As much as I can gripe about its flaws, it’s hard not to grin when you’re shoving a running motorcycle wheel into a demon’s face. But this won’t become another action game classic.

Games don’t have to be fun. They can have more value than that. And I’m not saying The Witness can’t be fun, but it’s just as often frustrating.

I really do hate Spelunky. It is frustrating in a way that few console games ever are. It's audio-visual trappings don't really help the matter for me, but the sense of discovery has me intrigued to find out what happens next. That doesn't make Spelunky a good game, but I can't wait to get back to playing it.

Monster Hunter 4 has a great game full of options, activities, and a vast world to explore and immerse yourself in living somewhere deep inside of it. And it will even show you these things. But its questionable design and control decisions suck all the fun out of it and make you feel every second of your time in the untamed wild.

This lack of variety in the style of play makes every run feel samey, and they begin to blur together. That leads to a roteness that made me want to put down the game when I was struggling with the difficulty. I like challenging games, but roguelites need to walk a fine line between familiarity and routine. Familiarity is the warm embrace of something that feels like home. Routine is boredom, and it is poison for a game like this.

I think that Cyberpunk 2077 delivers the big-budget gaming thrills that many people are looking for. But it falls short in a few key areas for me, and a lot of that comes as a byproduct of its ambition.

A video game that’s stunning to behold — one that can take players to unexpected emotional places and make them eager to push through the story to see the next brilliant cinematic. And we also get an experience that’s a bit too rooted in old Japanese role-playing traditions.

Know that the single-player components of Halo: The Master Chief Collection are excellent and well worth the purchase; however, if you intend to spend months tearing through multiplayer, reliving glory days or forging new conquests in sci-fi shooter perfection, you’re going to be sorely disappointed right now.

Sometimes Civ V feels like it’s on autopilot, which isn’t the hallmark of a strategy game worth your time.

Resogun does everything it promises, and not a a bit more. It has gorgeous graphics and solid skill-based gameplay, with valuable online co-op support and just enough content to keep things interesting for a while.

I found myself mostly thrilled with Kid Icarus: Uprising right up until the very end of the ninth chapter. It's almost impressive how quickly this game goes from being a great, well-rounded experience to a total narrative disaster that drags on for far too long.

While there is a competent fighter to be had, the woeful way in which Capcom has blatantly stripped out significant chunks and promised features, or locked away vital content that already exists on the disc, all with the vile intent of having you pay for it again, makes this a hard game to recommend.

The core mission of Ring Fit Adventure is to make you forget that you’re exercising, and I think it’s only partially successful at that.

In other ways, I really can’t find an enjoyable groove in the fighting system itself, which is the most important part of the experience. I’ll admit that it’s partially my fault. I like my mind games to have certain things going on, which maybe isn’t compatible with Mortal Kombat X. But part of the blame is definitely on NetherRealm Studios, with strange system decisions and move animations that are implemented poorly.

Dust: An Elysian Tail is a pleasure to look at. The combat is deep and highly kinetic, but the rest of the game can't keep up with that energy. What's left is an inconsistent and sometimes boring product that doesn't live up to its potential.

Tropical Freeze does little to justify the Wii U’s existence, but it’s still mostly a fun, challenging platformer. Fans of the series will certainly enjoy this difficult, beautiful romp through Donkey Kong’s islands, but the game will frustrate less-enthusiastic players.

Other than some really frustrating quirks, Sneaky Sneaky is a cute and challenging game that gives you plenty of options in how to survive its obstacles. Just stop walking in front of those damned guards, Sneaky.

While the newest Cut the Rope is one of the most creative and entertaining games you’ll download on the App Store this month, you may already be bored with Om Nom and the trouble you go through to give him sweets.

Virtua Fighter 5 is a very good game, and Final Showdown makes it better in many ways…but it could have been even better than that with just a few reasonable changes.

Chaos Theory can’t escape the shadow of its superior predecessor, but that’s not to say it’s a bad experience. Once you power through the dull fetch quests and irritating Chloe Time, it manages to provide some powerful moments and the best ending of any episode so far.

Everything about Gran Turismo feels functional but a bit soulless. Lonely, even.

Global happiness just doesn't work, and I don't know if fixing this is even possible, considering that so many other gameplay systems depend on the mechanic. The A.I. still doesn't provide an adequate challenge in combat, nor does it appear to even understand the rules.

It’s weird when you feel so unenthusiastic about a game that you know is “good.” This used to be a series that I would never miss. These days, I’d probably take a long break from The Show if I could.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is not all bad, it's just very bland. For a game that was in development for roughly seven years, the different gameplay systems don't seem all that well-thought-out. And perhaps the lengthy development also explains why Amalur brings absolutely nothing fresh to the table. It simply lacks its own identity.

Modern Combat 5: Blackout is at its best when it’s not trying to replicate the FPS experience from consoles and PC. The touch screen doesn’t give you the type of responsiveness you need for a game like this. The only reason it works for the linear campaign and quick-fire Spec Ops challenges is because of player-friendly options that make up for all the sluggishness.

Vermintide gets so many things right, and its designers have made enough smart decisions about how to deviate from the Left 4 Dead, that it makes the difficulty knee-capping and technical mishaps all the more disappointing.

This is yet another Yoshi game that doesn't come close to reaching Yoshi's Island greatness.

While Zone mode is damn near worth the price of admission alone, it's time for Studio Liverpool to refresh the franchise with some big ideas or hand it over to someone who will.

Judgment just might be the game that drops Gears of War out of the triple-A tier. It is competently done and no more. The rock-solid gameplay returns intact — virtually identical, in fact — and the Declassified options bump the entertainment value up a few notches, but the epic scope and precision level designs that elevated the franchise beyond its mechanics simply aren’t here.

It’s a game that’s enjoyable in small chunks but not really for a great length of time. And after a while, I felt that I had seen as much of Wonderlands as I needed to. I think at some point even the most die-hard Borderlands fans will simply lift their hands from their keyboard/controller and say, “You know what? That’s enough Tina for the foreseeable future.”

The Wonderful 101 is a good game … at times. Once I got the hang of its combo system, the battles were nearly always exciting and challenging, but Platinum’s Wii U debut has too much filler and a busted camera.

Rock Band 4 feels like both a necessity and an afterthought.

NSMB2 begins as just another night of nostalgic anecdotes. It eventually overcomes that on the strength of its world-class gameplay and level design, but pieces of that awkwardness remain.

It has plenty to satisfy the explorer in you, but not the gamer.

The trademark Borderlands humor and Telltale story prowess are missing from Atlas Mugged, which forces players to spend the whole game preparing to do something instead of just doing it.

Nintendo Land epitomizes the minigame-compilation genre - occasional flashes of brilliance surrounded by things you just don't want to exist.

It doesn’t offer enough yet, and what content options it does have is cloaked behind a clunky menu that doesn’t permit players to hop into its varying modes. Evolve had a beautiful start, but now it’s time to add to it. We need a queue for players that want to play one round of the nest, rescue or defend modes. We need more character choices, maps and play modes.

The new game didn’t bring anything new, instead opting to jam Hiryu into a formulaic experience that looks good on a whiteboard...This is a competent platformer. But when it comes to Strider, I’m not looking for competent. I’m looking for crazy.

If you have no other recourse, then getting the iOS version of Guitar Hero Live might be for you. But even then you may want to reconsider.

As Dusk Falls is a valiant attempt to tell a good crime drama where actions have consequences. The story went on a lot longer than I expected, as the tense moments at the motel spawned a lot of different threads — both flash forwards and flashbacks — that I didn’t expect. But ultimately the tale failed to move me in the way that I had hoped for. The characters were caught in circumstances where they had nothing but bad choices, and it just made me think that the dumbest thing they did was to allow themselves to be caught in those circumstances. In that way, I don’t think the storytellers succeeded in created the empathy for characters on both sides of the events that they wanted. I would like to see more from this talented studio. But so far the story feels more like a TV show than a stellar movie, and more like a soap opera than a memorable drama.

With its bright, cartoony visuals and easy-to-grasp concepts, Awesomenauts serves as a good introduction to the MOBA genre. While it might not have the longevity of a game like League of Legends, it's sure to provide hours of entertainment for anyone with the patience to endure some initial butt-kicking.

The Enemy Within has some great action sequences, but it leans too much on the wider Batman universe as a crutch. It doesn’t put in the effort to make you care about the characters or the situations, and because of that, none of the choices feel meaningful.

Right now, it’s a rock-solid shooter with no underlying purpose … or soul. Destiny is a ship floating in space without a place to go.

Though it’s technically a 9-year-old game, it feels far older, stuck in many of the conventions other RPGs from around the world have already moved past. If you have to see how the story ends, it’s worth seeing through, but everyone else should look for something else to spend this much time with.

I'm surprised to see Sony celebrate the return of one of its few exclusive franchises with outdated visuals, watered-down content, obsolete gameplay, and a buffet of technical issues, yet that's exactly what this $60 retail package consists of, albeit with a smattering of fun to be had when things go right.

It certainly isn’t up to Pokémon’s level: while exploring is fun, combat is a passive, frustrating slog that keeps it from being as enjoyable as it should be. Perhaps younger players will find more appeal in the fighting, but in terms of being strong enough to carry a global brand, the core game of Yo-Kai Watch still needs improvement.

Somewhere in Paper Jam are trappings of a great game.

Far Cry Primal shows us that gaming still has plenty of interesting worlds to take us to. Its Stone Age setting really is its best quality. Sadly, the series’ formula is beginning to feel familiar and, frankly, a little dull. The first-person combat is tedious, and I think I’ve cleared out enough enemy camps for one lifetime.

Yes, I wish it had more levels and less town-building, but Super Mario Run manages to feel like real Mario game even with only one button. It’s great to see that Nintendo is able to do so much with such a simple idea that most iOS users can easily pick up and enjoy...I just wish there was more of it.

The patient build-up of plant defenses is almost entirely absent, and the zombies act just like competent human soldiers. Although Garden Warfare has some charm, most of it is borrowed from the original games.

I can overlook a lot because of Paper Mario's charm. I really enjoyed a lot of it in spite of it committing the terrible sin of wasting my time.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is a demo being sold as a bargain-priced game. While the Metal Gear franchise is renowned for having exceptional game teasers, the idea of selling one of them at this price is absurd. The unsatisfying, unlockable content is painfully obvious filler. Not enough moments of gameplay or narrative consequence happen in the main mission to justify a price above $10, let alone the $20-$30 range.

As cute and clever as its creatures are, the puzzles just aren't deep or interesting enough. Still, I don't dislike Bugsnax.

Chapter 1 of this five-part series is off to a promising, if timid, start. It presents a lot of ideas and mechanics just to show you what you’ll be doing later, but it’s pretty clear that the really interesting bits are yet to come.

Grow Home is a better experiment than a game.

Record Keeper isn’t offensive. It can sometimes be a little fun. But it’s not incredibly engaging.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is not a bad game. I was interested enough to stick with it and engage with as much of it as possible. If you have more patience for open-world exploration and tedious collectable-finding than I do, then you might get more out of it. I didn’t go into detail about this, but the story is decent and well-told, and that counts for something. This game is also bursting with visual flavor and interest, the kind of which you won’t find elsewhere. But the majority of the game is spent in that open-world formula. Clear fog, gather items and souls, turn in for XP and money, do sidequests and tasks for that area. It’s all in the service of filling a percentage bar, and it just gets boring after a while. No matter how pretty or interesting the surroundings were, once I got well and truly stuck in the rut, I honestly stopped noticing.

Kingdom has solid ideas that get lost in its own simplicity. It’s a little too conceptual, and I found that it had a hard time holding my attention after a few in-game days. It has a whole kingdom out there to explore, but it just isn’t varied or interesting enough to warrant the type of commitment it ask of the player.

I'm a fan of more King's Bounty, yet the magic is missing with this latest expansion. The Viking faction isn't as fun to play as other groups. The tweaks to combat, though, give players more tactical options, something any player of a strategy-RPG can appreciate.

It’s like a free game, and not an awful one. But when you judge on its own, it’s novelty quickly becomes tedious.

It’s content to give you a solid, lasting sense of satisfaction from pushing buttons in the right order and hearing some good music.

It may have its flaws, but Neverwinter is highly enjoyable and accessible to veteran, beginner, and casual players alike.

Killzone: Shadow Fall is a pretty game, gorgeous even. But the demand for moments to punctuate trailers or demos forced a sacrifice of story that it never quite recovers from. The OWL will find its place in history as one of the few controller-based mechanics to actually entertain, while the time spent in free fall may make players actually consider a plummet-related death.

Questionable game design choices and some irritating bugs just overpowered the storytelling for me.

Its levels are predictable, the puzzles are obvious, and the four-player co-op adds little besides the literal ability to have four people playing at the same time.

I had a lot of fun playing Strike Vector. It’s a good game held back by frustrating glitches and a lack of polish.

If you love Destiny, Rise of Iron gives you enough new content to keep you invested and interested Bungie’s online shooter. But for more casual players like me, you won’t find anything here to really excite you. It’s just more. It’s all at the quality you’d expect, but little of it breaks through as exciting, creative, or daring.

I wish I could say that Dead Island 2 came out a big winner after such a long development cycle. But it’s not Game of the Year material. It’s not even what I would call a great zombie game — there are many that do story or even gameplay better. But Dead Island 2 is solid. It is competent, and it is fun. If you want some uncomplicated zombie-slaying antics in a beautiful setting, Dead Island 2 will scratch that itch. But I don’t expect anyone to still be talking about it this time next year.

It succeeds most as a tribute to Marvel. Its giant roster offers a great variety of heroes. And while the gameplay is simple, it can still be satisfying with some cool cinematic moments and boss fights that I won’t spoil for you here. I think most people know what they’re going to get with this one: a simple Marvel-themed beat-’em-up game. Just don’t expect anything more than that.

Anarchy Reigns tries to be many things, but what kills it is that it is too often the one thing it never should be: boring.

Dead Rising 4 is like a digital stress ball. It can be cathartic to let loose and kill thousands of zombies whenever you want, but it doesn’t have much else going for it, even with the charming Christmas setting and a compelling multiplayer mode. If you’re a diehard Dead Rising fan, you might get more out of the story than I did. Like the characters mentioned earlier, the narrative is not very interesting and mostly served as a way to push me to different parts of the map.

When it works, Loadout hooks you in with its deep weapon-crafting system and frantic battles where everyone is trying out their own crazy creations. And to its credit, Edge of Reality has shown incredible resilience in responding to the server problems so quickly. But Loadout isn’t worth playing until it solves them.

Games have to fit into our lives, and that's not always fair. Mass Effect: Andromeda might've worked a decade ago on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but it doesn't work in a world that is delivering games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, Nier: Automata, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In this reality, BioWare's latest role-playing game is old, broken, and often boring. Worst of all, it's going to disappoint fans of the Mass Effect series.

If you’re an experienced AC player, here’s my advice: Rogue feels like a good expansion, and it’s worth seeing Shay’s role in the ongoing drama. But because it’s so similar to Black Flag, I think you’re better off waiting for a price drop.

Many people will like the repetitive challenge and the racing-styled, score-based progression. Others will enjoy playing a game from their past, reliving the sights and sounds of a revered, almost mythical console, the Saturn.

You’ll find some great ideas here, and players who prefer Diablo 2 to its sequel will certainly love Helsing’s emphasis on character customization. But the story fails to elevate the familiar action to anything special. Mechanically, this is a great action RPG, but it lacks heart.

I think any gamers who want a farming sim with less grind and hustle will enjoy Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life. It trims a lot of the fat that has become common in the genre. You’re not a warrior or a spelunker or a craftsman. You’re simply a farmer trying to live a quiet life and make your way with the resources you have. If you played the original and loved it, you’ll definitely enjoy the remake because it’s almost the same game but prettier. However, if you’re more used to modern farming sims and want one that will give you more to do on a daily basis, AWL might be too simplistic for you. There’s just not a lot happening in Forgotten Valley. Regardless of your preference, the in-game marriage being pushed within the very first chapter felt way too rushed and forced. If you were hoping to have fun, interesting characters to spend your in-game life with, you’ll again likely be disappointed.

I commend ACE Team for trying to come up with something that’s authentic and clever. But the developer only got The Deadly Tower of Monsters halfway right. The excellent premise and likeable characters outshine the streamlined gameplay.

Dawn of Titans has some strong and fun moments, and people that are willing to dump money into it may have different experiences, but it’s a busy time of year — especially for gaming — and there’s plenty of other games out there that better respect a player’s time.

What good is a fully 3D world when you can’t touch or interact with hardly anything? What sense does it make that you can’t run away from an encounter in which you’re clearly outmatched (or even move once you’re in melee rage, for that matter)?...These glaring issues, combined with a general lack of polish, make for an experience that just doesn’t live up to my fond memories of Might & Magic.

Despite the awful A.I and dull locations, this game offers an enjoyable challenge. Each mission is so finely poised that pre-planning and scouting ahead is an absolute must.

We’ve learned what the rogues are after, but at the halfway point in the series, we still don’t know why. With only two episodes left, Telltale needs to raise the stakes and ramp up the urgency of Batman’s mission.

Guardians of Middle-earth sacrifices a lot of complexity to work as a console game. Hardcore MOBA fans will disapprove of the changes, but genre newbies looking for some team-based, Tolkien-inspired fun will happily take these heroes and villains to war.

Liberation feels like an unimportant side story in a far more ambitious tale, one that you don't really need to hear. If you've never played an Assassin's Creed game before, then this is a terrible place to start.

Although it's not as funny as past Ron Gilbert games, The Cave still manages to charm through its visuals and honey-tongued narrator, but it falls flat when it comes to storytelling.

As a modern video game, a few things hold it back from being truly great, but as a nod to the days when developers created characters just to have more 'tude than that fat plumber, it's a lot of fun.

It’s sometimes frustrating and sometimes monotonous, but it also transports you to an amazing world with striking designs, a deep culture, and interesting characters.

The wax-figure-like NPCs and mostly uneventful story, however, dampen a lot of the fun. It’s possible that once both parts of the two-episode Burial at Sea series are out, the story issues will evaporate. That’s just not the case right now.

The glaucoma-inducing choice of interface and the stretching of space and gameplay time beyond the point of breaking make this a hard game to broadly recommend. This would have been one hell of a 6-hour jaunt, but at upward of 20 hours for a basic playthrough, the amount of fluff is suffocating.

This first chapter casts a dull light that’s lost in the eclipse of its big-screen brother.

Ideally, the game would have some sort of asynchronous multiplayer system that I could compete in so I could compare my performance to my friends whenever they get around to playing. The 3DS game had tournaments that worked that way, but this does not. I want to call that omission baffling, but it’s not. Nintendo did not make this game for me. And that is leaving me wondering if I’m ever going to pick it up again. I suspect that I will not even though I still liked it while I was playing it. Or, at least, I won’t pick it up again until my young kids are old enough to care about a golf video game so I have someone to play with.

I have enjoyed my time with Soul Hackers 2. I’m a fan of the SMT series dating back to when they first came to America. This game has, as we’ve discussed, all of the features of any SMT game. The overall problem isn’t that it’s a bad game — it just doesn’t do much to stand out. Is that bad? Not necessarily. The story is interesting, the characters are likeable, and the voice acting is good. If you enjoy the core game loop for the SMT games, you are getting exactly that. Just don’t expect a huge new experience with a lot of new gameplay concepts.

The career mode and realistic gameplay will gain the love of diehard UFC fans and hardcore sports gamers...However, the complicated controls and unpredictable striking mechanics will frustrate and confuse everyone else. There are also a number of bugs that need to be fixed.

Some life-long players of the franchise may not feel like Explorers has enough Final Fantasy for them. It has a lot — and lets you customize much of it along the way — but it just doesn’t have that “magic feeling” I get when playing a Final Fantasy and knowing that game’s world is at stake.

It’s a stylish game centered around an interesting moral dilemma. However, there just isn’t enough world-building to hammer the point home.

Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a decent adventure game that lets you play as the great detective. The trouble is, it wants to be more than that. It wants to be an action-adventure game with an open world. It wants Sherlock to be a fun and interesting player character, but the game makes him drag around a buddy who’s even less helpful than Watson. That said, I am curious to see where Frogwares goes from here. Mysteries, not action, make for a good Sherlock Holmes game (as should be obvious), and I want to see if Frogwares sheds the latter or chooses to double-down instead.

The lack of real instruction and clunky controls further wear down the initial charm of this spell-clinging comic adventure.

Every level offers a new challenge from the last, and for that, Tumble VR never gets boring.