The worst 360 game I think I've ever played with nothing to redeem it. Earth Defense Force 2017 can't even stack up against the recent Burger King games, and those were little better than minigames on a disc coming in at four dollars each. The only possible future I see for Earth Defense Force 2017 is gaining the notoriety as one of those "so bad it's good" games, but don't be fool yourself - it's just bad.

It’s cliché to say “I want to love Starfighter Renegade, but…” so I won’t, but the fact is that the frustration mounted too quickly and too completely for me to remember the joys of simply flying around and splashing space-bogeys in the opening levels. Maybe those with better reflexes and more patience will get something out of it — or at the very least, get past level 14 — but the rest of us should probably avoid this one.

Road Rage isn’t half the game that it wants to be, and it’s hard to understand how it was released in its current state. There are plenty of places where I was able to drive through level geometry and out into a blank void, causing a crash. Likewise, I frequently found myself clipping off of courses into walled-off areas, and because the developers neglected to include a method for resetting my bike onto the track, I’d be forced to restart. Racing superbikes in a crowded city with narrow streets is a terrible concept to build a game around, and Road Rage marries that terrible concept with awful execution to create something that’s far less than the sum of its questionable parts.

I wanted to like Airheart. The concept of a roguelike with air combat, exploring worlds, and creating my own plane is a good one. Unfortunately, buggy game mechanics, lackluster crafting and the awful grind for money shoots this little ship out of the sky.

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.

Those Who Remain is a morally shallow experience with a repetitive plot. A few decent puzzles can’t rescue this otherwise-flat experience, and I was glad to be done with it when the credits rolled.

If Blacksea Odyssey worked the way it should, its deadly monsters with complex attack patterns and abilities would pose a significant, enjoyable challenge. Unfortunately, the current level of challenge comes from severe camera issues, poor design and too many bugs. Stick a harpoon in it and toss the corpse out into the void of space.

Brawlers aren’t the most complex genre, so the fundamental mistakes of visual noise and sluggish controls mean that it’s difficult to recommend Coffee Crisis to even the most dedicated brawler game fans.

I’m sure Cultist Simulator makes perfect sense to the people who created it, but they don’t seem particularly interested in letting anyone else in – it’s an intensely insular experience that almost demands someone track down a wiki to find a way in, and there’s little incentive to invest that much time and effort on a title that gives newcomers nothing but an indifferent shrug.

With a host of bugs, a fundamental lack of gameplay variety, and a key mechanic that doesn't serve the purpose it should, Ravaged is profoundly not the Mad Max game we've been waiting for.

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

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

The London Case occupies a strange sort of middle ground — it wants to facilitate player freedom, while at the same time telling a focused point-and-click story with little room for deviation. Perhaps it would have functioned better as a more pure narrative experience – a visual novel, for instance. It certainly would have been easier to avoid the technical hiccups in that case!

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

[A] poorly-designed, buggy mess.

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.

It's not especially big, but the tedium of the action makes it feel overlong. The lack of variety in enemies and gameplay make it feel almost like a budget title.

As a basic introduction to tactical RPGs, there are worse games to choose than Tears of Avia… but there are also so many better. However, with the amount of brokenness present in the content, I just can’t recommend it.

I will say that Sneak King was successful from the perspective that it provides an hour or two of incredibly offbeat play, not to mention the fact that it got me into a Burger King for the first time in years. If it wasn't for the stomachache and heartburn afterwards, I'd say it was a win-win situation.

GI Joe: Operation Blackout could have been something special, but it doesn’t capitalize on its nostalgia effectively, and has too many shortcomings to stand out in any meaningful way against the countless action games already available on every platform. It might be worthwhile as co-op fodder with a younger player, but everyone else might want to give this a pass.

As an exploration title the environments are dull, and navigating them is a chore. As a puzzle game, it’s a cakewalk. As a narrative, the framework of a solid concept is spoiled by poor presentation and pacing. As a horror game, it’s not scary. What Andreasyan was able to create here all by himself couldn’t have been simple or easy, but tell that to the person who has thousands of Steam games to choose from and a finite amount of time and money to spend on them.

Without replayability, unlockables or any other motivation to continue playing, Point Blank DS shows how advances in game design since the mid-90s could have saved even superficial titles.

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.

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

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

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

Well O’Neill is clearly a smart man and a sharply observant writer, but this is a case where some restraint and a shorter running time would’ve made Little Red Lie a more tolerable, or perhaps even an enlightening experience. Instead, it’s an interminable slog through a world of misery starring terrible people, and I left it feeling worse for wear.

It's not a terrible effort, but there are dozens of missed opportunities over the course of the game that could enhance the entire experience, and the fact that practically none of them were taken left me scratching my head.

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

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

In the end, Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel is a boring, meatheaded slog through about ten or so hours of predictable situations and sub par dialogue, and if someone told me that the development team had simply been handed a bit of cardboard with the words "sink this series" emblazoned across it as a design document, I'd believe it without hesitation.

Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia is a perfectly functional game, but those unfamiliar with the IP should probably watch or read the series instead — the lack of depth and content makes it hard to recommend to anyone except perhaps for the most hardcore of fans.

While the base game punched above its weight to deliver a satisfying and varied journey, this is weak, watery content that only holds the slightest hint of what endeared me to it in the first place.

NASCAR 2011: The Game feels like a slapdash effort, a rough draft of a game dressed up with a fancy cinematic and some licensed music and sent out to make a quick buck off the fans.

For an Xbox game, Fellowship Of The Ring sure does take a long time to load.

Clearly, the guys at Access Games understand that games in the Monster Hunter vein are supposed to be punishingly difficult. What they didn't get was that the soul-crushing challenge should come from the gameplay and not poor design decisions. Throwing down your PSP in anger because a boss has outsmarted you is acceptable. Tossing it aside because a fight revolves more around beating the bad game design than the actual enemy is not.

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

Overall, Zombie Driver: Immortal Edition misses a lot of opportunities and manages only to deliver repetition, failing even a basic level of entertainment. I won’t be driving back to this city anytime soon.

Pankapu is bitterly, unfairly hard to the degree that it’s almost unpleasant to play. There’s an audience out there for this sort of experience, but I’m not in it.

To recap: imagine playing the most uninspired, atmosphere-free "Resident Evil" clone that could exist... Then instead of using a control pad, you must verbally tell your brain-free character exactly what to do every step of the way. This is what Lifeline is like.

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.

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.

After a few runs I’d heard all the jokes, fought all the enemies, and seen all of the mild shifts in aesthetics. I wanted to rush through the content I’d already seen and finally, hopefully, get a glimpse of something new, but this Souls­-inspired combat prides itself on punishing the impatient, and hasty Necropolis players get a full reset. This was my internal struggle—I wanted to get the game over with, but I didn’t want to be even more bored with it by repeatedly dying and restarting in the process.

It's not like I need to be barraged by bells and whistles or the world's slickest design, but Rumble Roses XX comes off as cheap and patched-together. Konami should have put more work into making things (besides the women) appealing.

Heroes of Mana feels like Dawn of Mana, take two. It's gorgeous and somewhat interesting, but undermined by basic flaws in its ability to let players see what's going on. Here's hoping there's no take three in the works.

It's almost as though the developers focused everything they had on the art style and equippable items, but forgot to make sure the rest of the game worked as well. A tedious slog, this sort of project is a risky one to undertake since the potential for boredom to kill the experience is so high.

The most serious problems in Star X lie with its controls. The ship's movements are limited due to poor button configuration.

Sony Online is really out of touch with what makes this kind of game good. It adds nothing to the genre that hasn't already been done before—and actually gets a lot of it wrong. I'm never leaving my copy of "Lumines" at home again.

Instead of the friendlier, less-confusing version of Armored Core this UMD could have been, it's a bitterly disappointing also-ran that's in severe need of a tune-up.

If Mothership Zeta had been half as long and available at half the price, it might have been worthwhile simply for giving players a quick peek behind the origins of the main game's enigmatic alien wreckage. As it stands, this dog-leg jaunt into outer space ends up a giant could-have-been without any real reason to recommend it, save completion for completion's sake.

I understand that much of WWI was fought in the mud and it probably didn’t look like a Hollywood blockbuster, but I can best describe my time with Tannenberg by saying that it never felt like I was in the middle of a war — instead, I was more often wandering through an empty battlefield trying desperately to not quit in the middle of a round. But at least I learned some history!

Hidden Dragon Legend has some good visual design but not much else, and it’s a shame. I appreciated the style, but the actual game is so shoddily produced that it’s impossible to enjoy. I don’t care that enemies look good if fighting them is sluggish and repetitive. With tighter controls and fluid combat, Hidden Dragon Legend could have been a minor gem, but it’s just an attractive failure.

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

Side-scrolling combat games aren't new, and plenty of them are heftier, more substantial and cheaper than this one. Steam users can do better.

With a dull location, uninteresting combat and repetitive missions, Fortified only has its ‘50s robots to recommend it. While I can't deny that devotees of the period will no doubt find something to like in this menagerie of tin monsters, anyone looking for a solid Tower Defense/Shooter hybrid will have to look elsewhere. It won't be hard to do better than this.

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.

Line Rider 2: Unbound is a cute idea, but in my opinion it doesn't have the chops or the longevity to become a successful handheld title.

Getting back to me here, although I can see potential in controlling a team of four and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a perfect fit for such a concept, Mutants In Manhattan feels like a rushed contractual obligation rather than something created out of love or inspiration from the source material.

It’s tremendously disappointing, and hopefully either Aspyr can do something about it in the future, or ardent fans will come to rescue and save this title from a fate worse than death.

What starts out as an interesting idea for a strategy role-playing game (RPG) soon crumbles under the weight of poor design decisions, unintuitive gameplay, and an aesthetic presentation that would have been more at home on the Nintendo Entertainment System than the powerful GameCube.

Firegirl is a title that offers a good premise and some appealing design ideas, but it simply fails to deliver a satisfying experience. With the right updates this game could improve drastically, but as it stands, it’s impossible to recommend.

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

Frustrating, boring, and poorly executed, this is a game that is destined for the dustbin.

The sort of inspiration-deficient throwback that wore out its welcome long ago.

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.

Yes, it's an incredibly, borderline obscenely, brutal game, but within its own context it tells an interesting story and provides some great thrills for the player—or at least it would if it weren't so busy trying to give its players seizures.

I did manage to beat Elden, and I’m still not entirely sure what was going on. There was a forest, a desert, a mountain, and then some caves. I killed the same handful of monsters over and over again, then got stunlocked to oblivion by bosses that shoot immobilizing gloop. If it was longer than it is, I probably wouldn’t have bothered finishing and I can’t say what I played was worth it — whether it was a crutch or an intentional choice, the whole thing wraps up just as bafflingly as it began.

Xel tries to tell a compelling story about time travel, loss, anger, and consequences, but the game just isn’t in great shape. I want to see what Tiny Roar can achieve after they patch the daylights out of Xel, or perhaps what they do in their next project. As it stands, though, Xel needs to think about what it’s done and learn from tis mistakes before it’s not grounded anymore.

To put it bluntly, Ape Escape Academy is a textbook case of monkey-see, monkey-do; it goes through the motions and mimics the best it can, but lacks the intelligence and understanding required to imbue its efforts with any sort of elegance.

It is massively disappointing that a title with literary aspirations falls so flat when it comes to delivering an engaging experience in all regards. I appreciate that the developers must be huge fans of Kafka, but they’ve seemed to miss that the art in literature is found not only in the quality of each individual page, but also in how they create the accompanying theme.

All of these issues in design and execution are really a shame, since they mean that Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory is not enjoyable for any amount of time. The dialogue is clever and witty, and I enjoyed seeing Alpha Complex come to life in videogame form, but aesthetics can only carry something so far. While I can’t recommend this iteration. there’s always the pen-and-paper version for those who need a fix.

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.

For a title that’s ostensibly about surviving in the middle of a disaster, Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is incredibly slow, incredibly boring, incredibly outdated and incredibly frustrating – it fails at both its human side and its action side, and ultimately has nothing to offer fans of either. For anyone interested in the concepts or subject material, I’d recommend either Disaster Report (PS2, 2003) or Raw Danger! (PS2, 2006) over this crumbling mess.

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.

Just a bad use of Ubisoft’s talent pool, and a worse use of gamers’ hard-earned money.

#killallzombies has no excuse for getting this so wrong.

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.

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.

Although it was originally released for PC in the fall of 2015, The Park feels like a quick tech demo for virtual reality headsets more than a full release, and even if the content were presented in VR, everything about it is so bland that it wouldn't be effective anyway.

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

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.

I'm all for interesting choices and humor when making a game, but the appeal of a one-trick pony like Divekick wore off after just a few minutes. Like, five. Perhaps people steeped in the fighting game scene or those with friends (and beer) nearby might get more out of it than I did, but I can't imagine that many players will find value in this drawn-out gag.

I do admit that I gleaned more than a few moments of guilty enjoyment from the experience, it's really just a terrible, terrible game that wouldn't be able to justify its own existence without the gleefully gratuitous content.

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

With nothing to recommend it, I say toss this disc into the cracks of Mount Doom and be done with it.

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.

A lovely face paired with an empty head is a cliché, but I'm not going to waste a better metaphor on a game this dull.

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

My sense is that Azur Lane: Crosswave will appeal to established fans of the ‘moe’ subgenre of anime who will happily forgive the myriad problems, boredoms and irritations that will rise to the surface for everyone else. For those who aren’t ready to devote themselves to a seafaring waifu, Crosswave runs aground as soon as it sets sail.

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.

Nearly all progress in game design over the last fifteen years has been ignored, and it shows.

Submersed is a tragic mess of mistakes, and in addition to everything above, it’s buggy. I had several crashes, textures sometimes disappear from walls if one gets too close, and I’ve fallen through solid floors. If it wasn’t already obvious that one solid setpiece can’t prop up a mediocre game, Submersed should be all the proof that’s required.

The Witch and the Hundred Knight isn’t a good game by any means. It has an impenetrable equipment system, lackluster combat with no other gameplay mechanics, and a story that only gets good if players consult an FAQ.

A whole lot of hot air and buzz with nothing to back it up.

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

Candle Knight might look like an average platformer, but the lack of story feels hollow and the lack of options in gameplay sap any mechanical satisfaction I might have had. With more polish and balance it would be worth a look, but in its current state it’s impossible to recommend.

The issues in Everreach snowball off each other. Poor controls and defensive options make combat tough. Limited resources mean little ways to mitigate the combat. Dying often means story beats can potentially be spaced far apart. Fixing any one of these issues would elevate the others, but in its current state, Everreach feels like a dogpile of bad decisions and insane balancing. Have the devs not paid any attention to design trends in modern titles?

So Transformers: The Game is just a complete mess, a game that succeeds in almost nothing that it sets out to do.