With a lack of both polish and ambition, Dark will never be anything but an also-ran. As a budget title it's a passable entry-level stealth game, but there's not enough here to justify recommending it when there are so many superior games in the genre. When a game's best selling points are that the stealth is predictable and that the player is a vampire, something has gone terribly wrong.

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.

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.

After a while, the small things kept adding up and made this potentially great game less and less enjoyable. There will be players who can overlook the issues and complete Inked, but I’m not one of them.

I completed Entwined in about 90 minutes, and I was bored with it halfway through.

At the very least, I appreciated the creativity on display – the final level really hammered home the fact that the devs had a vision for the story of Crime o’ Clock that directly incorporated the unique format they chose to use, rather than offering a haphazard story applied to the gameplay after the fact. The whole thing feels a bit messy, but there’s a unique vision within it that might be brought to light with a bit of careful pruning… but I suppose we’ll never know.

The story is too short to say more about it, except that its climax hinges on an absurd coincidence and it ends in an act of obvious stupidity. Scarlet’s real purpose, however, is not to tell a story of its own but to introduce the story of another, larger game. In this sense, I suppose Lust from Beyond: Scarlet succeeds. The erotic-grotesque aesthetic it tries to employ (especially combined with the first-person perspective) repulsed me, while the horror components and mechanics seem workaday at best. All this tells me the main event is probably not for me, but if you’ve read this far, then perhaps it’s for you.

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.

It’s cute, and it’s strange, and it’s certainly got a solid ruleset, but there’s just not enough to Acorn Assault. The main campaign is twenty-five levels of repetitive combat, and the multiplayer mode is strangely handicapped, leaving it an oddity without much to recommend it. Unless, of course, one was curious about the events which inevitably led to the rise of Squirrel Napoleon…

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.

In the end, Pascal’s Wager is just another entry in the ever-growing soulslike genre. It makes some smart choices by giving an upfront story and multiple characters, but my feeling is that starting life on mobile devices hampered what the developers could do, and the lack of exploration and cohesive map design is a definite weakness — perhaps a sequel built for console or PC could expand upon this foundation.

Gods Will Fall has some striking visuals and the randomly-generated characters with their varied stories and abilities are great, but the frustrating, sloggy combat, repetitive nature of play, and the lack of any sort of exploration or value in the hub area is disappointing. The developers have already released a road map for more content in the future, but let’s hope they polish the combat first.

Rememoried is a deeply flawed and inaccessible title and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone. Its central conceit isn't a striking idea, and it mostly results in frustration. The lack of a plot means the game doesn't have any draw to pull the player forward. Yet even when it's at its worst, Rememoried has an interesting atmosphere that can be rewarding. There's something valuable here, but Rememoried gets in its own way no matter where you look.

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.

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.

The longer I played The Old City, the more I kept hoping that it would end sooner than it did. While each chapter can be completed in about ten minutes or less, the lack of involving content and Jonah's unbearable droning made it all feel much longer.

Strikes me as a good idea, but in its current state it falls obscenely short of the fun and playability that usually comes with a Mario game.

In rudely flipping Gunblade NY & L.A. Machineguns onto store shelves for some quick cash, Sega has shown that they can't be bothered. If that's true, then why should anyone else?

Heavy Fire: Red Shadow is a head-scratcher. It does what it says it does and certainly contains an extended turret section that spans multiple hours with competent delivery from the development team. It’s also unpretentious, which is something I want to admire. That said, the results are tepid and this version, remarkably, feels like a step back from its already basic predecessors.

I genuinely hate giving an earnest indie a bad review, but The Whispering Valley just gets too much wrong. There are positive points in its lovely environments and solidly effective sound design. The game also has a great atmosphere. Unfortunately, its padding, linearity, inaccessibility, lack of a main character, and pixel-hunt gameplay result in an experience that is dull and retrograde, even by the standards of the industry’s oldest genre.

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.

While it's impossible for any game to convey the experience of the Vietnam War to players, Air Conflict: Vietnam's senses-dulling mediocrity manages to express just how pointless and destructive the entire endeavor was.

There are lots of little things in this title that are genuinely good – the subplots add a depth to the world, the art style is buoyant — but there’s far too much that feels like it hasn’t been fully thought out. Shiness is a curious experiment that never quite hits the mark, which is a shame given the effort that has clearly gone into it.

Stay Safe‘s rankings are all about speed, which is unfortunate considering the questionable collision and shoddy controls. As such, I found that getting the top time for each level was seemingly impossible, and without doing that, the true ending remained locked away – Stay Safe‘s final insult, apparently. There’s an interesting concept and some cool art design on offer, but, but the level of dedication required to see it through isn’t worth the effort.

I’m genuinely sad that the little indie I found so enamoring many years ago turned out to be something that I can’t stand playing, but that’s the truth of it, and here we are. Masochists looking for something to test their mettle might think a trip Below worthwhile, but I suspect that most will find a harsh, unforgiving experience that’s outdone by other, less brutal titles.

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.

Maybe the connection between gameplay and theme existed more clearly in the developers’ heads than they managed to convey in the finished product. As it stands, Solo feels like a passable, if slight, puzzle-platformer trying to snag a little extra gravitas by gluing on a bunch of unrelated stuff about relationships. Despite the surface charm provided by the art style, the whole exercise felt disingenuous and gross, and I’m glad I never need to touch it again.

Quite honestly, I would recommend the first game over Crackdown 2 with no hesitation, and based on what's actually here, it seems to me that positioning the effort as a piece of $15 DLC would have been far more appropriate than trying to pass it off as a $60 retail release.

Even by the lowered standards of licensed tie-in titles, Phoenix Festa fails to impress, seemingly intent on undoing the redemptive work of other, better, tie-ins like the Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm series or even the various Sword Art Online adaptations.

I appreciated that Penny-Punching Princess brought some new spins to the action-RPG genre and using money as a tool to fight is a fairly novel idea that could be explored more. The calculator is also a thematically brilliant idea in a game about capitalism and debt. However, the combat mechanics are problematic and play falls prey to unnecessary frustration and repetition.

I don’t know who Orcs Must Die! is for, and I’m not sure Robot Entertainment does either. Anyone new to the series is at a massive disadvantage, and existing fans are going to be scratching their heads. This series might’ve put Robot Entertainment on the map, but what they’re doing here isn’t their future. I used to love these titles — I still love the first two — but even if this mess is the result of an unfortunate series of mistakes made with the best intentions, that still doesn’t mean it’s a good experience.

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.

In some ways, Shelter 2 improves on its predecessor, but its brevity and lack of depth make it much weaker than the first overall.

It's a pinball game at its core, and if the pinball isn't nailed down, then the entire experience suffers. With some redesign of the boards and a bit of physics polish, this would be an easy recommend. As it is, it doesn't feel quite ready for prime time.

Outbreak: Endless Nightmares might be the worst game that I’ve played for over 50 hours. It was a frustrating, unsatisfying experience, and yet I couldn’t stop because I wanted to see if it would get better — and it never did. As a longtime fan of RE-style games and roguelikes I’m the exact target audience for this title, but it honestly had nothing to offer. Plagued by one bad bit of design after another, I can’t recommend Endless Nightmares to anyone who doesn’t have an unusually specific passion for survival horror roguelites.

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.

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.

As much as I may admire the concept, I really can't recommend Lost in Shadow to anyone except those who crave simplistic, repetitive gameplay and an unnecessarily bloated running time.

I have absolutely no idea what caused Knack to be the kind of game that is, because it just doesn't make any sense. Whether it's the case of being a a vanity project that went unchecked or just another could-have-been that lost its way while rushing to meet the PS4's launch date, the bottom line is that it's a misguided title too simple for adults and too difficult for children.

Rifter is stylish as hell, and even the writing manages to extract more wit than one would expect from characters composed of simple geometrical shapes, but the sharpest presentation in the world couldn’t convince me that I was enjoying myself. I’m sure it’ll find an audience among those with an astounding level of patience, but for me, Rifter was all frustration, zero reward, and probably the best game I’ve ever hated.

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.

Mini Motor Racing X runs smoothly, and for the first couple of hours it was enjoyable enough. However, the novelty wears off quickly and the whole thing soon becomes a slog — the career mode could be cut in half and the experience would be better for it. As it stands, there’s too much padding and not enough substance to keep me coming back for more.

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.

A larger budget might have saved the driving physics and improved the experience of the town, but no amount of money could repair the terrible writing and wrong-headed design that really sink Deadly Premonition.

Unfortunately, Over 9000 Zombies! doesn't nail the tower defense or the twin-stick shooting well enough to endorse it as a worthwhile purchase, even for those who can scrounge up some friends to play with. There are just too many games that do this gameplay so much better. Over 9000 Zombies! isn't a bad game, but it isn't very good one, either.

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.

But Van Helsing's missions are all means to an end, which is to rehash the film's plot in a videogame.

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.

The retro appeal is lost, the mechanics aren’t updated for modern times, and it offers nothing of historical or archival value. Frankly, I have no idea who Toki’s intended audience is – someone obviously loved it enough to dig it up and give it a fresh coat of paint, I’m just not sure why.

It's been about a week since I finished Inversion, and I've already forgotten most of what happened in it. There were two plot twists that were mildly interesting and a couple of cool uses of the gravity powers, but as a whole the game is strangely lifeless. Most of the time, Inversion was boring me, and when it wasn't doing that, it was frustrating me.

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.

When The Cleaner sticks to gunfighting and slow-mo sequences, it’s a winner, but the platforming and overly-long levels destroy everything it gets right. I want to adore this game and I was more than willing to meet it on its own terms, but it’s just asking for far too much — it’s frustrating to see how badly its flaws undercut the rest.

The manager’s commentary during and after every stage is poorly performed, to say nothing of the terrible and repetitive victory ceremony featuring around three static commentaries, making it a must-skip. All of the aforementioned issues are especially notable considering TDF 2020 is dedicated to providing a realistic 3D race. The other modes, which include a professional career mode and other races, are hardly worth the time and effort. Tour de France 2020 is therefore greatly outclassed by Pro Cycling Manager 2020 in terms of content, and hardly makes up any ground with a better presentation.

There are moments of brilliance, but it's tough to enjoy them while being kicked in the face at every turn. It's a genuine shame, but I can't recommend Natural Doctrine when so much of it is so terribly wrong.

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.

If Fit for a King‘s narrative was brimming with historical or pop culture references, or maybe if it had a deeper underlying message to discover, I might’ve been able to look past the tedium of gold gathering. As it stands, there’s novelty in making crazy decisions as a monarch and finding a few neat nods, but that novelty wears off quickly.

Though short, Swarm lasts a bit too long, if you ask me, being that it fails to expand upon its novel concept. It's a shame, too, because when you get back to what I brought up before, Hothead's marketing is enjoyably irreverent and funny. Take a look at the promotional videos on their website, and it's clear that they really love this concept, and that they're attempting to inject their products with a very particular sense of humor. If only the game matched their ads in its pizzazz and charm.

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.

ExZeus The Complete Collection‘s greatest sin is just how threadbare it is. There’s nothing to unlock other than a few achievements, and no modifiers to mix things up once players have finished both games. With this kind of retro arcade collection one would generally expect to see things like a written history of the franchise, concept art galleries, and a set of challenges or achievements designed to get the player to go back to the game over and over, trying out different strategies and tactics, encouraging players to see everything the game has to offer. ExZeus, on the other hand, just tosses the games out there for anyone for anyone who enjoys the genre to check out. While there are some thrills on offer for fans of Space Harrier or Panzer Dragoon-style games, there’s literally nothing else here for anyone who isn’t passionate about that specific subgenre.

The characters, the story, the controls, the difficulty, and even the central premise... all of it seems to be on the right track, but none of it hits the mark. I still think there's a lot of potential here, but like any other game, the basics have to be nailed before it can start reaching for greatness.

Overall, This Is The Police is a somewhat enjoyable strategy/time management title, although the story felt like wasted time since I never grew connected to the characters or the plot, and it had no real bearing on play. With more weight given to the plot and better integration into the game overall, this sad tale of a man slowly sinking to the bottom would have come together into something fascinating. As it stands, the strategic parts can’t save the experience overall and the end result is a title that feels only half-done. Ultimately, This is the Police ended up being a game to kill time with, not one to lose time on.

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.

Secrets of Raetikon is thoroughly unenjoyable to play, and the secret itself is a miserable discovery.

Although I liked the minimalist aesthetics and I'm open to interesting little projects like this, Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition didn't feel like it had much of a point. I'm sure that something about this content is very significant to its creator, but the problem is that it wasn't very significant to me.

Being the first battle royale game may have been enough a few years ago, but in the current market where Fortnite is the biggest thing in the world, it takes greater ambition than “ugly but functional” to stand out. The best thing I can say about H1Z1 is that it’s free, but even so, I still can’t recommend it when its biggest competition is also free and offers a far better version of this same premise.

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.

When comparing The Executioner‘s frustrations to its merits, the negatives outweigh the developers’ intentions. This title seems like it plans to do and say a lot about morality within a cruel society, but its stat-based design feels like it’s going to need a huge overhaul before the statements it wants to make can come out clearly.

Sometimes it’s best to let things rest, and that is definitely the case with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered. It was a game that is mostly remembered for its ties to one of Nintendo’s many hardware gimmicks, and without that, we are left with a rather mundane game that hasn’t done enough to correctly update itself. As a game to be purchased and played in 2020, it’s just not worth returning to — it needed a remake (or, better yet, a sequel), not a remaster.

When it comes down to it, stripping away the gameplay, all GTA2 brings to the table is foul language, gratuitous violence, and aging 2D graphics. Once my bloodlust was quenched, GTA became a monotonous and painfully shallow game.

Night Call has the potential, setting, characters and plot to be an epic noir detective title, but instead of capitalizing on it, the developers feel like they’re too in love with the taxi driver premise to let the best aspects shine through. Instead of using my cunning to find a killer, I spent more time worrying about money and hearing the same conversations over and over. What started as a journey of intrigue and secrets quickly became underwhelming repetition.

It tells a story I've heard already and never really cared for, and its intended message is rendered meaningless by a shallow morality system.

The game does offer a 4-way link for both singles and doubles matches, though finding four people with a copy of Davis Cup Tennis is likely to be the biggest challenge.

I expected something more from Mosaic when I finished it — some sort of revelation or point to it all, but only credits followed. It’s ironic that a game trying to educate the player on individuality and ‘breaking the cycle’ has no significant message or meaningful character development. Instead, Mosaic relies too much on presentation and drags the player through its narrative, forcing them towards a perfunctory conclusion that was obvious from the first five minutes of gameplay.

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)."

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.

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.

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.

Becastled is certainly a game a person could spend hours playing, but in a genre crowded with unique and fascinating takes on the concept, I can’t think of a reason why one should put time into a title with so many annoyances and so little to recommend it.

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.

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.

Blood Bowl 2 suffered a poor launch, but was eventually patched into something enjoyable, and the developers have already been at work on fixes for Blood Bowl 3, so I am guardedly confident that it will eventually be a good experience… but that time is not now, sadly. In its current form, Blood Bowl 3 is not worth the purchase price — yet — but I’m ready and willing to love it when it matures.

Mazes of Fate might have had a slim chance a few years ago, but arriving alongside infinitely more capable competition renders rough, mediocre and annoying content immediately, undesirably obsolete.

I really wanted this game to be good. The E3 trailer looked like the ridiculous Fast & Furious title people have wanted for a decade, and I specifically asked for this review opportunity. In my mind, I was totally down for what this game was promising and in the mood for a good Need For Speed, but this just isn’t it. There are certainly worse racing games out there, but few can match Payback’s blandness. It’s a listless, lifeless, soulless product that perfectly exemplifies the current state of Electronic Arts. Maybe next time.

Metallia's antics coupled with the dull gameplay was just too much to take. Even if it does get better later on, the hours I sunk into the game's unsatisfying mechanics and nasty storyline left me cold. NIS has many good titles in their library, but this isn't one of them.

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.

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.

This is a mediocre release, and whatever excuse we make for it – that it’s practically free, that we expected no better, or that it’s following one of the worst sequels of all time – doesn’t make it look any less out of date.

The King’s Bird has a strong conceptual foundation, but the experience falls victim to the “git gud” mentality. It shines when players are allowed to explore the freedom of flight, but that light dwindles over time and is finally snuffed out in the final hours by tragic oversights that have been compounded on for hours.

Brink works fine, yes, and can deliver a competent multiplayer game of shoot-shoot, but as a full-priced retail title it leaves a lot to be desired. A simple, story-less downloadable game would have made much more sense.

If nothing else, Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition understands that it’s more of an oddity than a classic. A set of bonus materials offer insight into how the game happened and what the public reaction was to it at the time. It’s probably more interesting than playing, which is just as fundamentally ill-planned now as it was back in 1992. Without any changes made to improve the experience, Night Trap is more of a nostalgic conversation piece than an experience capable of entertaining and engaging players.

Weeping Doll isn’t much of a game, and at just an hour long with no hidden depth to necessitate a second playthrough, it’s overpriced at ten dollars. That said, as a first-generation console VR proof-of-concept, it succeeds more than it fails.

Alluring pop divas…political rebels…musical party game...Unison spreads itself too thin trying to satisfy all of these criteria, and ultimately comes up short everywhere.

Seen through a kid’s eye this game is very cool with its full compliment of squishing sounds and gun blasts. For adults, I suggest you look elsewhere for your entertainment.

I hate to say it, but Super Meat Boy Forever is a bummer. Its design and execution as an auto-runner is sound, but as a sequel to one of the most noteworthy and important indie games ever, it’s substantially lacking. Maybe that isn’t fair to say as much of the original team isn’t present, but I strongly disagree on the direction Team Meat took here. The original Super Meat Boy was brimming with panache and personality, and seemingly all of its magic has been lost in the decade since.

I still count myself as a huge fan of Dead Island, but Ryder White takes too many wrong turns and strays from what made the original game what it was. Completists will surely want to see the twist ending, but more casual fans of the game don't have much reason to take this brutal, frustrating trip.

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.

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.

Vambrace: Cold Soul is a confused title that apparently wants to deliver a rich story and hard choices, but due to strange systems, exploitable mechanics and weightless characters, none of it feels consequential in any way.