It is a massive shame to feel like I can’t enthusiastically endorse Wartile — it has a winning visual style and the seed of a novel idea, but that seed doesn’t bear a fully-formed fruit.

As appropriate as it would be to knock Tsushima for being the same sort of boilerplate open-worlder that Ubisoft tosses out every few months, the truth is that I still got some entertainment out of roaming the pretty landscape and engaging in repetitive tasks at my own pace. That said, every time Tsushima subjected me to its dreadful story and the tedious critical path missions, my patience wore thin. Ghost of Tsushima is positioned as PlayStation 4’s last hurrah, and while it’s an underwhelming note to end on, perhaps a game that pushes technological boundaries while taking zero creative risks is a fitting bookend for this generation.

It’s a pity – thanks to fast action, tremendous atmosphere, and some genuinely clever weapons, Phantom Fury could be special, but it winds up as frustrating as it is enjoyable. At this point it’s a tough one to recommend, but I’m hoping that it can be salvaged with some patching and rebalancing in the coming months.

Perhaps all of the limp comedy wouldn't be so offensive if the game did anything new in the gameplay department.

Even if it had made serious strides over Far Cry 3, even if the gameplay held true to the series's core, even if its story weren't junk, even if it had been put together perfectly, I would still find Far Cry 4 annoying as hell. It's not just that Ubisoft can't execute; it seems like they can't design anymore. To compensate, they've just slapped whatever crap they can onto an open world in the desperate hope that large portions will make up for the flavorlessness of the meal. Instead, I got sick of chewing, and longed for the days when Far Cry just shut up and let me shoot some guns.

If the online multiplayer had modern social features and an engaging story worthy of the IP, Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown would be as essential as other recent entries in the series. Unfortunately, the fundamental issues leave it hard to recommend. In lieu, I'd suggest replaying Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall instead.

Despite all these issues, Dead Space 3 isn't a bad game—but it's not a particularly good one, either. The focus on co-op, attempts to ditch the horror elements in favor of more mainstream sci-fi shooter aesthetics, and the disjointed, repetitive feeling of the project as a whole prevent it from ever becoming something that pops.

Although I can genuinely say that I have great affection for the Disgaea characters and I had a blast going through the game once, the drive to unlock every ending evaporated almost immediately. Watching a game made of cut-scenes isn't bad if they make you laugh and bring a smile to your face, but watching the same scenes over and over and over and over and over because you can't figure out how to get to the new ones isn't an appealing proposition.

Heck, if this game had been released in 1996, it would have been a classic. But it was about eight years too late, and ends up only being good enough not to be a complete wash up.

When reduced to a puzzle to be solved rather than a world to be experienced, the emotional impact of Gods Will Be Watching evaporates, leaving the sense that it wasn't interesting enough to justify the amount of work that went into making or playing it.

There are glimmers of clever moments caught in a sea of busywork here, but take away the shoddy controls and the obsession with layered math problems, and what are we left with? Someone’s absurdist thriller mystery that is so esoteric that it’s hard to care. Honestly, I can’t recommend Lorelei and the Laser Eyes to anyone other than the most patient and experimentally inclined players in the world. For everyone else, heed my words of warning — sit this one out.

It's more fun than "State Of Emergency" (but then, what isn't?) and more interesting than "Hunter: The Reckoning" (if only because Ash is a more identifiable character than anyone featured in that game), but most gamers will have to ask themselves if that actually means anything since neither of those games were classics to begin with.

Although it's accurate to say that Prototype 2 is "an improvement" over the original, that's not the same as saying that it's a great game, or that it's even on-par with the kinds of things hitting shelves these days.

As the central deficiencies (car physics, handling, lack of challenge) also become more and more prominent with each race, most players will simply tire of its blandness, and decide to save the time Namco wants them to spend tuning their cars for an altogether better racing game.

This type of design is an infuriating and transparent attempt to pad out the length of the game by making simple quests take longer to complete. Worse still, the occasional need to fire off a spell or two is entirely governed by Akko’s magical potion supply, which can only be replenished by spending money earned by repetitively grinding dungeon battles. It breaks my heart that Little Witch Academia: The Chamber of Time turned out the way it did, because the aesthetic success is undeniable, as is APlus’ attempt to design something that functions on a deeper level than just delivering fanservice.

Although it acts as a wonderful selling point for anyone considering developing an FPS for the Wii, Red Steel is too much of an unsatisfying tease to succeed as much else.

There’s not much within the game that is poorly done, or even downright bad, but the problem is Nefarious tries to do too much, and in that attempt, ends up doing none of it exceptionally well.

While Cold War is a part of a series I would have said that I loved, I can’t fully embrace it now knowing that this work is trucking in harmful stereotypes via patriotic-tinged gameplay. A decent CoD multiplayer experience will likely emerge from the currently-underwhelming Cold War, but I’m going to seriously consider whether that gameplay is worth enduring (and supporting) the rest.

With more time and attention given to the writing, characters, and quests, it could have been a very special experience. As it stands, it's a forgettable detour through Averagetown that strays from the exceptional content I've come to expect from New Vegas.

Simply put, F1 Race Stars is the kart racing equivalent of a self-help seminar, or of a powerpoint on learning real estate sales. Like those sorts of intellectual death marches, it frequently made me yawn while playing and the whole thing has a painful sense of inevitability to it-which at least draws a further comparison with the sport on which it places primary focus.

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

There’s nothing meaningful to recommend this title, and it’s easy to call it the weakest entry in the entire Kain series—an outcome that falls far short of the modern revival I had hoped for.

All Quantum Break made me want to do is invent my own time machine to go back and un-play this title, so I could reclaim the nine hours I spent on it.

Fans of ’90s-style retro-shooters might find Fashion Police Squad‘s offbeat and quirky approach to the genre to their liking, but there’s already a lot of stiff competition in the genre — it’s interesting, but flawed approach simply doesn’t measure up to the others already strutting on the catwalk.

It doesn’t really matter whether Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted is good or not — all that matters is whether the shocks it offers can startle the player. By that metric, it’s a passable success in docked mode. I won’t say the game isn’t scary, but I will say that it doesn’t have much to offer past that.

Anyone going into it expecting the bells and whistles of a "Half-Life 2" is going to be sorely disappointed. Anyone going into it expecting it to play anything like the table-top strategy game will be even more letdown.

It's not much of a rhythm game (or much of a game in general) but when taken as pure fanservice, it's pretty much everything anyone could ask for without doing an unfiltered Google search.

Overall, The Entropy Centre is a decent puzzle adventure that suffers from too much friction and an excessive runtime, and the individual issues are detrimental to the whole. A leaner package with fewer puzzles per chapter and more emphasis on the plot would have improved things – it’s a shame it’s not more compact and memorable experience.