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.