Aliens: Colonial Marines didn't leave me catatonic, but it did leave me scratching my head and wondering how a game that's been in development for roughly seven years at the same studio that gave us Borderlands 2 could be released in such an uninspired, unpolished state. Strangely, and perhaps fittingly, it's all wrapped up on a frustrating note that sets up some sort of Aliens tell-all continuation of the story without giving any actual answers.

Dungeonland could have done with a good couple more months in the oven.

All I can say is that The War Z is a bad game that deserves all the controversy it's drawn, and that you should avoid it like the undead.

Ace of Spades is also missing a level editor, which is really surprising in a game built from blocks, but that goes hand in hand with the locked-down server, I'd imagine. Those poor decisions have left it in the remarkable position of being fun to play, and completely unplayable at the same time. It's capable of some amazing moments, but Jagex haven't built the potential blockbuster (har har) that it could be.

In a way, Cortex Command seems like it's asking for a lot of concessions because, for the most part, it still feels like an unfinished game.

It's frustrating, because I can see how much more fun this could be with the ability to play against more human players, and until there is I can't recommend Miner Wars Arena. There's the inkling of a good game in here, but you shouldn't have to pay $10 to go digging for it.

It feels painfully slow on the PC, and the controls are better-suited for a mobile touchscreen than a mouse and keyboard combo. It even manages to lose a feature in the translation, which is stunning given how much more powerful the PC is than, say, the iPad. Throw in the fact that it has little to nothing to do with the series proper, and it becomes impossible to recommend this spinoff, even to the most dedicated Total War fans.

As a concept, Starvoid is pleasantly surprising; as a multiplayer game, the lack of community is disastrous, which makes Starvoid both quite easy and annoyingly difficult to recommend.

It's hard to say how much patches can fix this wreck, because right now its technical issues eclipse everything, to the point where it's barely even a game. But what is there, in the brief moments you can play it before it crashes, does not tie together into a coherent strategy game.

You can randomize population (electoral votes), wealth, issue importance, and demographics, but all this does is divorce Political Machine 2012 from context even more. There are historical and social reasons for red state/blue state divides, reasons that Republicans tend to be more successful in rural, poorer states, reasons that certain issues may be more important to California and New York than they are in Georgia and Tennessee. But Political Machine 2012 is only interested in the game of presidential politics -- and unfortunately, it doesn't even do a good job with that game.

Krater is a game with many problems, most all the more irritating for being specifically added to the formula instead of simply messing it up.

DiRT: Showdown delivers bargain-basement entertainment value for the high, high price of $50. With its neutered physics, limited driving venues, clunky multiplayer, and diminished off-road racing options, discerning arcade racing fans should just write this one off as an unanticipated pothole in Codemaster's trailblazing DiRT series.

Gratuitous Tank Battles may do a brilliant job of catering to some idiosyncratic gaming tastes, but I don't think it has much to offer the tower-defender or the strategist.

Again, Nexuiz is by no means a bad game. It does, however, seem like a superfluous one.

Really, being boring is Confrontation's greatest flaw. Sure, there's a slew of frustrations, both technical and design, but those are oddly welcome after the tedium of everything else.

I occasionally caught glimpses of a competent simulation underneath the bugs, poor instruction, and rage-inducing interface, but not even the best of today's strategy games would be tolerable to play if subject to the malfunctioning saves, crashes, and sloppy presentation of Port Royale 3.

It's out and it costs money, despite being far from ready for prime time. Even as a quirky indie release with a budget price, Orion asks for too big a leap of faith that it'll eventually work out.

Binary Domain looks and plays the third-person, cover-based shooter part, but it's really just a soulless imitation. And I'd love nothing more than to bash its robot brains in.

More than most other genres, if an adventure's core narrative foundations aren't solid enough to carry the rest of game, everything else is meaningless -- and Yesterday's is a story built on matchsticks and marbles. To play it is to see it come crashing down.

With apologies to The Little Mermaid, perhaps third-person shooters aren't one of those things that's "much better, down where it's wetter, under the sea."

The upside is that all of these problems are presumably fixable via a patch -- this isn't the first PC game in history to ship with something busted. And I sincerely hope the team at 2K Sports can get around to addressing the issues I've encountered, because MLB 2K12 is is a lot of fun to play in single-player, and should be just as fun online. But right now it's in dire need of some Tommy John surgery if it has any hope of reviving its career.

I can't say I had no fun at all playing Jagged Alliance: Back in Action -- in fact, I'm having an entertaining time replaying the early missions with an all-melee hit squad and doing better than my first time around -- but I can say that of the 50 hours of my life it took to put a bullet in the queen, I want about half of them back. Even hardcore strategy players are going to have a hell of a time liberating Arulco without it turning into a frustrating quagmire.

It's easy to see the potential for King Arthur 2 to have been a good game rather than "not bad." But it never gets there, mostly because it's doing a half-dozen unrelated things at once, and none of them very well.

Gotham City Impostors isn't a free-to-play shooter, but it sure feels like one. Even as a $15 purchase, it's a game that's as eager to get you into its cash shop as its paltry five maps, with one of the slowest character customization systems ever to be unlocked by DLC, and matchmaking so poor that getting into a full 6v6 game actually feels like an achievement.

The Steam blurb for Oil Rush says it "combines strategic challenge of classic RTS with sheer fun of Tower Defense." But as far as I can tell there's nothing more Tower Defenseish about Oil Rush than any other RTS in which you build defensive towers -- which is pretty much all of them. I'm not sure Unigine knows what Tower Defense is.

It's encouraging, though, that in just the week since SOL's been out the developers at Seamless have done a great job patching issues, with three released so far. It's a damn shame there are so many issues that are likely beyond the power of mere patches, because the space shooter genre badly needs a new classic to really get it going again.

Even if it does look really cool with its robots, aliens, and model spaceships, Unstoppable Gorg is just an unbalanced mess of a tower defense game. It seems to spend more time setting the player up to fail, than to offer a compelling reason to keep playing.

It's frankly incredible to think that Running with Scissors made fans wait eight years for this. Is the trademark Postal "humor" still there? Postal Dude's frequent remarks about hoping to "kill women and minorities first" say hello. But a lack of freedom, unforgivable glitchiness, and generally terrible design make this a hard sell even for fans of the series.