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.