So while I can understand what Tornado is trying to go for, I never really found it all that fun to play.

The disappointing sequel keeps the open ended play of the original, but the menial chores and lacking play mechanics could make any samurai give up on their career path.

The gameplay borrows heavily from Driver – so heavily that it winds up destroying the cop-like feel it tries to pull off.

I can’t really suggest Metal Gear Survive to either Metal Gear fans or survival game fans. There are better options out there for both, and Metal Gear Survive provides little incentive. I can appreciate the idea of trying to make a Metal Gear sidestory work, but this is an abysmal first effort by Konami, and really adds another layer of tarnish to the whole Kojima exit.

In the end I think it’s a solid idea that is just executed poorly, and it really isn’t something I’d suggest checking out.

If you’re a fan of OK K.O.! Let’s Play Heroes and you’re eager to experience it in another medium, then you may want to check it out. If you’re not, look elsewhere, because this is a strictly fans-only game.

There are glitches almost everywhere, and even if they’re almost all niggling little details like occasionally getting stuck while moving forward, or not being able to attack, or inconsistent hit detection, they add up to make the game pretty frustrating.

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.

To work Lost Phone Stories needs really compelling stories — after all, both games rely on being so interesting and engaging that you can’t help but want to search through the phones to figure out what to do next. And, quite frankly, they don’t succeed.

In the end though, I found Ragnarok Odyssey to be a bit of a bore. I was looking forward to my first Monster Hunter clone on the Vita, but came away from this one with a pretty sour taste in my mouth.

But if you're the type that will get a kick out of watching the fighters launch from the tubes on the titular ship (and those launches look a lot like they did on the TV show), and you long to put those one-eyed robots in their place, this game will entertain you enough to feed your nostalgic cravings even if none of the characters or even the robots look all that familiar.

A bit of the same old song and dance provided by most shooter games on the market.

If they had just made it so that there was any kind of skill involved in picking the right door — literally any skill whatsoever — it could have redeemed the whole thing. Instead, Left-Right: The Mansion just feels like a seemingly endless, monotonous game of chance, where the only way to win is to simply not play.

The Caligula Effect's combat is undoubtedly a major point in the game's favour, but when you stack it up against a forgettable story, terrible music, and a camera that doesn't want to cooperate, it's hard to say that it's nearly enough to make the game worth checking out.

It's high on presentation and style, but the short time it takes to beat it doesn't warrant a purchase.

I’d like to say that there’s some redeeming quality to balance that out, but there’s really not. I mean, on some level, it’s kind of neat to see how well the game mimics the Game Boy platformers to which I devoted countless hours during my youth, but that’s hardly reason to recommend the game. There other games out there that inhabit the exact same space (did I mention Super Life of Pixel enough?), and they do it much better than what you’ll find in Awesome Pea.

It may be nice to look it, but it's not all that fun to play.

A collage of two genres that collide harder than the crashes you experience in the game. Why? For one simple reason, you don’t take time trial speed races and toss in Tony Hawk style tricks in to slow you down. Bad choice boys, oh what a bad choice indeed.

It’s this unoriginality that hurts the game most.

All the wacky weapons and wormitude are present in Worms 3D, but it offers far more frustrating moments than fun ones.

My ranting aside, this game, while flawed in many areas, is decent to play single player.

If you're really, truly desperate for a decent-sized Vita JRPG, it might help you pass the time until something better comes along (otherwise known as that glorious day when the new Ys game finally arrives), but otherwise, you'll want to steer clear.

I don't feel like Yakuza: Dead Souls is a game that anyone really needs to play, even if you're a pretty hardcore fan of the series. The action is such a departure from the series, and handled so poorly, that it literally turns you off of wanting to do anything but the non-combat side stuff found throughout.

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.

The graphics have received a much needed boost (though at the cost of some nasty side effects), and the gameplay is still decent, but there are definitely better pickings out there.

What makes it really frustrating is that The Sims 4 has so much potential to be great with so many customization options. The game even throws people like me a bone, allowing you to give your Sim clear motivations and emotions, and it tailors the gameplay around that. But, cruelly, it makes doing all those things a massive chore, meaning that unless you really, really like moving your cursor slowly around the screen, you’re not going to get much out of it.

Easily not enough fun and gameplay potential to suffice for a 50-60 dollar purchase, that's for sure.

It doesn’t do anything incredibly well, and the things it does poorly are so minor that it’s hard to get very worked up. If you want a short, easy shmup it’ll do, but otherwise, you can probably skip it.

The overall experience is just not there. If you want to guess words or answer trivia questions, it’s fine — but it never aspires to be more than simply “fine.” Given how easy it should be to make these games fun, just being fine doesn’t do the trick.

It's a ridiculously easy game, and doesn't take a whole lot of time to finish off the single player mode. While I do appreciate that the mini-games are somewhat fresh and definitely varied, they're hardly going to keep anyone's attention for very long, even the younger players that this might appeal to.

Plague Road looks great, and that, in itself, is an accomplishment. But it's also the sort of thing that can be appreciated in screenshots — since once you get to playing, you may find that it ruins the overall experience.

Unless you fit into a very specific box — that is, V-Tube fan who loves repetitive action, meandering dialogue, and awful noises — you’re probably not going to get much out of Neptunia Virtual Stars.

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.

I have to give Nerved credit for doing one thing surprisingly well — creating the right environment for a horror game. No matter that literally every other aspect of it is bad, it still does that one thing right. It’s not enough to make the game worth checking out, but it is enough to say the game isn’t a complete failure.

It's about as bland as a game can get.

If it had been given the proper treatment, budget, and amount of time, Kane & Lynch would have easily been an A-/90% game. As it was released, it feels like a preview build that somehow hit retail shelves.

Game play can be summed up in one word…repetitive.

Despite Conflict Vietnam’s faithful, regurgitated depiction of the reality of war in Vietnam, the mechanics of the game are far too poor to make it recommendable to any but the most hardcore fans of gritty war games.

Button mashers rejoice, there is another title for you to pounce on! For the rest of us who have played games like "Devil May Cry," "Chaos Legion," and "Castlevania," you will know this little game play tale after the first few minutes.

Not the title to bring soccer to the greater masses; it only insults those who enjoy the sport.

Overall, Backbreaker has a couple good things going for it with the physics of the Euphoria engine, the team customization, and the unique POV when on the field, but the actual gameplay really sets this one back.

The reward for spending more time with Krinkle Krueger, after all, is…well, spending more time with Krinkle Krueger. And unless you've got a thing for games that actively try to annoy you, I don't get why that would be very appealing to anyone.

It’s just not as fun to play as "Mario Kart DS." The power-ups aren’t as entertaining, the game runs slower, the characters are generic, and the tracks feel uninspired.

GENSOU Skydrift may be essential if you’re a Touhou Project fan who always wondered, “Hey, how would those girls work as racing karts?”, but for everyone else, there are plenty of other much better racers out there.

The Church in the Darkness wants to be a stealth game that puts you in the midst of a doomsday cult. Consequently, rather than giving you insight into the world of a cult (a la Sagebrush, which I’ll once again point you to as a better game about the same topic), you get a dull game that’ll just make you appreciate how to avoid someone’s field of view. There are better options out there (*ahem* Sagebrush), and you’re better off getting that than wasting your time here.

The problem I found is that it felt like the RTS equivalent of button mashing; if I lost, I'd just as soon turn it off than feel all that compelled to try a different "strategy". A shame really, because there's nothing technically wrong with the game.

Syphon Filter 3 is a quality film with B-movie gameplay. The visuals, music, and CG are all top-notch, but the chewy gameplay center gets old after a few bites.

Depending on your ideological persuasion, you might take a very dim view of Breach & Clear's politics, but honestly, its biggest, most unforgivable transgression is that it's simply not a very interesting game.

I really wanted to like Arizona Sunshine, but as it is I really have a hard time recommending it. The horrid snap movement controls and twitchy aiming make it very difficult to have fun with, even though the concept is sound. Everything this game does wrong, and games like Farpoint do much better, and the things this game does well are plagued by the mediocre presentation. I truly love the concept and some ideas that Arizona Sunshine presents, but overall, it's just too broken of a game to get a high level of enjoyment out of.

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.

But a clumsy game/ And terrible visuals/ Drag this down, way down.

In The Escapists' defense, I guess, there are plenty of people for whom "being insanely hard" is a pretty attractive value proposition. And for those people, there should be more than enough here to love. For anyone else, though, this will just offer dull, endless drudgery, and that's precisely as fun as it sounds.

On top of losing everything at the beginning of a chapter, the music in most places of the game sounds like really bad shopping music.

The animation is equally as weak, and this is especially noticeable when you see Blade's rigid front and back flips. The XBox does a noticeably better job than the PS2 though.

I applaud the effort of making this type of game on the Vita because I want to see more in this genre, but I can't blatantly support a game that's not very much fun to play.

The game looks really crappy for a 2D title on any console, and plays exactly the way you think it would.

Biomutant has been hit with multiple delays, but unfortunately still feels like a half-finished product. The morality system is little more than a means to a few strong magic attacks, and the choices you make throughout the story are laughably irrelevant. A lot of the choices like the single narrator for all of the voiceover, and the overly simple combo mechanics can all be called creative choices, but in the grand scheme of things simply feel like the quickest route to a finished product. I truly wanted to love Biomutant, it has been high on my list of “must plays” since it was first announced, but in its current state, I simply cannot recommend anyone rush to buy it for $60.

So let's add it up: a story that's virtually impossible to follow, grind-heavy gameplay that consistently leads nowhere, and frustrating combat. I'm not saying that it would've been better off in Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy never got localized — more games are always welcome, no matter how bad they may be — but at the same time, I'm not not saying that either.

The city is not very alive, if you know what I mean. It looks like New York, but it doesn't feel anything like it.

Considering that Patapon and Patapon 2 are both available in the Vita's PSP store, you're better off saving your money and just picking up both of those instead.

It's a ridiculously easy game, and doesn't take a whole lot of time to finish off the single player mode. While I do appreciate that the mini-games are somewhat fresh and definitely varied, they're hardly going to keep anyone's attention for very long, even the younger players that this might appeal to.

What you get here will take you no time at all to complete, and it's hard to feel like there's not a sizeable amount of content missing from this particular game.

For this reviewer it just feels like an expensive demo in which I will forever await a full version that will never come. Sorry EA, 15 yard penalty for a personal foul on the gaming community. Repeat first down.

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.

The dialogue is enjoyably sarcastic, and it blends in political commentary in an impressively unobtrusive way, getting the point across without feeling like it has to slam you over the head with it. It’s still not funny enough to make it worth your while to play A Knight’s Quest, though. There are numerous games that do the same thing but in a much better, more interesting way, and you’d be better off playing any — or all — of them than wasting your time and money here.

Right now, unfortunately, it's a bit of a brightly-coloured, confusing mess, and you're better off waiting and seeing whether they fix everything.

Overall, Backbreaker has a couple good things going for it with the physics of the Euphoria engine, the team customization, and the unique POV when on the field, but the actual gameplay really sets this one back.

To some extent, Oure reminds me a lot of AER, another flight-heavy that seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity. Until the day when Heavy Spectrum and Daedalic Entertainment get together and make a really great flying game with a purpose, then, you’re stuck with what’s on offer here — and right now, that’s not enough to make Oure worth your time.

Simply a boring, run of the mill adventure that likely would not have turned out much different if there were six months tacked onto the development time or another developer was at the helm.

Not bad by any means. It's mediocre at heart, and I realize that I'm not the target market for this.

Game play, while trying to recapture the essence of the old school arcade game, is excruciating, dull, and repetitive.

I can totally see 5 to 10 year olds eating this game up. They'll love the characters in the game and it's not overly challenging. The multiplayer modes will keep them entertained, but any serious hardcore player will want to play a game with more substance and deep gameplay.

I unfortunately can’t really suggest anyone should pick up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan. As a pretty big fan of the franchise, and the old arcade hits, this game does little to capture the sense of fun in any way that actually matters. Instead you are left with a 3 hour game that feels longer for all the wrong reasons.

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.

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.

I’d really like to love Prime Monster, because it ticks off so many boxes for me in terms of my personal interests. And it shows signs of being an inventive game. But showing signs of being interesting doesn’t mean actually interesting, and it’s hard to see how this game bridges that substantial gap without some pretty major changes.

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.

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.

I know it’s a survival horror game, but it doesn’t take long for it to start feeling incredibly unfair. Not only is your ammunition limited, the enemies are also bullet sponges. It’s a weird combination, and it means that, far from the fast-paced shooter promised in the trailers, you’ll spend a lot of time running away – or, I guess, trying to run away, since we’ve already established that movement in Beneath is pretty terrible.

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.

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.

Granted, the game utilizes several really nice ideas that haven't been really been explored enough in the real-time strategy genre but for all of the good ideas, "New Worlds" still lacks focus, polish, and fun.

I was really excited to play Rodea: The Sky Soldier because I feel like there aren’t enough new IPs coming out and publishers are going to the well too often on sequels and reboots. So I'm extremely disappointed that I could barely find anything redeeming in my experience.

Unless you’re dying for achievements or are a fan of the films, there’s no reason to buy or even rent At World’s End. Instead, leave it to the films to do all the work for you, it’s easier and costs less.

Honestly, I can’t figure out why anyone would want to buy Ghost Sweeper. I mean, it’s a free phone game (with in-app purchases, of course), and, better still, you can also play Solomon’s Key itself in your browser right now. I’m all for supporting indie games, but when they do as little as Ghost Sweeper does to build on their inspirations, there’s really no point to playing them.

The AI basically flip flops around from being faster than any other racer out there to racers who lack that gray matter up in the head called "brain".

One more thing that just twists the knife a little more is that Nintendo of America decided to bring this wonderful compilation of mediocre games over to our shores, but refuses to release games that would actually propel the Wii's game library to new heights.

The implementation here is nearly a complete waste, considering the richness of the universe involved. Lousy controls, sterile and anemic environments, and weaksauce driving environments all pull down the good work done in the sound, character graphics and new footage departments.

It's immediately obvious that a great labor was undertaken to create and maintain the art style throughout, but it's marred immediately by lazy game design that neither finds any synergy with the art nor shows any pride in the product.

The game is a mess from the opening bell to the K.O. punch. As for differences between the two versions, nothing was touched up for the Xbox version, and both games are virtually identical.

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.

Another big disappointment is the lack of inclusion of the incredibly catchy Spy Vs Spy theme song heard every week on the MAD TV show on Fox.

The game, while pretty to the eye, is flawed in execution in most every way, shape, and form. The story is bland, the game is short, the controls are iffy, and the camera is laughably bad.

In the case of NBA Ballers: The Chosen One, not only is concept stale, but some of the new features hurt the game more than help push it to the next level.

So skip this. It's not a very good game, not a good Spider-Man game, and not something I'd suggest to anyone.

Still, when a game looks as nice as this, it's hard not to wish it played even half as well — and the fact it doesn't means that Vita owners can stay far, far away.

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.

Contrasted with the playful, pleasant narration that accompanied Thomas Was Alone, it just comes off as obnoxious. But really, that’s just a minor annoyance that pales in comparison to the fact that Alteric is demanding without balancing its demands with a sense of fairness. It’d be easy to overlook some annoying gasping if the game was good otherwise, but seeing as Alteric isn’t, it’s the grating cherry on top of an unfair sundae.