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

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.

The audacious premise is incredibly fun all the way through, and right up until just before the last few missions the gameplay more than holds up its end. It's too bad the game gets so frustratingly difficult right at the end.

This game is the epitome of the phrase ‘one-trick pony.' There's just nothing here. The hardest-core fans may want to dip in as a way to reminisce, but I'm guessing even those fans would be hard-pressed to find much value. If nothing else, I will say that the game made me want to watch the series, so that's something, I guess.

Dungeon Lords provides solid, if glitchy, Action-RPG experience.

Sadly, anything good about the game gets bogged down in the mindless, repetitive blasting.

Graphics aside, battling with the Unlimited Saga system is clunky and completely unintuitive. The battle engine features an insane potluck of disparate elements, almost as if Square-Enix took all of the purged leftovers from ten or fifteen other games and smashed the scraps together to create the unholy videogame sausage that it is.

Guru players posting how-to videos on YouTube might not get a lot of it, but those craving a fighter that doesn't require slavish dedication will find Tournament of Legends to be a very welcome offering, and one that comes at a budget price, to boot.

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.

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.

I am thoroughly disappointed with She Sees Red. It’s an irrelevant, irritating adventure that is unlikely to please even serious fans of the FMV genre.

Although several of its elements still need some work, I like what Project Root is trying to do overall, and I appreciated the effort to blend non-traditional elements into the shmup genre. There's a lot of potential for the free-roaming shooting, leveling-up, and dual-layer combat, but none of it is quite there yet.

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.

Coming from seasoned developers who’ve turned out great games like Just Cause and Mad Max, the quality of this brand-new IP is incredibly disappointing. I hope that it continues to be patched and improved, because the current state of affairs can’t possibly showcase the vision Avalanche must have originally intended.

If Hyperdimension Neptunia's take on the JRPG doesn't break any new ground, it's certainly a step in the right direction for the developers. More accessible than Trinity: Universe while maintaining and expanding on that game's witty style, HDN is another perfect title for anyone looking for an easy entry to the genre, or really anyone who appreciates some laugh-out-loud comedy with their RPGing.

Why an emphasis on replay value? Ugly, boring and stupid, NightCry isn't even entertaining on the first go. Being told that I had to repeat a major chunk of the story for the fifth time, particularly after two crashes, was where I had to draw the line. It's rare for me to review a game without finishing, but no matter what's past that damn island, I couldn't see it changing the fact that NightCry is the worst game I've played in years.

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.

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?

It's not going to be winning any awards, but it's an entertaining gameplay experience packaged alongside a virtual vault of nostalgia, and worth at least a glance for fans of the genre or the characters.

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.

Overall, I can respect the publisher for releasing a straightforward and no-nonsense port of Glover, as fans and purists will probably enjoy having the original experience preserved on modern consoles. Personally, I would have preferred some slight concessions be made to the gameplay in order to be more accessible. Regardless, I’m sure fans of the original and of obscure retro titles will enjoy seeing this four-fingered hero back in the limelight.

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.

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.

Bombshell is a failure in every meaningful way, and feels like a barely-functional Alpha build rather than the finished product it's supposed to be.

More than anything, Devil's Third feels like a last-ditch salvage job that scrapes together what could be rescued from previous builds, slaps it all together, and then shoves it out the door. That said, as rough as Devil's Third can be in many ways, I've had an absolute blast with it most matches.

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.

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?

A port of a six-year-old PS2 title might not fit the profile of a platform defining title, and it might be more than a little ironic, but the fact that the game manages to accomplish this so far out from its initial release is a testament to its quality.