Bungie has said it has come up with 10 years of content for Destiny, but I was bored at around 10 hours. The game has its moments, but it needs more. It needs adventurous thinking and risky ideas. It needs challenges that go beyond racking up headshots. It needs engagement among players to make them feel useful and important. It needs people and places within it that have more character than just pretty helmets and vistas and lens flare.

There’s a great game buried in the code of Lightning Returns, and if you’re the sort that’s willing to dig through a seemingly endless amount of mind numbing sidequests, then you might be able to find it. For me though, Lightning Returns was a draining gauntlet of fetch quests and gathering missions that occasionally allowed me to have fun with its deep combat and customization options. Unfortunately, occasional fun is not something I can recommend for a game that lasts upwards of 40 hours, especially when the rest of time spent playing feels like running errands.

Unity is still one of the weaker entries of the series. Co-op, while fun, feels half-baked; the game is ultimately meaningless in terms of the series canon because of the lack of focus on the present day story line; and many of the design decisions feel driven by the unwelcome addition of micro-transactions. Better luck next year, I guess.

A mediocre cover-based shooter combined with a mediocre turn-based tactics experience that is peppered with RPG seasoning, and the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.

The problem with the big battles of Helm’s Deep is that it’s a story we all know, and it’s possible the concept could have been stronger if Turbine had included other battles from Middle Earth’s history for variety. All too quickly, the repetition grows tiring and the appeal wears thin, and that’s true of the questing content as well.

At its heart, Space Hulk is still a classic board game highly recommended by a legion of fans and well worth playing, but this adaptation is littered with thorny little issues, from superficial graphical glitches and incorrect text on the main menu to occasional UI quirks–like incorrectly calculating the optimal movement paths for marines, forcing you to do it square-by-square, and even a few exploits involving being able to re-roll or undo actions that really shouldn’t be allowed.

Other rickety spots aside, How To Survive’s biggest issue is that it doesn’t do enough to keep you engaged across its short, repetitive campaign.

There just wasn’t enough here to warrant a standalone purchase.

With dodgy controls and a compendium of worn platforming conventions, Oozi: Earth Adventure just doesn’t pack a lot of punch. It’s by no means a terrible game or a terrible platformer, but my time with it ultimately amounted to more irritation than elation.

Ryse has the look and feel of a stellar AAA action game, and it even has the makings of a combat system that can be positively compared to the highly regarded Batman games. Unfortunately that combat system remains underdeveloped as the game goes on, and as a result, the game becomes a repetitive trudge through its brief 6 hour campaign.

A wobbly title that misses the mark on both sides — keeping the wrong things of a bygone era while failing to introduce much of anything exciting to go with a new console generation.

Ignoring the visuals, it is an inferior product in every way compared to last year’s WWE 2K14, and even WWE 13 from the year before that. WWE 2K15 ofers fewer wrestlers, match types and creative options, a weaker story mode, and the same core gameplay that, honestly, is starting to feel a little stale.

When firing on all cylinders, MWO is an enjoyable sim-shooter, but for all the overheating energy weapons in the world, the current product still feels a little half-baked.

Rush Bros is a thoroughly mediocre platformer. The best reason to purchase it is, in fact, the soundtrack, which is probably worth the price of admission. If you buy it looking for an innovative platformer or exciting music game, you will be disappointed.

Defiance is a game that actively flaunts bad gunplay in the player’s face, has no real progression to speak of, lacks cohesion of design in both mechanics and art, and is missing the most important part of an MMO: variety.

In Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream had the tools necessary to make something great out of its quirky game design philosophy. But having the tools and using them are two different things. A game like this lives and dies by its story, and unfortunately for Beyond: Two Souls, the story was fatal.

There’s a fun game to be had with the right mix of these elements — ghosts, crime-solving, a troubled cop and a serial killer — but Murdered: Soul Suspect just isn’t really it.

Burial at Sea is a DLC package that trades on the fan love for Rapture and little else, with nothing new to add to that place — and what’s more, it feels a bit lazy and a bit messy. Maybe it’s time this undersea city was left buried, finally.

Monochroma is a flawed but beautiful game that has a few shining moments, but for the most part struggles with the two most important aspects of a puzzle platformer: the puzzles and the platforming.

When at its best, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is every bit as capable of scaring the pants off of horror-seeking players as its predecessor. But uneven pacing, a nonsensical story, and a general lack of danger or risk breeds a sense of detachment that by the end didn’t give me chills–it just left me cold.

It’s an atmospheric slog with some cool art direction, granted (although its anemic, somewhat confused mad science story doesn’t add much on that front). But it’s a slog nonetheless, constantly punishing the player for not reading its mind. Dying in a game isn’t scary — almost dying is. The Evil Within, however, never figures that out.

Awakened is a thin piece of DLC that really only subsists on what made Dead Space 3 good to begin with, and offers little else. It also sells you the real ending to a game you already bought, and the big cliffhanger setup for Dead Space 4, at the rate of $10 — and that kind of sucks.

Nothing feels like it matters. Freedom Cry has an interesting protagonist with an interesting perspective in an interesting time and place, and reduces it all to numbers on a sheet and repetitive tasks, all while playing it incredibly safe with gameplay or storytelling.

It does nothing particularly well – in fact, a number of mechanics are an active detriment to the experience, like food – but it also doesn’t do anything particularly poorly. The best way to describe it is tepid.

To top off a growing tower of gripes, navigation around space in Rebirth is an astounding hassle.

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.