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.

Opponents cannot be forced off balance, pressured, or intercepted. Kaktuo Chojin rarely forces players to think, react, or adapt to their opponents. Worse still is the absence of a deep grappling system.

Never Breakup is a good idea wrapped in a bright, colorful package that is ultimately let down almost completely by the controls and the device it’s on.

Rather from the bold, unique effort I hoped it would be, it's a weak, contrived bore that never gets off the ground. A four alarm blaze? More like a soggy day-old campfire.

After putting my time in with Bound By Flame, I'm left with the sense that the Spiders team has badly overreached. There are some superb ideas on display here, but none feel like they even begin to tap their full potential, and the experience overall feels rushed and incomplete.

As a big, big fan of the previous Toy Soldiers games, it was tough to see War Chest falling so short compared to the other two.

It's too bad that this is the only way an English version of Deadly Premonition is available on the PS3, since it absolutely should not be played.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that Jewel Summoner is at least half dialogue, if not three-quarters - a fatal mistake when the quality of such is so unappealing.

In around an hour, I managed to complete Bucket Detective with two endings, and the developer smartly added the ability to load any section of the game I wanted so that I could go back and play for the others. I guess the fact that I want to see more of it makes it a ‘good’ title, but to be honest, I’m not sure I’d ever recommend it to anybody.

By the end of the first level, the player will have encountered every type of objective that the game has to offer, aside from the afore-mentioned "guard the thing" scenario. This depressing formula repeats itself throughout the game, with the "levels" distinguishing themselves solely through window-dressing and increasingly difficult enemies.

Hardcore fans of the original show, if they exist, may find something to like in Punch Line’s exploration of alternate possibilities. Other folks just looking for a decent adventure game with a nice look had best project their spirits to more promising prospects.

I want to be charitable towards DreamBack since it’s clear that a lot of work went into building these detailed environments, but Come Over Gaming didn’t populate them with anything of substance, and the resulting product feels like an old-school Resident Evil game with everything removed except the key-hunting. A flat version of this title would be the dullest thing imaginable, and the VR format only slightly elevates it.

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.

Far: Changing Tides is the perfect example of a sequel that largely repeats what the first one did, except now it’s longer and more complicated. Maybe some players will admire the additional challenge and length, but I spent most of this adventure frustrated with the tedium. I will admit that the ending does tie a nice bow on things at the end, I just wish it got there sooner, and with less fuss.

It Came from Outer Space was a good idea that just comes off poorly. The twisting, obstructed area design makes playing more difficult than it should be, the small number of buildings feels even more limited due to the palette-swapping, and the humor falls flat. Players who feel a desperate need for new Kefling action may enjoy this DLC, but nobody else should apply.

The core game certainly shows promise in its distinctive style and its solid procedural generation engine, and players partial to fighting games may gel with the combat more than I did. However, the difficulty spikes make the campaign more frustrating than rewarding, and the shoddy optimization on Xbox 360 nearly drives it into "unplayable" territory.

Depth of Extinction has a solid concept but suffers from repeated assets, uninspiring combat and questionable mechanics. With all the other tactics options on the market, I find it impossible to recommend this one.

Everything from the graphics to the storyline feels half-baked.

The silver lining to this otherwise mediocre (at best) experience is found in the rich visual presentation. The giraffe is well animated, the art not unlike the average family CG animal adventure by Pixar or Dreamworks, and the backgrounds have depth and richness. Although I hate to make the lipstick-on-a-pig comparison, the graphics just don't make up for an otherwise lackluster mobile distraction.

For a piece of DLC that offers so little, $7.00 seems steep. Save some hard-earned money and watch the videos of it on YouTube instead… the most relevant bits can be seen in a minute or two, and those Microsoft points can instead be spent on something more substantial.

After about six hours with Demon Skin, I think I’m done. Overall it’s just too simplistic, and it felt like I was repeating content far too soon. Sure, there are are new enemies and new areas, but ultimately it feels like a samey sort of ride that has players constantly jumping over spikes, battling similar monsters and leveling up basic stats. There’s just not enough new content, story or ideas here that make me want to continue the push to the end.

While I can’t imagine how any developer could have followed up the balls-to-the-wall tour-de-force that was Saints Row 4, Agents of Mayhem feels like it isn’t even trying – it’s a tiresome, atavistic throwback that feels at least a decade out of date. It qualifies as An Open World Game on the most basic level possible, but has none of the charm, audacity, or OMG did that really happen? appeal that put Volition on the map. What happened here?

If the game does not play like road cycling, look like road cycling, or sound like road cycling, the question can be posed whether it simulates road cycling at all. In the last four years, road cycling has changed immensely. Pro Cycling Manager has not.

Rather than a game created to hook people with strong gameplay or a novel idea, Noble Nutlings feels like it's all about the Benjamins. Pass.

I honestly do think that Sir Daniel Fortesque is a good character with potential, but I would have much rather seen an all-new game with a nod towards current methodology than a rehash of something that honestly wasn't all that great in the first place.

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.

Mechrunner has a unique setting for an infinite runner and the combat usually works great, but there are just too many design mistakes to overlook. For an infinite runner to be successful, it has to feel like a game of pure skill. Players have to be able to see the threats coming, and be able to react with precise controls. Mechrunner just can’t offer that kind of experience, and it fails as a result.

I hate to be so harsh on a game with ties to incredibly traumatic real-world events, but The Town of Light feels like something that was produced as some sort of virtual reality tour and was later cobbled into being a videogame by adding an undercooked story. As it stands, this experience isn’t cementing nor commemorating a dark chapter in Italy’s history as elegantly, interestingly nor effectively as it seems to think it is. And the narrative, with its overabundance of awkward sexual scenes, lack of meaningful suspense and story that left me confused does nothing to validate the painstaking care that must have gone into recreating the asylum.

Lost Sea has some good ideas. Exploring randomized islands alongside talented crewmates sounds exciting and it looks like an enjoyable swashbuckling adventure, but the annoying music, repeated areas, boring combat and terrible AI sank this game long before the ship reached its destination.

Skyhill is a decently short game that can be played in bursts, and despite the inconsistencies and annoying interface, I enjoyed it and was curious enough to see it through to the end. (And there are multiple endings.) However, the ‘survival’ aspect feels nonexistent — my runs were either doomed from the beginning or flawless victories, and I can’t wholeheartedly recommend something so unbalanced from one run to the next.

Even with all these problems, however, I found the plot interesting enough that I'm definitely hooked. If by some miracle there is a The Cursed Crusade 2, I'd be interested in seeing the story wrapped up as long as this title's wealth of problems are fixed.

In the end, Arkedo has shown up to the party to share with us a huge ball of digital cotton candy; as soon as we get a taste of its ultra-sweetness, it's already evaporating. Fans of the game might counter that there's nothing automatically bad about a trifle of a game, but there's also nothing automatically good about one, either.

Red Faction: Armageddon is a perfectly functional third-person shooter, but there's nothing at all to recommend it. The design is incoherent on its own merits, even more so in the context of the series, and the narrative fares even worse.

It was pretty short, I forgot it had a story, and the interface needs some work. It wasn't bad, though. It was just Sudoku.

After playing Heavy Rain, it seemed like Quantic Dream was heading in the right direction, but Beyond: Two Souls takes two big steps backward.

Corpse Party: Blood Drive has very little going for it. The amusing contrast of seeing cutesy anime kids in a horror story can't sustain such a jumbled plot, muddy visual design, and irritating construction. It may be worth investigating as a cultural curiosity, but otherwise this is a party to avoid.

Between the laggy inputs, unfair boss fights and a reliance on grinding as a means of survival, I can’t recommend this one, even to the most fervent fans of the genre.

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.

The potential is clearly here for another out-of-left-field cult hit, but the charm of sautéing, stewing, and sometimes scorching wears off too soon, and there's nothing to fall back on to bolster the experience.

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

Even if the game falls apart fairly quickly, and has bugs and interface quirks that make the main story borderline unplayable, it still deserves a measure of attention and admiration.

It's a game that asks too much of the player and offers too little in return.

Fractured Soul is not a bad game by any means, but its keen concept is played out again and again with a taskmaster's sternness, and little else.

If the harmonization sequences appeared on their own, Laserlife might seem too thin, but I'd be willing to replay it. As it is, Laserlife is a game I'll be fine with forgetting.

There’s some joy in experiencing the landscapes of Paws and Soul, but that’s about all that can be said for it — it’s a dull, sluggish effort in service of two boring and awkwardly-conveyed stories that don’t connect with each other. Not all purgatory games feel like purgatory, but this one sure did.

What I want out of a puzzler is the moment of revelation when a solution becomes clear. What the characters are getting out of their adventure here is the joy of playing music together, but the sloggy grind of actually playing Backbeat doesn’t provide the first and can’t mirror the second. Although the game makes a respectable effort to connect the resources it’s asking the player to manage to the mechanics of a successful funk session, it never finds the joy inherent to the music. This is the right game for someone, surely, but not for me.

Straimium Immortaly is the second title I’ve tried from Caiysware (the other being Skelly Selest, also on Switch) and I see unreached potential in this work. Both offer good ideas and a few nice moments, but neither has the level of polish or balance needed to deliver an engaging challenge. That said, I do feel like the dev is on the cusp of greatness and I’ll be curious to see their next attempt.

While I can see Atomic Heist appealing to the truly hardcore roguelike fans who wallow in the cruel agony of random number generation until the unlocks finally get good, I can’t see that the effort would be worth it for anyone else. I eventually made it to the third area, and when I found another set of new enemies with new immunities and new weapons I’d be forced to unlock, I finally called it quits. There just isn’t enough good here to warrant the time and effort it takes to see it all.

Despite Papetura‘s interesting nature, the puzzles were not entertaining and the story lacked a strong central theme or premise beyond ‘paper’. As a demonstration of the craft involved in animation, Papetura is a wonderful artifact. As a videogame, it is considerably less successful.

There are no puzzles, no secret rooms, no open exploration of any kind, and the game wants players to do this with ten unique characters, leveling them each to 99. Battle Princess of Arcadias is so monotonous that I kept playing it out of inertia rather than because of enjoyment, but I kept hoping for more of the magic from its first five minutes. Sadly, that magic never appeared.

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.

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.

While Ivy the Kiwi? is an incredibly cute character and makes a valiant attempt to bring back a style of game that few developers have attempted in recent years, the core concept never quite finds happy coexistence with the player interface. For project as simple and straightforward as this one, that particular barrier proves too great to overcome.

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.

Hood: Outlaws & Legends tries too hard to mesh different game types into one unified multiplayer experience, and its lofty ambitions get buried under clashing elements. What could have been an exciting co-op title ended up a frustrating slog, and in a heist — whether it’s a movie or a game — if the main caper ain’t good, the rest doesn’t matter.

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.

In the end, Of Bird and Cage left me with a terrible taste in my mouth, and I wondered how it managed to get released today. In fact, it’s so bad that I would almost recommend it to connoisseurs of terrible games, but frankly, I’m not sure I could live with my conscience.

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.

LA Cops is a gorgeous piece of art design which, by all rights, should have served as the foundation for a classic indie shooter. The utter failure of its gameplay to deliver on that potential frustrates to no end. This is clearly a game with a lot of talent behind it, but I have no idea how they botched things so badly.

In short, Dungeon Siege III is a morass of flat characters, a story as dull as dishwater, and combat that manages to be both frustrating and boring.

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.

Should people play Star Wars: Bounty Hunter? Definitely. It’s an acquired taste, but I still enjoy its high points. But should anyone play it via this remastered edition? Goodness, no. Considering how long fans have waited for this title to get a next-gen boost, there’s no excuse to release it in this state.

I might have had less aggravation if I had a dedicated group of other players to go through the game with from beginning to end, but I wouldn't ask any of my friends to pay full price for The Lord of the Rings: War in the North. Thankfully, since War in the North was released after Dark Souls, before Skyrim, and on the same day as Uncharted 3, there's a good chance the game is already in the bargain bin for a fraction of the MSRP.

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.

Players who haven't started (or finished) Fallout 4 yet will likely get more out of Wasteland Workshop than I did, but this content was too insubstantial to keep my attention for long.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although the controls were solidly implemented, the graphics were some of the best I've seen on the Wii, and I do believe the developers' hearts were in the right place, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a tedious, trying experience that didn't offer enough reason for me to carry on in spite of its downsides.

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.

Gas Guzzlers Extreme strikes me as a project that likely held much promise when it was conceptualized, but was probably hindered by a lack of resources. With a simple, accessible premise, uncomplicated control scheme, and action-oriented approach, the title could have served as a nice change-of-pace from hyper-technical racing sims and overdone street racers. I doubt I’m the only gamer who imagined it might be a modern-day Twisted Metal, but Gas Guzzlers never quite captures that spirit.

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.

There's nothing particularly broken or wrong here, but without a fresh, new idea driving it, it's got precious little to offer.

The simple fact is that even with the elemental tweaks and team attacks, this game is sorely average in terms of the challenges and ideas presented to players.

Between the tedious levels, incoherent story and offputting gigolo missions, I found very little to appreciate about Killer is Dead. I grew quite tired of the shallow game design and weak attempts to distract me from its vacuous lack of substance, and put the game down before rolling credits.

From its incongruous RPG-style leveling up to its endless recycling of levels to its utterly ridiculous Arabian Nights-themed story, Sonic and the Secret Rings feels horribly padded from top to bottom.

It seems like the developers of RIDE have a passion for motorcycle culture, as evidenced by the narrator's enthusiastic burblings and plenty of descriptive loading screen text, but they lack either the necessary budget or the level of technical know-how to bring that passion into the final product. The mediocre graphics could easily be forgiven if the rest was up to snuff, but the absurd loading times, glitches and lack of polish and speed kill it at the starting line.

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.

Until chapter two arrives to change my mind, I'm going to have to call Missing an interesting failed experiment in reviving the FMV genre.

There's nothing juicy about a boring hero on a boring quest walking around aimlessly searching for the next area to continue a story that I had a hard time caring about.

I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have completed Anthem if I didn’t need to write this review. No amount of pretty environments or impressive flight can make up for the sorry, incomplete state this game was released in, and given the flimsy foundation BioWare has laid here, I’m not confident in Anthem’s ability to survive as a loot-based co-op service. Until there’s more content, variation, and stability, players should definitely steer clear of this one.

I enjoy classic run-and-gun games, even with their old-school difficulty. Unfortunately, the lack of quality-of-life features, imprecise controls and poor color choices mean this one is currently a difficult one to recommend.

On a mobile platform like this one, a title has to look good, feel good, and be comfortable to play. This one strikes out in all three areas.

I could almost recommend Doug Hates His Job as a cheap, quick palate cleanser between meatier experiences, but for just a few dollars more than what Doug costs, any number of better experiences could be had. It’s tough to make a case for purchase here.

The most monumental loss is style.

I like Teriel as a character, and I dig the mordant, yet surprisingly colorful world that IMGN.PRO and Fool’s Theory have put him in. This team is clearly talented on certain levels, but there’s a lot of refining and revising to be done before I’d be even remotely interested in seeing more of Teriel’s story.

While the plot interested me and I would have preferred to see it through, The Wild Eight‘s technical and design issues cancel out its charm and atmosphere. Aspiring survivors be warned!

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.

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.

I did eventually find my bearings, and the entire game took me less than five hours to complete, after which I was told in no uncertain terms to go back and continue training with other players – this is obviously meant to be the true hook of the game. Unfortunately, the co-op functionality isn’t working properly at this time. While Sloclap will probably get the servers stable eventually, the fact remains that Absolver’s core combat feels so awkward and unsatisfying that I can’t imagine it ever taking off. I certainly can’t recommend it now, and I doubt that’ll ever change.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 does a mediocre job of offering up a shooting gallery, but it's so limited in scope that it's almost impossible to recommend to anyone who doesn't feel a strange sense of arousal whenever they imagine popping a bullet into someone's head at several hundred yards. Well, whenever Diaz finally tells them to, of course.

Secret of Mana isn’t an improvement in any way, and as such it fails the number one requirement of a remake – there’s no reason to recommend it over the original. Square Enix’s attempts to modernize this classic only make it feel older and less relevant, and the resulting mess is something I can’t see appealing to anyone. Returning fans will wish they were playing the original, and newcomers will likely wonder why Secret of Mana was ever such a big deal to begin with.

With decent gameplay and mildly intriguing story, I would have given Space Rift a passing grade in the current PSVR lineup. However, the lack of a coherent art style and the disastrous bugs keep me from being able to do that. If and when Chapter 2 is released, I hope the developers manage to buckle down and make sure everything works properly. I don’t hold out much hope, though — I mean, how many games are there where even the end credits are broken?

Were Clan of Champions a skeletal presentation piece designed to convince a publisher that these developers were worth investing in, I would give it extremely high marks. As a finished product that people are asked to pay money for, it's completely unacceptable.

Seems like a battle system without a role-playing game. There is little variety or depth to the combat, and even in the presence of assorted power-ups it becomes painfully repetitive after only a short while.

With more polish, it could have been a great mashup. As it stands, it will only appeal to the small segment of players who love punishment, but to those less skilled, it's got nothing to offer.

Like a deflated football, 7 Trials doesn't encourage you to play, nor does it promise exciting play, it just makes play possible.