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.