I was once again left disappointed, unfulfilled, and betrayed.

This game is so weak and poorly constructed that I can't imagine playing it online with real people would make it any better.

To make an embarrassing story short, Splinter Cell: Essentials is a mess. For a series that leads the stealth genre and has worked hard to make itself more accessible and more polished with each successive sequel, an entry like this—even on a portable— can only be seen as a miserable failure.

In a market where fresh faces are constantly churning out promising new content, seeing a game as sloppy, unpolished and archaic as ReCore being produced by such experienced minds is downright heartbreaking. The game shows promise in its early hours, but after seeing the whole thing, I can’t recommend ReCore in good conscience.

If viewed as an RPG with a tiny world and far too much text, I would imagine players walking away from Fate/Extra feeling unsatisfied or bored. However, when taken as what it really is-a visual novel with a superb level of gameplay-then it can only be appreciated as the fine effort that it is.

Compile Heart’s ambition in trying to leave its comfort zone should be lauded, but unfortunately, Dark Rose Valkyrie‘s release in a period full of landmark JRPGs (not least among them Persona 5 and Final Fantasy XV) highlights how tough it is to make a JRPG that can stick the landing. In leaner years it would be endearing enough for a player to push past its awkward aspects, but against such stiff competition, there’s simply no reason to settle for this botched execution.

While the game suffers from minor technical flaws and repetitive gameplay, it does something legitimately new with its TV show concept.

There’s certainly an able amount of fanservice in Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity, but it simply wasn’t built to be much more than a knowing nod to a friendly audience, rather than a genuine ambassador for one of Japan’s most beloved gaming brands.

Elex is the best game Piranha Bytes has ever made. They’ve taken all the lessons learned on plotting, worldbuilding and character development from their work on Risen and Gothic and applied it something far more ambitious. The result is a truly great action-RPG, full of interesting characters, memorable quests, and amazing environments. While Elex‘s story comes to a satisfying conclusion and all the questions Jax starts with are definitively answered, it ends with the suggestion that there’s a much bigger story on the way, and I can’t wait for it to arrive.

It's not broken, and at times it threatens to be interesting to more than the already-converted, but it's utterly lacking in the heart and spark that helped other Compile Heart titles lineup transcend their inauspicious beginnings.

Hawken may not make the grade as a mech title, but when stacked up next to other free-to-play FPSs, it doesn’t have anything to be ashamed of. The combat is faster and less impactful than I would have liked, but it’s still solid, and I spent more time with it than any other online FPS since the first Titanfall. While there’s not much chance I’ll eventually unlock everything in the game, Hawken has me thinking about going back and spending more time with an F2P FPS, which has never happened before.

Dying due to confusing design rarely makes for good times, and this soured me on Stereo Aereo pretty damned hard. It’s unfortunate because I genuinely dig the overall aesthetic, and I definitely enjoyed the soundtrack. Even the relatively meager storyline has its high points. However, when the difficulty kicks into high gear, it all bubbles down into an overly busy, confusing and imprecise mess that I can’t wrap my head around.

Pixel Heroes has playful writing and art, but there isn’t enough here to warrant sticking around for more than a few hours of retro-themed dalliance.

Manages to be engaging thanks to its rich storyline, and the typically luxurious cutscenes provided by Square Enix. I found it challenging enough for my level of twitch skills (or lack thereof) in the genre.

The developers have managed to create[] a beautiful world to explore, but whether some players will find the journey's tale worth experiencing is a different question altogether.

Sinner does what it sets out to do and looks fine enough while doing it, but it just doesn’t feel like its own product, and given how unique the premise is, that should speak volumes on how forgettable Sinner’s core battles actually are. I love the concept, but I hope someone eventually does something more interesting with it.

One-on-one battles were a great way in the past to offer quick diversions in the middle of a longer AC campaign, but they are not enough to sustain a game all by themselves. Toss in the fact that the game's graphics are still as bare-bones as they were five years ago, and that there's virtually no new content with much of the material being recycled from previous games, and you've got something that would be a $20 add-on at best.

For players who'd be interested in a truly dark fantasy world and don't mind pushing through roughness to enjoy top-quality writing, worldbuilding and characterization, Of Orcs And Men is an overlooked gem waiting to be discovered.

Just inexcusably bad. How can a sequel suffer from the exact same problems as the first title?

The very definition of a missed opportunity. Thirsty mecha fans are still stuck in that same desert, and they’ll have to wait for something to quench their desires a while longer.

The concept of a game that joins dancing and karaoke sounds intriguing on paper, and if Boogie had managed to capitalize on its strange mix of gameplay ideas it might have been pretty enjoyable in practice.

I love the idea of a turn-based gothic adventure like Black Legend, but concept alone can’t carry it, and there’s little excitement to be had with these dull characters and this tedious, overcomplicated combat. I appreciate the attempt, but I’m going to abandon this city to its fate.

Spyhunter 2 isn't intolerably bad; it's merely average and uninspired.

A decidedly mediocre game. There's nothing really new here, and nothing that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

Carried along by high adventure, interesting sidequests, and a cast of characters I was glad to spend time with, Rise of the Argonauts was an entertaining ride that I would recommend to people interested in the subject matter, or to players who crave an action-RPG that's a little on the lighter side.

As someone who likes the show and the concept, it checks most of the boxes I’d want from a licensed title – if the combat was solid, I’d have been totally content with One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows as fanservice for a series I enjoyed. Instead, the part that players will be spending the most time on is also the worst part of the experience, and no amount of callbacks or cameos can carry it.

I wish I could say that there was some charming, redeeming feature that made my time with Pocky & Rocky with Becky worthwhile, but there isn't. The box art sure was cute, though.

I left Whispering Willows with the nagging feeling that it could have been elevated if the devs had added just a few more levels, a few more powers, and a few more story twists to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. In the end, I was... haunted... by the wasted opportunities.

It's always a great feeling to go into a game with no expectations and then come away highly impressed, and that's exactly what happened with Onechanbara Z2: Chaos. It's an irreverent, enjoyably kinetic game, and the takeway is that quartets of highly skilled warrior women murdering the absolute hell out of zombies in bloodthirsty fashion is, above all else, completely and totally rad.

The Way of Life tries to present a large number of situations where choices matter, but most of them fail to deliver any meaning at all.

Overall I think it’s fine for a puzzler. However, I resonated with In My Shadow on an emotional level and walked away feeling like I got something out of it despite my frustrations with the gameplay.

Unfortunately, despite the ranged combat perking the experience up, Dolmen‘s general design feels like it is too indebted to soulslikes and ultimately suffers for it. The melee is not consistent, enemy AI is weak, the exploration is not deep, and the level design is just passable. What Dolmen does well is sci-fi flavored third-person shooting with a good level of challenge that isn’t a cakewalk. I hope the developers get the chance to take a look at what worked in Dolmen and try again… as it stands, it’s too tempting to make comparisons to games like Dark Souls, and those comparisons aren’t favorable.

Anyone looking for a better example of TenNapel's creative spark should seek out a copy of The Neverhood—it hasn't aged perfectly, but it's far more entertaining than this failed follow-up.

Breach isn't terrible, but I don't see anything here that hasn't already be done better by another game, resulting in an instant recipe for mediocrity.

Fightback is as straightforward as its name, and equally dull.

The production values are pretty abysmal, and it's far too unforgiving for anyone new to the genre, but Neverland Card Battles occupies a unique space as far as digital card games go.

As is, it's a shallow, irredeemable miscalculation not worth anything close to the $20 asking price.

While taking on legions of shambling undead with Morgan's fists was a genuine high point, it's not enough to make up for the fourth-class experience that Riptide is. I forgave many of the original Dead Island's problems since it had such a fresh, exciting vision, but Riptide lacks the same heart. Don't get me wrong, though—the developers don't need to reinvent the wheel every time (and more of a good thing is usually a good thing) but there's no excusing the slapdash production values and shortage of good ideas on display here.

Although I like the idea of what Protonovus is going for, it plays its cards too soon and runs out of steam far too quickly. There simply isn't enough variety to sustain its extended run time, so fatigue and boredom set right in. It's a good try, but these rotating rings of death are in need of a more challenging, more interesting campaign.

Its puzzles and story aren’t really bad, they’re just bland. There are occasional mentions of philosophical and moral debates regarding the game’s artificial afterlife, and a deeper, more thought-provoking analysis would have made for a more engaging experience. Instead, these headier subjects were kept on the back burner in favor of a less-thrilling, more pedestrian adventure, and the game suffered for it.

Only a masochist would have the patience and stamina to finish it. I was on one of the game's final missions when, after what was at least my twenty-fifth re-start, I impulsively hit the OFF switch on my television. I'd had enough. I opened a beer, then sat in the darkness, enjoying the sudden silence and the fact that this game, which had been vexing me for days, was once and for all out of my life.

With so many great cooperative experiences already out there, it’s impossible to recommend Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance — it shows little promise from the start, and somehow only gets worse as time goes on. This is one quest that even the bravest warriors would be wise to avoid.

While I’m sure there is some novelty to be found in buying a new NES title in the 21st century, as a downloadable game on the Xbox, this leaves much to be desired. On the plus side, it does answer one long-standing hypothetical — it turns out that without the ability to swap powers, Mega Man would have been a pretty bad game.

With adorable characters having wacky adventures in space, Mugen Souls Z's charm and the solid writing kept me motivated to zip through the storyline, and the fights are still a thrill... It's just too bad that the deadly-dull non-combat sections and the ending-ruining bug keep me from recommending the game wholeheartedly.

Maybe this DX is redefining film grammar for videogames. Because in this case, director's cut means the same damn thing, complete with glitches and issues of the first game.

Plunder-by-panic and slippery experience points are intriguing, but these innovations fall flat without solid, bug-free foundations to support them.

Knock-Knock could have been amazing; with a slightly different outcome on that early night, and if the mystery gets its hooks in before the mechanics start souring the experience, it could have been a tense nail-biter. As it happened, I got fed up with Knock-Knock long before its secrets surfaced, and I was happier to break the game than to continue playing along.

There was something enticing there, and the exploration and the mood made it stand out beyond anything I’ve experienced recently. It’s glitchy, bewildering, addictive, and strives for greatness. I strongly recommend it, even though I’m sure it will infuriate almost as many as it enraptures.

Just Die Already is like seeing a meme flood social media. The first few variations of it are funny. Then, as time passes and the same joke keeps popping up over and over, it just gets annoying. Like its characters, the content in Just Die Already starts old and it only goes down hill from there.

Lovecraft’s Untold Stories was a low-key delight. Yes, the gameplay was sometimes stiff, but the sheer depth and the developers’ obvious passion for strange fiction showed through, creating a memorable experience. LUS2 has none of its predecessor’s style. With its lack of compelling narrative and overcomplicated crafting system, Lovecraft’s Untold Stories 2 is as unfortunate a sequel as I’ve seen, dropping almost everything that worked about the original and expanding on what didn’t. It’s a disappointment, and I can only hope that if this franchise continues, the developers manage to rediscover what made the first one special.

While my attention span is getting short and Rave Master: Special Attack Force! never really amazed me, I had fun playing it. I liked the button-mashing.. I liked experimenting with new moves.

It's an intriguing and ultimately fatally flawed entry in an already clogged genre, and a warning to other companies who would use games as a commercial vehicle: please be sure you can make a decent game, or it's worse than no advertising at all.

After having gone through as much of the content as I could without teammates, my take on Raiders of the Broken Planet is that it’s a great B-tier action title shoehorned into an episodic games-as-service model that absolutely does not fit. If it was a standard single-player or couch co-op effort, episodic or not, I’d have no problem recommending it to folks who don’t mind rough edges wrapped in style and character. However, I’ve got serious reservations that this project could have ever worked, and these concerns seem founded since no one’s playing. Broken Planet is a great property with a lot of potential, but it’s in desperate need of a structure that makes more sense.

While I’m sure Warplanes works fine on phones and tablets, it needed a lot more work to get console-ready. There’s too much repetition, too little progress, and no narrative to give players a reason to keep plugging away. In fact, so little work was put in that the mission generation would occasionally toss out complete nonsense like asking the British to blow up an oil refinery in rural England. The developers couldn’t get something as basic as this right, and that same lack of effort is indicative of the entire experience.

Theseus provides a stunning, atmospheric world to ogle in virtual reality that ends too soon, all the while mired by clunky controls and instant deaths along the way. Although based on Greek myth, Theseus proves to be far from mythic.

While it manages to offer decent characters and an interesting battle system, MeiQ: Labyrinth Of Death is a disappointment overall. With so many strong entries in the dungeon-crawl genre already, one that only goes half the distance is impossible to recommend.

My advice to Team Soho would be brief: raze the series to the ground and start anew. This engine is long past its better days.

The characters are there—now someone just needs to figure out how to create some gameplay that makes the experience fun and not a chore.

With hundreds of weapons to collect and different ways to play, RemiLore’s charm makes it enjoyable in short bursts. That said, it definitely has major flaws and requires a great deal of patience — especially in the early going — to get the most out of the experience.

It's a stale, ugly revisiting of a genre that should be put deep in the ground, with no story or aesthetic styling to redeem it, a hollow exploration of ground that's already been trodden flat.

Neverwinter Nights deserves better than this tragically compromised port for the Nintendo Switch. With no supplemental content to help explain the tabletop fundamentals or to describe the immense impact it had when it originally released, players are left with precious few reasons to struggle through a creaky real-time combat engine hampered by countless technical hitches and clunky controls. Even though its tale of plague-ridden devastation is especially haunting with the coronavirus lingering at the forefront of our collective discourse, everything else about this game fares poorly in modern times.

So Medal of Honor: Vanguard is just a waste of time and money. A tedious plodding waste suitable only for those absolutely desperate for another first-person shooter to play on their Wii.

By Perception’s conclusion, I’d witnessed several generations of families who’d lived in this mysterious estate, how they meshed together and found Cassie’s link to them. Some were more interesting than others, but Perception ends up dragging on for too long with too little intrigue to carry it through. Had it been half as long and experimented more with the applications of Cassie’s blindness, Perception could’ve been a fascinating experience. What I actually got was the chance to stumble around in the dark for six hours, which is about as enjoyable as it sounds.

Half of Adr1ft is a fantastic experience. The spacewalking segments are like nothing I’ve ever encountered in a game before—freeing yet claustrophobic, beautiful and terrifying. If it was judged solely by how well it captures the mystery of and fascination with the great emptiness beyond the earth, it would be a success. This isn’t just a floating sim, though, and once simply being in zero-G gets old, there isn’t a compelling reason to get through the rest.

With another year in dev and refinement of story, gameplay, and technical aspects, Toren might blossom into something special. As it stands, it's a work-in-progress sent to market too soon.

The monsters are creepy, the combat is great, and the setting is endlessly explorable – Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics has plenty going for it, and yet it still feels underdeveloped. The RPG elements are thin, and the story is little more than a skeletal justification for the next skirmish. There’s plenty of stellar design here, but it feels like a preview of a more robust experience. It’s a fantastic use of the Cthulhu Mythos and a solid game, but I’m guessing the franchise will have more to offer next time.

With a few decent plot twists and likeable characters, Gal*Gun 2 is a satisfying relationship comedy with a solid rail shooter at its core. With multiple endings and dozens of girls to meet there’s a robust amount of content, never falling for the trap of offering just a handful of missions with no reason to come back after a couple of hours. As games about supernatural romance go, it will be difficult to find one cuter or sweeter than this one.

It’s a bold, funny, scary, unbelievably intense way of getting closure for the previous game. As such, it’s a masterpiece that’s difficult to recommend because it can only be fully appreciated by those who are already deeply invested in Zach’s story. Still, I have to recommend it because it provides a more powerful ending to the Deadly Premonition story than I ever would have expected, and a better experience than we probably deserve.

The closest thing to a complaint I can muster up for Spelunker HD is that it has a sparse online community, but that's almost like criticizing a masterful painting because it hasn't been seen by enough people.

While it’s far from the most attractive FPS I’ve played this year, Verdun gets its setting and tone incredibly right. There’s a moment in every match where I found myself peering out from behind cover, looking down my rifle, desperate to catch sign of any movement in a field of debris — a moment where the game completely justifies its setting and mechanics. Verdun is rough at times and only half of its modes are any good, but those special moments it offers are rare enough to deserve attention.

Yes, the Switch has a solid touchscreen, but it handles controls so much better with a joystick and buttons. Not even providing the option to use the joycons in handheld is an unfortunate omission. Just a few stages shy of the end of Solar Flux, I gave up directly due to the lack of controller support in handheld mode. As somebody who primarily plays the Switch undocked, it’s too big a problem to look past.

After my time with Rise of the Slime, I was left feeling a bit confused. It’s too simple and the graphics don’t seem like they will appeal to fans of the genre, yet it’s too punishing and difficult for casual players or those unfamiliar with the deckbuilders. I’m not sure of who it’s trying to target, but my guess is that it’s a bit off the mark regardless.

The gameplay lacks any redeeming qualities, and would have been behind the curve in the 16-bit era. Today, there's just no place for a game like this at all.

It gets halfway there with an elaborate backstory and interesting premise, but it gets too stuck in standard FPS design conventions to ever really distinguish itself as anything special.

Unfortunately, this version of Mafia II feels like a barely-touched-up version of a last-gen game that constantly tested my patience and despite my love for the script, I can’t recommend that anyone play through hours and hours of a mediocre, buggy mess just to see the cutscenes. In its current state, Mafia II: Definitive Edition is not worth a player’s time or money — without any further improvements or substantial patches, this one needs to sleep with the fishes.

There are a lot of good things going on in Winter Ember. Its ambiance is strong, the freedom to move through levels in multiple ways keeps progression interesting, and the stealth mechanics are solid. However, these positives are consistently overshadowed by performance issues, clarity issues, or weak combat. I enjoyed sneaking around with Arthur, but unfortunately, Winter Ember still has a way to go before it can be considered an easy recommendation to stealth fans.

An almost completely successful swordfighting simulation. It does a better job with its setting than any game I've seen, and even though it's a little limited in scope, it's satisfying and effective at what it tries to accomplish.

Syndrome might offer a beautiful ship to look at, but it’s a buggy mess that fails to get the essentials right. This lovely ship can’t make up for an ugly everything else.

The fundamentals of Touken Ranbu Warriors are fine. Great controls, a good variety of playable characters, and the bite-sized missions are a nice change of pace. Also, after Samurai Warrriors 5 it’s refreshing to see a game that doesn’t treat Nobunaga Oda like a misunderstood saint. The story doesn’t impress, though, and despite how intriguingly bonkers the premise is, the experience never manages to rise above being a perfectly serviceable musou.

Since it’s a multiplayer-only title with exactly one mode, Hunting Grounds was clearly banking on the strength of its premise. Failing that, there’s just not much to it, and players will have seen everything there is to see after just a few matches. Maybe we should take this as a signal to stop trying to make Predator games a thing — if this didn’t work, I’m doubtful that anything will.

It's too bad that by over-complicating everything, Touch the Dead gets this simple formula so very wrong.

With its relatively small menu of uninspired puzzles and cast of irritants, One Against All fails in its attempt to capture the Layton magic.

I would have rated Don’t Knock Twice a little higher if the weird dwarf bug hadn’t forced me to switch to a television, but even setting that flaw aside, there’s not much special here. As a haunted house simulator it delivers a few high-quality scares, but never really challenges the player with its mysteries or makes them feel involved in the story. It’s creepy enough for anyone looking to be unnerved as Halloween season creeps closer, but that’s all it has to offer.

In its current state, it’s about 15 minutes’ worth of gameplay stretched out into a bland, lifeless four hours, and it faux-finishes with a blank stare when the content runs out. I hate to see something so promising get rushed out the door when it is so clearly not ready for prime time, but it is what it is. And it’s a shame.

I certainly didn’t have a bad time with Tasomachi — the environments are gorgeous, and exploring the towns is entertaining for short stints, but there are many other platformers that are simply more successful in their mechanics, storytelling, and polish. This might be a viable choice for younger players or those desiring low-stakes play, but for everyone else, there are better options.

It may not look fantastic and certain mechanics shouldn't have been resurrected along with the rest of the game, but Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded succeeds at being a brief bit of naughty fun—and since it never aimed any higher, that definitely counts as a win.

Dynasty Warriors 9 is a complete mess. The open-world elements like crafting, hunting and finding landmarks don’t fit with the story, and the technological sacrifices made to include them ensure that the mass battle sequences are nearly non-functional.

While Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 may be the ultimate modern sniping experience, it also offers a clear sign that sniping games may soon go the way of flight simulators, in that it’s only possible to make engaging ones set before technology makes the human factor obsolete. One unlockable in the arsenal are ‘DARPA bullets’, which are prototype in-flight auto-correcting projectiles — and yes, they’re real. Simply point a laser at a target and the bullet strikes it dead-on, every time. The player isn’t forced to use these bullets, of course, but as technology barrels forward, the concept of a man in a ghillie suit crawling through brush with a rifle strapped to his back is going to feel anachronistic, and will likely survive only as nostalgic looks back at the history of violence.

Crimson Dragon is clumsy, frustrating and often downright hideous. I realize that the Xbox One's launch lineup was pretty underwhelming, but even those new owners desperate for software to play on it should keep Crimson Dragon low on their lists.

With top-tier writing and characterization, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory does its series proud.

Topatoi Episode 1 delays its payoff for too long, and in the end exists mostly as a suggestion of a game that might be good to play when (and if) it makes its way to the PSN store. Add the fact that the characters of Topatoi lack any of the charm or personality of your typical platformer cast—their in game models look a little revolting even—and it's a hard game to recommend.

Perhaps, someday, the WH40K universe will offer experiences as compelling as its fantasy brethren. Until that time, players looking to scratch the WH40K itch would do better by dusting off a last-generation console or firing up Steam and buying Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. It’s a pretty charming third-person action game that, while a little long in the tooth now, satisfies the urge to mow down bad guys by the thousands in a much less frustrating format.

Just a decent sci-fi story mixed with some rather unambitious gameplay. Nothing is done gratingly poorly, but neither is anything done with any sense of innovation or panache.

Bright Memory looks fantastic and the action is strong, but there’s just not enough actual game here to recommend it. As interested I am in seeing a full-length version, I can’t say this taste is worth the price when all it has to offer is six rooms and a couple of hallways’ worth of content.

At fifty dollars, and with significant locked away on the disc from the people who paid for it, it's the biggest rip-off since Crackdown, and shouldn't be purchased by anyone for any reason.

Myst III has so much going for it, in that clearly much effort was put into the plot, the acting, and the richly detailed pre-rendered graphics. But the whole experience never gels into an enjoyable game, and the world of Myst, while scenic, feels too static to be captivating.

Galaxy Warfighter was good for about an hour of play, but to just got too repetitive after that. I kept going through mission after mission hoping for a new boss or an enemy that would keep things fresh, but that hope faded as I kept flying the same missions for what felt like endless waves.

What we can learn from Into A Dream is that ideas alone are not enough to carry a game to greatness. I can truly feel the passion put into the narrative and I do acknowledge that the story, in isolation, hits its mark. Sadly, everything about how the game is built fails to meet the same standard and severely undercuts the power of the script.