It's likely Valhalla Knights will either lead to you pulling out your hair in consternation at its difficulty, or have you convinced you're doing something wrong. It’s a hard-lined dungeon crawler of the strictest caliber, and that's fine for anyone simply looking to fell a couple hundred skeletons or trolls in the most painstaking way possible.

In style, class, and atmosphere, The War of the Worlds nails it. There are exciting setpieces where you run from gigantic walkers as buildings collapse and heat rays vaporize civilians around you, and strangely those sections usually aren't difficult or plagued with control and checkpoint problems. It's sad to say that those sections make up the minority of the game. The rest is composed of dying repeatedly due to poor controls, poor visibility, cheap enemy ambushes, and ambiguous clues as to where you can hide safely, and then randomly getting screwed by checkpoints.

A few small tweaks, overlapping missions and a reduction of redundant verbosity and this could be as exciting and addictive as old school adventure games. It'd be destined for the bargain bin if wasn't already as hard to find in a store as objects are to find in the game.

There's just nothing particularly great about it. The only incentive to sink any major amount of time into it is that most of the achievements on offer require the best cars in the game to attain. But it's highly unlikely most people will be able to stay interested for even that long.

Bond's latest shooter is barely kept afloat throughout the five-hour-long campaign, but while it has a smattering of good ideas, they're buried beneath concepts so tired, you'll have a hard time caring. It's a game filled with occasional highs and frequent lows--and you'll be thrown between them so quickly and haphazardly that you'll be lucky to make it through 007 Legends without whiplash.

A wildly entertaining creative concept makes Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League a captivating prospect, but repetitive mission design, a messy confluence of combat systems, and the drive towards a cooperative live service structure ultimately undermine the game's strongest qualities.

StarDrive is not a bad a game, per se--but it's a lot like the games that came before it, and does little to differentiate itself from the pack. It has character, sure--what game with samurai bears wouldn’t?

There’s also a two-player co-op wireless mode, though the fact that both players need the game make it seem unlikely you’ll use it much. Overall, this isn’t a bad game, but it really does feel like the other half is out there somewhere waiting to be found. If it were $15 or $20, we’d say give it a shot. But at press time, it’s $30, only ten dollars cheaper than the latest Guitar Hero game on DS.

It's killer as nostalgia, somewhat crap as a game, and the surprising $50 price will put it out of the minds of all but the most passionate collectors.

In the end, the shoddy interface, graphics, and controls do more than step on the toes of some interesting concepts - they massacre them.

Topping off all of this mediocrity is the weird multiplayer, containing modes (free-for-all deathmatch, capture the flag, etc.) not normally found in this type of game. In theory the game should be more unique for these options, but there's a reason hack-and-slash RPGs avoid this style of multiplayer: it doesn't work well in the engine.

I was shaking my head and laughing during every cutscene, and some of the modes that get introduced are just abhorrently beautiful. They're so bad, they're actually good. Whether it’s flying through the air raining laser bullets down on battleships, or playing a Street Fighter reskin (complete with the same combos for I.R.I.S. as for Ryu), you'll never be bored while playing this tragically beautiful road trip.

A multiplayer game that required the turtles to co-ordinate their efforts and powers could have rocked so much harder. For that matter, so could a camera that chose better angles and thus caused to fewer missed jumps due to misjudged distances.

With excellent sailing and naval combat mechanics, it's a shame that Skull and Bones is so hampered by its lack of diversity, odd developmental decisions, and minimal capacity to offer a true pirate fantasy.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory had the potential to improve tenfold upon the previous games, but squanders the opportunity for flashier transformations and hundreds of quests.

Surf’s Up is a bad Mario Kart clone (replete with cloned weaponry) with a dash of the barest of bones from SSX thrown in. As such, there’s no excuse that it’s made for young kids, because any kid would be way better off just playing Mario Kart DS, which uses almost the exact same basic formula, but offers depth and polish.

This third-person shooter is buried under an avalanche of repetitive encounters, endless backtracking, and a partially-thawed storyline.

The on-court gameplay doesn't look very next-gen-like, especially when compared to its NBA 2K14 counterpart.

An undersea adventure that is more about seeing the sights than captivating gameplay.

Disney Infinity 2.0 tries to do too many things, and ends up not being very good at any of them.

The game sure looks pretty, but hopefully your tastes are refined enough to browse the menu a bit longer.

There’s a definite emphasis on quantity over quality in Warriors Orochi 2, and not just in the numbers of mindless soldiers you slice through. The amount of content is frankly overwhelming if you’re one of those completist-types, and the drive to level up every character may appeal to those who have a lot of time to kill while traveling.

Like a trip to a natural history museum. It's empty and nostalgic, meticulous and dated. More importantly, it's hands-off. Like a museum, Colonial Marines is at its best when you're admiring the view. The moment you attempt to reach out to interact you're met with a barrier, reminding you that you're there to look, not to touch.

So while it's always nice to see an attempt to breathe new life into stealth action games, Dark retains and even amplifies many of the frustrating trappings that make the genre so off-putting for some. It's too buggy, imprecise, and narratively unengaging to be of much interest even to those in the market for this sort of thing.

Sonic Forces is a spectacular but empty sugar rush that’s over in a blur. Once again, Sonic’s return to form falls flat.

It’s not that Art of Fighting Anthology is packed with sub-par games; it’s just that it isn’t “packed” with anything. If this were combined with the publisher's upcoming 4-game Fatal Fury collection into one big compilation, the resulting package could be a must-by. But that's not the case, so it isn't.

Hard Evidence is so fast there’s something satisfying in flying through a game in one sitting, especially considering you’ll probably unlock all 1,000 Achievement points along the way just for staying on task.

Here’s hoping Watchmen’s problems, and its price, can be addressed for part two later this year.