An ugly collection of poorly conceived minigames, The Polar Express is a failure by the standards of any medium.

The unfortunates who decide to rent or buy this game will be stuck with nothing more than a filthy, horribly buggy port of an already middling game.

Previous budget-priced shooters didn't set our expectations for Navy SEALs very high, but the game undercuts even those standards.

The environments are no fun to get through, fights are infrequent, and the simplistic combat is unfulfilling.

Shoddy controls, buggy gameplay, and some of the worst character design we've seen this year, resulting in a game that can't even justify its $15 price tag.

The flaws in the game are topped off with some mediocre graphics, a horrible soundtrack, bad voice acting, and a ridiculous number of loading times.

Planet of the Apes has no compelling action, no puzzling adventure, and no interesting places to explore. It is gaming stripped of virtually everything that separates games from work.

Overall, it's an experience that redefines the word "bland."

This poorly designed shooter, with awkward controls and particularly shoddy sound, comes off as an embarrassing attempt to cash in on a franchise name that wore out its welcome years ago.

It's buggy, it's ill-conceived, and it's even totally unplayable on some systems in its current state. If you think Bet on Soldier is a recipe for a game worth skipping, you're exactly right.

An ugly collection of poorly conceived minigames, The Polar Express is a failure by the standards of any medium.

Anyone who doesn't already have an affinity for Yugi, Kaiba, and the rest of the gang will likely be unable to tolerate the game's shoddy graphics and its dull, shallow gameplay.

There are so many shortcuts that the handheld version of Smuggler's Run doesn't even come close to evoking the same kind of excitement as the original PS2 game.

We were able to tear through the game's 15 levels of difficulty without breaking a sweat, thanks to this infinite spinning feature.

Terrible from top to bottom, suffering from bland, derivative gameplay, simplistic level design, brain-dead AI, and a buggy graphics engine that chugs even at low resolution.

Underground Pool is a squalid representation of the game of billiards.

Plot is more of a protracted errand through drab, gray streets that are a chore to navigate.

Shadowrun Chronicles isn't just a bad Shadowrun game. It's a bad game. That it comes from a series with such an exceptional pedigree and plenty of exceptional recent successes just makes the disappointment that much more bitter.

Godzilla commits so many game design sins that they become impossible to count, but the greatest horror of them all is that such giant monsters could be so boring.

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.

Summer Athletics captures none of the passion and excitement of summer athletics.

There's little reason to make the tiresome journey down The Oregon Trail.

Unleashed is the worst thing to happen to Godzilla since getting killed by Mothra's babies.

The bland and ugly Duke Nukem Forever turns a famous gaming icon into an embarrassment.

Bad Day LA has all the subtlety of a hammer, and the occasional commentary on the absurdities of modern life is drowned out by a constant barrage of uninspired vulgarity. Even the game's shock value rings hollow, and it doesn't distract from the fact that this third-person action game is short, ugly, and sloppy.

The resource gathering is tedious, the crafting is superficial, town management is convoluted, microtransactions are practically inescapable, and the world is unwelcoming and empty. In short: The individual components aren't enjoyable, and they don't contribute to anything bigger. There is no payoff. There is no point.

Summer Athletics captures none of the passion and excitement of summer athletics.

The bottom line with Deep Raider is that you should avoid it at all costs.

Dragons and Titans is a mere shadow of other, richer MOBAs, and while its significantly shorter average game time may give it some initial appeal, that appeal comes at the cost of almost any enjoyment of the time invested.

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.

There's no way to break the curse on this staggeringly bad action game.

Buggy, broken, and entirely unoriginal, Dawn of Magic is one horrible action-oriented role-playing game.

Sword of the Stars II is a hot mess, beleaguered by crash bugs, freezes, a poor user interface, and limited tutorials.

Hoodwink may look pretty, but beneath its lustrous sheen is a short, frustrating, illogical mess that ends before it has a chance to get going.

Not only is Grotesque Tactics 2: Dungeons & Donuts light in the strategy department, but its misogynist humor is awful and insulting.

Beijing 2008 proves beyond a doubt that rapidly pushing buttons is not fun.

Somebody will no doubt someday make a good sci-fi Diablo. But The Harvest is definitely not that game. Use three hours of your life on something else.

Sure, it's a budget shooter, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it's a very bad game.

Clever comic-book trappings aren't enough to save Kung-Fu High Impact from frustrating motion controls and boring action.

The Cursed Crusade is a repetitive hack-and-slash that is marred by clumsy combat, poor dialogue, and some serious technical issues.

The Cursed Crusade is a repetitive hack-and-slash that is marred by clumsy combat, poor dialogue, and some serious technical issues.

The later platforming sequences are frustratingly difficult, the load times are excruciatingly protracted, the combat is sloppy, and sometimes the game just breaks. Jumping up walls and across crevices can be fun, but that's not nearly enough when everything else is such a chore to play.

This one-hour prelude thinks as little of you as it does its characters.

If you have cherished memories of playing The Simpsons Arcade Game, keep holding on to them and ignore this port.

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.

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.

While Toxic Grind has the standard complement of features you'd expect from an action sports game and mixes things up by including a clever back story, the actual gameplay ruins anything else the game has to offer.

Basement Crawl is buggy at worst and unfinished at best.

Gettysburg: Armored Warfare is a busted online real-time strategy/third-person shooter hybrid that falters despite its cool premise.

The Short Message is desperate to be understood and devoid of novelty, leaving no room for interpretation, no sense of lingering mystery, and no strong impression for anyone who may be playing a Silent Hill game for the first time. Its unintended short message ends up feeling unfortunately obvious: Do not download.

Who knew that samurai swordfighting could ever be so dull and annoying?

Raven Squad is 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad.

Beijing 2008 proves beyond a doubt that rapidly pushing buttons is not fun.

Its systems are either unreliable or illogical, and as a result, it feels almost impossible to get a foothold. The first time an enemy kills you when they should have been dead, you may shrug it off. When it happens the dozenth time, you'll probably wonder why you're playing Umbrella Corps at all. There's ultimately no good excuse.

All too often, though, the stages are designed in such a way that you're tricked into failing, and any technical issues stand out more than they might elsewhere because precise timing and concentration are so vital to success.

The opening portions of Winward have you falling asleep at your computer; later areas have you cursing angrily as every small victory you win is erased by the overzealous enemy AI (aided by utterly complacent allies content to watch town after town fall to pirates). The promise of exploring Windward's world as you see fit is a false one, and Windward never earns its sea legs.

If this haphazard collection of minigames was the best the developer could muster for an Apprentice game, The Donald may be due for a firing spree.

Beijing 2008 proves beyond a doubt that rapidly pushing buttons is not fun.

Raven Squad is 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad.

Rekoil suffers from game-breaking glitches that range from aggravating to completely bewildering.

Deep Black: Reloaded squanders its potential on broken cover-based shooting sequences.

This hypersexualized role-playing game degrades the console war with questionable gameplay mechanics, choppy animation, and some truly awful music.

Ridge Racer offers incredibly poor value, with a lack of compelling content to back up its competent arcade racing credentials.

Whatever merit Myst had left has been blown away by a sloppy touch interface, poorly implemented new features, and overly compressed visuals.

Dull, repetitive, and carelessly programmed don't even begin to sum up how crummy this action game based on the Looney Tunes license is.

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.

Short, unremarkable, and overpriced, Battle: Los Angeles is a shooter to be avoided.

Big Oil is poorly designed all around, with frustrating bugs, a practically unworkable interface, and tiresome gameplay.

Extreme repetition, poor controls, and a barely there story makes this game a dull proposition from start to finish.

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.

Even if the game featured stable controls, the overall package is still mediocre at best. But with the bad controls, compounded by lackadaisical graphics and boring gameplay, Q*bert: Rebooted never had the potential to shine anyway. Q*bert, old friend, you deserve better.

Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is ultimately just disappointing. It's unclear whether it wants to be a remaster or a collection that preserves two major games from Star Wars' history, but in both instances, it fails. This is neither an accurate representation of what Battlefront and Battlefront 2 were, nor does it make enough adjustments to bring two decades-old games into the modern era. The result is a collection that's not really fun to play, and well worth skipping.

Daylight makes for an interesting experiment in audience participation, but no crowd of online viewers can make the poor writing any better or the themes any less hackneyed. In creating a game designed for return visits, Zombie Studios ironically forgot to make a game worth playing in the first place.

Decent ideas can't rescue this shoddy survival horror game.

Awkwardness abounds in this messy Kinect sports collection.

Onechanbara makes zombie-slaying women boring.

Lucha Fury is a beat-'em-up that proves that beauty is only screen deep.

It's a challenge, to be sure, but so is crossing the Sahara. The desert might even give more back.

Not counting massively multiplayer delivery quests, my top benchmark for delivery-style games is still Choplifter. Fluster Cluck can be found at the opposite end of that spectrum.

A simplistic, extremely short experience, with abundant flaws that outweigh its few redeeming features.

Hatred is too repetitive to be exciting, too dumb to be frightening, too basic for you to feel accomplished at its end, too dour to be violently cathartic, too self-serious to engender ironic amusement, and yet still too childish to matter...essentially, it's a nothing of a game.

Despite the occasional laughs and wonderfully weird multiplayer modes, Devil's Third is near-impossible to recommend. The numerous issues with the controls as well as crucial elements of the game's combat systems soon mount up to provide an experience that frustrates far more often than it entertains, resulting in a missed opportunity for what could've been a cult hit.

The empty and amateurish Post Apocalyptic Mayhem belongs in the junkyard, not on your PC.

Stripped-down controls with little punishment for crashing make Wacky Races an extremely boring racer.

Breached has a spark, but it ultimately fades before catching fire.

Ultimately, Conan Exiles is one of the most unsatisfying games I’ve ever played. Its crafting and resource systems may be dense enough that the ultra-patient could find something to enjoy here, but anyone else would likely walk away with their hands thrown up in defeat. The mind-numbing tedium of harvesting resources, woefully boring combat, and a slew of bugs left me feeling completely underwhelmed and unimpressed when it was all said and done.

Ultimately, Conan Exiles is one of the most unsatisfying games I’ve ever played. Its crafting and resource systems may be dense enough that the ultra-patient could find something to enjoy here, but anyone else would likely walk away with their hands thrown up in defeat. The mind-numbing tedium of harvesting resources, woefully boring combat, and a slew of bugs left me feeling completely underwhelmed and unimpressed when it was all said and done.

Shallow gameplay, technical flaws, and rubbish difficulty make this more of a benchwarmer than a goal.

There is a nugget of a good idea here, and one that is interesting on paper. Unfortunately, Fire Emblem Shadows' most innovative ideas bump up against its mobile and free-to-play nature, resulting in a game that is both not for Fire Emblem fans and hard to recommend to anyone.

Hello Neighbor is a game you persevere in due to sheer luck rather than any sort of actual skill, foresight, or cleverness. There's no catharsis, insight, or revelations waiting at the end of the ordeal, just a sort of uneasy malaise over what the images and environments near the end are meant to represent. As such, a simple, appealing concept is rendered inert.

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

Stripped-down controls with little punishment for crashing make Wacky Races an extremely boring racer.

Bad controls and awful physics destroy any chance this cute platformer had of being fun.

Even if you manage to achieve a stable experience, MindsEye still commits the cardinal sin of being mind-numbingly boring. More than anything, it feels like a game firmly trapped in the past. It wouldn't have been good 15 years ago, either, but perhaps some of its design choices would have made more sense. As it is, issues like broken AI and uneven car physics simply exacerbate the problems with its archaic and insipid design. Impressive visuals can't compensate for a lack of substance, whether that comes from its pointless world, tedious combat, or any number of other egregious shortcomings. If you're looking for quality, cast your mind's eye elsewhere.

NBA Live's first appearance on the Wii is a complete disaster.

Dragon Fantasy Book II is a pale shadow of the Super Nintendo role-playing games that it is inspired by.

Bloodforge's striking brutality doesn't stand a chance of overcoming its crushingly dull gameplay.

You'll have more fun laughing at this light-gun shooter than playing it.