Even if Saborus had the purest of intentions and I loved everything about its message, that wouldn’t change the fact that it’s still a terrible game. It’s a frustrating mess that doesn’t do much of anything right, so you’re better off just avoiding it.

There’s still decent content within Mega Dimension, despite the continuing to lock Mega Stones behind an online battle system requiring the online subscription being absurdly stupid. The combat’s still solid when you’re in most of the zones, the new Mega Evolutions are fun, and being able to hunt previous mythical Pokémon and some Legendaries is always nice to have back. It’s not fully irredeemable, but for $30 for an expansion for the game in the most profitable franchise on the planet, I don’t think it’s wrong to say it’s severely lacking. If you enjoyed Legends: Z-A and just want more of the same fun you already had, go for it. If you’re on the fence because of the base game, I wouldn’t even glance at it. Pokémon Legends: Z-A Mega Dimension is a hard sell, and it’s a bummer because this is very much something I love and have since I was a kid.

The campaign and endgame content in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is another great addition to the franchise’s lineup, and, while it was slightly lacking in some aspects with the storytelling itself, the set design and experience of the whole campaign more than made up for it. Do yourself a favor and turn off social media for a day while you play, to avoid letting people get in your head about why you shouldn’t like it, and just give it a fair shot. If you like Black Ops, you will like this. [Campaign Review score = 85]

I think it’s very much worth playing. Like I said, the story is… fine, but that’s not what you’re here for, is it? Go blow some stuff up and let the flames reflect in your sparkling little eyes. It’s glorious to behold. I have to give just one score to the campaign as a whole, so just know with this that I’m thinking the story is maybe a 6, but the mission to mission experience is probably more at a 9. Balancing that out, the campaign gets a middle grounded, 8. I lean toward favoring the strength of the experience over the weakness of the story because it’s doing exactly what it wanted to do, and does so very well. Buy it, try it, blow some stuff up in the Battlefield 6 campaign.

Taking the game as it currently exists and reading the roadmap to its eventual release, I want to believe that it’s going to turn into something special…even if it’s not something special right now. [Early Access Provisional Score = 70]

There are plenty of ways to look at GUG, and none of them are good. Is it a scam? A prank? A thinly disguised attempt at creating a botnet? Normally I’d say that it’s just a developer biting off more than they can chew, but GUG is so bad in so many ways, you almost hope that it’s because it’s a cover for something worse. Regardless, avoid this game at all costs.

It’s just a poorly made imitation of a PS1-era classic, and you’d be better off going back and playing Metal Gear Solid than wasting time with this garbage.

Without a multiplayer mode and so many better versions of the game currently available on the GBA, like "Bomberman Tournament," this game really isn't worth $20.

It’s not a good game – and again, the voice acting and cutscenes and script are abysmal – but on the whole it’s not interesting enough to generate really strong feelings. It’s a bad game that’s also incredibly boring, which is just about the worst combination imaginable.

Even if you’re a diehard fan of TMNT in its current incarnation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed is a stuttering mess that doesn’t deserve your money.

Given the state that Virballs is in already, it feels reasonable to expect that it’ll continue to evolve into something worthwhile. And if it doesn’t? Then even in its current state, if the price were to come down, it’d offer an hour or two of fun. Here’s hoping, though, that it’s able to deliver on its clear potential. [Early Access Provisional Score = 75]

Mika and The Witch’s Mountain is pleasant enough that you probably won’t hate it, but it’s far from being a must-play. [Early Access Provisional Score = 65]

Quintus and the Formidable Curse’s one saving grace is that it an odd, off-kilter color scheme that gives the game some eerie vibes — always a good thing in a horror game — but ultimately, those aren’t enough to distract from the fact that the scariest thing about this game is that it was released in this state.

It’s a genuinely fun time, and I hope the developers stick with it and turn it into something even better. [Early Access Provisional Score = 80]

It’s a decent enough game now, and provided its developers see it through to a full release, it seems reasonable to believe that it’ll continue to improve. [Early Access Provisional Score = 70]

Is Metro Simulator 2 the worst game on the Switch? It’s quite possible. There’s a lot of shovelware to be found in the eShop, and I’ve only played a fraction of it, but there’s a strong argument to be made that Metro Simulator 2 might be the worst of the bunch.

Taxi Life wouldn’t be a very good job simulator if it tried to add in a bunch of glitz and glamor. But it’s still possible for a game to be a solid job simulator while also having fun elements (or at least being so terrible at representing its job that it becomes laughably good). Taxi Life doesn’t come anywhere close to either extreme: it shows how boring it can be to be a taxi driver, and it makes it so that you don’t have any real reason to play this game.

While I did not run into any bugs amidst my time playing Endless Ocean: Luminous, and it did run at a very comfortable 30fps, it just adds up to an incredible disappointment and doesn’t really have much going for it. It’s a downgrade from the Wii titles in basically every conceivable manner, and I sincerely cannot recommend it, especially for a $50 price tag. If you have the option, please just go find a copy of the second game at a secondhand shop for $15. I promise you it’ll be a better experience.

For now, though, Nightingale isn’t quite there. I’m still interested in seeing where the game gets to by the time it leaves Early Access, because I’m still intrigued by its promise, but for now, it needs some work. [Early Access Provisional Score = 65]

The Switch has plenty of fishing games on offer, so there’s no need to waste your time with one as frustrating and dull as Pocket Fishing.

It’s a dull, plodding slog that does a grave disservice to its source material, and you’d be wise to search out that source material instead of wasting a dollar or a moment on this game.

While it certainly deserves praise for its ambition, and it can’t be faulted for not delivering a Rockstar experience on a fraction of the budget, it’s not too much to ask that game asking for your money to deliver more than this. If you can buy it on a deep discount and have no expectations – and, of course, you’ve exhausted everything else there is to do in Red Dead Redemption – it might be worth it, but otherwise you’ll want to give Guns and Spurs 2 a pass.

As I said, I know that DINOSAURS: Mission Dino Camp is intended for a younger audience, so some allowances need to be made, and you shouldn’t go in expecting the greatest game ever or anything. But even kid-oriented games can be good, and when they’re done right they can offer hours of entertainment. DINOSAURS: Mission Dino Camp is definitely not done right, and for that reason should just be avoided.

Is Paperman: Adventure Delivered the worst game I’ve ever played? Honestly, it’s quite possible. It has no redeeming qualities, and I got more and more annoyed every moment I spent playing it. You can’t just write it off as one of those dumb meme games that clog up digital storefronts that are intentionally bad, nor can you say that it’s so bad it’s good. It’s just flat-out terrible.

The Witch of Fern Island is still in Early Access, so it’s totally possible that the developers will build on what’s here and turn the game into something worth playing. But that’s certainly not how I’d describe the game at this point in time, so until and unless it gets there, it’s really not worth your money.

Strangely enough, the last game I played from Lightwood Games was also a logic-based puzzle game – though in that case, my complaint was that the game was too easy, and I finished all the puzzles the game had to offer in less than a hour. I certainly didn’t finish Word Web by POWGI in less than a hour – but finishing the puzzles dragged on so much, it made me want to quit the game and give it up after just a few of its 120 puzzles. Hopefully next time out, Lightwood can try a word game that’s not also a logic game, because the results so far aren’t great.

I will be transparent and say that I have only spent about 5 hours with Firewall Ultra at the time of this writing, and have not had the ability to link up with friends or colleagues yet, so all of my time has been spent with random party members online. That 5 hours has been something of a chore though, and I was ready to step away within the very first hour of time with Firewall Ultra. As I said earlier, there is definitely something here, and an adjustment to environmental interaction, reloading, and the combat engagements itself could turn this around. Unfortunately, as it stands here now, I cannot truly recommend this as a VR game worth spending your time and money on, at least not yet.

Year in and year out, its 3 yard gain on first down then a 10 yard sack on second down and we’re caught in 3rd and long. Just when we think EA is righting the ship on Madden, we get this lazy borderline rerelease of the previous year’s iteration. It’s clear the NFL doesn’t care about the quality of their games, as long as you’re not making “after the play hits” for which the Blitz franchise was famous. No one is holding the developers and publishers accountable anymore and the only way to see change is by voting with your wallet. Don’t buy this year’s release of Madden. Even if you didn’t grab Madden 23 last season, go pick it up used and update the in-game roster. EA should be embarrassed passing along Madden NFL 24 as a brand new release for $70. Enough is enough and it’s time for a change.

There’s some good ideas in Tenebris Pictura, but, much like Pentadimensional’s other game, they’re buried by bigger ideas that are much, much worse.

Honestly, even after writing all these words about Fort Solis, I still feel like I’ve only brushed the surface of why it’s such a terrible game. It may look nice, but there’s literally nothing of value here. It’s a waste of time, money, and hard drive space, and you’re better off forgetting its existence.

I really wish I could say that Hammer of Virtue is a fun game despite its many, many issues. Really, I do. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing as fun in games as making the world around you come crashing down. But Hammer of Virtue shows there’s limits to even that. You need to be fun and functional, and Hammer of Virtue is very clearly neither of those things.

What makes this decision even more frustrating is that it’s so close to being a good idea. Your character is constantly having to turn the candle to pour out extra wax, and adjusting it in their hand so they have a better grip on it, or walk slowly so as to not snuff out the flame – these are all defensible ideas that you could imagine working out well in another, better game. Instead, you spend all your time in Project Nightmares Case 36 looking at a candle taking up your entire field of view. Whatever good ideas the game might have, that one monumentally stupid decision literally crowds out everything else.

With time and with patches, it’s easy to imagine it becoming a game worth playing, but it’s definitely not at that stage yet.

While Crime Boss: Rockay City isn’t particularly fun, as I said up top, I’ve also played far, far worse games. For all its faults (and it certainly has many), nothing here is egregiously terrible – which means, ultimately, that Crime Boss’ biggest sin isn’t that it’s a bad game, but rather a very boring one.

There are few things as fun as a game where you get to destroy everything, so you’d think that Demolish & Build Classic would be a slam dunk. Instead, it’s just a total mess of a game.

Essentially, what I’m telling you is that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is indeed a bad video game. It’s not fun when it works, it’s even less so when it doesn’t, and the overall concept of the game is one that ultimately makes it feel unnecessary altogether. I don’t know of anyone clamoring for Gollum’s whereabouts to this degree, and if they were, I’d at least hope they were expecting something far more interesting than this. So yes, believe what you’ve heard, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not worth your money, and certainly is not worth your time.

It’s all enough to make you wish that you could just look at Arto instead of having to play it. It would probably have worked really well as a visual novel or a walking simulator, where you could luxuriate in its incredible visuals without having to worry too much about how it plays – but in this state, as a hack & slash action game, it’s a lot harder to recommend.

In the case of Monster Tribe, where the gameplay is atrocious and the visuals are equally bad, the idea of having to go back and consistently replay parts you've already paid is torturous. Better to not play it at all, and save yourself the frustration.

It all makes you wish that there was nothing notable about Death or Treat, so that you could just write it off completely. But it's hard not to go back to that intro cutscene and see how much care went into creating it, and then wondering what went wrong. It makes you conclude that these developers might have a great game in them, it's just definitely not this one.

All of this might be worth it if you’re super into Dokapon – but do such people exist? I mean, I’m sure there are some, but if you’re in that very tiny group you probably don’t need to have anyone tell you to pick this game up. And if you’re not? Then you’re definitely going to want to give Dokapon Kingdom: Connect a pass, unless you feel like devoting dozens of hours to a board game that’s not really very interesting.

The fact is that the game is plagued by camera controls so dire, they make it impossible to enjoy anything else. With some major tweaks to those controls, it’d be easy to imagine Molly Medusa becoming an under-the-radar hit, but for now, it’s definitely one to avoid.

Even if Castle Renovator delivered on exactly what its name promised, I have a hard time imagining it’d be much more fun. There’s a way to make these job sims fun, and a way to make them feel like a dull slog, and every design decision here ensures that this game falls squarely in the latter camp.

Even if you somehow ignore the platforming and the combat – and you shouldn’t, because those are the most important parts of the game – there’s nothing here worth recommending. You have a garish color scheme, annoyingly repetitive music, and grating voices. The Legend of Gwen is just an all-around bad, bad game.

I get that I Am Your President isn’t trying to be Suzerain or Democracy, so expecting it to be on par with either of those isn’t fair. But it’d be nice if it made any effort whatsoever, rather than thinking that a few pop culture references and some vaguely political words are enough to make it a political simulator. There’s room for a good, snarky satire game, but this definitely isn’t it.

As it stands, my early hours in Wild Hearts have definitely been enjoyable. Performance had some hiccups prior to the day one patch, which seem to have smoothed out a bit on Xbox Series X, so that’s off to a good start at least. Also, while my online play was limited prior to launch, the handful of team-ups I did have went smoothly, and the online multiplayer functionality here is pretty easy to understand, so barring any network issues I think it’ll work pretty well at launch. For the time being I’m calling this a review in progress primarily because I’ve not approached the end game content yet, which if you’ve any experience with Monster Hunter styled games like Wild Hearts, you’ll realize that can be a pretty major component. So for now I’ll hold off on giving this a proper score, but will say that everything I’ve played so far has been immensely promising.

It might be fine on PC (though the Steam reviews indicate even that’s a bit of a mixed bag), but as far as the Switch release goes, even if you’re a huge fan of motorcycles, you’re better of skipping this one.

I cannot overstate how bland I found Neptunia: Sisters vs. Sisters to be, I was actually pretty surprised by how bored I found myself hour after hour. I can safely say that you’d be fine avoiding this one, and if you’re a fan of the series, you’d probably still do well to steer clear of this entry.

Despite the sheer amount of words that have been written about the game – including by me, I’ll acknowledge as I pass the 1,500 word mark on this review – the reality is that it’s just a forgettable, mediocre game. It does plenty of things very poorly, but it also does one or two things well enough that you can’t say it’s completely and irredeemably awful. There’s no real reason to seek the game out, and there’s no reason (apart, maybe, from that stupid talking bracelet) to avoid it at all costs: Forspoken is just kind of there.

I realize I’m spending way too much time complaining about a game that’s only $5. But the fact is, this developer used to be a reliable source of fun, inexpensive retro-tinged games. As Slime’s Journey shows, lightUP’s games are still inexpensive and retro-tinged, but they’re certainly not very fun.

Everything in One True Hero has been done before – and much, much better – and you’d be wise to play one of the games it’s borrowing instead.

Instead of being immersed in the environment of The Callisto Protocol, I found myself thinking back and wishing more and more that I was playing Dead Space. There are promises of patches to improve some of the complaints around the actual mechanics of the game, but I don’t see anything on the horizon elevating The Callisto Protocol above mediocrity.

I know that, as a middle-aged man, I’m clearly not the target audience for a game about rebuilding your family estate and bonding with your horse. At the same time, though, I can’t imagine that the people who would be interested in that would want to put up with it, either. Horse Tales plays poorly and performs even worse, and it’s bound to disappoint anyone who picks it up.

There’s an argument to be made, I guess, that if you stop thinking about it as a Batman game and just judge it on its own merits, it’s not half-bad – but even if you do that, you’re still left with the reality that the game that doesn’t come anywhere near matching up to what the genre is capable of. This is a mediocre game through and through, and Batman branding or no, it’s not really worth your time.

Mages and Treasures may come from a developer with a decent track record, but this is proof that even developers who know what they’re doing have a misfire once in awhile.

Rather than playing this game, you’d be much better off watching Vertigo, and Notorious, and Psycho, and Rear Window, and whatever other movies you could squeeze into the 10 or so hours it would take you to play Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo, and I guarantee you that it would be time better spent.

It’s not inconceivable that LEGO Brawls could turn into something fun one day. If it were beefed up with loads more content, along with more interesting and more dynamic fighters, it would definitely be a lot more interesting. But in this state, with so little content – and with the content that is there being of such poor quality – there’s no way to classify LEGO Brawls as anything other than a massive disappointment.

Overall there is not enough here to recommend to most players. Souls veterans will be left wanting more, and most likely frustrated by the limited options available to approaching combat encounters. Newcomers to the Souls-like games will most likely be put off by the initial difficulty, as well as the massive skill check that the first boss poses. A forgettable story, relatively bland world, and overly simplistic combat leave quite a lot to be desired after the initial hour or two with Thymesia.

The controls are so bad, in fact, that they outweigh whatever good or interesting or intriguing things Pendula Swing may be trying to do here. There’s a lot going on, and there are all kinds of ideas, but the only way to experience any of it is by dealing with constant frustration, and in the end it doesn’t seem worth it.

There’s a lot of potential there, but unfortunately Hazel Sky never really gets into any of that. Instead, you get Shane and Erin talking about what they want to do in the future. While I’ve always had a soft spot for stories about characters on the peripheries of something bigger – only so many main characters can be The Chosen One, after all – in this case, it’s hard to care about any of it. Or maybe it’s just hard to care because the game is so poorly designed and so frustrating. Whether you’re falling through the world, or having a needed object vanish out of your hands (which happened to me with alarming regularity), or merely just fighting with the camera, Hazel Sky is chock full of terrible decisions.

Ultimately, the Wonder Boy Collection is a mediocre release. While the titles included are all decent games, it seems lackluster in options and presentation. There is a very small “gallery” of art included which is made up of Master System covers and instruction book pages as well as a small amount of promotional art from magazines. Again, seeing Master System related screens in this collection while not offering the ability to actually play those versions demonstrates how phoned-in this collection really is. While the price isn’t terrible at $29.99, I feel it should offer more in the way of playable games, options and extras. If you are interested in picking this one up, I would say wait for a sale or price drop before diving in. Decent games in an overall disappointing package.

XEL isn’t a great game. It’s not even a mediocre game. It’s a half-finished mess that shouldn’t have been released in this state.

It feels as if the developers wanted to make a different, more interesting game, but couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do with it, so instead they turned it into a sequel for a game that wasn’t particularly good or memorable in the first place. You’re left with the feeling that they didn’t really care about Freddy Spaghetti 2 – and really, neither should you.

It’s this awful technical performance that makes Autobahn Police Simulator 3 go from so bad it’s good – or, at least fun – to just plain bad. If the whole thing was just a collection of nonsense, then it would be easy to laugh at, assuming you bought it on sale. The fact that it can’t even do that reliably is what makes Autobahn Police Simulator 3 a game to avoid.

Playing Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, it becomes clear the series has continued to find new ways to be mediocre, even as they’ve evolved in some ways. It’s a so-so game from nearly ten years ago that now feels positively ancient, and you’re better off just ignoring its existence.

It’s a game that genuinely seems to want to help players understand what it’s like to be a gymnast. But just because the game has its heart in the right place, it doesn’t make it any more interesting. Great intentions are fine, but as Pro Gymnast Simulator shows, they don’t make for compelling gameplay.

Promesa is a slow-moving, boring game that never really explains why it exists, which makes it hard to care about any of it.

There’s a gulf between competent and enjoyable, and Jumanji: The Curse Returns comes nowhere close to crossing it. It may work, but before you’ve finished your first time playing it, you’ll be wishing there was something more than that to it.

I can’t help but shake the feeling, though, that it could have been done in a way that was interesting, or at least tolerable. Instead, The Magnificent Trufflepigs makes the prospect of spending a few hours in this world seem like a dreadful slog. The whole thing feels like it was tailor-made to win awards and win critical acclaim, but like the worst kind of awards bait, they forgot to make the game interesting enough to merit either.

Obviously, Unlock the Cat isn’t terrible, since it’s a functional game, and it works exactly like every other version of this basic puzzle works. But unless the only thing stopping you from playing Klotski puzzles was the general lack of cats, there’s really nothing here that’ll make it worth your while.

As I said up top, I get that it’s a little unfair to come into a series that’s been around for a couple of decades and complain that you don’t know what’s going on. But at the same time, the more you play of Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, the more you get the sense that it’s being so convoluted because it doesn’t know what else to do. It tries to wrap everything together sometime around the 15-hour mark, but there’s really no reason why you should want to stick around for that long.

As Far As The Eye’s one saving grace is that it’s kind of pleasant to look at, provided there’s no text on the screen. Given that there’s lots of text on the screen, however, along with lots of incomprehensible gameplay and unresponsive controls, it doesn’t matter how nice As Far As The Eye’s visuals are when everything else about it is so awful.

Busted in more ways than anything I’ve played in a while, it’s very disappointing as an evolution to the series. Maybe we’ll get the No Man’s Sky of Postal games and in 5 years, this review will look stupid, but where I’m sitting now, at the 1.0 release, I’m not hopeful. At least I liked No Man’s Sky on launch.

Honestly, there’s nothing redeeming about Waifu Impact. It’s bad, it’s broken, and it’s boring, and there’s no reason whatsoever to play it.

It’s a dull walking simulator mixed with an equally dull visual novel, and the end result – while fairly unique – is indescribably lousy.

It might be worth it if you’re obsessed with Trophies or Achievements on another system, but if you’re just playing for the fun of it, don’t bother. There are plenty of other, better platformers to be found on the Switch.

If you just want to learn to spell, I guess, that makes Mini Words Collection kind of an attractive proposition. If, however, you’re a fan of word puzzles and you want anything that’ll challenge you in the least, then keep looking, because you’re not going to find that here.

It’s entirely possible that Rustler is a lot better if you’ve played the original GTA games. But I doubt it. Between the lousy controls, the ugly graphics, and the all-around annoying gameplay, there’s really nothing here worthwhile.

As I said up top, there’s a paucity of good wrestling games on the Switch, which means that it’d be very easy for a half-decent one to break through and feel like it’s Game of the Year-material. Action Arcade Wrestling, unfortunately, isn’t up to that task.

It’s a shame that the execution is so bad, since, as I said, there’s a good idea at the core of Monster Harvest. Given that there are plenty of very good monster-breeding games and farming sims out there – even if not necessarily in the same game – you’re much better off playing those in tandem rather than suffering through this.

It’s clearly better than its predecessor, but that’s the lowest bar imaginable – and it’s pretty clear that it’s a bar that this one only just clears by the barest of margins.

At some point you have to assign proper value to your own time, because Extraction will not. There are too many good games out there that manage to do this better. If you are on PC, play GTFO instead. If you are only interested in GamePass games? Play Aliens: Fireteam Elite. Do you want tight Rainbow Six gameplay and tactics? Stick with Siege. There are no upsides to Extraction that outweigh the negatives here, and I cannot suggest it to anyone in its current state.

If you loved the games back in the ‘90s, you may enjoy reliving your youth, but for everyone else, there are plenty of other more modern games worth your time and attention.

It’s a wisp of an idea that’s not even interesting enough to sustain the minimal game that’s here, and you’re couple of dollars and 20 minutes would be better spent on pretty much anything else.

Despite the near-constant action, it’s still a dull, repetitive shooter that wears out its welcome within a few minutes, and you’d be well-advised to skip it entirely.

To give A Day Without Me some credit – very, very limited credit – it’s got some interesting ideas. Putting your character in an empty neighbourhood and asking you to figure out what happened could’ve made for an engaging mystery. But that would’ve required the game being halfway decent or competent, which it’s not. No matter how intriguing the mystery at its core is, nothing can make up for the fact A Day Without Me fails so utterly at everything else, and that’s enough to make the game an easy skip.

It’s a low-effort, forgettable visual novel that’s not worth the time or minimal money it’ll cost to pick it up, so you can safely skip over it without worrying you’re missing anything.

For a game that promises ninjas, Neptunia x SENRAN KAGURA: Ninja Wars is awfully short on actual opportunities for fighting. I know: that’s not why people usually play these games – the presence of Senran Kagura should have been a dead giveaway for that. But even so, as much as I generally loathe those games, I can still acknowledge they feature some decent action – and Neptunia x SENRAN KAGURA: Ninja Wars simply doesn’t, by any stretch of the imagination.

As much as I’ve always liked the Danganronpa series, I can’t imagine wanting to sink endless amounts of time or money into such an empty, boring game. And given we’re talking about a series for which the word “boring” should never apply, that should tell you how much of a failure this game is.

Maneater, for all its problems, at least had some personality. Strip that away — along with anyone else remotely good about the game, and you’re left with…well, you’re left with Angry Alligator.

If World’s End Club existed in a vacuum — or even in a world where neither Danganronpa or Zero Escape didn’t exist — it might seem a little more interesting. The premise is solid, and there’s nothing inherently objectionable about the gameplay, it’s just not incredibly interesting since we’ve seen it done so much better elsewhere. But that’s precisely the problem — it’s been done much, much better, and those games are all still quite available, with the Danganronpa trilogy slated to arrive on the Switch in a few weeks. You’re better old holding out for that, rather than wasting your time with this pale imitation.

Again, I don’t have a ton of experience with Doctor Who, so I may be the completely wrong person to be judging The Edge of Reality. But given that the series has been around for about sixty years, I’m perfectly willing to accept that it’s a fun, substantive universe. Unfortunately, none of that comes through with this game.

Obviously, Don’t Touch This Button is hampered by the fact that other games have mined very similar territory, and done the same kind of thing much better. If this were a world where none of those games existed, Don’t Touch This Button might have more to recommend it, but as it stands, you should probably just play those games instead.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about Mickey Storm and the Cursed Mask is that it’s very clearly aimed at young kids. It’s been years since I was a kid, but based on the few young kid gamers I know, I can’t imagine many would have the patience to deal with terrible controls like these — particularly when there are plenty of much better, much fairer platformers available to them. For that matter, I don’t have the patience to deal with Mickey Storm and the Cursed Mask’s terrible controls. Or anything else about it, really. It may look bright and shiny and welcoming, but it quickly becomes clear that there are far better platformers out there.

The studio that made this game was also responsible for 2018’s The Dreamlands, which was also marked by being appallingly putrid in every way imaginable. Killer Dolls United continues that trend, but is somehow even worse. It’s a bad game, and even if you’re a Vita completionist like me, it’s one you should strongly consider skipping.

As I said up top, even in a best-case scenario, Instant Sports Paradise would’ve felt like a bargain basement version of Wii Sports Resort. But this can’t even achieve that very low target. Instant Sports Paradise is a lousy game that’s completely and utterly lacking in every way imaginable.

Obviously, given it’s only about $5 at the time of this writing, it’s not like Loopindex costs you a whole lot in terms of money. But there are much, much better ways to spend those $5 — not to mention much better ways to spend the time it would take you to earn this quick-ish Platinum — and you’d be well-advised to look into any of those, and forget about this one.

Poker Pretty Girls Battle is only $5 on every platform, so it’s not asking much. It’s hard to recommend it even just for the poker aspect when the algorithm doesn’t always pay out correctly. If the game catches your eye, give it a shot and maybe you’ll find something to like. As it stands, however, it is pretty shallow and the core mechanics have visible flaws, making playing pretty rough.

It’s definitely got heart, but it needs a lot more than that to make it worth recommending.