In time, it may well become a great strategy game to stand alongside the franchise’s true classics. But for now, it’s a bloated mess, and it’s unfair for the developers and publishers to take everyone’s money and then give them a game that has so many obvious problems. Maybe Creative Assembly and SEGA will learn a lesson. Maybe Total War fans will. Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic.

There’s just no reason to play Deus Ex: The Fall, even for big-time Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Human Revolution fans. You can get the same experience out of reading a Wiki entry online. Better yet, if you must play the game, grab it on a mobile device, where it will actually work.

What’s most shocking is that it’s also a complete failure when it comes to basic game design. The gunplay is unconvincing, weightless, and repetitive. AI allies are literally bulletproof; AI enemies engage in a litany of truly bizarre behavior. Thanks to a long development cycle, the game arrives feeling and looking dated, offering ugly animations, textures, and cutscenes, cover-shooting with no cover, and lifeless, obsolete character models.

Updating an old game is always something of a balancing act as developers work to maintain what made the original game great, while bringing it up to speed with modern conventions. Unfortunately, Flashback HD fails on both accounts.

Not content with being the most mediocre and generic shooter I’ve played all year, Alien Rage makes its way into terrible territory. Countless bugs and a brutally unnecessary difficulty curve help artificially lengthen the game’s four hour campaign, while simultaneously ruining any chance that Alien Rage had to be enjoyable.

A strange thing happens when you review a game as bad as DARK. You get really, really good at it. So desperate was I to be done, to not think about it again, to not deal with the save system, that by the end I fashioned myself into a kind of DARK savant, flitting around levels with as much ease as the game would permit and a certain kind of Dark Souls-powered, no-room-for-error concentration. So far that reason, I’m sort of glad I played it. And for one other reason: so I can tell everyone else to never, ever play DARK.

Just like the island of Montague’s Mount is empty, so too is this game. There’s no substance — just darkness, rain, and the airy affectation of what “emotional” games should be like. But emotions are more than sad-looking photos, plodding pace, quiet narration and soft violin music. In Montague’s Mount, just like that ethereal mountain, emotion is decidedly absent. All that’s left is boredom.