While a lot of Starfield's familiar Bethesda cruft is outdated and often boring in the early game, the story, quest, characters, and interactions all get better the more you play. That doesn't mean you can ignore the awkward traversal and janky bugs, but it is questionable how damaging those elements are to the experience after 250 hours in Todd Howard's space epic. [Quick Look]

Redfall fails to compel on nearly every level, not just in its uninteresting story, but also its all-too-familiar gameplay. Not only does Redfall feel like a game stuck in yesteryear, even its performance finds a way to disappoint. [Quick Look]

It's so nice to have a surprise like this come out of nowhere...and at the end of the year I expect I'm still going to be thinking about this when it comes to game of the year time. It would have made my Top 10 last year. - JG [Quick Look]

A spooky and ambitious little indie game that knows exactly how silly it is, Choo-Choo Charles has some expected flaws from the constraints that come from being a single-developer project, but makes up for it with its originality and moxie. (I mean, what other game out there is about fleeing from and fighting a demonic spider-train? You just can't get that in a AAA game!) It's one of those indie horrors that's brimming with the joy and the jank that makes me love the genre overall. [Quick Look]

Despite the way-too-chatty guns (for what it's worth, there's options for that), High on Life ends up being a pretty fun shooter in a colorful and ridiculously stupid sci-fi world. It's not reinventing the wheel with its combat, but it doesn't really have to in order to be an alright time. The boss fights are surprisingly enjoyable and the game's exploration is satisfying, with upgrades and unlocks that open the world gradually, in a way that reminds me a bit of Ratchet and Clank. High on Life's crass humor is an understandable balk point for many — and the first hour or two is unrelentingly... well, Roilandy — but if you can push past the bad first impression, it's a good ol' competent FPS. [Quick Look]

Mirror Forge is a little indie horror joint with a lot of heart and a lot of glitches... but that's not really a deal-breaker for me. It's one of those scrappy super-indie titles whose charm is actually kinda amplified by its rough edges. The developer's love for Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness, and Stranger Things is apparent as our trauma-laden protagonist wanders through bloody hallways with ancient secrets, told to us via somewhat goofy voice acting. Cliché stuff, yes, but I can't help but enjoy that this is a game that knows what it is - an ambitious, mishmashed, indulgent homage to some really great things. A solo developer stretching their legs and seeing what they can pull off. A janky, but entertaining time. [Quick Look]

The Callisto Protocol was touted as the next Dead Space and it unfortunately suffers for that comparison. With frustrating, awkward combat, an uninteresting plot, and jump scares that fall completely flat, The Callisto Protocol struggles in the shadow of its spiritual predecessor, which did all of those things better 14 years ago. (This is all not to mention the full-screen strobing light effects that cannot be turned off; an accessibility failure that one would not expect of a modern AAA game.) It's a pity that Callisto copied the aesthetic of Dead Space while failing to execute the aspects that made it frightening and fun. [Quick Look]

An intro into the Warhammer universe that'll make you want to dive all the way in. Gothic organs blast as you and three other friends blast through hordes and hordes of decaying enemies. [Unprofessional Friday]

Ship of Fools is a neat little roguelite Overcooked at sea mashup. Things get chaotic real quick as you and a friend have to navigate the seven seas and make sure to not throw precious material overboard. [Quick look]

Marvel's Midnight Suns has snappy tactical combat that's incredibly satisfying and manages to juggle numerous social links successfully with familiar heroes. [Quick Look]

"The Devil in Me" takes an intriguing historical true-crime premise, mixes it with a bit of SAW, and half-bakes it, amounting to a very by-the-numbers, unscary addition of the Dark Pictures Anthology. Unlikable characters with dull personal problems and a plot with glacial pacing bog down a game that had a lot of potential in its set-up. That's not to mention the graphical glitches and other oddities that make the game feel rushed out the door. These unfortunate factors culminate to make The Devil In Me the weakest of the Anthology series thus far. [Quick Look]

The age of the Switch's hardware and GameFreak's prowess as a studio is on full display in the newest Pokemon release as we see muddy textures and single frame animations. While we get a new crop of cute Pokemon, a more open world, and new battle mechanics we're unfortunately stuck trudging along at a snail's pace because of the game itself. [Quick Look]

The age of the Switch's hardware and GameFreak's prowess as a studio is on full display in the newest Pokemon release as we see muddy textures and single frame animations. While we get a new crop of cute Pokemon, a more open world, and new battle mechanics we're unfortunately stuck trudging along at a snail's pace because of the game itself. [Quick Look]

Somerville's strengths come from its mysterious narrative and storytelling intrigue, but it fails to match the overall polish and cohesive game design language as its spiritual predecessors. [Quick Look]

Pentiment sheds the dice rolls and combat to emphasize the branching conversations and compelling narrative that Obsidian is best at. And the result is an engaging page-turner that can only really work as a video game. [Quick Look]

The Chant is a psychedelic folk-horror action-adventure game that has more to it than one might expect from an indie title. While it doesn't bring anything particularly new to the table with its gameplay, it does provide a successfully fun experience and a compelling cult setting to sink into. [Quick Look]

Platinum makes Bayonetta wilder and more unpredictable than ever, mostly for the better. [Quick Look]

The Entropy Centre is a brutally brain-bending Portal-like, using time as its main mechanic. Casual puzzle-enjoyers might find its trial-and-error game loop more frustrating than fun, but the meticulous-minded will probably enjoy its challenges. [Quick Look]

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Former GameMaster Jess geeks out way too hard at Jeff Grubb, teaching him the ropes of escape rooms! [Quick look]

The Jeffs and Jan convene and hold gnarled fingers together to chat about their harrowing adventures in the world of Elden Ring.

Undoubtedly a gorgeous spectacle in every way, Forbidden West struggles to develop a compelling storyline out of the gate. It mitigates that through a satisfying and customizable combat system, though in our playthrough so far, hasn't demonstrated a substantial evolution from the original. [Quick Look]

Some say it takes a village to do a quick look, others say it only takes Brad and Vinny. Sit back and enjoy as the Giant Bomb team takes an unedited look at Resident Evil Village.

Jeff Gerstmann & Jeff Bakalar's early impressions.

Kojima's first post-Konami project is a bizarre, self-indulgent mess that never quite manages to tie its myriad pieces together.

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Quick look (video).

Twice on PS4, the game crashed so hard that it literally powered down my console, forcing me to repair all my storage devices before I could boot it back up. A game making you worry about damaging your hardware is just inexcusable. I don't remember seeing this many big and small technical issues in a major release since, well, Mass Effect: Andromeda. How that reflects on BioWare's recent track record doesn't really need to be said.

Anthem needs more than just new content. A lot of work needs to be done on a wide variety of the game's fundamental elements before it can join the ranks of other redeemed loot games like Diablo III, Destiny, and The Division. Whether EA will give BioWare the latitude to overhaul the parts of the game that need it--and whether it's even technically feasible for them to do that in the first place--are questions with uncertain answers.

I don't think I'd call Crackdown 3 an awful game, but I would call it dated.

Crackdown 3 shows very little in the way of learning from the past or learning from the other open-world games that have graced consoles over the last nine years. Instead it feels slight, mindless, and dull. It feels like a gussied-up first-generation Xbox One game. Like the sort of game you might have expected to hear about back in 2014. In the here and now, though, there's... way less room for this sort of game on store shelves.

Jeff, Brad, and Ben jump into Respawn's new free-to-play battle royale game.

Quick look.

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It has all the trappings of a game that should probably be free-to-play, but Konami is asking $40 for it up front. That's a bad deal.

After Phantom Pain was released and the split between publisher Konami and series creator Hideo Kojima became public, some folks lamented that we'd never see another game on Konami's Fox Engine ever again. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

Metal Gear Survive is both a bad survival game and a bad Metal Gear game.

The end result feels like a game that was created in a boardroom, its DNA formed by focus testing and market research. Time will tell what EA does in an attempt to remedy its grave errors with Battlefront II, but the game as it stands today is little more than a disappointing mess. Its technical prowess, beloved characters, and shiny spacecraft serve as little more than a distracting facade that covers an embarrassing attempt at a marquee Star Wars game.

It may share a genre and universe with Saints Row, but Agents of Mayhem is a lifeless husk of Volition's prior work.

It's also an utter mess in a technical sense. There are a few enjoyable moments here and there, and over time you can see the skeletal framework of a better game start to emerge, but given the heights Mass Effect has reached in the past, it's hard to believe this is what we've been waiting five years for.

So stylish...I am diggin' it. [Quick look]

Quick Look.

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A dreadful combat system brings down an otherwise beautiful and funny Mario adventure.

The combat, platforming, crafting and customization, even the parts of the story that work were clearly built with care and seem like they'll amount to a really engaging game with a lovable cast of characters and an intriguing world, but the game's rampant problems are just impossible to look past. This game deserved to be so much more.

ReCore offers a lighthearted, fun first few hours, but all that promise is quickly buried in a torrent of bugs and oversights, poor storytelling, and disjointed pacing that all make the game a pale shadow of what it could have been.

Homefront may look pretty, but it's a monotonous and confused slog.

It is a dull game that fails to offer more than passing enjoyment, hitching and glitching all along the way. It offers a middling co-operative mode in a field filled with games trying to innovate in that space. It struggles to say anything--even something bombastic and cartoonish--about crisis, nationality, or revolution. It tries to roar America, but instead coughs out a few, unintelligible grunts.

It is a dull game that fails to offer more than passing enjoyment, hitching and glitching all along the way. It offers a middling co-operative mode in a field filled with games trying to innovate in that space. It struggles to say anything--even something bombastic and cartoonish--about crisis, nationality, or revolution. It tries to roar America, but instead coughs out a few, unintelligible grunts.

All of this would have been welcome in the early 2000s, but the years of disappointing follow-ups and the overall progression of industry standards leads to Star Fox Zero having the impact of an HD rerelease rather than a full sequel. Being able to beat the game in 2-3 hours doesn't help, no matter how many branching paths or lackluster challenge missions are included. Even the moment-to-moment action doesn't have anywhere near the impact that it had almost two decades ago, as this limited style of gameplay feels dated in 2016.

There are a lot of sound ideas in the middle of Quantum Break and, hey, if you're a sucker for goofy time travel hijinks this game has that going for it, too. But those ideas are the only things holding this project together. The moment you look past that heady connective tissue, every single one of Quantum Break's individual elements fall flat.

WWE 2K16 improves on the many things wrong with last year's game, but not nearly enough.

The quality feel of the driving and nice-looking environment are buried under heaps of technical issues and bland objectives.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is a mess of half-cocked ideas, astoundingly poor execution, and technical woes that layer a little insult on top of injury.

The only thing worth knowing is that no part of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is worth your time. It's bad. Real bad. And not the type of bad that makes for good comedy, either. It'd be bad at any price, but it's especially egregious that the publisher is charging a full $60 for this sucker. It'd be something you'd want to avoid for even a third of that price. Don't waste your time. You deserve better. Tony Hawk deserves better. Hell, even guest skater Lil Wayne deserves better.

The campaign has aged pretty poorly and the graphical updates to the campaign side of Gears of War feel half-baked, so unless you're really excited for the competitive part of Gears of War, there's nothing for you here.

It's a technical showpiece, a graphical powerhouse that, in some ways, is almost without equal. It's also a short and disappointingly straightforward cover-based shooter that offers little to no variety in its encounter design, a lackluster story that fails to make good on its initially compelling premise, and a set of jarring Quick Time Event setpieces that aren't especially interesting from a gameplay or a storytelling perspective.

Nothing about the gameplay feels broken, it just feels soulless this time around.

Yes, 2K has imbued 2K15 with impressive graphical prowess, but those hot visuals don't mean a whole hell of a lot when the rest of the game feels so undercooked.

Assassin's Creed: Unity is at once an object of exquisite beauty and exhausting boredom.

An improvement. It's a better looking game than NBA Live 14, and a better playing one, but "better," in this case, does not directly translate to "good." Live 15 is still too shallow to hang with 2K's game, but it represents a glimmer of hope that this series could eventually provide some legitimate competition to 2K Sports somewhere down the road.

For every brilliant moment, there's a handful only worthy of exasperated annoyance.

It just isn't much fun to play. The core act of driving a car feels off in a way that completely put me off of playing the game. Without that in place, the rest of it just falls apart. The PlayStation 4 has been without a serious racing option since launch, and Driveclub doesn't fill that gap.

Whatever steps forward NHL 15 has taken in visual presentation hardly make up for the alarming gutting of many of the series' best features.

Moments of true thievery are frequently left to side missions, which leaves roughly 10 hours of story in which you navigate bland mazes of narrow corridors, dull traps, and dimwitted A.I. foes, all for an end result that does nothing but underscore what a colossal waste of time the whole endeavor ultimately was.

This game is not very much fun in any facet of its execution, and the supporting modes don't make the crappy basketball-playing any better.

Online play is straight-up garbage.

Here is a game that dutifully balls up tired cliches and flat, unimaginative game design just for the sake of filling a presumed-to-be requisite slot in a launch lineup. It does the barest minimum necessary to craft a functional, if utterly flavorless morsel for families hungry for something to feed their shiny new PlayStation 4.

While I can usually get behind forgiving some problems in the face of quality fan service, Deadpool's fan service is highly specific to those who want the character taken to the most hyperactive extremes imaginable. Maybe that particular subset of fans will be able to look past the game's issues more easily, but anyone else will likely find Deadpool intensely grating and largely frustrating in equal measure.

Combine those problems with the game's generally chuggy, unattractive visuals, generic-as-hell soundtrack, painfully obnoxious late-game difficulty spike, and breezily short campaign (I beat most of it in a single afternoon), and you've got yourself a game that really doesn't offer much to anyone, outside of the most dedicated fans of the Merc with the Mouth.

There are glitches and other unfortunate quirks to talk about, but those problems barely register over the din of utter mediocrity that pervades so much of Star Trek: The Video Game's campaign. Outside of a horrid, poorly-explained turret sequence in which you (barely) pilot the Enterprise in battle, there is scarcely an acknowledgment anywhere in this game that Star Trek fans might want to do something other than just run around and shoot aliens. Such a concept ultimately belies the very point of Star Trek in practically all of its many incarnations.

If I'd come out of Dead Island with a burning desire for more Dead Island, Riptide would go down a lot easier, but since that original game started out strong and just got weaker as it wore on, playing through another 15 hours of almost exactly the same thing, when the first one already felt like more than enough, instead just becomes a tiresome exercise.

As awful as Survival Instinct is mechanically, the really depressing thing about it is that it offers no meaningful information or commentary on the characters it revolves around. Yes, Daryl and Merle's lives are a bit more fleshed out, but nothing you learn is anything you couldn't have gone the rest of your life not knowing.

Both functionally broken and creatively bankrupt, Aliens: Colonial Marines is an extinction-level disaster.

If you're the sort of person who doesn't inherently find the concepts of greased-up deaf people, Amish people commenting on their sex lives, older women grotesquely demanding group sex from frat boys, people in wheelchairs falling over, or "the gays" completely hilarious, do not get angry at Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse.

A disjointed mess of meaningless missions played against a clock backed up with a multiplayer mode that occasionally approximates something that resembled proper Call of Duty combat. More often, though, the game feels too small to be entertaining, with maps so tiny that you'll literally spawn with an enemy in your crosshairs... or vice versa. This would be a questionable purchase at traditional downloadable pricing. But at $50? No way.

The idea of an anthology-like tribute to Bond films of the past isn't a bad one, but 007 Legends wastes whatever potential for fun there might have been. Instead, all Bond fans are left with is a heavily rewritten, Cliff's Notes version of some great (and not-so-great) films with a bunch of forgettable shooting and stealth sequences shoved into the mix. Ultimately, nothing 007 Legends offers is worth the effort of trudging through it.

Resident Evil 6 is a big-budget disaster on the order of the Star Wars prequels, a sprawling production that clearly required so many individual talents to bring it into being, you can't help but wonder how the end result could have turned out so bad.

I enjoyed it in spurts, but there's just too much wrong here to hold your attention for long. As amusing as it can be, it's really just a janky wrestling game with avatars stapled on for maximum stupidity.

This is most definitely a lazy, slapped together, overly expensive waste of time that nobody need bother play. And yet, for some bizarre reason, all I could think about while playing The Expendables 2 was that it didn't have to be this way.

It's designed in such a way that only pixel-perfect aiming and split-second responsiveness will get you through its missions unscathed, but your ability to react quickly and take in your surroundings is so severely compromised that you'll die, repeatedly, in each attempt.

That's pretty much the whole of Game of Thrones. Sad dialogue, combat, sad dialogue, combat, sad dialogue, more sad dialogue, something outright horrifying happening, sad combat, and so on repeated in varying orders for a bit more than 20 hours.

It can't even craft a halfway competent action game out of the myriad things it stole from much better action games.

There are a few glimmers of what could have been in here, but this is not the game that legitimizes Kinect as a game-playing device, nor does it do a single thing to restore any vibrancy or value to the Star Wars license. Fans of Star Wars, Kinect hopefuls, and little kids all deserve better.

I'm comfortable in saying that South Park: Tenorman's Revenge is a gigantic middle-finger extended in the direction of anyone who might actually want to enjoy a game featuring the myriad memorable characters and storylines of South Park in video game form. And because of all of that, I'm completely comfortable declaring that you should stay the hell away from South Park: Tenorman's Revenge.

It has a criminally low number of courses that have all appeared in previous Ridge Racer games, no interesting career structure whatsoever, a new car customizing feature that somehow manages to make the "machines" feel less unique, and a bunch of music that also appeared in the old games. You'd have to be extremely hard up for any form of ridge racing for this to add up to something worth purchasing.

Killing the combat system that made this franchise so enticing, and robbing it of any modicum of challenge was so far beyond what was necessary that it leaves Ninja Gaiden 3 feeling like little more than a stripped-down husk of its former glory. If the previous Ninja Gaiden games were like carefully built, brutally fast hot rods, Ninja Gaiden 3 feels like it should be up on bricks on somebody's lawn.

I Am Alive is extra disappointing because it has so much potential right up front, and then wastes no time squandering all of it. Its premise is exciting but its promise goes wholly unfulfilled, and at some point you've got to stop lauding a game's good ideas and think about how much you actually enjoyed playing it.

No amount of perfunctory challenge maps can make up for a game design so functionally lazy, so utterly indifferent to your enjoyment, that it can't even be bothered to make its lone gimmick work even slightly well within its hacked-together world. If the developers in charge of NeverDead didn't care enough to make it a remotely enjoyable experience, why should you care enough to bother with it?

THQ wants you to pay $7.00 for eight missions and a handful of mostly meaningless unlockables. That's just crazy.

All of this misery for $50 a pop. An hour and a half of busted-ass light gun shooting that barely masks the deplorable PR message underneath. In effect, buyers of Blackwater are paying for propaganda. They're handing over money to a shady group of alleged killers for the privilege of being told that these guys aren't shady or killers or anything to that effect.

It squanders its terrific concept by saddling it with poor handling, insanely inconsistent off-road and crash behaviors, and straightforward, race-only multiplayer that isn't good enough to keep you coming back. If you want to play this type of light, arcade-like driving game, stick to last year's Hot Pursuit.

It squanders its terrific concept by saddling it with poor handling, insanely inconsistent off-road and crash behaviors, and straightforward, race-only multiplayer that isn't good enough to keep you coming back. If you want to play this type of light, arcade-like driving game, stick to last year's Hot Pursuit.

The Just Dance series feels like it's headed in the right direction with Just Dance 3, but it still has a long way to go. If you were satisfied with the Just Dance experience on the Wii, and you find the soundtrack to Just Dance 3 appealing, you probably won't be disappointed. But you should know that you can do better.

Save for some occasionally witty banter, this generally generic brawler is too concerned with the window-dressing of time-travel to capitalize on Spider-Man's character, abilities, or mythology.

Top to bottom, this game feels rushed, a supposition backed up by Silicon Knights' history of protracted development cycles, from which X-Men: Destiny did not benefit. While politics of why that's the case, as well as speculation on the impact more time and money would've had on the game, are ultimately irrelevant to the game's failures as they are, it's not that hard to see how it could've been something great.