A slower, less colorful Age of Empires. None of the research trees make much sense (you need to go through multiple steps just to get a spearman) and by the time you get to the cool weapons like scythed chariots and elephants you won’t care very much.

Repetition, repetition, repetition.

The game - or string of small games connected only through common characters - is only worth dabbling in for the humor and bourgeois rock and roll attitude of it all.

If you're going to make a game with ninjas and dragons, it better be larger than a mountain and a couple of rock textures.

Cities: Skylines 2 offers the foundation of a world-class city-building game, with a wide array of features, smart quality-of-life improvements, and a genuinely impressive simulation to help bring your town to life. But its promise is completely overshadowed by its technical problems, dragging a fantastic core experience down into frustration and disappointment.

While this could have been an awesome game to geek out on, its numerous technical problems kill the mood pretty quickly.

Sonic Frontiers features the kind of lightweight yet engaging storytelling that should easily enrapture fans young and old – though I'd hate to be a child forced to play through some of the abysmal platforming featured throughout. Was taking Sonic open world an ambitious endeavor? Yes. Did it pay off? Absolutely not.

While a few of these games may have some value when played with a group, fans of board games may as well stick to actually playing board games.

The atmosphere of Theresia, as well as its convoluted story, just doesn't scare us, but instead makes us want to stop playing, or failing that, kill ourselves.

Every installment has us hoping for a return to glory, but each one further craps on the hedgehog's legacy. The redeeming qualities here are few and far between, and it's just plain not fun.

These miniscule improvements tacked onto a broken game are like repairing a wrecked car with duct tape.

The graphics are fair, but like the fighting, they grow redundant too quickly, and the story couldn't get the game noticed even if it were drunk, topless, and the only woman in a bar full of sailors.

Dragon Ball Z for Kinect is more a curiosity than a game, and even then one specifically aimed at DBZ fans. The one-two punch of nostalgia and novelty is appealing for a while, but thanks in large part to shoddy motion controls, later rounds will leave you waiting for a haymaker that just never comes.

Don’t bother with this title unless you love the idea of playing an interactive commercial for Ford Motors.

The overall feel of the game is just not engaging – there's no sense of speed, there's no sense of control, and there's no sense of variety.

Any fun you may have teaching Rover to pluck wounded waterfowl out of the water and onto the grill will end fast once you’ve mastered duck calls, shooting, and retrieving. And that won’t take long at all.

Even if you’re a tremendous fan of Marcinko and love his books, rent this one before you spend your hard-earned cash. The season is too full of top-notch games and excellent DLC for you to spend your cash on this stinker.

The Ant Bully isn't wholly shameless about setting the bar low, and kids are bound to get at least a little joy from its small world, but this colony is just too repetitive and dull to be fun for long.

It looks like a dungeon crawler but plays like an action RPG, yet it doesn't provide enough variety to make you want to come back for more. Its format gets repetitive far too quickly, and the only the thing that will keep your attention is knowing the fate of your character, even if you only played a small part in it.

None of the key features really hold up compared to other shooters, save for the appearance of Seth McFarlane and his crew of writers and actors. Even then, this would have made for a weakly written episode of the show. If it were down to a night with your buddies in front of the TV with a few drinks, then it would make for an alright rental.

From the game-stretching fetch quests to the clanking camera to the clumsy cliffhanger ending, Hydrophobia just doesn't feel like a finished game. The water is truly unique and special, but everything else feels too much like a soggy, overblown tech demo.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold takes place over four chapters, each separated into a handful of levels. You can grab a second controller and team up with a friend or family member, but you might not want to subject them to the boredom.

If nothing more, this mostly broken game exists purely as a way to cash-in on the latest CG snoozer not starring anthropomorphic animals. At least the packaging has glitter on it. Really, it does.

The gameplay is still fun if you’re willing to suffer through painful hand cramping from playing guitar and bass, severely wounded vocal registry, and a general lack of precision provided by the Drum Grip. Oh wait, that doesn’t sound so fun. The peripherals do more to kill the experience than enhance it, which totally defeats the purpose of this pricey package.

The game - or string of small games connected only through common characters - is only worth dabbling in for the humor and bourgeois rock and roll attitude of it all.

But to finally give us a lightsaber game, even a crap one, and not enable us to take on the role of Luke Skywalker and battle Darth Vader? That’s just freaking cruel.

While games like "Time Pilot" aged gracefully, this side-scrolling space shooter feels old and inflexible, a crusty gaming battleship dragged out of drydock. All you can do is stare and go, "Wow, that's old."

Most levels in Diner Dash: Sizzle and Serve last five minutes tops, which makes it a flexible on-the-go offering. We’re increasingly annoyed by publishers’ tendencies to toss a casual PC game onto portable consoles for a notably higher price than its PC version.

Every installment has us hoping for a return to glory, but each one further craps on the hedgehog's legacy. The redeeming qualities here are few and far between, and it's just plain not fun.

The resulting storyline isn't quite Final Fantasy quality by any means, but series devotees will find plenty to admire here. Still, given the constant interruption for battles and the heinous dungeon layouts, we suspect that none but the most devoted fans of the series will care.

It's so dumbed down that it might actually be more appropriate for children if it weren't for the T rating on the package. Just play the 360 version. Actually, scratch that, just go play Spider-Man 2 instead. It's worlds better than this.

We know that plenty of people will look past the monotonous gameplay, poor voice acting, unimaginative level design, lack of online play, etc., but our advice is to hold out for the next movie.

You know the drill: games based on movies tend to bite.

It's when you get into the tedium of every activity that you realize a game that only does a few things well holds more value than a game that does a dozen things poorly. Variety is supposed to be the spice of life, but let's be honest, everything has its limits.

Spend a couple of hours coping with the plodding narrative and oppressive gameplay and you'll swear off RPGs for life.

But perhaps the worst part of it all is that the transplant to a home console has removed a good chunk of Tag Force’s initial appeal: the ability to play on-the-go card battles with friends who also have a PSP and the game.

The worst thing is, there was tremendous potential here. The art style is fantastic, and the campy, B-movie concept is golden. And the way you make new weapons out of garbage you find – sticks, needles, broken shards of glass – is really fun. But once you add the gameplay in there, ugggh. Mushrooms grow where living things have died – in this case, the underlying corpse belonged to fun.

The graphics are fair, but like the fighting, they grow redundant too quickly, and the story couldn't get the game noticed even if it were drunk, topless, and the only woman in a bar full of sailors.

Borderlands 2 remains an excellent game--unfortunately the Vita port makes too many concessions. Frequent frame dips, sluggish response, and OK controls make it hard to recommend.

It’s also definitely worth mentioning that this is the weaker of the two Zenses titles by a mile. Rainforest has better puzzles and a stronger style.

Sacred 3 has the skeleton of a fun co-op hack 'n' slash experience, but it's marred by too much repetition, balance issues, and the worst comedy routine this side of Open Mic Night at the Middle of Nowhere Comedy Shack.

If nothing more, this mostly broken game exists purely as a way to cash-in on the latest CG snoozer not starring anthropomorphic animals. At least the packaging has glitter on it. Really, it does.

Even if you’re a tremendous fan of Marcinko and love his books, rent this one before you spend your hard-earned cash. The season is too full of top-notch games and excellent DLC for you to spend your cash on this stinker.

If you're a fan with your heart set on a dragging video game (in whatever sense of the word), you'll probably find enough to keep yourself amused for a short time, even as you hope for something a whole of lot better in the future.

Control without the superpowers was always going to be a tough sell. Sadly, FBC: Firebreak makes a pretty appalling case. Moments of supernatural whimsy are few and far between, bogged down by repetitive objectives centering around shooting some pretty mediocre feeling guns.

Our main problem with History Great Empires: Rome is that the historic elements are only surface level and the strategy elements aren’t much deeper than that.

There was limitless potential here, but it's wasted. Transformers: The Game should be a sleek, cutting-edge sports car; instead, it's an old beater whose driver's seat has a spring sticking out in exactly the wrong place.

WayForward’s second Adventure Time game fails to marry the imagination of the Cartoon Network series with a top-down dungeon crawler, resulting in a lifeless quest that does neither the cartoon nor the genre any justice.

The simplified controls, which work with a very minimal interface, won't stymie anyone without RPG experience. But the absence of story and strategy will. This is a game best played on autopilot, if you have to play it at all.

We really, really wanted to like BCFX, as the idea of any kind of competition for EA’s NCAA monopoly is music to our ears. Sadly, BCFX simply isn’t anywhere near ready for the big time.

Without addictive, refined gameplay in its short-lived play sessions or a worthwhile single-player experience, Puzzle de Harvest Moon comes across as a glorified minigame.

It's hard to recommend this game to anyone but the most hardcore of flight simulator fans. As in, you have to be unreasonably hardcore. As in, you have Apache-themed bedspread and keep a picture of a Boeing AH-64A in your wallet that you stare at longingly throughout the day.

If your biggest complaint about previous such entries is that they didn't include horseback riding, hang gliding or skiing, then MotionSports might get you in front of the TV for a weekend of flawed fun. Otherwise, we suggest leaving this one on the sidelines.

The cities are huge and beautiful, with country-appropriate cars, and while the gameplay is muddy, it’s easy to see how it could have been better. But as it is, DRIV3R is all flash and little substance.

The imprecise combat of Fighter Within does an awful job of showcasing the new and improved Kinect 2.0 tech. This is easily one of the weakest Xbox One launch window titles yet.

In an arcade-style game, anything that requires the player to take a break from shooting is a questionable call. We’re okay with reloading, but handicapping us with awkward controls is just uncool.

Ultimately, it's difficult not to come out of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum with a sour taste in the mouth. You can see glimmers of Deadalic's intent to create a different kind of Lord of the Rings game throughout, particularly in the ways it manifests its unlikely hero's unique psychological state, but those bright spots are quickly lost amidst all the other ways Gollum stumbles in its execution. Perhaps there is a Gollum game that could work at both a narrative and mechanical level, one that reframes our relationship with the iconic character to the point where people think twice before doing their terrible impressions of him at parties. Alas, The Lord of Rings: Gollum is not that game. I'm sorry to say it, but those terrible impressions are here to stay for now.

Sadly, it's just a pretty face, and there's not much below the surface. As a result, exploring doesn't yield much in the way of rewards, so odds are, you'll just stick to your daily routine of repetitive levequesting and crafting. And then you'll log out. And then, one day, you'll probably just decide to omit the part where you log back in.

Gallop Racer 2006 would be more fun if its presentation weren't so overwhelmingly confusing and its races so surprisingly difficult: it's a nasty combo.

Things could've improved in the later parts of the remarkably minimal story when you start colonizing islands, but because every nation on the map will swiftly descend on your new outpost, even this is reduced to grinding out enough cash and crew to withstand the assault.

Basically, you're getting a half-baked version of The Sims with an even less-baked version of Nintendogs grafted onto it.

It's hard to recommend this game to anyone but the most hardcore of flight simulator fans. As in, you have to be unreasonably hardcore. As in, you have Apache-themed bedspread and keep a picture of a Boeing AH-64A in your wallet that you stare at longingly throughout the day.

Sonic Free Riders can offer some real fun when everything comes together and works properly but those instances are rare and the rest of the time the game can be very frustrating. The lack of content also makes it quite a steep purchase.

Saying it's improved is like admiring the silver lining on a nuclear mushroom cloud. This is a series slowly urging its squat, miserable bulk in the right direction, but it’s impossible to recommend.

With so many other notable SRPGs already out for portable consoles, Hero's Saga: Laevatein Tactics fails to emulate the magic of its forebears such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, and also fails to define itself among contemporaries like Rondo of Swords and Jeanne D'Arc. We still love classic SRPGs; it's just that at this point, Hero's Saga feels like a step back.

El Matador may be fine to play for a few hours but it's not worth a long-term or full-price commitment.

To be fair, there’s also a sandbox-like, “just suck it all up” mode that unlocks when you’ve beaten each level, as well as a two-player versus mode that finds you racing to suck things up or change the color of crystals (which earned it a bonus point in our score below). But Tornado still just doesn’t have the suction to hold us for long.

Even if you’re a tremendous fan of Marcinko and love his books, rent this one before you spend your hard-earned cash. The season is too full of top-notch games and excellent DLC for you to spend your cash on this stinker.

We know that plenty of people will look past the monotonous gameplay, poor voice acting, unimaginative level design, lack of online play, etc., but our advice is to hold out for the next movie.

A shame then, that marvelling at the cartoon tennis racquet pretending to be in your hand is immensely more enthralling than anything you'll actually do with it in the game.

The cities are huge and beautiful, with country-appropriate cars, and while the gameplay is muddy, it’s easy to see how it could have been better. But as it is, DRIV3Ris all flash and little substance.

When the best thing your game has going for it is supplemental abilities to support your primary one-button combat, you know you've got problems.

With energy hearts constantly appearing, respawning masks, and enemies that kindly back off, if you die in Bionicle Heroes you may want to strongly consider hanging up your gaming gloves.

Spectral Souls is a true sob story. There's a perfectly serviceable game here, buried underneath one crucial problem.

With a mediocre story and lackluster gameplay that wastes the potential of its sci-fi premise of big tech and AI, MindsEye is a resoundingly disappointing action-adventure that's neither satisfying as an old genre throwback nor presents a confident foundation for others to build upon.

The soundtrack is a shocking state of affairs, the cars sounding how you think mud would sound if it could talk and in the background is a Europop house soundtrack.

The game’s levels lack any sort of checkpoint system, an annoying little flaw that becomes a real hassle as later levels take a massive difficulty spike and Hulk smash! becomes Hulk awkwardly dodge walls of randomly fired bullets and missiles.

If you love card games simply because cards are fun to you, well then you might get something out of it. To those who don't wear their hair in gigantic blonde spikes or drool at the thought of any type of card-battling, stay far, far away.

Ultimately, Bomberman Land isn't bad, but there are certainly better minigame collections out there. Likewise, there are a myriad of alternative ways to play the classic Bomberman battle mode if that's what you desire.

Ninja Gaiden Z is a disappointing entry in the Ninja Gaiden series filled with repetitive enemy encounters, cringeworthy pervy jokes, and frustrating, unbalanced gameplay. This is not the ninja game you're looking for.

Disciples will be disappointed by the fundamental lack of gameplay depth, even as they might like the surprisingly high level of difficulty, but more casual fans might appreciate being able to grab a quick space battle here and there in skirmish and multiplayer modes.

Unlockable spells lend a little variety to the otherwise stale battles with moron squid-monsters and typical fantasy fodder. Beyond that, this is a stagnant role-playing game with nothing to offer anyone who isn't already obsessed with the original game, the 2001 PC remake this is based on, or the DS remake from 2009.

There was limitless potential here, but it's wasted. Transformers: The Game should be a sleek, cutting-edge sports car; instead, it's an old beater whose driver's seat has a spring sticking out in exactly the wrong place.

Such a half-hearted attempt.

Even the multiplayer over Xbox Live can't save this title from a near-complete flare-out, and while there's nothing actually broken about Over G's gameplay, it still comes off as stale and tedious.

We can’t think of any good reason to spend time with Eureka 7 Vol. 2. Even if the story intrigues you, you’ll have to suffer through the rest of the game to see it. It’s just not worth it.

Modern Warfare 3 is one of the most underwhelming entries in Call of Duty's 20 year history. A lackluster campaign can't distract from the tired multiplayer formula. Decade old maps, messy progression, and misaligned changes to mobility and gunplay leaves MW3 lost trying to find an identity to call its own.

Few people will accuse Monster 4x4 World Circuit of being a good game, but it's been dressed up enough that it at least crawls out of the sub-mediocre sewer.

Oxenfree 2 is a disappointing sequel that takes the flawed gem of a first game and rubs out almost everything that made it shine. A reasonable plot and neat audiovisual effects find themselves submerged under ponderous navigation, flat characters, and overly regimented dialogue.

In the end, it’s a cool experiment, but it quickly goes horribly wrong.

It retains a base level of playability that is so often lacking from similar titles, but that's only because its myriad parts range from poor to horrifying in nature. Need we really say more?

In the end, Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N.'s gravest flaw is its beat-for-beat recreation of the original game's many problems. None of these issues are new, and they haven't been improved in any notable way since the first game.

Even the multiplayer comes up short by supporting just four players, though we assume the game would likely collapse upon itself if tasked with anything more. It's a shame to see such a sloppy effort from a stellar independent studio.

The lousy racing also means that the reasonably attractive graphics go to waste, and that the only one of the middling engine sounds you’ll want to hear is your own, cooling down. At least the atrocious techno music is easily silenced.

So, unless you like condescendingly easy adventure games where the gameplay is only loosely tied to the story at best, you’re better off reading a mystery novel instead.

Even training monsters has become a total chore; you have to set each task manually, instead of being able to set long-term training schedules. This is a de-evolution at best.

State of Emergency 2 deserves a spot right next to 25 To Life, 187: Ride or Die, and Final Fight Streetwise as another title that's an urban nightmare for all the wrong reasons. Stop buying them, and hopefully they'll go away.

Even the multiplayer comes up short by supporting just four players, though we assume the game would likely collapse upon itself if tasked with anything more. It's a shame to see such a sloppy effort from a stellar independent studio.