Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town feels closer to a remaster than a remake, with the majority of in-game mechanics feeling antiquated by modern standards. Shallow systems combined with inflated upgrade prices makes progress a slow trudge, with the rewards rarely feeling worth it. Interacting with the people of Mineral Town offers a nice, romantic look at small-town farm life, but the rest of the game fails to sell it.

Effective offense is a struggle to achieve, and defense is far too automated to keep you interested. Even with individual players looking better up close, NBA Live 15 fails to present an attractive package when all ten bodies are running plays on the court.

As much as I appreciated the shift away from the crime investigation premise of Assassin's Creed Unity, sending Arno on a mere fetch quest turns Dead Kings into the blandest kind of open-world adventure, in which a man who used to be a hero is reduced to a mere errand boy.

Kinect Sports Rivals is an inconsistent collection that will get you up off the couch and moving around for a bit of mild fun, but that's about the best you can say for it.

Harvest Moon: Back to Nature and Harvest Moon for Girls are poorly ported together in this bundle that brings nothing new to the farm.

Great strategic gameplay is dwarfed by embarrassing technical issues.

Almost everything here is mediocre, and that's really a shame given the promise of Wars of Ancient Greece.

Forspoken is visually stimulating and a musical delight, but boring combat, poor characterization, and loose movement mechanics make for a mediocre experience.

Realms of Ancient War delivers the basics of action RPGs without any noteworthy hook to make things interesting.

An extensive cast of DC characters can't help Scribblenauts Unmasked overcome the dangers posed by its own flawed internal logic.

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

Inconsistent writing and shallow characterizations keep this adventure game from fully resonating.

Ultimately, Lego DC Super-Villains goes down as another cookie-cutter Lego game, and while there's still plenty of merry mayhem to unleash, it's the same kind of mayhem we've seen before. What should be as wild and riotous as the Clown Prince of Crime comes off as just another mild-mannered reporter.

Deracine has the buildings blocks of a good VR debut from Dark Souls creator FromSoftware, but it lacks the engrossing gameplay and mystique that has made the studio's previous titles so successful.

There are things to like and even possibly love about God of War: Sons of Sparta. The combat system is smart and layered, the visual style is often beautiful, and the story eventually becomes surprisingly rich. But it's difficult to recommend, because so much of the metroidvania design--the core of the genre that Kratos has found himself in--is like that frozen wasteland: slowly plodding through, just trying to reach the next warm spot where it's fun again.

This rote puzzle role-playing game delivers a few exciting moments but falls far short of measuring up to the game that clearly inspired it.

Those of you tired of the franchise's repetitive button-mashing gameplay, stale features, and dated presentation have plenty of better action games to choose.

Even fond memories of the 1989 original can't disguise the fact that Populous isn't relevant or fun almost 20 years later.

Football Manager 26's overhauled UI simply feels like change for the sake of change. Its functionality is worse, several key features are missing, and bugs only exacerbate the issues. After a two-year wait, it's an unfortunate outcome, giving the impression that the delay wasn't long enough. There's definite potential here with the new tactical interface and match engine, and if you could combine these aspects with the previous UI, you'd have one of the best games in the series. Instead, the revamped UI's problems and inherent frustrations are too big to ignore. Such a vast undertaking is commendable, especially for an annual sports game, but its missteps are many and mostly lead to disappointment.

Immortals of Aveum stops just short of fully complementing its traditional military shooter story with an engaging environmentalist message, instead opting to primarily use those narrative themes to inform the world design and lore. It leaves the overall story feeling half-baked, further highlighting the uncharacteristic actions of its unlikable protagonist. The actual shooting fares a bit better, especially in the first half, when combat is more like a color-coded puzzle. But it, too, falls short--the repeated use of enemies and arena layouts make for repetitive firefights and the sheer number of combat options is difficult to navigate when combat reaches an overwhelming fervor. I enjoyed small pieces of Immortals of Aveum, but not enough to strongly recommend.

Taz has no butt stomp or double jump maneuvers, the latter of which would've come in very handy for the game's prevalent platform jumping.

I did have moments of fun playing Apex Legends on Switch. Panic Button has managed to take a game that I love and make it work just well enough on Nintendo's hybrid console. I don't want to keep playing it on Switch with its many technical concessions (nor do I want new players to be introduced to Apex Legends this way), but this port is--in its current state--a decent last resort. If your only way to play Apex Legends is on Switch, then you now have that option. Just know that you're signing up for something less than ideal.

For all the gripping tension that its setting instills, Blair Witch can't maintain its initially frightening atmosphere and ends up losing it entirely by its conclusion.

Saving the human race shouldn't be so tedious.

Balan Wonderworld feels like a game from another time. In a different era the rough edges, inconsistent mechanics, and formulaic design may have been things that players could overlook, but in this moment in time, it's a 3D platformer of a quality that can't compete with polished modern-day contemporaries from Nintendo, Sony, and the like. It has its merits and delivers an unexpectedly mentally stimulating platformer when it manages to play to its strengths, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

This Naruto-inspired 3D fighting game is little more than a shadow clone.

A well-meaning title that seems to have all the necessary ingredients, but its key features simply feel too underdeveloped to be any good.

Why didn't the PC get the GOOD version of Spider-Man 2? Who decided to make an entirely different and decidedly mediocre version of the game specifically for Windows users?