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.

Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash is fun. I enjoyed my time with it — much more so than I did with Mario Tennis Open. It’s a step up over the last iteration in some areas, yet still it manages to be a lackluster entry in a series that seems to be sadly suffering from continual decline.

It’s hard to recommend Breach & Clear in its current state for anyone but the most devoted of tactical players or military fanboys. Maybe the upcoming modes and maps will add some variety, but as it stands now, it’s a pretty empty and shallow experience.

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.

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.

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.

It's a good-looking game with a unique style that screams Goichi Suda's name, but the gameplay is rarely rewarding. So much is working against you that you feel like the only reason you're making any progress at all is because of pure luck rather than skill.

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'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.

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.

Colonial Marines comes off as too much fan service with few (if any) ideas of its own. It provides a tired narrative with an unsatisfactory conclusion that opens more questions than it attempts to answer.

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.

ORC is defective in ways I've never seen before. To their credit, Slant 6 has invented new methods to creating a faulty game.

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.

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.

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.

Sonic Adventure 2 HD isn't terrible, it's just a relic from an unpleasant era. All of its problems are the sort of thing that plagued countless games back when Sega originally put it out, but they're also the sort of thing that people figured out how to fix in the years since.

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.

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.

While you certainly won’t hate your experience, Moebius offers nothing remarkable. You can have better adventures elsewhere.

The studio needs to keep banging away at Dangerous Golf until it can make the camera more dynamic in all situations, until it can tune the difficulty, and until it can include some more attention to detail.

Daylight is a victim of its most-touted feature. When the random generated items and enemies work, every step carries a palpable sense of dread and unease. But the immersion’s lost when the player gets caught in an enemy spawning loop with too few flares is hard to get back. The story’s climax works better on paper, and bland visuals just make maze navigation aggravating.

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.

While this globetrotting, tier-one engagement has some fun beneath its gritty fingernails, it fails as the category flag-bearer it wants to be. And that's unfortunate, because Medal of Honor innovated in its gunplay-friendly space so many years ago. Now, it stands as a bastion of blasé.

Not everything about the game is great. There are boring parts, where you’ll wonder why you’re searching for that final clue. While the West Virginia setting is beautiful, the human animations aren’t perfect, and the action is pretty slow. Critics of “walking simulator” games should stay away, especially if all you want from a game is action. If you’re a fan of Dontnod games, however, this one is worth picking up.

Dark Alliance feels like many D&D adventures: Sometimes, you gotta slog through some combat in order to learn more about the world and enjoy a good story.

It’s most compelling as a one-and-done. If you have a difficult time grasping the concept of abstract narrative in pinball, it will be a fantastic eye-opener. Taken any further than that, expecting the replay of almost every other pinball option out there, and it disappoints.

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.