The controls and interaction with the game world are suspect at best and downright awful at worst. And even looking past that I still come away disappointed. The script is weak, the characters' interactions/motivations are often left unexplained, and the voice acting is mediocre in some places and bad in others. The only thing Heavy Rain really has going for it is the composition of some of the individual scenes, and that's not nearly enough to carry the whole game on its own. So in the end we don't have much of anything except the spectre of what might have been.

For all its advertising about a virtual world governed by cause and effect, Fable is really just a terribly unambitious hack and slash game in a bad marriage with a personality simulator. The hack and slash works fairly well-everything else, not so much.

Even if Bungie backtracks on some of these horrendous missteps, there’s evidence that the dev team is either flailing around without a clear idea of the experience they want to present, or even worse, they’re happy to offer the least amount of mediocre content possible until the player base starts pushing back. When free-to-play titles like Warframe and Let it Die seem monumentally more generous and offer vastly more entertainment value than a triple-A sixty dollar release built with a budget large enough to feed whole continents, it’s clear that something has gone horribly wrong.

A bit of a disaster...Why? It's a half-assed, crudely cobbled-together product prone to crashing, lockups (and as of press time) absolutely non-functional multiplayer.

If Treasure's name wasn't attached to this product, I seriously doubt that it would have ever found a publisher, let alone the warm reception most other review sites have given it.

If the words "the death of Aeris" don't bring a tear to your eye, then dropping $40 on Crisis Core certainly will.

I’ve seen articles mentioning that Gorogoa was created by a single man over a number of years, and it’s clearly a monumental labor of love. I want to respect that and I appreciate the amount of work that must’ve gone into this title… I honestly can’t even imagine. That said, as someone coming to this project knowing nothing about it beforehand, I found the Swiss-watch mechanics and detailed illustrations to be impressive, but the experience fell short in all other aspects. I’d love to view an edited Let’s Play of all the sequences being solved in order, but I have a tough time recommending it as something to play.

I wish All Possible Futures luck in their future ventures, but here, in today’s hyper-crowded indie scene, there are dozens and dozens of games that deserve to be plucked up ahead of this Squire.

I was ready to forgive a couple of rough episodes as long as things got rolling by the midpoint, but with only two installments left, it seems unlikely that The Walking Dead, Season Two will be able to muster anything that season one didn't already do better.

It pains me greatly to say it, but this one is a whiff for a studio with a previously-perfect record. For those who need something to play on the Vita, I would strongly encourage them to pick up either of the Mutant Blob titles, and Guacamelee is an absolute must-have. Those are genuinely great works, and despite my disappointment here, I still call myself a Drinkbox fan... I'll just forget that Severed exists while I look forward to what they do next.

In every way save the graphics, I found Muramasa: The Demon Blade to be a failure.

Until now, I’ve liked each new Ninja Theory game more than the last, and I can never deny the craft on display. Given that this is their first release since the Microsoft acquisition, I credit Hellblade II for not feeling compromised by corporate interests, but that only makes it more baffling that it lacks any real vision that I was able to discern. It’s not an offensively bad experience, and yet I can only offer one of the most damning criticisms imaginable – I have no idea why it was made.

It leaves out the most crucial element: a compelling story. The story is predictable and unimaginative and little is done to move the story forward any faster than at a snail's pace.

If the first game was a chillingly-black horror to be feared, Bloodshot's a pretender in a goofy rubber mask, making funny noises and stumbling over its own feet.

From Dust is an interesting, original and creative project... unfortunately, it never capitalizes on its promise thanks to too many technical problems and a feeling of unpolished awkwardness. More frustrating and tedious than uplifting and deific, I'd love to see a revamped installment with the kinks ironed out. As it stands, I was all too ready to leave the islands behind and head back to the mainland at the first opportunity.

As a dungeon crawler, Strange Journey is abominable. As an SMT, it's unforgivable.

Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel lacks vibrancy, the animations lack imagination, and the characters are a bunch of bores. Not having played any other games in the series, I can’t say whether this series is suffering from sequelitis exhaustion, but this installment just lacks so much. It’s an excruciating play that I cannot recommend.

While it’s nearly impossible to hate a Pokémon game, Let’s Go Eevee doesn’t rank with the greats. Rather than forging a new path in the current generation, this quasi-remake relies too heavily on the weak gameplay of the mobile hit and lacks both the strategy and motivation to succeed. Eevee is cute and innocent, but this particular entry has not reached its fully-evolved form.

For the most part the simplified controls work like a charm, allowing the player to zip around the map, easily locating their prey. It's the maps themselves that are the problem-they're far too small for the number of players that regularly compete on them.

While there are a few sequences that thrill the way a proper Hitman should, like stalking a dark cornfield or combing Chinatown without being dressed as a chef, these brief glimpses of 47's predatory roots are outnumbered three-to-one by kludgey segments more about duckwalking towards exits than they are about killing professionally. I would imagine that the goal of Hitman: Absolution was to take Agent 47's detailed, methodical gameplay and make it appeal to players more familiar with modern action/stealth hybrids, but all the devs have done is eviscerate their unique franchise with poorly-implemented mechanics and left him to die an awkward, humiliating death.

Hardcore Trials fans have probably already bought and completed this game, but for others who may be curious and haven't jumped in yet, I'd recommend either of the others before this one.

Defying all expectations, BioWare managed to take one of the most memorable Western RPGs in recent history and completely destroyed everything that made it so good.

While I enjoy the idea of dedicated co-op and I’m excited to see someone exploring the space, it doesn’t feel like A Way Out trusted itself or its players to do so – the gameplay is simple to the point of being bland, the script is too predictable, and its efforts to evoke emotion feel cheap. It might be fine to play with a friend over a weekend, but it will be forgotten soon after, and it’s a shame.

Ashen now holds the dubious honor of being the first game I couldn’t bring myself to finish before posting a review. Well done, Ashen — you broke me. It’s just a shame you didn’t do it in a more interesting or cleverly-designed manner.

Dead Rising was never a great game — it’s perverse and didactic in equal measure, and an exciting concept delivered with almost no artistry or craft. Why not put in a little extra effort to fix it, rather that just running it on superior hardware? The sequels offer a clear roadmap for the experience that Dead Rising could have been, but apparently Capcom had no interest in following it. It’s too bad, because even as a budget title, this reissue is just too rough to recommend.

I think Demi looks like a cool character and I like the idea of using a rocketpack to dash through platforms in a kinetic flow state, but Super Cloudbuilt is too frustrating and haphazard as an experience. I’m sure the people who made it (and a handful of YouTubers) are really, really good at it, but thanks to a lack of polish and elements that never fit together well, I couldn’t understand what it was trying to be. I’m not sure Coilworks knows either.

For players who click with these characters, Oxenfree offers between four and six hours of walking around and listening to them hash out issues in their lives. I congratulate the developers on the quality and production of the dialogue, but as a whole, Oxenfree is a weightless slip of a game that left no lasting impressions.

This undersea tour is quite short. I got through it in about two hours or so and was surprised by the brevity, but it’s probably better that way. No matter how beautiful it is to swim with whales or to descend into an undersea crevasse, there is precious little to do in Abzu, and it’s never particularly touching or thought-provoking. If it told a better tale or if there were more to it than swimming and occasionally pushing a button, it might have been a knockout. As it stands, the appeal of looking at pretty fish wears off in a hurry, and there’s not much else to recommend it.

This underwhelming finale to the rebooted Doom saga would be limp enough when judged on its own merits, but the fact that the developers went back and screwed around with what made The Ancient Gods, Part One work so well is criminal. This expansion is more Doom Eternal, which should be a good thing, but turns out to be the weakest and most disappointing that Doom Eternal has ever been.

The beauty of its locations can't be denied, but it seems to be at odds with the game's core. The backstory didn't grab me, and the avatar's journey lacks internal logic or a narrative thrust of its own. Rapture coasts a long way on the strength of its visuals and score, but in a minimalistic game, production values can't mask the weak storytelling and thematic inconsistency.

I desperately wanted more Dying Light after choosing it as one of the year's best in 2015, but now that I've gotten it, I'm bitterly disappointed that the new content fails to build on its strengths. By shifting focus away from what it does best, The Following is a mediocre, frustrating, open-world experience that's nowhere as good as what inspired it.

Fans of the Giana Sisters likely Kickstarted this game, thus earning a copy of it in the process. However, for those who don't already own a copy, there's no way that I can recommend it without it weighing on my conscience. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is simply not worth the time.

Too much effort was spent trying to force loveable, quirky characters down my throat with all the believability of The DaVinci Code's plotline.

Although there are some interesting ideas here and the Vita could benefit from a title like Soul Sacrifice, everything rides on how good the core game is, and to me, it just doesn't hold up.

In its current state, Destiny feels unfinished and unfocused, but I imagine that things will be looking quite different in a year's time.

Honestly, I’m glad The Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1&2 Remastered exists. I know longtime fans will rejoice at playing on newer hardware and the story is still to be relished. I am truly hopeful that this reappearance will entice a new generation of fans and perhaps inspire the creation of a true finale for the series overall. As for me, I’ll be content with my memories of playing these games new, as I find them too frustrating on multiple levels to genuinely embrace them today.

If every element of Metro Awakening were on par with the reloading, it’d be one of the best VR games of the year. Instead, I struggle to imagine who this experience is for. I’m a longtime fan, and after spending time with it, all I have is a list of complaints about how the previous Metro style has been sanded down to nothing. I can only imagine new players being lost on its lore while finding gameplay that comes off like a blander version of every other shooter on the market. It’s not even a technical or graphical showcase. Instead, it feels like a product. The Metro series is an incredible, harrowing journey with moving ruminations on the human condition. Metro Awakening is… not.

There were interesting ideas-and a very pretty opening video-but everything about Solatorobo felt…flat.

I don’t envy any roguelike unfortunate enough to release immediately after Hades — that game made every run feel distinct and provided a persistent narrative justification for the repetition inherent to the genre. I obviously can’t expect smaller developers to match that effort, but what Hades does well underlines the fact that so many roguelikes let stellar ideas go to waste, lost amid endless monotony. Noita is a spectacular technical showcase in desperate need of a more fully-formed game.

Singularity is the very definition of average, and the lack of subtitles knocks it just below. It is the gaming equivalent of white rice, the Ford Focus, and black coffee. Its taste is decidedly bland, but it'll do its job.

While I greatly enjoyed Control and The Foundation was solid, it feels like Remedy didn’t have any gas left in the tank for AWE. It’s visually boring, it’s irritating to play, and the connections to Alan Wake are laughably thin — the entirety of it could have been summed up in 90-second cinematic trailer. If this content had been available when I was going through Control the first time, I probably wouldn’t have objected. But now, a year later? It’s far too little, far too late.

Unfortunately, the game comes off as disappointingly beholden to classic computer RPG style despite being a modern creation, and the world feels dry and dull. I can’t imagine many players who aren’t already familiar with the license finding much enjoyment here. But worst of all? This particular version is a terrible port that’s nearly unplayable in some areas, and serves as a good example that not every game belongs on the Switch.

I played Crimson Shroud for a total of 6.5 hours before I got frustrated and gave up because five hours of that playtime was spent fighting the same group of enemies over and over for the random drop which never appeared. Holding back rare weapons or magic items is one thing, but it's incredibly disrespectful of a player's time and a waste of a consumer's money to make forward progress reliant on pure luck.

But what baffles me most about Manhunt is that I'm not exactly sure how I'm supposed to feel about those executions. What do the game's producers want me to feel? Should I feel...vindicated? Exhilarated? Vengeful? Empowered? I'll tell you how I did feel: I felt evil, and queasy, and numb. Eventually, a strange kind of self-loathing set in, followed by a low-level depression.

While M2’s emulation work is spectacular as always, the Darius Cozmic Collection suffers from a failure of imagination. It envisions the history of this eclectic, evocative franchise as a commodity to be fastidiously repackaged and sold as’ content’ rather than taking the opportunity to explore and appreciate one of the strangest sagas in gaming. It’s a frustratingly narrow view that leaves the Darius story untold, and Taito has ensured that these collections will blend in with countless others on a shelf, struggling to be found in the crowded marketplace.

The remaster's packed-in expansions add little, and the "upgrade" is a failure.

But Clear Sky takes everything that I loved about Chernobyl—the mature storyline, the nerve-wracking underground laboratories and the rewarding combat—and muddies them with a litany of bugs and bad design to the point that it overwhelms its more redeeming qualities.

As I ran around this forest performing repetitive fetch quests for much longer than I wanted to, I felt an awful lot like the fox I was possessing – a tool in a conflict I have no stake in, when all I wanted to do was look at the pretty scenery.

Unfortunately, F.E.A.R. 3 is a prime example of a game that can't decide what it wants to be. In trying to be an intense horror campaign and an intricate co-op/multiplayer experience at the same time, it winds up being neither and pleasing no one. I see some good ideas in the story and multiplayer modes, but a distinct lack of focus brings it all down.

Far and away, Legacy of Kain: Defiance's most heinous offense is the way it shamelessly doles out its own sloppy seconds, thirds, and fourths in place of actually creating tasks and challenges that would be interesting or engaging.

A dating simulation combined with more traditional combat is certainly an interesting concept, but with Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love's inconsistent tone, exhausting battle system and poor story, it's trying to be too many things at once.

What little the game does add to the saga is forgotten by everyone at the end. Disney fans will be most disappointed of all: Disney's characters barely put in an appearance, and Disney's worlds are just window-dressing for a killzone.

This could have been a great original title, but instead it's a waste of shelf space with just one redeeming feature: it only takes around five hours to beat.

I just can't imagine a filmmaker putting me in a situation where, once the movie stopped, I was forced to go onto a website to find out how it ended. I also can't imagine how anyone at Microids couldn't see just what a fatal misstep this lack of an ending was.

While Evoland 2's trip through video game memory lane made me feel like a kid again, the high points are outnumbered by the times I muttered "Ugh, one of these." Nostalgia can be great at times, but but most of this stuff is better left in the past.

Titan Souls strikes me as a time-wasting boss-rush that constantly tried my patience and delivered no enjoyable or profound climax—it just peters out and credits roll.

My time with Starlink: Battle for Atlas was surprising, but that doesn’t mean that it was positive. It’s got lot of potential that goes unrealized since the story and quests are a wash and the toys-to-life aspect is DOA, but the ship mechanics are dead-on and it’s not hard to imagine how some retooling and editing could result in the best Star Fox game ever made. This Battle has been lost, but I believe that Ubisoft can ultimately win this war.

Expeditions: Viking could have been wonderful. I love its strategic combat layered atop a real world setting that hints at the fantastical without ever crossing the line. It has intriguing moral choices that aren’t afraid to shy away from making the player pick between equally terrible outcomes, and it flirts with making the player both warrior and politician. I could have overlooked the timer and the lack of information, but what I couldn’t overlook is that in its current state, the game is outright unplayable.

I knew Melody of Memory was a rhythm spin-off before I started it, so I kept my expectations fairly low, but it didn’t even clear that bar. The music isn’t awful and the visuals are beautiful, but it gives players almost nothing substantial in the main story. In light of this, I can only recommend it to those who really love rhythm games or the music from Kingdom Hearts.

Humor and unusual storytelling can't save it from stiff controls and an awkward camera.

For a game that could have been that potential leap forward, it's a real shame that all Apex manages to do is present a mediocre-to-poor driving experience in a painfully threadbare setting.

Ultimate Spider-Man is nothing more than a bargain-bin effort that would be over and forgotten in an hour or two except for the pointless required side missions artificially extending playtime.

One could argue that my boredom was an intended result of Flat Eye‘s ludonarrative theming, but I just don’t buy it and that diegetic UI just wasn’t enough — I’ll be taking my business elsewhere.

Mafia II is every bit as soulless and dull as its bland sociopathic protagonist

At times, Forgive Me Father feels like a great idea that lost its way during development. There’s no denying that it offers a robust package of first-person shooting gameplay, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s so much more it could offer. With more emphasis on the narrative and the addition of more interesting mechanics beside shooting and strafing, this could be a much more robust experience. For now, it’s recommended only to hardcore FPS throwback fanatics. [Early Access Provisional Score = 65]

I didn’t care for Dead in Vinland. The setup’s decent, and early on I thought I’d enjoy my time spent starving, dehydrated and constantly getting attacked by murderous brigands on a desolate island. Alas, it takes an experience that could have been an acceptable eight-hour journey and stretches it out to over fifty (or more!) and becomes an absolute chore by the time players finally wrap it up.

This could have been a great original title, but instead it's a waste of shelf space with just one redeeming feature: it only takes around five hours to beat.

Hardcore item-management fetishists might find some joy here, there’s simply not enough balance or content for Phantom Crash to stand on its own, much less measure up to the competition (I’m looking at you, "Armored Core 3").

Simply put, the releases in this compilation are not worth the extravagant and loving package Digital Eclipse surrounded them in. In this collection, there’s just one bonafide classic (Crystalis), one game people might remember fondly (Ikari Warriors), and a bunch of basically unknown stuff that ranges from being brief, dated distractions to downright horrific work. While celebrating SNK is a fine idea, the ratio of good-to-bad here make this particular compilation extremely difficult to recommend.

Without marrying any substantial content or meaningful context to the visuals, this is the type of depth-free cheap titillation that we need to move past if we're ever to break away from the stereotypical gutter that society at large perceives current videogames to be in.

After Burner may be spiritually true to Sega's seminal 1987 hit, but game design has progressed by leaps and bounds since then. Cleaving so closely to its dusty, outdated forefather hurt more than it helped, I'd say.

It’s unfortunate that I find myself having to put the boot in this hard to what’s obviously a passion project from an indie developer, but my emotional state playing Fretless oscillated between boredom, irritation and occasionally finding it all mildly pleasant. Perhaps it will hit differently for someone who’s into the music scene or deckbuilders, but as a JRPG fan who’s partial to a good rhythm action game, it hit a bit of a bum note for me.

Dull, mediocre games… well these games are like a painter's palette filled with nine shades of gray. There isn't much to work with, so the end result is as lifeless and flat as a Midwest landscape study in wintertime.

In a way, the shallow nature of play, the points system and the short run time make me think Monster Prom XXL would be better suited as a hyper-casual board game brought out on a Friday night, but in its current incarnation, this finned, furry student falls far short of a passing grade.

While I still respect the concept and gameplay at the core, this superfluous follow-up stretches the definition of what a sequel is, and the majority of what it changes isn’t great. More than anything else, Nidhogg 2 is like someone drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa with a sharpie – it was perfect the first time, and ‘touching it up’ has only marred that beauty. I’ll be sticking with the original.

It's sad. It boggles the mind to think that this much time was spent on presentation and backstory when none of it resonates in the slightest.

While girlfriend-friendly and action-ready, Crimson Alliance needs some beefing up to be a memorable experience. Booting up the similar Torchlight for just a few minutes is enough to show that while simple is good, elegant is better.

Cognition fails not from a lack of execution, but from a lack of imagination.

BioWare has often shown more willingness than most triple-A developers to respond to community criticisms and they’re already pushing patches to rectify Andromeda’s many issues, so I’m not pronouncing the Mass Effect series dead just yet. But speaking as someone who owns multiple pieces of N7 apparel and has read the Mass Effect books – the freaking books – I hate Andromeda. Maybe this is karmic balance for all of the recent big-name releases that have actually lived up to my expectations, but it’s been a long time since a game left me feeling as deflated as this one.

While the story may be uninspiring and some mechanics don’t quite stick the landing, I found myself returning to Shadows Awakening mostly for the amusing stories of the puppets. Even so, the characters alone can’t carry the game — maybe fans of this IP will be happy to jump in and will find the mediocre gameplay enough, but for those like me, it’s hard to recommend this title as a starting point to the Heretic Kingdoms world.

In between the unsatisfying battles and the go-nowhere story, there's a lot of searching for the right area or person that will trigger the next cutscene, and a lot of wandering back and forth for the sake of extending the game's playtime.

With the modern ability to patch games, there’s a good chance this review might be rendered completely irrelevant within a few months — that’s one of the perils of writing something in an age where so many experiences are dramatically different months after release. My hope is that someday the Spacer’s Choice Edition will be a great version of The Outer Worlds, but that day ain’t today.

Comic books are excessively violent. Mortal Kombat is excessively violent. Yet somehow the combination of the two has been watered-down to the point of irrelevance, all in the hopes of increasing the number of people who would play it.

Unfortunately, Resonance of Fate gets almost everything wrong and even screws up what it got right.

Rain tries to emulate the form of others, while totally failing to capture the same substance. The result? A forgettable also-ran that feels more like the product of a committee than someone trying to bring their vision to life.

While Suda-51’s trademark style and weirdness is still present, this is perhaps his worst-playing game to date, and this leaves me a bit worried about Grasshopper Manufacture being in NetEase’s hands. Those who enjoy Suda’s work will still manage to find bits of his output that they like here, but it’s a real slog to get to the good stuff, and I suspect that anyone who’s not already a fan of his catalog will find this experience to be genuinely awful.

I'd much rather play as a horny male chauvinist in an engrossing game than as a strong woman in a bad one. Playing the part of a warrior queen should be fun, but my enthusiasm was gone by the time I beat the game's final boss. "I never have to play this again," I thought. "Thank God(dess)."

As it stands, They Are Billions on PS4 is a title whose strong RTS fundamentals and brilliant premise are undercut by the complete failure to respect someone’s time or offer any reason to keep coming back once the novelty of the first few hours has worn off.

I was really hoping that Tiger 08 would satisfy my desire to have a polished and refined golfing experience that uses the Wii remote. With its frustrating and inconsistent gameplay, however, Tiger 08 is (much as I hate to say it) way under par.

It’s a shame that such lovely art is paired with monotonous environments, a rudimentary story, and subpar combat and crafting elements. My advice? Smoke something else.

Zanki Zero: Last Beginning is a bit of a disaster. It looks nice on its surface, but the initially-promising setup soon devolves into complete drudgery thanks to inferior dungeon crawling, poor combat and a cast I had no empathy for whatsoever. My interest in the overall mystery got snuffed out long before it was solved.

In closing, as said before, it's nice for a game to be simple and get right to it, but only the very few combo-obsessed high-score junkies will follow The Splatters all the way to the end.

Co-op certainly helps make a dull game slightly less dull, but the nicest thing I can say about God’s Trigger is that it’s serviceable, and given how crowded the market is, being competent simply isn’t good enough.

If the game were less suffocating, then perhaps I would give it a chance. You'll just get too frustrated with this game waiting (read: reloading) at your next chance to drive through a frustrating trial.

While the new formula of Shadow Warrior 3 offers a few minor positives, they’re far overshadowed by the numerous absences — fewer weapons, simplified combat, a more linear world, a too-brief campaign, and more. It’s a strange and unexpected step backwards for a series that I had previously enjoyed so much. The dialogue might still be filled with Lo Wang’s jokes, but compared to its predecessors, the joke is definitely on Shadow Warrior 3 this time.

I was ready to love Days Gone, and in some ways, I still do. It didn’t love me back, though. If SIE Bend had cut the length by a third, cleaned up the technical problems and had more variety in level design, it could have been one of my favorite games of all time. It’s tragic in hindsight, because I can feel the love and passion flowing through it. Unfortunately, the shared appreciation of our homeland pales in comparison to the astoundingly long list of problems on display here. It’s heartbreaking, but only homesick Oregonians like myself need apply.

With flat, repetitive environments and uninspiring combat, Breakdown doesn't have much to recommend it.

I would have never guessed that The Fall, Part 2: Unbound would land this flatly after adoring the original, but the plot doesn’t click, the premise is too idiosyncratic, and the puzzles are too unintuitive – I’m still a fan of ARID, but this entire thing needs to be boiled down and streamlined into a more elegant, sensible package. And, it has to be said… after getting a wonderfully complete story in The Fall and seeing the reaching stumble that Unbound is, I’m not convinced that there was ever enough here for a trilogy.