This simplistic minigame collection is great for young kids, and no one else.

Enemy Front lands in that unfortunate middle area where its faults aren't bad enough to leave a painfully lasting negative impression, but its key moments are too generic to be memorable.

There's too much detritus to dig through in order to get to the fun bits.

Like the source material it was ported from, Armored Core: Last Raven Portable is esoteric and difficult, with limited controls that don't help matters.

While the modest selection of maps are sufficiently large and multileveled, the uninspired deathmatch and conquest modes offer nothing that you can't find in other shooters.

A deeply flawed game that fails to bring anything new to the world of golf games.

Pac-Man World Rally is a paint-by-numbers kart racer with almost zero in the way of unique qualities or challenges.

Lots of little annoyances add up to make Darkout less than than the sum of its influences, though they're not enough to ruin the entire experience.

Every system has its share of dogs, and like a painter writing off bad paintings for being "good to get them out of your system," it's good for the Xbox to get this one out of the way early.

Heroes Over Europe offers some enjoyable arcade dogfighting, but it lacks the depth and excitement needed to keep you coming back for more.

Slain is easily one of the best-looking 2D side-scrollers I’ve ever seen, but the monotonous gameplay fails to match up. The combat system is too repetitive and, in some cases, broken, making boss battles a total drag. Slain’s stunning Gothic aesthetic is wasted on an otherwise mediocre game.

Dancing All Night might have sounded like a fun idea on paper, but it simply doesn’t hold a candle to better portable rhythm games.

You're better off reading a book than playing this flawed interactive crime novel.

This dreary action role-playing game has its worthwhile moments, but they're separated by countless hours of fetch-quest tedium.

Coincidentally, much of the game's voice cast is plucked from the Youtube comedy/gaming community, which seems oddly self-fulfilling, since the game is likely to be more enjoyable watching other people comment and play rather than actually playing it. 100t Robot Golf is an elaborate, even hilarious, joke, that rather perfunctorily has a game attached to it.

There's plenty to do in Port Royale 3, but little of it is fun.

The game was never too solid to begin with--aside from its amusing track design and decent customization elements, there really isn't anything much there in regard to actual compelling gameplay.

The smooth 3D graphics are the game's lone bright spot. Otherwise, the driving is too basic, the AI is too dumb, and there are barely enough tracks and play options to occupy more than an hour of someone's time.

With its intricate leveling system and randomized dungeons, The Guided Fate Paradox succeeds in creating a game that can easily gobble up biblical amounts of time. It's simply too bad all that time spent ends up feeling like a waste when there's no great payoff for all that hard work.

While cute and colourful, the PSP version of Sony's EyePet lacks content and really isn't portable.

A turn-based role-playing game with a strange combat system, and at times it plays more like a poorly designed board game, where the rules don't make much sense but instead exist only to make you carefully scrutinize your every move.

Soltrio Solitaire is a solitaire game that costs $10. Yes, solitaire. You know, that game that comes free with every Windows PC ever made? The single-player card game that is so easy to obtain for free on the Internet that it might as well be falling out of the sky? Right. This is that, except it's on Xbox Live Arcade, and it's 10 bucks. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?

This little platformer isn't engaging, charming, or clever enough to even be worth its low asking price.

The video game version of Order of the Phoenix captures none of the magic in the Harry Potter books or films.

There's nothing inherently broken with the game, and until it fizzles out at the end the story's not bad, but the gameplay is so contrived and repetitive that it's unlikely anyone will garner much enjoyment from the game.

Crimson Dragon frustrates more than it entertains. Flying your dragon can feel good, but it's only when the game takes a rare breath and slows down that it feels right. The ability to raise dragons is mildly intriguing, but they take forever to evolve into slightly more effective warriors, making the process more of a distraction than a rewarding challenge.

Unfortunately, spotty AI isn't Homefront's only technical problem--far from it. You can find rough edges basically everywhere you look, and on all three platforms.

That some inoffensive visuals and a few fun 2D sections are the highlights of a largely 3D game is telling. Sonic Lost World desperately wants to be Mario Galaxy, but in overtly coveting the great Italian plumber, it smothers the talents of its blazing blue hedgehog.

Between its lackluster introductions and almost total lack of context for why you're doing anything in the game, Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars feels more like a particularly robust tech demo than a proper full-release.

Its substantial story campaign is impressively rich and its shooting can be tense and fun, but half-baked stealth, an unfulfilling story, and a vast menagerie of technical inadequacies drag the overall experience into disappointing mediocrity.

Crimson Gem Saga's cheery veneer quickly wears away to show a simple, uninspired role-playing game.

Silent Hunter 5 has promise, but this buggy and unstable game needs to be sent back to the drydock for some serious refitting.

I could never call it good, or imaginative, or varied. I can see through its obvious attempts to appeal to my most primitive impulses. But I can also say that Ryse succeeds in tickling your brain stem even when you know your time is better spent. I don't believe, however, that it deserves congratulations for having done it.

What The Infamy promised, The Betrayal fails to deliver due to a glacial pace, repetitive missions, and an inconsistent new power.

Saturated with control and gameplay issues, Fast Food Panic is junk food for your Wii.

The camera's viewpoint, an otherwise awkward mash-up of overhead and axonometric shots, reveals all the pixelated squalor, all the detritus and homelessness and violence that so often goes ignored by the upper crust. The RPG feels at home here, among the dregs of society, like it did back in the Midgar slums of Final Fantasy VII. The genre's old mainstays--fetching, bartering, and grinding--are much more suited to a blue collar than they are to plate armor.

Even though I wanted to love Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour, if even just to dig into the nostalgia evoked by replaying a game that absorbed a lot of my spare time in 1996, the only emotion aroused was a sense of amazement at just how far shooters have come in terms of graphics, immersion, and level design in 20 years. The Duke may forever be the king, but he's the king of 1996, and his game is so set in a particular time and place that it should probably be left there.

While Brink sits in history as a game that tripped on its path to fame, Dirty Bomb will be fortunate to be remembered at all.

It is, at best, perfectly playable, and lovely to look at and listen to. But it is also the face of mediocrity and missed opportunities. A bad game can make a case for itself. A boring one is harder to forgive.

Rush of Blood can be completed in roughly an hour and a half, and though you can unlock a few alternate paths in a couple of levels, they generally lead to more of the same--just in a different arrangement. Rush of Blood has a disturbing flavor overall, but that alone can't save what amounts to a largely predictable experience filled with straightforward action, dumb enemies, and predictable frights.

Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus is a gorgeous game, featuring an incredible art style and sound design that strengthen an already colorful world that I want to explore. But getting around in the game is regularly a chore, and Bō's floaty, dance-like movements too often lead to frustrating deaths during platforming gauntlets. The game at least shines through its combat, and the story is exciting once it does actually get going--but there's just too much in the way to fully enjoy what the game does well.

An '80s arcade classic is reinvented as a not-too-successful 3D platformer in BurgerTime: World Tour.

Be prepared to grind for several hours before the game's rhythm picks up and its diversity compels you towards the exciting closing battles that reveal Salvation Prophecy's best attributes.

The game that began as a free PC download has made its way to retail shelves with this Xbox 360 iteration, but it looks as if most of the fun was lost in transit.

Mighty No. 9 is an inoffensively average game sprung from the memories of the past, with little to show for its position in the present.

There’s no amount of visual charm or dark humor in its violent deaths that make the effort of sticking with Felix the Reaper worth it. It’s a thoroughly enticing setting and premise that is misguided by puzzle mechanics that aren’t that aren't fun to play around with, and then fail to meaningfully build on their foundations in any way after that.

Cat Cafe Manager is a perplexing game. Its design is deliberately forgiving, but in some cases to a fault. It looks and sounds joyful, but bugs related to actually building the cafe of your dreams can be frustrating. It's still a game where fans of the genre can have fun with it provided they don't mind--or especially if they prefer--something so directionless, but I find it hampers what could've been a lovely blend of cat-sitting and frappe-serving.

A few fun minigames don't make the watered-down story and tedious fetch quests tolerable.

Unless you're desperate for a new Star Wars story, you'll find nothing worthwhile in this shallow action game.

SimCity (the game) isn't the pinnacle of the series, but it's super fun. SimCity (the service) is a disaster. What you get out of the package as a whole rests solely on how many flaming hoops you're willing to jump through before arriving at your just reward.

Mass Effect 2: Arrival is a disappointing conclusion to a beloved series' second chapter

For a remake, it's not a good sign that the best part about the modern Shadow of the Beast is revisiting the game that inspired it.

A generic shooter notable only for its intense difficulty.

Thanks to Viking: Battle for Asgard's mundane and tedious gameplay, the only battle you'll wage will be a losing one against boredom.

Mass Effect 2: Arrival is a disappointing conclusion to a beloved series' second chapter.

A deeply flawed game that fails to bring anything new to the world of golf games.

This collection of classics and their updates is a frustrating mix of old-school fun and dumb design choices.

Has-Been Heroes is, at least, a great fit for the Switch. It’s the sort of game you can play while half-watching a sitcom in the background, rather than one to which you’ll want to give your full attention. By the same token, playing the game with intense focus starts to feel like a waste of time after the first few hours. It’s a demanding game that gives very little back for the time and effort it eats up. The game’s name does not lie--it’s best to let these has-beens be.

There just isn't very much to Oure beyond aimless exploring, since the battles are unsatisfying and brief and the collectables feel arbitrary. Lazily soaring through the clouds collecting orbs and finding secrets can be momentarily relaxing, but there's no compelling reason to keep exploring the clouds once you've wrapped up the Titan fights. The plot doesn't go anywhere, and the main action sequences feel like a small batch of concept proofs. Oure is the gaming equivalent of a daydream--it's pleasant and light, but it feels like a distraction rather than something worth latching on to.

Painfully short on content.

The tedium of the G.U. trilogy comes to a welcome end.

A sleek-looking game of racing and vehicular combat with an intriguing boost mechanic, but there's not much happening under the hood.

Even with improved on-court control and an online Pro-Am mode that can lead to pockets of outlandish fun, NBA Live 16 still fails to justify its existence. Its Rising Star and Dynasty modes are too underdeveloped and unvaried to remain interesting beyond the first few hours of play, and the basic dribbling, passing, and shooting tend to trip over themselves during offensive rebounds or fast breaks.

The fact remains that you have to perform a lot of legwork to understand how each boss works in respect to your abilities. There's a fine line to be crossed in a boss rush game, where hard fought battles lead to either sighs of relief or aggravated groans. Too often, Malicious Fallen earns the latter. Malicious Fallen isn’t a game that feels triumphant so much as tiring.

A counterintuitive control scheme, oddly balanced difficulty, obnoxiously repetitive combat, and a nearly useless camera in co-op mode. Eventually such problems become too numerous and too annoying to tolerate, turning what could have been a simple monster-killing romp into a scattered, clumsy mess.

This bare-bones movie tie-in is like a machine with synthetic rubber skin: it's not fooling anyone and you should stay away from it.

Unfortunately, in the end, not even the inclusion of the classic version of Battleship is enough to save this pointless game.

Burial at Sea seems a prime example of the tail wagging the dog, and the result is an adventure with fantastic sights and sounds that don't come together in a meaningful way.

The Half-Blood Prince is a lousy representation of the best-selling novel.

BioShock Infinite's floating city of Columbia was both a monument to manifest destiny and a tombstone marking the human empathy that perished when the city was born. Burial at Sea uncomfortably merges the two worlds, and diminishes Rapture's enduring legacy in doing so.

It's hard to recommend a wrestling game that doesn't contain any actual in-the-ring wrestling. EA's Backstage Assault is a novel idea, but in the end, it doesn't have enough variation to make it worthwhile.

State of Decay 2 settles into a rhythm that might be easy for you to pass some hours with, but it’s never a ride with genuine surprises, excitement or purpose. There’s promise in so many systems that it introduces, but they’re woefully underutilized to make space for repetitive activities that are nowhere near as exciting to engage with. State of Decay 2 feels like the lumbering enemies that populate its country mountains. Aimless, wandering, and just out of place.

Blandly go where no Star Trek game has gone before in this unexciting multiplayer shoot-'em-up.

For a game that needs to present information clearly and effectively, it fails to do so, and this failure has an unfortunate ripple effect on the rest of the game.

This real-time strategy game's cute visuals belie a mostly frustrating experience with poor controls.

Fails to excite on any level. It offers a decent amount of different tracks and courses, but nothing that you do on any of these courses is the least bit interesting.

Perhaps if State of Decay 2 had the kind of depth that drew you in, these technical faults would be easier to overlook. But it’s because of the lack of meaningful motivations that they stick out so predominantly.

While the initial thrill of decorating the game's big spaces is fun, I wish there was something more cohesive that tied Happy Home Designer together--a way to play with friends or an actual village that takes shape as you add more and more denizens.

Piling on enemies and tossing in the Transformers-inspired ship just clogs up what could have been a charming, if deeply predictable, space shooter.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is a disappointing return to the classic series. While its gunplay is satisfying, the moments where it shines are all too brief, stunted by cutscenes that force you to stand in place and spectate a story that rarely includes you or your character. On the other hand, the multiplayer has potential but is in need of more players and some balance tweaks. There are some incredible World War II games that are worth playing even today, but Above and Beyond falls short in far too many ways to be considered among them.

Need for Speed Payback's banal racing is only magnified by this focus on grinding. The simple, almost retro, handling model provides occasional bouts of fun, but it's never enough to escape Payback's flaws, with an unwillingness to let you partake in its most hair-raising moments, and a general drabness that seeps into every layer of the game. Fast and Furious, this is not; and that's a disappointing outcome.

Big Bash Boom's potential is clear. Despite its singular focus making it feel a little barebones when compared to other cricket titles, the shift towards arcade gameplay feels perfectly suited to the relatively flamboyant presentation of the BBL. But it's washed with bugs that affect the core of the experience, and those technical issues make it difficult to warm up to.

Sometimes, simple is better. Maintaining focus on frantic space battles that move quickly and wrap up before you have time to regret what you're playing would have made Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut more energetic and compelling.

Despite its impressive visuals and contemporary trappings, Payback's pick-up-and-play driving model harkens back to Need for Speed Underground and its Fast and the Furious-inspired street racing. Yet, unlike the series' heyday, Payback's arcade sensibilities aren't enough to save the game surrounding it from wallowing in mundanity.

By the end of it you'll realize that there's not much more to Desert Child than what you got in those opening minutes.

Speed and crazy difficulty make this Rainbow Six rip-off with a British accent immensely frustrating.

By the end of it you'll realize that there's not much more to Desert Child than what you got in those opening minutes.

This battle between invading extraterrestrials is hardly a fair fight. It's also not a very interesting one.

Blacklight: Retribution has its fun moments to balance out the frustrating ones. But with a few unpleasant quirks, some missing features, and a borderline draconian pricing model, it's hardly a must-have shooter for kicking off the new wave of current-gen gaming.

Inazuma Eleven 2 offers a new story and a couple of gameplay tweaks but is ultimately more of the same.

Blandly go where no Star Trek game has gone before in this unexciting multiplayer shoot-'em-up.

Desert Child has a wonderful sense of style, and there are moments when it clicks. When you jet across the water on your bike firing a shotgun blast that shatters several televisions in front of you, or when you first start to wrap your head around the aesthetic of Mars, the game briefly, but brightly, shines. But Desert Child doesn't quite hang together, and by the end of its very brief runtime the things that seemed exciting just an hour prior have lost most of their luster.

Inazuma Eleven 2 offers a new story and a couple of gameplay tweaks but is ultimately more of the same.

NBA 07 on the PlayStation 3 doesn't have the entertaining story mode that the PlayStation 2 version has, but it does have most of that version's flaws, and some new ones, too.

Unless you're a rabid fan who simply has to be in contact with all things Futurama, this game is playable enough to warrant a rental but little else.

The gameplay will have you shaking your head in disbelief and disgust as you encounter one badly designed puzzle, maze, or action sequence after another.

A Bomberman game without multiplayer is hardly a Bomberman game at all.

Like a one million-horsepower sucker punch to the good feelings we've all suddenly developed toward Astro Boy games, however, the second release, Sonic Team's Astro Boy: No Subtitle, turns out to pretty much stink.