put humor over fun and created a game that might do well for a couple of Twitch streamers or YouTubers, as I can imagine it might be fun to watch. But it sure isn't fun to play.

It’s as if someone played Mark of the Ninja and thought “we can make a worse version of this.” Just take away the depth of combat, the freedom of choice, and any semblance of longevity, and voila. That’ll be $15.

It is as if someone sat down and made a list of 'what is popular with the kids these days in games' and tried to shoehorn pieces of them into this game...Aside from the graphics, everything here stinks, which makes sense because a lot of the game takes place in the sewers, and also because this game is crap.

Sometimes my job is to play bad games so you don't have to. Homefront: The Revolution is one of those games.

Unless you're an aquatic dinosaur fanatic who has a thing for submarines and listening to facts about dinosaurs, you're probably not going to enjoy this. Your time would be better spent at a local museum; at least they have the cool dinosaurs there and not just the underwater ones. [Tested both Vive and Rift]

Shadow of the Beast is as dull as it is brown, which is to say extremely. The platforming is clunky, the AI is bad, the story requires multiple playthroughs, the game defies its own logic, and it reeks of other laughably awful design decisions. Don't bother with this beast.

With high-quality puzzle games like The Talos Principle available, I don't understand why anybody would pay to play Attractio. Its numerous flaws and bad design decisions aren't something that can be patched at a later date.

Hardcore amiibo addicts and Animal Crossing die-hards may even pass up on this, but if you've got a wide range of gamers who want a family-style night, then you may get some enjoyment out of it.

As a fighting game fan, I’m disappointed by the simplicity and small-mindedness that seems to have gone into Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butoden. As a fan of the animé series for so many years, and having played many, many versions of this story over my years as a professional reviewer, this attempt at a cash-in just hurts my feelings.

All in all, Just Dance 2016 is the same Just Dance that millions of party people in varying levels of enthusiasm and sobriety have enjoyed for seven iterations now (not counting the multitude of spin-offs). Nothing's really changed there. What has changed, though, is how badly Ubisoft wants to get in your phone, your living room, and your wallet.

Its moments of thrilling gameplay and competition-rich multiplayer are sideswiped by bad performance, the poor implementation of Slam, and frequent glitches. The series might have once had potential to be revived, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 makes sure that all signs of life have been squeezed out of it.

Devil’s Third fails to be even an adequate game on almost every count, from its performance, to its gameplay, to its story and characterization.

I like games that are fun to play, not that remind me that I could be playing something else so, so much better.

I honestly feel that this game could’ve been actually re-made, brought into modern times, and been successful. As it is, though, it’s just further fodder for the anti-remake resistance.

The worst part about my experience with Godzilla is the fact that it didn't provide laughs or enjoyment because of its poor quality. Instead, I just sat there bored for much of the time as I endlessly destroyed cities and fought other monsters in terribly unbalanced fights. On top of all that, the game costs $60 despite its lack of meaningful content

If ever a game was made to put (mostly) buxom girls in bikinis and have them fight, this is the culmination of that.

It offers a challenge and requires careful planning, but it's missing mechanical depth.

It’s not difficult to see why people would seek a more relaxing game after having their senses barraged with endless gun-toting violence, but this game doesn’t offer the video game equivalent of a week spent dozing in a hammock on an Aruban beach; it’s an exhaustingly dull weekend in the Scandinavian countryside with only chickens and low-poly civilians for company.

It’s completely cynical and not engaging in the least. I’m trying honestly to follow a story that doesn’t want to be told, and I’m playing a game with accessible game mechanics of little value in the end.

When the best part of your game is leaving the title screen up to repeatedly watch the anime’s intro sequence and hear that operatic battle cry of an anthem, you’ve done bad. What a disappointment. But honestly, with the reputation licensed games have, I can't say I'm surprised.

Normally, having side-by-side muliplayer is a welcome addition, but I doubt if anyone could find three other people who want to play Yorbie for more than two minutes. Hell, even I didn't want to play it after two minutes. I can only shake my head and ask, “What were they thinking?”

Rampaging through the French countryside is entertaining enough for a quick rental. Otherwise, it doesn't have much else going for it and squanders its fantastical setup with a lackluster plot, limited online options, restricted strategic choices, and neutered dragons.

Shelter 2 isn't all bad, though, as the unusual watercolor-style visuals help to create a uniquely attractive view of nature.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy Plus will definitely appeal to aviation aficionados who happen to game as well, but not to many other gamers. Either way, the “Plus” feels like a misnomer—the title doesn't offer enough new or entertaining features to justify a full-price purchase point for a four-year-old marginally average game.

Perhaps some day, Ready at Dawn could develop a sequel that's gorgeous and fun, and lives up to the promises of The Order: 1886, fingers crossed. But today is not that day.

The awful bugs, lack of polish, boring story, and repetitive gameplay are gross enough. I suggest watching The Omen. There are less bugs, and it’s significantly shorter.

To say that its immature and painfully unfunny sense of humor would be appreciated by 13-years-olds is doing a disservice to the intelligence of 13-year-olds, as Zombeer makes Duke Nukem Forever look like Withnail & I.

Few levels provide much of a challenge, so breezing through the entirety of the game in a short period of time is more than likely, though for sub-15-buck price, it’s not much of a lost and can be worth it if you’re looking for a quick downloadable fix. But surely this blended concoction has sorely missed the bull's-eye of arcade perfection.

I wish I could feel like Boss! meant something other than a cheap throwaway downloadable, but sometimes video games we love become the story all on their own. I couldn’t find that in Boss! though you may have an excuse to download a handful of PSN games this holiday season.

After a few months, the price is bound to drop well below current asking price and make its way to the $10 and lower bin.

If you're being generous and don't care about the missing creation features, then WWE 2K15 is about as strong as WWE 2K14, except that it asks for premium price. In fact, that this current-gen WWE 2K15 could have been better as DLC for WWE 2K14.

In short, this game is entirely underwhelming. The storyline tries to be interesting, but just appears a muddled mess of stereotypes; the characters themselves look alright, but set pieces are empty and boring and littered with invisible walls pointing in only a few directions for exploration; and the battle system isn’t much for “battling” at all, even against the “tough” boss characters.

There just isn’t anything of note really in Fairy Fencer F. It looks outdated, feels “meh” at best and “Seriously, really?” at worst.

The game was meant to put players into a spooky kind of mindset, but everything about it is just frightfully boring.

Add new ships, new weapons, new maps, new enemies and a few more colors, and this thing goes from less than ho-hum to slightly above average. As it stands now, Pulstar is not a game I can easily recommend.

Mugen Souls Z relies heavily on underboob, sideboob, and boob windows to get the job done, but this is not the full extent of the overt sexism, fetishism, or hypersexualization.

Betrayer is a game that suckered me in with its alluring visuals, but once it had me within its grasp it outright refused to let me enjoy myself. This is a game that is far below the standard of quality one would expect from the creators of F.E.A.R., and further proof, if we ever needed it, that presentation shouldn’t take precedence over gameplay.

Windforge has set sail without an adequate pilot, but I’m sad to say that this promising game has crashed and burned.

Its concept had the potential to inspire a few laughs, but South East Games has drained it of all humor and left us with the video game equivalent of a knock-knock joke: tired, unfunny, and not worth anyone’s time.

It would have been fine to integrate the storytelling in the play—of which there is absolutely none—and had a “meh” battle system, because that would bring this up a few notches. But instead, it’s little more than an interactive manga with some battles tossed into some of the most boring environments this side of Dragonball Evolution.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII will be lauded in the short term for its fun battle system, but remembered in the long term for its bad story and atrocious ending.

Unfortunately, while its developer can roll out a patch to improve its performance, it can’t roll out a patch that will increase its player-count. With that being said it is impossible to recommend Rekoil, a game which is swiftly heading towards stagnation before it ever had a chance to prove itself.

Recovery: Search and Rescue has absolutely no redeeming qualities.

Let's hope that updates can better Ice Mechanica's UI and design and that developer Blindspot Creative can do better next time. At least a socially conscious game would have had more of a message, but Ice Mechanica kind of undermines the label "time-waster" by taking the player's attention for granted.

If I can leave you with one thing before you leave this page, it’s that you should not play this game. Don’t spend money on it. It’s meant to be bundled with these consoles for suckers so eager to play with the latest in-home ripoff technology that they’ll spend more money to get games they don’t want with it.

Knack may be built on the blocks of charm and difficulty, but by the fourth level, those blocks topple over into a pile of excess tedium.

Sega obviously tried to emulate aspects of Super Mario Galaxy or other 3D Mario games to make this leap in the Sonic series, but Sonic: Lost World suffers with each “feature” they have added to the Sonic’s successful formula: running and jumping.

If you love him as I once did, you’ll agree that it’s time to take Sonic out back and put him out of everyone’s misery.

Urban Trial Freestyle steals the core gameplay of the Trials series but fails to do anything interesting with it. It’s a brief and utterly forgettable experience, one which only those who are willing to overlook its tedious gameplay in order to see their name in lights on its leaderboards will enjoy.

This concept behind Storm does have potential, but until it feels more controlled and less like an irritating crapshoot, I'm going to have to pass. The presentation is all well and good, but only when there's a game that's wrapped in that little blanket am I interested. Storm looks like a comfy blanket… until them damn wildfires start up and slowly spread across my controller.

The bottom line is that I play games to have fun. While I found the handling and tracks fun, I have no desire to play a game whose difficulty curve turns it into a second job because it demands near-perfection from the outset. Chances are, if this game is for you, you've already bought it.

Trust me when I say you'll have more fun testing a phaser set to stun on yourself.

Defiance is full of good ideas and a bevy of solid MMORPG systems, but it's all buried under a messy-looking, shoddily designed shooter that you'd never enjoy on its own merits.

Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel is an underwhelming third-person shooter that is a clearly a half-hearted cash-grab by Electronic Arts. If you're looking for a game in this genre, I suggest you turn to Gears of War or any number other titles of this ilk. Seriously, this game isn't worth your time. It isn't broken, it just isn't good either.

I have a hard time recommending Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds to anyone. If you're obsessed with 2D brawlers and love Japanese animé, I strongly recommend you give the demo a try before shelling out any cash. The redundant and dated gameplay, coupled with weak production values, make this a forgettable experience that won't keep you entertained for very long.

Quality assurance is a beautiful thing, people. It keeps sprites on the screen, weapons able to be picked up when available always, and everything working as they should. I don't know if all was alright in Windows, but playing on a Mac… well, don't bother.

I love the gooey center of every cyborg PMC out there, but Revengeance fights the player every step of the way. What's more, reducing the difficulty ultimately boils down the combat to a button masher, leaving the experience hollow and draining all the same. Fans and masochists alike might find a lot to love, but even I can't stand the crunchy outside of a bug for the sweet gooey insides.

When I started Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable, I was looking forward to a charming, if uninspired, shooter for on-the-go action. What I found was just the uninspired part. Fans of the series will certainly find a lot to love, but the uninitiated should steer clear. As playable games go, Sandlot and D3 have packed plenty of gameplay in, but the charm quickly fades and all your left with is more invading ants.

Family Party is terrible. Not only is it bad, it's borderline unplayable.

Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified doesn't just lack a story-it lacks an attempt at a story. It doesn't just lack good multiplayer stages; it lacks stages. It doesn't just have a few occasional bugs; it has entirely too many gltiches, disconnections, and crashes-though I must admit, seeing a chopper spawn inside a house is good for a few laughs.

I assume that double-Os 1 through 6 died horribly painful deaths and that Eurocom is trying to give me some sense of that misery in 007 Legends. While a tie-in to this November's new Bond movie was too good to resist, I'm disappointed that the franchise has to follow up a moderately successful remake like Reloaded with a shoddy patchwork of first-person shooter set pieces and broken stealth gameplay.

DBZ Kinect is a novelty wrapped in repetition. A small child in your household might have a lot of fun, if he or she can properly use the Kinect. While many of Namco's Dragon Ball games feature ever expanding rosters, knock-down, drag-out fights, and really pretty, animé-inspired graphics, DBZ Kinect is a totally passable affair, even for (lapsed or otherwise) diehard fans.

Fable: The Journey is just a jumbled bunch of nonsense. I believe the intentions for making this game were good as far as the Kinect technology, but the poor controls coupled with the weak storyline really hurt this title.

It's the grinding that honestly made this game more of a chore for me than an enjoyment. If you need that old-school fix, there are better ways to do it on both PSN and XBLA, and you can just download and listen to the songs through your iPod or something if you really need the flashback. I just can't recommend it beyond the die-hard Double Dragon folks… if any of you are still out there.