Penny-Punching Princess doesn't set its sights particularly high, and while it feels like it's achieving what it intended, it's hard not to wish there was a little more to it.

Interacting with Daffy Duck and watching animated sequences unfold is fun, but there's barely a half-hour's worth of entertainment here.

Randomness is key to battle royale games, but Hyper Scape leans a little too much into it. The game has solid weapons and hero-like Hack abilities, but you're at the mercy of being lucky enough to get what you need to have a higher chance of winning. The battleground doesn't help in this regard, since it's difficult to know where you're going and make a plan about where to loot next without stopping to open the map. At least the individual moments in Hyper Scape are fun. A match could be ruined by the randomness working against you, but that doesn't stop moments like turning into a ball and trying to out bounce three enemy balls any less fun in how ridiculously silly it is.

It's the endless meandering in between that proves troublesome, much of it intended to build tension, but most of it falling victim to a neverending sameness. I say neverending, but in reality, Alien: Isolation limps to its frustrating ending after many hours more than it can support.

No voice chat and an over-reliance on stupid bots take away much of the joy in this silly take on capture the flag.

Below's extreme demands for patience and tolerance remain right through to the game's mysterious ending. But despite its assured aesthetic and the initial pleasures of discovery, Below will eventually turn into a slog for all but the most committed of players.

Randomness is key to battle royale games, but Hyper Scape leans a little too much into it. The game has solid weapons and hero-like Hack abilities, but you're at the mercy of being lucky enough to get what you need to have a higher chance of winning. The battleground doesn't help in this regard, since it's difficult to know where you're going and make a plan about where to loot next without stopping to open the map. At least the individual moments in Hyper Scape are fun. A match could be ruined by the randomness working against you, but that doesn't stop moments like turning into a ball and trying to out bounce three enemy balls any less fun in how ridiculously silly it is.

Below's extreme demands for patience and tolerance remain right through to the game's mysterious ending. But despite its assured aesthetic and the initial pleasures of discovery, Below will eventually turn into a slog for all but the most committed of players.

Shotest Shogi is a challenging experience that relies on you having at least a passing familiarity with the tabletop game that it's based on.

Pendragon is a fascinating experiment in trying to marry procedural storytelling to a roguelike structure. It does so with mixed success. With smart writing at the forefront, it delivers a rich and evocative world steeped in fantastical adventure. But when its more mundane systems intrude, you find that reality is a little more prosaic.

Like just about every other sequel in Koei's Warriors franchises, Samurai Warriors 2 offers an overly familiar and ultimately mundane hack-and-slash experience.

There's fun to be had in Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, but ultimately this return to form does not spark as much joy as we'd hoped.

This is not the return of No More Heroes you'd hoped for, but it at least shows signs of a series that still has life in it.

Shaun White's latest appearance starts off with some board-flipping fun, only to squander its potential.

As a single-player experience, One Piece is inadequate; as a two-player romp, it won't hold your interest for long, even (and almost especially) if you're a fan of the One Piece anime or manga.

It's a shallow, crude pleasure, but the delightful disorder that's just around every corner is strong enough to overshadow an otherwise forgettable experience.

The game gets in its own way, stumbling when it seeks to siphon strategy mechanics into a formula that doesn't support them. The Bureau wants to rocket you into outer space, but it can't escape the gravity of the games that spawned it.

This is what Anthem is like as a whole: a game where promising moments are bookended by frustration, where good ideas are undone before they can be fully realized.

Huntsman: The Orphanage does manage to convey a sense of terror in its quiet moments, but they're more benign chills than you find in bloodier horror adventures that let you fight back or at least present enemies who do more than engulf you in darkness.

It delivers some enjoyable stretches of shooting action, but The Bureau: XCOM Declassified too often transforms the series' signature tension into tedium.

Ratatouille is a sufficient, if unfulfilling, platformer.

Jason spends too much time talking and not nearly enough time fighting in this Greek mythology-inspired action-RPG.

Spyborgs serves up competent two-player cooperative action on a nice-looking platter, but the dish is bland and unappetizing.

Man, is Consortium glitchy.

This is a technically competent add-on that feels like it was designed to latch onto a growing co-op trend and to plug a gap in the game's multiplayer repertoire because the market research said to, rather than something designed with some real heart and soul behind it.

This competent example of the well-worn dungeon-crawling formula lacks the spark of innovation that might have made it something more.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it's hardly uncommon in the video game industry. Nonetheless, it's difficult to recommend Redacted when both Hades and its sequel exist and do almost everything it's attempting to do with much more aplomb. The Rivals system is a compelling breath of fresh air for the genre, and its combat is engaging--even if parts of it are severely lacking. There's a good game here, somewhere in the middle, once you're past the lackluster opening and monotonous ending. Redacted doesn't really expand on The Callisto Protocol universe, but I'm glad it exists. For as flawed as both games are, I still haven't lost interest in seeing more stories from this world, and I hope Striking Distance has a chance to tell them. Redacted just falls short a few too many times.

Glare offers an inventive mechanic that could have given rise to a memorable adventure, but then fails to build meaningfully on that early promise. This is an entertaining pit stop that can tide you over on your journey to a bigger, brighter galaxy.