The battles are unchallenging, but complex. The story is trite, but entertains. The exploration is fun, but easy.

Vibrant and full of personality, but has also tightened up the series gameplay so you’ll actually need to pay attention, strategize, and conserve your resources to defeat its challenges.

Despite a solid set-up and the joys of disc-throwing and lightcycle action, Tron: Catalyst ends up being more style than substance, failing to truly build on predecessor Tron: Identity. It's fun while it lasts, and is visually gorgeous, but an overly repetitive structure drags things out with a story that ultimately falls flat.

Pokemon Ranger is an enjoyable marketing sidequest, despite lacking depth or challenge. Pokemon fans will find it a satisfactory appetizer to tide them over until the main course arrives next year.

If it sounds complex, just understand this: It makes it surprisingly easy for you to make decent sounding tunes, and it’ll store up to 12 of them. You can even join up over Wi-Fi and record yourself and three other players jamming together, or connect to the vastly inferior Wii version of the game and use your DS to run a light show. Guitar Hero, are you paying attention?

If you've got the time and patience to prep, and an audience willing to go along for the ride, Master of Illusion could turn you and your DS into the hit of the holiday party.

You won't find an epic amount of unique content here (perhaps throwing the full price tag into question for some), but while it lasts, Speed Racer: The Videogame is a thrilling, futuristic race experience that succeeds with stylish visuals, incredible speed, and addictive combat.

At its best Man of Medan delivers a confident and well crafted horror experience with a genuinely clever two player mode. But it’s unbalanced pacing has a little to much opening filler and an unsatisfying conclusion.

In its visuals and audio, Trek to Yomi nails its brief to create an Akira Kurosawa-inspired samurai adventure. Its interactive elements, however, along with its story, are all too ordinary and rarely combine to heighten the atmosphere or create suspense. Worth a try for the sightseeing perhaps, but don’t expect it to cut deep.

Mario Hoops betrays the tradition of quality inherent in other Mario sports titles, and proves to be a lot more style than substance. The stylus is not, in fact, perfect for every game type.

Invizimals won't be toppling the house that Pikachu built, but it's at least an innovative competitor.

There could have been twice as many puzzles and we'd still want more. Kororinpa: Marble Mania is just plain fun.

Technically sound, and with a few friends, there's definitely some competitive fun to be found. If you're willing to deal with the lack of a true singleplayer experience (beyond competing against AI opponents for cups) you'll likely enjoy yourself, though the omission definitively feels like a tremendous missed opportunity.

Thief maintains the strengths of its stealth-centric predecessors and offers plenty in the way of actual thievery, but don't expect any fun, new gameplay mechanics or an enchanting story in this reboot.

Look past the tedious story and Eternal Strands features some brilliant massive monster battles, especially when you unlock some great magic to use on them. The problem comes in getting to those bits, bogged down in plenty of bloat and repetition that results in its best moments being fewer and far between. Flawed but fun behemoth battling makes this an interesting if imperfect mix of its superior influences.

You’ll also find a few vehicular sections that revert to the standard, over-the-hood follow camera and culminate in a battle with Lockdown.

Fallout 76 is still far from perfect but the main thing about the Wastelanders DLC isn’t that it makes things more fun or more interesting, and it certainly doesn’t fix much in terms of mechanics, it’s that it shows Bethesda is really trying. Wastelanders is the absolute antithesis of what launched which should underline how much work has gone into designing, making and implementing an entirely new game. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach a ‘remember when Fallout 76 wasn’t good’ point, but it’s clearly climbing in the right direction.

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

Even if the storyline is somewhat intriguing and the battles (eventually) excite, sitting through one lengthy dialogue tree after the other while alchemists-in-training spout empty phrases about homework diminishes the experience.

Though Badman is insidiously difficult, there’s something about its quirky humor, cutesy retro aesthetic, cool monster ecosystem, and addictive tunnel building gameplay that drew us back repeatedly for round after round of punishment.

While Parallel Lines is a decent offering, it feels very much like a watered-down Grand Theft Auto, with a more linear storyline and fewer random fun things to do outside of missions.

It cannot be compared (favorably) to the console versions, but it's the only iteration of Mater-National that improves upon its predecessor, and is not a bad option for race-loving tykes this holiday season.

If you're really into strategy role-playing games, and if you can tolerate the low budget sights and sounds, you may enjoy Rondo of Swords.

We're also sure the majority of today's gamers will find it nasty, plodding, and archaic.

If you have any love for the little rodents left once you’re done, go ahead and buy G-Force for your home console. Otherwise, wait until the game inevitably finds its way into the bargain bin, and then pick it up if you’re curious.

A throwback to the bygone days of the RPG genre - whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on your tastes. But even players who aren't retro-fans will be hard-pressed to consider Magical Starsign a truly bad game.

Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a flawed but nevertheless fascinating look at the angsty years of the great detective.

It's hardly the pinnacle of stealth games - the enemies are dumb, and there's not much to do aside from sneaking and killing - but if you're in the mood for something creepy and horrific that'll leave you feeling a little dirty, Manhunt 2's still-shocking murders and eerie, is-it-real-or-am-I-just-insane storyline won't disappoint.