With multiple endings, several unlockables, and a nice difficulty curve it's an enjoyable play. What frustrates me about Neo Contra is that it could have been another "Gunstar Heroes" had it taken the quality of its humor more seriously.

After completing the campaign, Outlast 2 boiled down to being too repetitive and maddening — it’s a horrific, beautiful disappointment. I can’t help but wish the game was half its length and set entirely in environments filled with the creepy corridors, ghostly apparitions, murderous priests, gory suicides and the demons that it does so well. Those moments are when Outlast 2 is at its very best. Instead, the fear was drained by constant deaths, sequences that are more frustrating than they should be, and an abysmal checkpoint system that only highlights how bad the rest is. Outlast 2 looks amazing and sounds amazing, but the gameplay that would make this dark gem shine just isn’t here.

There's nothing deeply wrong with The Last Tinker: City of Colors. It's playable, and in places quite enjoyable, but it's so pedestrian in its approach that it's a disappointment.

With so many puzzlers available online, why should I pay $20 for something I can get for free? To turn a profit in this day and age, a puzzle game needs to be divine-and Zooo, unfortunately, is just a diversion.

Liberation HD won't change anyone's mind about the Assassin's Creed series. It clings closely to the style of the series' earlier entries, but feels cramped even in comparison to those games.

As a singleplayer title, it seems to offer a wealth of content — the stories have a quirky kind of charm and each scenario has four possible outcomes, with a total of over twenty endings possible. Of course, playing with rivals adds a replay value of its own, but after a little time spent with it, I came away feeling that Monster Prom is only functional at best — despite the wealth of options, the scenarios become predictable and tired quickly. Even so, a group of friends turns it into a delightfully messy romp of the kind that my younger self would have loved, minus the cocaine.

Big fans of professional soccer or management sims may find more to like in Nutmeg! than I did, but as for me, I’m putting in my resignation from the team.

Five years from now, I’m not sure how much I’ll remember about The Adventure Pals. The quirky main characters will probably come to mind, but not much else. Platorming fans won’t go wrong checking it out, but it’s solidly in the middle of the spectrum — not great, not awful — and as such, it’s smack-dab in the middle of that good category that vanishes from memory.

Need for Speed: The Run was designed to raise the bar for the racing genre, but while setting up the supports, the game must have slipped and wound up with the bar clonking it on the head. While there's great fun to be had in online competition, everything that was supposed to be different and special about The Run is flat-out garbage.

At least the petty indignities of the multiplayer are optional and situated around gameplay that's solid and unique, if frustratingly stagnant. In the single-player campaign, however, it's impossible to escape the ham-fisted manipulations of the Assassin's Creed III development team.

Citizens of Earth may entertain for a while, but I doubt it'll have any real lasting appeal.

After finishing the game, I can say that The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was not what I expected. I thought it would be a good (but not great) practitioner of the Zelda formula hampered by unnecessary motion controls, much like Twilight Princess was. Instead, I got a game that's cripplingly hamstrung by its controls and even falters when presenting the basic Zelda recipe.

I was disappointed that The Great Escape opted for a more conventional action-game route rather than challenging the player through a sim-like game of socially-based puzzle solving. But it's still a game that is varied and sophisticated enough to be fleetingly fun and worthwhile for any fan of the film.

No matter how many games I played, I regularly gave up shallow bloop and in-the-gap inside-the-park homers because I couldn't gel with the computer's logic of who should be fielding the ball.

I didn't love it as a survival experience—maybe I couldn't have—but I enjoyed The Flame in the Flood as a tour of a drowning America.

Just how much replay value is in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 will probably depend on how much a player enjoys the Olympics. There’s not much the game does poorly, but there’s not much that really stands out, either. Mario & Sonic 2020 is good enough to qualify, but it won’t be bringing home more than a bronze.

That being said, the game still does have its issues-and some of those issues do really mar the experience. The foundation of a solid current gen SSX game is lurking right beneath the surface of this title-let's hope EA unearths it for the potential sequel.

Episode 1 is strictly for the fans. Anyone hoping that this expansion would explore some new gameplay elements or even improve on the old ones is up for a disappointment. It's good stuff—hey, it's Half-Life!—but it's the same stuff.

Neither the storyline nor the final puzzles delivered the type of reward I enjoyed with similar titles. For fans of the genre there’s plenty of challenge to be had, but those seeking something that compares a little less directly to Portal should probably hold off.

Ultimately, Slime Rancher 2 is a strange beast. On paper it has everything the original does, and more. More slimes, more unlocks and more imaginative environments. Sadly, the frustrations overshadowed many of those positives for me, as many of the new additions actively work against the tone of the experience. Quicker access to fast travel or unlimited stamina would go a long way to easing these complaints, and make me feel less like my time was being wasted. I’ve been rather negative on its latter sections, but for those who enjoyed the original Slime Rancher, it manages to hit many of the same pleasant notes — but maybe have a guide handy to minimize the travel and grinding.

In the end, I still enjoyed it enough to put in more than fifty hours in and still want to play more, despite all its problems. When it’s running as intended, it’s clear that this is the kind of game I’d like to see a lot more of — bloody, unpretentious, and gameplay-focused in a manner that’s eminently replayable thanks to strong core combat. That said, the good stuff in Wanted: Dead is buried under a mountain of problems — and when I say buried, I mean buried deep.

No matter how salacious things may get, Reflexions never loses sight of the sweetness at the game’s core – fundamentally, this is a game about a girl attempting to overcome her shyness and tell a boy how she feels about him. While I’ll be happy to get back to battling demons and ninjas when the next full entry in the series is released, I won’t say that this is a waste of the franchise or a disrespectful use of its main character – just the opposite, in fact.

Maybe it’s a slow burn and I need more time with it, but Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is so unrelenting in its first act, it left me hanging my head in defeat. It’s a title with a lot of potential, but ultimately, the punishing, repetitive foundation it sits on isn’t enough for me to support continued playthroughs.

Effie is a short, enjoyable 3D platformer that needs more polish on the combat. That said, it’s a kid-friendly alternative to pick up and enjoy for those who’ve already been through the others in the genre.

Cozy Grove‘s time-gated content slowed the pace of play too much for me. I love the art style and bringing color back to the island, but when each session’s content ends up being exhausted after 30 minutes or less, it was too easy to forget the whole thing and divert my attention elsewhere. I do look forward to learning more about the spirits, I just wish it wasn’t so slow!

As this is my first foray into videogame taxi driving apart from Crazy Taxi, I can only guess how it might stack up against others in the same vein. However, what I can say is that I suspect it will scratch the itch of most simulation gaming enthusiasts, and I found it worth the time and effort needed to build my taxi empire — just be prepared for something clearly on the simulation side of things, with no arcade-style action here.

Overall, I enjoyed the concept of Osman more than the execution. There’s a decent action title here, but the steep difficulty and lack of bells and whistles make it a tough sell.

Earthblood does just what it’s supposed to — the developers have done a great job of making a ‘play it your way’ action-RPG that lives up to the player’s werewolf-associated expectations. It lacks any extra spark to make it feel essential, though — sneaking and brutalizing my way through the levels was enjoyable enough, but I wasn’t at all interested in why I was doing it.