Invincible VS is clearly a game by the FGC for the FGC, which results in a double-edged sword. It serves as an incredibly fun and satisfying tool for competition, featuring just enough of that modern fighting game sanding of edges to welcome in new players, while also offering plenty of depth through playing chicken with the combo meter and a combo breaker-esque system of Heroic Strikes, Counter Tags, and Assist Breakers. Disappointingly, this focus on creating a game for tournament players seems to be what has caused the single-player offerings to suffer. The presentation is brilliantly flashy the whole way through, but after playing through a mediocre “episode” of the show and reaching disappointing arcade mode endings, the casual audience is left with little to do in the game other than rematching the CPU in standard matches over and over.

t may fall short if you’re looking for a deep city builder or life sim, but as a piece of absurdist Dada comedy I absolutely love Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. Every day I look forward to booting it up, making a Mii or two, seeing what unlikely friendships are forming, and watching ludicrous vignettes play out. I’ll boot up Stardew Valley or Pokopia if I’m looking for something mechanically deeper, but I know I can count on a good laugh whenever I check in on Kayfabe Island.

Mouse: P.I. For Hire shows a deep love for animation of the era, but the gameplay and script lack the same level of care. A Gouda attempt, but nothing bleu me away. Cheesy in all the wrong ways.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a frustrating title - a truly new game in the series has finally made its way to us after decades away, but the choice to retcon the story, coupled with the absolute whiffs in gameplay, leaves it feeling like little more than a flimsy footnote in the series overall. There’s a ton of love here for the story of Legacy of Kain, but its changes and contributions to the lore make it feel more like fan fiction than a true prequel. I wanted this to be the triumphant return of Kain, Raziel, and the strange, dark world of Nosgoth, but what arrived instead was something draped in the series’ skin - not an evolution, but an uninspired reinvention.

Mario Tennis Fever has me worried for Nintendo’s sports games on Switch 2. It’s not worse than any of the sports games on Switch 1, but it’s also not any better. The trouble is that it commits almost all of the same sins: the mechanics are solid, but nothing outside of the core tennis gameplay is that much fun.

As a huge fan of Terminator 2 and the 16-bit era of sidescrolling action games, I certainly found plenty of things to appreciate about this faithful throwback from Bitmap Bureau. If you see NO FATE on sale for $10 and have the same nostalgia that I have for its inspirations, I’d give it a hearty recommendation. It becomes much harder to recommend a $30 purchase for a 45-minute long experience. But then again, it did remind me of that scene where Arnold kneels on the hood of a semi truck and unloads a full assault rifle clip into the T-1000. So it can’t be THAT bad.

It's good enough that its host of technical problems feels like an affront to what the game could have been, and to the hard work and talent--and there's a considerable amount of talent here--of the people who made it.

On paper, these elements add up to one of the most elaborate and original Star Wars games in a very long time, but poor performance, a multitude of minor bugs, and a pervasive sense that swaths of the game are just lacking in refinement all undermine what would otherwise be an easy game to recommend.

Jedi: Fallen Order is both one of the best Star Wars games to date and distressingly unrefined.

If all you want is another huge, slightly lukewarm portion of a meal it feels like we just finished, then Odyssey certainly delivers that. Personally, I feel like I'm going to explode.

The ambitious setting doesn't pay off in this story that seems to want to hedge every chance it gets. The end result is a story that goes nowhere, says nothing, and fails to live up to the previous settings and villains in the franchise. If you can get past that... the rest is pretty much fine if you're up for another Far Cry game.

Far Cry 5's story is a real let-down, but the action still makes for a solid co-op experience.

A decent video game undermined by bad pacing, weak characters, and a wishy-washy world view. Play it cooperatively with a friend, ignore the characters and their motivations, and you'll probably have a good time.

This rollercoaster ride of a turn-based strategy game starts out almost impossibly strong, but by the end I mostly wished it'd been over three hours earlier.

This feels like the most wheel-spinning, by-the-numbers Call of Duty they've made thus far.

Call of Duty's return to World War II looks great, but feels flat and uninspired from start to finish.

This core action and the complex systems that underpin it are fun enough to play around with that it's a real shame that so many issues exist around the edges of this package, because those issues eventually started to diminish my enjoyment of the game's good parts.

This core action and the complex systems that underpin it are fun enough to play around with that it's a real shame that so many issues exist around the edges of this package, because those issues eventually started to diminish my enjoyment of the game's good parts.

Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite's gameplay lives up to its predecessors, but in most other ways, it takes you for a ride.

If you play enough Arms, you’re bound to have the occasional thrilling, close-fought bout. These brief moments are fleeting, however, and the game simply doesn’t give you enough reasons to keep coming back.

There's a pretty decent core to it, but everything from the monotonous mission design to the way the characters are introduced and immediately discarded to the lame audio to the overpowered AI just chips away at different parts of the game until you're left with a game that's probably only enjoyable if you're playing with friends and ignoring large parts of the world building and lore. If "shoot first, ask nothing later" is your style, you'll probably have a pretty good time. It's a dumb game with decent combat and effective co-op. But the game isn't good enough to recommend to anyone in any other situation. If you like playing alone, I'd recommend you look somewhere else.

The IW campaign is great, but not long or replayable enough to warrant a full-priced purchase on its own.

Drifting over the polygonal landscape looking for crystals is still a peaceful good time, if you can overlook a few flaws.

Drifting over the polygonal landscape looking for crystals is still a peaceful good time, if you can overlook a few flaws.

It's light years from being a great game, but there's still something at the heart of No Man's Sky that speaks to the would-be explorer in all of us.

It feels like it has even less of a story than Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has, but that's because that story is spread incredibly thinly across a large world that's packed with cookie cutter content. There's nothing inherently wrong with Primal, and I found the game's combat systems to be pretty exciting at times, but the structure of the game and most of the tasks you're given are one-note. It's a monotonous grind that gets a good lift from its approach to combat and a handful of other tweaks to the formula, but it's still the formula.

Far Cry: Primal feels like one long, optional side mission.

I have some very strong feelings towards Street Fighter V--positive and negative. The lack of single-player content is less of an issue for me personally and I’m sure a lot of people feel the same and are really only interested in local or online versus. But there are a surprising number of modes and features that are either missing completely or coming later that should have been included at launch...However, I don’t want to understate the fact that I am having an absolutely great time playing Street Fighter V.

If you're looking for anything other than a solid fighting game with strong netcode, you should probably hold off until the game sees a few more updates.

Firaxis delivers a fantastic sequel in many regards, but a large assortment of technical issues plague the overall experience.

Slick production values, solid controls, and tons of fan service can't make up for mediocre progression and a lack of content.

Slick production values, solid controls, and tons of fan service can't make up for mediocre progression and a lack of content.

At some point, I just want the games to work reliably. Fallout 4 follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, which is to say that it's a large, sprawling world filled with so many different quests and locations that most players will miss entire subplots as they scavenge their way from one side of the world to the other. That's also to say that it's occasionally kind of broken, from performance issues specific to the console versions to scripting glitches that might just prevent you from progressing to the same sort of "physics gone wild" moments that make for killer animated gifs and such.

There's a great game in Fallout 4, but how much of that greatness gets through to you is largely dependent on your own tolerance levels for those glitches and how willing you are to play another game from the same template as Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, and Oblivion.

Perhaps some pockets of the still-large Call of Duty fanbase will enjoy different parts of it more than I did, but as I add it all up, Black Ops III is a pretty even mix of positive and negatives. It's OK.

Rock Band 4 feels more like a maintenance release than a proper relaunch of this once-popular franchise.

Rock Band 4 doesn't feel like a grand, triumphant return for rhythm games. It feels more like a minimum viable product than the fourth game in a long-running and popular game franchise.

There's tons to do in Mad Max, but most of what you do are the same few things, over and over again. I did it because I felt like I was supposed to, because some piece of my weird brain told me what I was doing was fun.

Where Hotline Miami felt lithe and creative, Hotline Miami 2 often feels sluggish and inflexible. There's fun to be had with this sequel, but it's the kind that only the original game's most ardent and obsessive fans will find in great supply.

Hotline Miami's thrillingly brutal gameplay is stretched to the point of breaking in this aesthetically pleasing, but otherwise disappointing sequel.

Given the embarrassingly long time spent patching and getting Battlefield 4 up to snuff, maybe a "stable" Battlefield will be enough for some players.

Battlefield Hardline is hardly a disaster, but it feels like a franchise spinning its wheels with minor adjustments, rather than truly advancing forward.

If you’re looking for a new collection of Saints Row activities in a new setting, Gat out of Hell is just that, so it can be enjoyed if you go in without expecting a significant upgrade to what’s been seen numerous times before in the series.

The little mushroom man finally gets his name on the marquee, and the result is a charming, unique, and puzzle-heavy adventure.

Its best modes are too often hobbled by reliance on 2K's junky servers, and bugs and design flaws are too prevalent to ignore. NBA 2K15 still offers the most realistic version of the game of basketball you'll find on any platform this year. It's just a shame that players will have to struggle against its shoddy infrastructure in order to get the most out of that experience.

Its best parts are aesthetic in nature, changes to a visual palette that evoke a world of futuristic possibility. Yet the game itself feels regressive compared to the many changes made to Civ V's formula throughout its lifespan.

This is a fun sequel spinning its wheels, capitalizing on what worked well before without real progress towards an endgame. Like most sequels, that works once, but it won't a third time.

This quirky offshoot is better than any Dynasty Warriors game I’ve played, while simultaneously being the worst Zelda game I’ve ever played.

When you throw it all together, you're left with a game where the missions are designed to be repeatable, but all the missions are so repetitive that it's hard to get excited to see the same handful of environments again and again and again as you attempt to grind out faction reputation or hunt around for high-end weapons. It's a beautiful game, but a hollow experience.

Even though I feel its story is often weak and its action isn't that different from other games in the genre, I still enjoyed my time with Watch Dogs. It turns out that the old stuff still works, and the strong-but-standard mission design kept me entertained, most of the time. It's rough around the edges, though, so if you don't settle for anything less than the best, you'll probably be disappointed...But hey, Watch Dogs 2? That'll probably be pretty cool.

Even though I feel its story is often weak and its action isn't that different from other games in the genre, I still enjoyed my time with Watch Dogs. It turns out that the old stuff still works, and the strong-but-standard mission design kept me entertained, most of the time. It's rough around the edges, though, so if you don't settle for anything less than the best, you'll probably be disappointed.

For every moment Tesla Effect had me cursing the '90s, another put a big, fat grin on my face. It's unapologetic about its roots, even when it probably shouldn't be. But I really enjoyed my evenings with the barely functional gumshoe, and it didn't destroy my memories of Tex Murphy in the process.

As visually resplendent and periodically fun as Child of Light can be, it too often buckles under the weight of its own aspirations.

At its core, Yoshi's New Island is not a bad game. This is an acceptable, middle-of-the-road platformer, and one that I had an OK time with. But it's not particularly memorable until it's ready to say goodbye, and you're given a fleeting, tantalizing glimpse into the game that might have been.

As far as entry points go, Danganronpa is a great one, even if 999 and VLR are better games. If you like what you see here, more strangeness awaits you. Danganropa's tongue-twisting sci-fi (or is it?) narrative will have you constantly second guessing, and while the game-y parts aren't its strongest point, they work well enough.

With more variety to its combat and some more time spent smoothing out its rough edges, Strider could have been a significantly better game.

The control feels good and the combat starts out in a pretty satisfying way. But, over time, those positives wear off. The game doesn't do enough with its additional items, areas, and action to make it feel like a steady challenge and the variety in the action is a little lacking.

Forza Motorsport 5 becomes a game that is outstanding in specific, limited situations, but overall, it's kind of a drag.

The truly criminal part about Rivals' inability to bring people together is that it's actually a great game.

Rivals feels like it's on the cusp of greatness. The pieces are all there--the handling is exciting, the soundtrack is solid, and the systems that surround the multiplayer help build meaningful battles between racer and cop. But with just six players driving around the entire world and no good way to pull those players together for some true multiplayer activities, those pieces go absolutely nowhere, leaving behind an empty world that might as well not even be online at all. It's a real shame.

Unfortunately, the game doesn't do enough to bring players together, resulting in an online game that feels empty, cold, and lifeless.

Ryse makes a good showpiece if you've bought into the Xbox One early, but at full price it feels a little thin.

Madden NFL 25 doesn't represent enough of a leap forward to make it either a technical showpiece for your new console, nor a more exciting football game than what EA already put out a few months ago.

Madden NFL 25 doesn't represent enough of a leap forward to make it either a technical showpiece for your new console, nor a more exciting football game than what EA already put out a few months ago.

It's a quality multiplayer shooter paired with a lackluster campaign that starts out with promise that it completely squanders by the time the credits roll.

It's still my favorite online multiplayer shooter. But the bells and whistles surrounding the game are muted and missing, leaving behind that same core without giving you enough new and exciting reasons to come back.

Ghosts offers the same style of video game combat that Call of Duty has had since 2007. The core of it is still engaging and can be very thrilling, if you're receptive to this type of action. In fact, it's still my favorite online multiplayer shooter. But the bells and whistles surrounding the game are muted and missing, leaving behind that same core without giving you enough new and exciting reasons to come back. Even with the improved graphics to be had on next-generation consoles, I'd rather play Black Ops II.

All I can say is that in spite of its sometimes dopey script, its slavish dedication to control mechanics that don't always quite fit, and its unrelenting desire to stuff in as many obvious blockbuster movie references and cliches as a single game can hold, I enjoyed the experience of playing Beyond: Two Souls.

The problem is, Madden NFL 25 isn't anywhere near the best or most memorable edition of the game released. Hell, it's barely much better than last year's flawed, but generally playable game.

As is, The Bureau makes for a decent enough 10 hours of alien-obliterating combat, but all the way through you'll find yourself lamenting the many aspects that feel like they could have, and should have, been better.

Maybe if it had scaled back the scope of its X-Files-meets-the era of Mad Men concept, focusing on the earliest incursions of the massive conflict brought to bear in Enemy Unknown, it might have helped rein in some of the crazier, stupider, and more aggressively junky portions of the game.

That art design, the game's intriguing story, and the terrific score by composer Olivier Deriviere are ultimately betrayed by Remember Me's slavish dedication to a game design that just doesn't quite work.

Remember Me is a better story than a game, a mixture of Philip K. Dick-style plotting and Luc Besson's sci-fi aesthetics grafted onto an initially nifty, but ultimately repetitive gameplay design.

Fuse's bland art design and overall lack of personality are disappointing in the context of that initial reveal trailer, but under the hood it's still a generally well made third-person shooter with a clear emphasis on co-op and the imaginative weapons Insomniac is so good at dreaming up. But there are too few of those weapons, and a few too many irksome issues, to lift Fuse significantly above the many, many other cover-based shooters it's competing with.

There's just enough exposition there to keep things moving and just enough of a gameplay tweak to make you wish they had made these changes two games ago. It's a fun but feature-light shooter for people who already enjoy the basic style of Gears of War. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is a game with startling clarity of vision, but that vision often feels narrow and intractable. It knows precisely what it wants to be, and in most key ways, executes on those ideas with precision. But in setting that course, it all but dismisses the way in which many played SimCity sequel after sequel. And while I expect many will fall head-over-heels in love with this SimCity's cooperative design, at its best, the game feels more like a really thoughtfully designed multiplayer mode for a larger, single-player capable game that, sadly, doesn't exist.

The Xbox 360 version is grungy, by comparison [to the PC], with lower texture quality and a lower framerate. That's unsurprising, but when taken against the other games on the platform, the 360 version still looks OK. It's certainly playable, anyway, though a weird audio bug made one of the early open-area segments practically unplayable, since it's hard to know when to take cover and hide from incoming rockets if the audio isn't playing back at all.

It's serviceable and, again, it looks great on the PC, but was this trip really necessary? It's an average experience, overall, and in a genre that continues to be packed full of competition, you'd probably be better off finding a discounted copy of Crysis 2, or, if the open-world combat of the original Crysis really floats your boat, spend some time with Far Cry 3, instead.

This final chapter in the trilogy certainly gives you your money's worth in necromorphs waiting to be dismembered, but the overall quality of the game just doesn't feel equal to the high standard set by its excellent predecessors.

I'm still glad I saw the Dead Space trilogy through to the end--and if you're invested in the series it's absolutely worth playing--but it's too bad this respectable series, which felt so exciting and fresh when it debuted just a few years ago, had to go out on a middling note.

It's a sharp-looking game, the voice acting is largely on-point and funny (if occasionally obnoxiously repetitive), and there are at least a few solid hours worth of puzzle-solving to be had here. It's just that those hours don't really add up to a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, ultimately relegating The Cave to an interesting curiosity that sadly doesn't have much sticking power.

Ooo is lovingly rendered here, and the character art and animation is really sharp. Unfortunately, visuals aren't everything, and the actual act of playing Hey Ice King! is something that cannot be ignored.

PlayStation All-Stars makes a couple of design decisions that make the whole thing feel a little more awkward than it should. Also, for a game that's supposed to bring together the greatest heroes of the PlayStation platforms, it's missing too many key figures.

Everything about New Super Mario Bros. U is pretty exciting, except the game itself. Is it possible that this is the best game in the "New" series to date--not to mention one of the best exclusive Wii U games on the market, by default--and at the same time kind of flatly uninteresting? Apparently so. The game is perfectly well made for what it is, and I had plenty of fun playing it in short bursts here and there, but at this point the series' by-the-numbers design philosophy is starting to lend the name "New Super Mario Bros." a degree of unintentional irony.

Its protagonist is an intriguing one, and her mission frequently teases greatness. But it never quite arrives, due to the developers' inability to marry the "full-fledged" Assassin's Creed gameplay to the Vita's form and function.

It does all the things that sort of game is supposed to do, but not with the flair or invention that would make it possible to care again about playing something you remember having played so many times before.

Far from the loving tribute to an important milestone in modern games it could have been, BFG only adds a couple of esoteric technical features and a short, mediocre new campaign add-on to Doom 3, at the expense of some of the core graphics and gameplay features that defined the game's identity on its initial release.

The BFG Edition is the best you're going to do right now if you want to buy a new copy of a shooter that, for better or worse, ranks among the most hyped video game releases of all time.

The whole thing is just so gosh darn British, too, which I imagine is less of a selling point if you are British. That pervasive sprinkling of refined, humorous nonsense makes The Journey feel a little more like one worth taking, even when some of its nuts and bolts are less appealing.

In spite of its misfires and glitches, Madden NFL 13 is a step forward for this franchise. It's a small, clumsy step, but considering how little forward progress this series has made in recent years, any kind of step is a cause for minor celebration. If you can forgive the technical problems and often cumbersome menus, there's a football game worth liking here.

It has the right idea with character-specific abilities that help to make the individual Transformers feel different. But it doesn't go far enough in that direction to stand out, and it ultimately feels like it's being held back by its by-the-numbers shooting. There are some great ideas here, but you'll have to wade through a pretty thick set of drawbacks to enjoy them.

A game that improves upon the developer's past work. But it's still a pretty lackluster shooter that doesn't perk up until the end, and it's only truly suited for people who are fiending for a Transformers game.

In an age where indie games are finally beginning to bloom as a way to experiment with narrative, Papo & Yo still feels like a brave step forward into uncharted territory. And as with all first steps, it's something of a clumsy one, perhaps unsure of itself and its own limitations.

There aren't many action games in this particular mold to begin with these days, so those with fond memories of Deadlight's spiritual predecessors will likely have a reasonably fulfilling few hours here. Without an existing sense of nostalgia for the source material, though, you may find Deadlight's minor flaws collectively outweigh all the things it does right.

A terrific idea that just doesn't pan out as well as it feels like it should. All the little tweaks and decisions, from level list to the soundtrack to the decisions about which moves to include or exclude eventually start to weigh on the overall experience in a meaningful way. It turns something that should have been a joyous update and revival of a tarnished franchise into something that simply misses the mark.

The story in Spec Ops: The Line isn't amazing, but the way that it's told really stands out and, in many ways, saves the entire project from being a complete waste of time. But that doesn't make it easy to recommend.

If the fundamentals were a little more refined or the new ideas a little more fully implemented, I'd feel better about recommending it wholeheartedly, but given the new elements in play here, you can at least take heart that Traveller's Tales isn't resting on its laurels.

The gravity-shifting gameplay offered might be complete enough for game-starved Vita owners on the hunt for something to do with their device. But do manage your expectations, lest you be disappointed by how hollow Gravity Rush is underneath its breathtaking shell. This is a game that does one thing very well. If you need more than that, then Gravity Rush isn't for you.