Poor AI, dull design, and lackluster presentation all add up to make Blade II a game that you should definitely skip.

You get only generic adventure-game puzzles that have little to do with detective work and everything to do with tricking people into helping you perform mundane tasks.

A pretty standard hack-and-slash action game that doesn't deliver on much of the stumblingly bombastic charm of its title character.

As a licensed product, it's mediocre, with enough charming moments to rescue it from the immediate bargain-basement abyss. But as a game, it's an absolute insult and more likely to put kids to sleep than it is to entertain them.

Amazing visuals have come at a price--as a gameplay experience, Shrek is pretty unsubstantial. Only the youngest of players will find its gameplay compelling in the least, and even they, by now, have become accustomed to something more.

The biggest failing of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is how familiar it feels. In fact, there have been other open-world games starring Spider-Man that walk a remarkably similar path.

A short, ugly, slightly buggy, and brain-dead beat-'em-up that all but nullifies the good work of the Budokai games.

Madden NFL Football offers up a bare-bones experience that fails to satisfy on any level.

Awkward controls and shallow gameplay make Deca Sports 2 a game to avoid.

The computer-controlled players aren't terrible, but they're just as prone to ill-advised plays as any game out there, and some of the poker variations available suffer from bizarre hand repetition, which is a baffling problem.

Castlevania's switch from 2D side-scrolling to 3D fighting is an endless stream of missteps that will frustrate even series devotees.

Ripping off every Japanese horror trick in the book doesn't make this poor attempt at survival horror any scarier.

The Legend of Korra harks back to the days of branded hogwash, when the most we could hope for was functional gameplay and total disregard for the source material. Korra looks the part on the most superficial level, but possesses not one ounce of the flair and depth that characterize the television series.

These missions are very difficult. They are puzzles with very little margin for error, and as you load one for the second, fourth, and even 10th time, you'll find frustration overshadowing a lot of the game's strengths.

You might have trouble appreciating Shadowflare's gameplay nuances, because the game's sound isn't too great and its visuals are absolutely primitive.

The expansion's scenarios, and the ideas behind them, seem tired and overused, and the expansion itself is overpriced.

The game is inadequate and tedious--22 levels of mindless button mashing that will come as a major letdown to anyone who grabs it hoping to relive any portion of the film.

It's hard to believe that the survival-horror genre can only be done right by Capcom (and perhaps Konami), but Hail to the King will do little to convince you otherwise.

Ghost Rider steals liberally from several major action games, yet somehow avoids stealing the parts that made those games fun.

A dull and clumsy racing game that will disappoint even the most forgiving Ford enthusiasts.

NFL Tour would have made a great arcade game, but as a console game, it's simply too shallow to hold your interest for long.

The novelty of the Vietnam War setting is just about all that Whirlwind Over Vietnam has going for it.

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.

Its minigame format is a well-worn one, but the inclusion of online play in Fuzion Frenzy 2 gives the game an edge.

This dull physics-based puzzle game is neither charming nor exciting, and most importantly, it isn't fun.

It's neither smart, nor frightening, nor fun. Readers are better advised to look at either the most recent "Oddworld" or "Resident Evil" titles, and leave this one for the antique collectors.

The Runabout series not only hasn't kept up with the times ("Crazy Taxi" is this type of game almost fully realized), it's lost a lot of what made it so appealing in the first place.

While much of Duke Nukem Forever is embarrassingly bad--the kind of game you point and laugh at--its biggest problem is that it's so tedious...This game takes an icon and turns him into a laughingstock. Except, no one's laughing.

The Sims 2: Pets for the DS feels limited and repetitive, and it lacks the heart that any good pet-care sim must have.

Spitfire Heroes does little to distinguish itself among a myriad of middling flight combat games on the DS.

This stand-alone Venetian expansion adds practically nothing to the gameplay of The Guild 2.

Mad Catz's lastest outing as a publisher crashes and burns with the awful flight simulator Damage Inc.: Pacific Squadron WWII.

A broken, boring, bland zombie killfest.

A disappointment from top to bottom. The soundalike song performances are sketchy, the entire gameplay and lyric display systems are deeply flawed, and the decision-making that went into the editing and censoring of the game's songs is totally scattershot.

Bust-A-Move Universe is a lot like its bubble-bursting predecessors, except it costs more and delivers less.

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

All the wonder of the Bionicle universe has been bled dry by a vapid design and an atrocious camera system.

Ultimately falls short of its potential with sluggish controls, mostly bland visuals, and a relatively low difficultly level.

Ship-to-ship combat is somewhat exciting due to some fresh options to set and trim sails, but everything else is tedious, poorly designed, or both.

This mild collection of minigames isn't worth the admission price.

Bolt's superpowers can't save anyone from a poor camera and dull gameplay.

Ultimately, co-op adds little to the overall package, which is a shame since Homefront definitely needs some help. 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.

The game utterly fails to capture the majesty and mystery of the Dune universe, turning it into an interactive Saturday morning cartoon--and a bad one at that. Toss this one to the worms.

Whether you love or hate the game's clichés and shortcomings, Ephemeral Fantasia is nothing more than average when compared with the majority of other RPGs.

This stand-alone expansion to 2004's Universal Combat adds a few new features, but it can't make up for dated production values and some dubious gameplay.

Much like Slider in the movie upon which this air combat game is based, Top Gun for the DS does, in fact, stink.

Good songs can't save this poor attempt at a rhythm party game from being a dull and repetitive experience.

A short, ugly, slightly buggy, and brain-dead beat-'em-up that all but nullifies the good work of the Budokai games.

The rudimentary design of Astonishia Story isn't surprising, given that it's a no-frills remake of a 1994 PC game. However, that doesn't excuse the very apparent lack of story, character, and depth in Astonishia Story.

A mediocre platformer, and its racing aspects just make things worse.

Had the Prototype Biohazard Bundle actually been a full upgrade, it would at least show us how far we’ve come. But given even Prototype 2’s mind-boggling technical limitations, this troubled bundle is more of a reminder that mediocrity is still not obsolete.

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.

It provides absolutely nothing that hasn't been seen and done countless times before and done better at that. Unless you're absolutely rapt with morbid curiosity about how Malice ultimately turned out, your time and money are definitely best spent elsewhere.

All of the missions in the game (even the ones that you can unlock by completing Murakumo's main mode) grow incredibly tiresome, not only because they're mostly identical but also because the mechs themselves are so poorly designed.

With nonsensical dialogue muddling the complex plot, Lux-Pain shows how an entire experience can be ruined by poor localization.

Hard Evidence offers few surprises and even fewer challenges throughout its five undemanding murder mysteries.

Despite the title, there's nothing bold about this boring, vanilla racing game.

I loved seeing LocoCycle through to its zany finale, because I enjoyed the jokes and Iris' robotic line delivery, and because I loved seeing the characters get themselves into silly situations. This would have been a great short comic film. But LocoCycle is a game, and in an unexpected twist of fate, it makes the act of catching rockets, fighting soaring robots, and rushing through the rural fields outside of Scottsburg, Indiana, blander than they deserve to be.

It's safe to say that only the most diehard of Gundam fans could possibly find anything at all to like about this game.

A brief and generic action game that does nothing to distinguish itself from the glut of similar--and cheaper--games on the market.

Questionable design decisions, terrible implementation, and the apparent lack of faith in a project doomed long before its completion make for a game that is more frustration than fun.

If you don't already have an established love for Takara's customizable line of toy cars, you'll find that ChoroQ has little in the way of redeeming qualities.

The squad premise of the game serves only to throw a few meaningless options into an otherwise thin game.

Even though Those Who Remain may awash you in good old-fashioned terror and ingenuity for a few brief periods, these are mostly lost in a sea of frustration and generic horror metaphors.

Valhalla Knights 3 is a far cry from being any sort of enjoyable. The setting and class system, while great in theory, are attached to a game that is ugly, grind-heavy, laughably animated, and just plain unpleasant on numerous levels.

Pteredon's seminal Vietnam War-themed first-person shooter has been thoroughly retooled by a different design team. Though a few of the changes are constructive, the new developer, Coyote, has generally made a mess of what used to be a good game.

From its bland, generic premise to its one-note gameplay, WinBack 2 does nothing that another third-person shooter hasn't already done better.

The high-flying Astro Boy stays firmly planted on the ground in this unimaginative adaptation of the film.

And that's Colonial Marines' biggest problem: enemies come, and you shoot them down easily, again and again. The game is remarkably light on variety. A couple of battles masquerade as boss fights, but they require no strategy and are just as easy and thrill-less as the rest. The four- to five-hour campaign has no thrust to it; it feels the same from beginning to end, and the finale just drops with a thud. And by being so easy and predictable, the game lets down the license.

FlingSmash's reliance on a very basic, flawed control scheme saps most of the fun from all of your flinging and smashing.

The racing is boring and way too easy, the physics are bouncy and unrealistic, the rubber-band artificial intelligence is ridiculous, and you can easily beat every race in the game in a couple hours.

Regardless of the validity of the license, D.I.C.E. the game is a dull, repetitive, and often frustrating experience that should be avoided.

Disappointingly presented and blandly written, TRL Trivia is a poor substitute for ("You Don't Know) Jack" and not exactly a ton of fun in its own right.

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.

This frustrating, broken mess is one of the worst strategy games in years.

A sense of murky monotony sucks most of the life out of this action RPG remake of Sega's classic arcade shooter.

Thanks to the inexplicable inclusion of timed exploration tasks in between the racing levels, Carmageddon 3 is exactly one half fun and one half frustration.

This may please whatever contingency there is of fans who still keep up with Bandai's answer to Pokémon, but for everyone else this is just a slapdash action RPG that seems more intent on punishing players with clumsy, tedious gameplay than actually engaging, or maybe even entertaining, them.

A train wreck of a game that has no direction, no technical merit, and little appeal except as a game design house of horrors and a showcase for some good music by Stewart Copeland.

Tedious gameplay, a plot that veers between goofy and incomprehensible, and an alphabet soup of grammatical errors render Paradise Cracked almost unplayable, let alone enjoyable.

If nothing else, this game should serve as a fine example of what not to do when developing a street sports game, and if it serves this purpose well, hopefully no one will ever have to endure another urban-themed train wreck like Freestyle Street Soccer.

DBZ: Infinite World fails to live up to the standard set by previous DBZ games on the PS2.

Eragon relies entirely on tedious, unenthusiastic gameplay that's way too shallow to sustain interest for more than a few minutes.

The PS2 version of this military shooter addresses some of the issues that hampered its 2-year-old PC counterpart, but it introduces far more problems than it fixes.

It’ll be rare for you to want to save any of the creations Supermash lets you construct, which is indicative of how shallow and unsatisfying they all are at their core. In a bid to try and do so many things right, Supermash forgets the fundamentals of all the genres it tries to encompass, while also overreaching by trying to make them all work in some way together. None of Supermash’s creations feel close to replicating the joy of their inspirations, and instead serve as reminders that there are far more focused and polished attempts at each individual one that will reward your time better. There’s no doubting the imaginative idea at Supermash’s core, but it ends up choking on its ambition.

This fighting game offers some simple yet brutish fun, but poor controls and uninteresting presentation make it a struggle to get past the first few rounds.

Because of its confusing story, unappealing visuals, and counterintuitive controls, Konung ends up looking like a Diablo clone that hit the shelves four years too late. Even at the bargain-bin price of $20, it's not worth recommending Konung, because it simply isn't fun.

The gameplay doesn't do anything a thousand other identical games haven't done before, and the frustratingly repetitive level and mission designs further solidify Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a mediocre effort, at best.

If you look up the definition of the word "poor" in a dictionary, there's a good chance you'll see Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 staring back at you.

An undeveloped plot, derivative gameplay, idiotic enemies, and boring presentation.

All these guns and abilities are wasted in a game that never makes good on its potential, and what potential you glimpse is overshadowed by a careless porting job that makes you wonder why the teams responsible even bothered in the first place.

If Indy had encountered nonsense like this during one of his escapades, he'd have let the Nazis win. Secrets of Atlantis is best left in a watery grave.

SNK vs. Capcom Card Fighters DS is an often entertaining game, which makes its shoddy production and localization especially disappointing.

MLB 2K13 is a complete and utter retread with all the appeal of used chewing gum.

If you're up for a little bit of trivia with a dirty sense of humor and you have three like-minded friends, The Guy Game won't let you down.

McGrath vs. Pastrana stutters along like Gomer Pyle on amphetamines. The frame rates are so poor that the entire game has a jerky feel to it, and the overall package comes off as erratic.

Just too light on action, production quality, and overall gameplay to make it a worthwhile purchase.

Despite its earnest attempt at realism, the game's clunky, overly convoluted interface, general lack of gameplay variety, and incredibly stripped-down presentational aspects leave it dull, confusing, and generally not much fun to play.