If it wasn't for the load times, I would be far more likely to recommend Deadliest Warrior: Ancient Combat to anyone that liked the television show and wanted a cheap game that called back to Bushido Blade. The gameplay has merit and there's a good selection of weapons to unlock, but I wouldn't want anyone to suffer through thirty second loadtimes for those occasional flashes of depth.

Receiver has a neat idea at its core, but that didn't translate into an interesting game.

Those expecting a God of War type experience within Asura's Wrath are bound to be disappointed. Hell, those expecting a game are likely to feel some letdown because the bulk of Asura's Wrath is spent watching things instead of doing them. Hardcore anime fans will probably find something worthwhile here, but those looking for a solid action brawler would be well-advised to keep searching.

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.

Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel lacks vibrancy, the animations lack imagination, and the characters are a bunch of bores. Not having played any other games in the series, I can’t say whether this series is suffering from sequelitis exhaustion, but this installment just lacks so much. It’s an excruciating play that I cannot recommend.

For a game that could have been that potential leap forward, it's a real shame that all Apex manages to do is present a mediocre-to-poor driving experience in a painfully threadbare setting.

It leaves out the most crucial element: a compelling story. The story is predictable and unimaginative and little is done to move the story forward any faster than at a snail's pace.

Even three months and numerous patches after release, it’s clear that this project is nowhere near complete.Worse, the developers are clearly prioritizing the more successful PC version over this compromised port job. Console-owning fans of the survival genre may find something to enjoy in 7 Days To Die, but my advice is to steer clear all the same.

As a dungeon crawler, Strange Journey is abominable. As an SMT, it's unforgivable.

As the subject of this review so deftly proves, a whipped-together concept by itself is not enough. I may spend a few minutes flipping through Lowrider magazine the next time I'm at the newsstand, but I'm not going to be spending any more time on the game.

It's a bad game that needs to be reviewed so other gamers out there can avoid being sucked into the whirlpool of uninspired gameplay, bland graphics, and generalized mediocrity that colors the entirety of the title.

Time and Eternity's veneer is gorgeous, but style doesn't trump substance—and the substance here leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Toki and Towa may love Zach the Alleged Protagonist, but I sure don't.

Mable and the Wood isn’t a big game, but a person could spend a few hours on it and walk away feeling like they’d spent fifty. Drab, ugly, and at turns borderline unplayable, Mable demonstrates how quickly a good idea can become a bad one when it’s so thoroughly misapplied.

Gamers will play Van Helsing because it scratches the itch for this type of action adequately at this price, but the repetitive action, awkward controls, poor graphics and strange tower defense levels make it feel like an unfinished title. Despite being a cheap (or free, on Xbox One) diversion, Van Helsing is a bad value, and a worse investment of players' time.

I have no idea how something this bad came from team capable of creating something so good, but the magnitude with which Drakengard 3 fails is impressive.

What bothers me the most about the gameplay in Bear With Me is the overall lack of direction — it just didn’t feel like there was any reason to play. The script evolves into a predictable cartoonish melodrama and the case basically solves itself without challenging the player to come up with their own theories along the way. There’s no morally grey culprit or alternative outcomes. There’s only one way to play through Bear and unfortunately, it’s not one that kept my attention.

LEGO Worlds is a disappointing and frustrating mess. The idea of an open-world Minecraft-like title is brilliant, and maybe with a few patches and improvements it might live up to that promise. But right now? LEGO Worlds feels like it was rushed to consoles and performs at an unacceptable level. Kids might enjoy it in short bursts, but I’d recommend waiting to see if improvements are implemented in the coming months. Until then, go buy some real LEGO bricks instead.

With not much of value in the narrative or the gameplay, Forgotten Fields’ merits are some pretty virtual environments and an original soundtrack that often takes the spotlight. There are ways in which Forgotten Fields could have worked as an emotionally powerful experience, but these avenues go under-explored and the result is something that I can’t recommend, even to enthusiasts of this particular genre-transcending premise.

I see no reason to purchase and play a mediocre amalgamation with no exceptional qualities to recommend it, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised because nearly every game employing dragons as anything but enemies ends up stinking.

I know that the company gets a lot of flak for rehashing its material, but if Star Fox Zero is Nintendo’s idea of innovating an established franchise, I hope that this is their final attempt to prove that motion control wasn’t just a fad.

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.

There are times when it looks like there’s a much better game trying to claw its way free from the technical and design issues that plague it, but they’re only fleeting glances at what could have been before it gets overwhelmed by the muck dragging it down. Fans of the books it’s based on might get some worth out of The Dwarves, but when compared to pretty much any other half-decent RPG on the market, it comes up short in almost every possible way.

South Park: Snow Day! features some interesting mechanics that change up the drudgery of its mediocre combat, but it ultimately feels too shallow and underdeveloped. The short length doesn’t allow much room for the content to grow or develop, either. In the end, I think this is one snow day I’d rather stay inside for.

Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back is a mess. Bad controls, uninspired enemy and level design, and a total lack of motivation to keep playing. I want to find something nice to say about it, but even the three boss fights are tedious, confusing slogs. The game ends with a promise that Bubsy will return in another installment, but it feels more like a threat.

The Silver Case is a dud, through and through. With neither story nor gameplay to grab its audience, and with production values that never manage to impress, all players are left with is an impenetrable plot which takes too long to unfold. It’s possible this would have worked better as an actual novel – as a visual novel, there’s nothing here to recommend.

The weak plot, thin characters and lackadaisical approach to combat added up to a final product that was inconsequential best and a disrespectful waste of my time at worst. I can’t recommend it to JRPG fans, people who want more VR experiences, or really, to anyone at all.

Wheelspin is slightly improved in multiplayer, but that requires having at least one enthusiastic person with a good sense of humor in the same room. Even so, this title is short on features, short on consistent gameplay and short on charm. Wheelspin Frenzy should be avoided.

Blood Knights is representative of the terrible trend in game design where its devs have taken what might have been a mediocre-but-serviceable brawler and packed it full of systems that do nothing for the player but push them further away from the action.

I was hoping that Daymare: 1998‘s intentionally schlocky feel and cheesy voice acting it would result in an enjoyably old-school experience that Capcom’s re-releases don’t quite nail, but the technical issues, dull action and lack of fresh ideas mean it’s never more than a pale imitation of the real thing.

Element Space is a fusion of two good ideas, utterly debilitated by poor pacing, an awful interface, game-breaking bugs, a brutal difficulty level, and mystifying metagame. Avoid it at all costs.

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.

When compared to all the love the Turtles have been receiving lately, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants feels like a big step backward. The gameplay is dull and offers little variation, the prevalence of screen-clears highlight the poor combat design, and there’s no real replayability or any rewards to encourage players to come back. Wrath? It’s more like a whimper.

The spinning intensity of "FreQuency" and the glowing, surreal world of "Rez" are perfect examples of the synergy that can be achieved by blending traditional videogames with the energy and visceral response music can command. Arika's effort seems to want to carve itself a similar sort of alternative niche, but possesses only a fraction of the gameplay required for relevance. As a result, it fails vapidly.

Out of all of the nearly-forgotten games to bring forward into the 2020s, I’m not sure why Limited Run chose Gex — it’s such an absurdist concept that I have to laugh at it now, but while playing Gex in the moment, I despised it.

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

WarTech: Senko no Ronde is a trite piece of airy piffle with nothing meaty to recommend it.

There were interesting ideas-and a very pretty opening video-but everything about Solatorobo felt…flat.

The cover shooter genre has plenty of untapped potential. Vanquish hinted at this by kicking up the pace a few (hundred) notches, but Mindjack is perhaps the first to actively introduce truly new kinds of gameplay, and I had my fingers crossed for its success. Unfortunately, the finished product is about as botched as a game can get.

I wish that the developers had put more effort and creativity into this setup. It seems designed to be streamed since it’s much funnier to watch than it is to play, and most of the playtime consists of waiting for the hero to get up or to simply turn in the desired direction. It took me about 80 minutes to finish Drunken Fist, but it stopped being enjoyable after the first ten.

The characters are not only woefully generic, but poorly drawn and animated.

This minor disaster is a huge step down for the developers, Rebellion, after their fun-but-flawed Sniper Elite, and the "people-would-acknowledge-as-better-than-Gears-of-War-had-anyone-actually-played-it" Rogue Trooper.

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.

Zoids Assault, while not a complete disaster, is something altogether worse. It's completely unnecessary.

While I enjoy a good matching title, Puzzle & Dragons GOLD makes too many missteps, and I can’t recommend this version over the more robust, more entertaining mobile iteration.

I’m sure there are those who will enjoy the atmosphere, cute art style, and the fail-and-repeat mechanics that Hungry Baby: Party Treats has to offer. Perhaps sharing this dish with friends does give the game more life, but I’ve had my fill of frustration.

In light of this incomplete content, the fact that it’s being be sold without this information up front feels disingenuous, and prevents me from being able to recommend it to anyone. Dead Synchronicity is dead on arrival.

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.

However, I don't really think Tycoon really wants to be more than ‘a glimpse' at video game production, and any attempt to comment on the industry from this dull, monotonous experience fails to hit its mark.

The lack of meaningful puzzles and memorable characters make it pale in comparison to her Sierra adventures, and when put next to Telltale or Daedalic's offerings, it comes off as even more outdated.

Games as an art form are ready for that next big step, I think. We're ready for that true war game that explores all of a conflict's facets and ramifications, but for now we're stuck with drivel like Homefront that's still about Buff McRockHard fighting evil foreigners. Homefront is the most insidious kind of bad game-it's the kind that masquerades as something more special.

Ultimately, I can’t imagine who this game was for. If it was directed at children I could understand the level of difficulty, but the thin content and basic systems will hardly appeal to seasoned players. If Salt 2 were a ship, it would give the Kraken indigestion.

With difficulty leveling, or at least the ability to save SOME of my progress, Subaeria could have been an enjoyable romp. As it stands, I’m glad to break the cycle of die, restart, rinse, repeat.

The high difficulty curve and unbalanced enemy vs player interaction in addition to all of its issues make it hard to recommend 99Vidas to even the most enthusiastic beat-’em-up fan. This title tries to stay afloat on nostalgia for old favorites in the genre, but not only does it miss the target, it makes errors that this genre learned to avoid long ago.

A miserable, frustrating, and graceless experience, I can't recommend this game to anyone but the most dedicated Samurai Shodown fans—and even those players should be well-warned to stay away

Reservoir Dogs the game takes a groundbreaking film and jams it into a formula it wasn’t meant to fit in the first place. Some heist movies don’t have heists, some stories are told out of order, and some movies aren’t meant to be games.

With shoddy production values and multiple lapses in judgment with regard to the game's overall design, BloodRayne: Betrayal feels like an amateurish, half-baked XBLI title that should be begging for a buck instead of the ready-for-prime-time XBLA title it's pretending to be. No thanks.

This is the kind of thing that should be handed out by uniformed men in mall parking lots, not sold in stores.

There’s very little to recommend BE-A Walker. The control concept just doesn’t work, and the design of the levels and encounters is abysmal. The core of its problems is due to choosing to focus on a colonial Goliath rather than an aboriginal David, but even on its own terms almost every aspect of BE-A Walker misses the mark.

Despite the problems, Freaky Awesome has potential. It’s unusual to make players rethink their combat strategy and even movement methods every few, hectic minutes, and the concepts are solid. Sadly, the depth of the procedural generation is sorely lacking and the mutation options aren’t as broad as they need to be. Overall, it feels like it’s only halfway to what its proper final state needs to be — hopefully the devs will pump some more mutagen into it and let it develop.

Poor control, graphics, level and mission design. These are flaws, and major ones at that. Where the game really fails, though, is that not for one second while I was playing it did I ever feel like I was controlling Superman. Is there anything worse that you can say about a Superman game?

A highly disappointing game, no two ways about it.

I didn’t care for Dead in Vinland. The setup’s decent, and early on I thought I’d enjoy my time spent starving, dehydrated and constantly getting attacked by murderous brigands on a desolate island. Alas, it takes an experience that could have been an acceptable eight-hour journey and stretches it out to over fifty (or more!) and becomes an absolute chore by the time players finally wrap it up.

I’m fine with the fact that Dragonborne is a throwback RPG, and in that sense it’s a lovely tribute to a classic console. What I am not fine with is the lack of meaningful combat and character-building. This title would have been barely satisfactory in 1997, and players looking for similar retro-themed experiences today have a wealth of better options.

Overall, Dead Age felt like an old-school educational computer game — something like Liberty’s Kids or Carmen Sandiego where the extent of gameplay is reading and being shown things happening, with little engagement from the player. There was no excitement or thrill to it — the presentation is dry, the gameplay is simple and repetitive, and the story goes nowhere. Send this one back to the boneyard.

I had high hopes for Zack Zero going in, but the game is too rough and unpolished to recommend it. The dodgy platforming, bland gameplay, and goofy main character are huge detriments to the experience, and the ridiculous ending is like one final slap in the face before gamers go about their life.

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.

So, is M.E.A.T. a terrible game, or is it exactly the game the developers want it be? Is its frustrating gameplay a way of telling the player that they don’t belong on the frontier, and that everything wants to kill them because the white man’s presence in the West is anathema? If that was the developers’ intention, I applaud the bold decision to deliver a repellent experience in order to make a historical point. However, even if this is all by design, it doesn’t make the game any more playable, nor can I find any reason to recommend this agonizing gameplay.

It takes a special kind of ineptitude to make a game about giant monsters incredibly boring, but Natsume Atari has managed to do a world-class job of it.

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.

The final nail in the coffin was that the in-app store offers instant level-ups and level skips to help you "speed up" the game. I frown on this kind of stuff, and between this and the low production values, it was hard to shake the feeling that this title is perilously close to being just a money-sink in disguise.

Something like Infernal: Hell's Vengeance might have gained a minor following during the last generation (and that's a big might have) but it simply doesn't have any place in today's environment. It's technically weak and showcases no forward-thinking in terms of design, and the conceptual side is just as stale.

Almost nothing in Fable Heroes seems well-designed or carefully thought out. Its incoherent visual design is wrapped around a poorly-tuned beat 'em up with an obfuscated progression system, spiced with lousy mini-games. The total absence of story or even silly dialogue is likely to put off fans of the flagship Fable games, and without that draw it's difficult to see why anyone would bother. One or two interesting ideas poke through, but Fable Heroes is a failure.

A Knight’s Quest opens with a masterful sequence as its hero leaps across crumbling pillars, wallruns over pits, and slashes the occasional beast. It’s tight, focused, and incredibly entertaining, and if the rest of the experience had felt anything at all like that, I would have loved it. Instead, the minute players get out of the first dungeon, the developers’ assumptions of intuition and inability to design a playable open world absolutely ruins everything. With a map and markers, A Knight’s Quest would be a little rough, but charming. In its current state? It’s a borderline-unplayable mess.

At its core, Zombie City Defense 2 is just fundamentally wrongheaded. If the developers had wanted to make either an RTS or Tower Defense game with the concept, I might have found something of value. By trying to do both, they’re left with nothing.

It's just not fun yet. Sure, playing against people is a mild diversion, and it has a small amount of nostalgic appeal, but if they want to come up with something that's sold entirely on the basis of the fun of destruction, destruction has to be more fun than this.

When a title shows off obvious influences one hopes that it will rise above them, but Anima: Gate of Memories isn’t fit to shine its influences’ shoes. Its fundamentals are shoddy, and its characters and narrative are a bore. Anima never executes anywhere near the level its considerable ambitions demand.

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.

In every way save the graphics, I found Muramasa: The Demon Blade to be a failure.

It’s possible that Play With Me gets fantastic further in, and the developers certainly show a thorough understanding of the SAW franchise – this is a much better implementation than the official adaptation. Still, the experience is just too user-unfriendly to be worth spending time on. There’s some hope, however – they already noticed and fixed the match issue. Perhaps future patches will address some of the other myriad problems. Until then, however, I won’t be playing with them.

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.

It is a game that utterly fails to capture any of the elements that make its source material so enduring and beloved.

I tried playing sober for the first few times, but I just couldn't get into it. It took a bottle of wine and a few shots of Southern Comfort to inspire me to play long enough to come to the conclusion I've come to with this game: Galerians: Ash feels like one bad hangover.

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.

If Treasure's name wasn't attached to this product, I seriously doubt that it would have ever found a publisher, let alone the warm reception most other review sites have given it.

I played Crimson Shroud for a total of 6.5 hours before I got frustrated and gave up because five hours of that playtime was spent fighting the same group of enemies over and over for the random drop which never appeared. Holding back rare weapons or magic items is one thing, but it's incredibly disrespectful of a player's time and a waste of a consumer's money to make forward progress reliant on pure luck.

Between NanoBreaker and "Lament of Innocence," I remain absolutely unconvinced that there is any hope for the KCET studio to develop a playable, enjoyable 3-D action game.

Anyone with a few hundred dollars and a couple of months of free time could build Gore Doctor for themselves. The only thing that it has to offer which didn’t come from the Unity store is the plot, and that’s so threadbare as to be nearly incoherent. As a sample designed to demonstrate how a variety of different assets can be assembled into a playable experience, Gore Doctor is functional. As something that people are expected to pay for and enjoy, it doesn’t clear the very low bar set to call something a real game.

Terminator Salvation is abject in its failures. I almost wish there was something I could give it credit for, but as it's impossibly short and incompetently made, there's just no reason to ever play Terminator Salvation.

If only the rest of the game had offered some fraction of this scene's inspiration, Eat Lead might have even been worth buying, rather than just taking up space in the budget bin.

It’s a crying shame. There’s clearly a game in there that I want to play, filled with cool ideas and interesting quirks, but right now I’d have to dig out the Wii version to experience it without experiencing soul-crushing frustration. If Little King’s Story is ever patched to the point where most of the port-related frustrations are gone, I’d love to give it another shot. As it stands, it’s impossible to recommend due to catastrophic technical issues.

For a game that offers nothing but brawler-style combat (along with the occasional jump across a ledge), it's simply not acceptable that the fighting itself is such a boring experience.

While I can’t excuse the frustration I felt playing through The Plane Effect, I genuinely sympathize with the developers, as I can sense what their vision was. I would argue it’s even possible to interpret their work as intentionally draining, as it metaphorically strengthens the theme. Unfortunately, it crosses a line and all I was left with was the urge to finishing the game as quickly as possible so that I could leave it behind.

Defying all expectations, BioWare managed to take one of the most memorable Western RPGs in recent history and completely destroyed everything that made it so good.

After sitting through the entire experience, I found Lollipop Chainsaw to be a failure on every level thanks to the rough, unsatisfying play and a script and characters that are the worst of what video games can be. I'm all for edgy, challenging pieces that push boundaries, but this thing isn't hip, sassy, smart or sarcastic-it's just a lot of absurd, awful nonsense with pedo-bait breasts slapped on top

While I appreciate that the team behind Mad Devils is trying to deliver a good, solid shooter, I cannot in good conscience recommend it until the bugs are worked out and the level design is tweaked.

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 can’t recall the last time a game frustrated me as much as Sundered, and it’s not because of the game’s difficulty. It’s because it’s all so pointless. Countless deaths, endless repetition, thousands of sword swipes aimed blindly at illegible clouds of monsters… all endured with nothing gained, nothing learned, nothing I can bring with me to my next challenge. Jotun is one of my favorite indie debuts of the last few years. How its developers could follow it up with something as flatly wrongheaded as Sundered is entirely beyond my comprehension.

It may have the right attitude and style for a VR shooter, but nearly everything is implemented abysmally. From its awkward controls and awful presentation to the fact that the whole experience lasts less than an hour, there’s no reason to invest time or money. There’s almost certainly a much better game lying within, but for now Grave should probably stay buried