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.

The gameplay, as singular a combination of gameplay styles as it is, suffers from being a jack of all trades and master of none. Like most teenage metalheads, this game has got issues, but if you're willing to look past some very uneven gameplay, Brutal Legend will rock you. Hard.

So no version is perfect, but the faster loading makes the Wii version the best choice, provided you've got the right controllers on-hand.

It's a technically competent shooter with co-operative play. For some, that's plenty. But if you're more discerning about your shooters, you'll probably get bored of this one before you've seen the end credits.

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

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.

I really enjoy the look and feel of Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and there's a good amount of content here, but the severe difficulty level makes it all much harder to appreciate. It's punishing, but if you're up for it, there are some sights worth seeing here.

It's a solid first step. With some iteration, more content, and more vocal contributions from more members of the TNA roster, a sequel could be just as viable of an alternative to the SmackDown! series as TNA's brand of wrestling is to WWE's.

It's just too bad that the online matchmaking is totally broken on the PS3, making the game's fun online multiplayer a total chore to experience.

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.

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.

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

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.

As a guy that appreciated Tron back when it was released who is already interested in seeing the new movie, the way Evolution fleshes out the world and sets up the events of Tron: Legacy makes it a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise.

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.

Wii Fit is a decent package, and it works exactly as advertised. But you may outgrow it quickly. Unless you’re already convinced that you’ll want other balance board games down the line, you’re probably better off just going for a nice, long walk.

It's a short game, but if it were longer, the excitement of bullet curving would probably wear off. That said, it's got some cool concepts and it compliments the film fairly well. If you can find it for less-than-full price, it's worth checking out.

The awkward campaign mode would be completely forgettable if Tekken 6 worked better online. But with it ranging from "almost acceptable" to "pre-patch King of Fighters XII" in connection quality, it's hard to recommend to anyone who doesn't already have a local crew of Tekken fiends at their disposal.

The game feels like it's stuck between two worlds, and it doesn't execute well enough on either side to fully satisfy any type of racing fan.

That Mercenaries 2: World in Flames isn't better seriously bums me out. Even in its current state you can see so much potential for breakneck, anarchic fun, which makes its laundry list of problems that much more frustrating.

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is definitely more a game for those familiar with the series than players looking for a deep, competitive fighting game. While it's visually engaging, those without an interest in the actual Dragon Ball Z franchise will find the fighting too simplistic to be rewarding.

If you don't come into Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles with an innate appreciation for the fiction of Resident Evil, all it really has to offer is a pretty by-the-numbers guided shooter experience. This doesn't make it a bad game, just an unambitious one, and one that has a hard limit on the audience for whom it will hold any significant appeal.

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.

If you're looking for the history lesson, you're better off grabbing it for $10 on the Virtual Console.

Overall, it's sort of hard to recommend Soulcalibur IV to anyone who isn't already a big fan of the series. It felt like everything I liked about the game (the actual fighting) was countered by something else (the meaningless story mode, equipment stats, Ivy's creepy-looking boobs) that made me want to take the disc out and put it away forever.

WarioWare: Snapped! does make for a great tech demo, though. It's pretty crazy that you can do all this on a handheld, and it's goofy enough that you'll want to show it to your friends.

But if you expect forward movement and new ideas from sequels, it's hard not to look at Ridge Racer 3D as a stubborn relic from a bygone era.

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.

The story of double-crosses and revenge feels pretty inconsequential over the course of Wet, but it manages to get the game's sharp dialogue across, so it certainly has its place. But that's probably the best thing that can be said about Wet, because the rest of its interesting moments get driven into the ground through repetition over the course of its 12 chapters.

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.

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.

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 game looks marvelous, and it's an impressive effort in this little-seen genre, but the gameplay is wrapped too rigidly around mechanics that feel a bit at odds with one another for me to feel good recommending it wholeheartedly.

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

Final Fantasy XIII just needed to be about half as long as it is, with tighter pacing and a faster ramp up to entertaining combat in its first half. But at least whether it's entertaining or boring you, it's unflinchingly gorgeous from one end to the other.

As a guy that appreciated Tron back when it was released who is already interested in seeing the new movie, the way Evolution fleshes out the world and sets up the events of Tron: Legacy makes it a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise.

While the edges of the action can get a little rough, especially after repeated use, the core of the game offers a lot of solid trivia and a controller that anyone--even a person who has never played a video game before--can easily understand. That makes it a good dose of group fun.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Your ability to possess, displace, and disintegrate a wide range of objects and human beings gives the designers ample opportunity--which they mostly use wisely--to set up unique and mindbending puzzle scenarios, but clunky controls and some basic game flow issues undermine what's otherwise a pretty neat little game.

It's only at its peak when you're sitting next to another player, locally engaging in SFXT's brand of tag battles. Online, I found it to be a bit of a mess, and the game's attempts at meaningful character customization fall victim to layers and layers of slow-moving menus and a bundle of additional content that only serves to further confuse the issue.

As I trudged through hour after hour of Lost in Shadow's adventure, a singular, pervasive thought cycled through my head: I wished this game were shorter.

It's only at its peak when you're sitting next to another player, locally engaging in SFXT's brand of tag battles. Online, I found it to be a bit of a mess, and the game's attempts at meaningful character customization fall victim to layers and layers of slow-moving menus and a bundle of additional content that only serves to further confuse the issue.

A third-person shooter that feels caught between doctrines--it's not tactical enough to feel like a deep, strategic experience yet it punishes run-and-gun tactics just enough to prevent fans of those sorts of games from having a great time, either.

Perhaps the greatest issue with Dead To Rights: Retribution is that it feels like last generation's ideas and standards reanimated for a new set of consoles.

For what Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection lacks in quality, it at least partially makes up for by its sheer quantity of emulated games.

If anything meaningful happens in this game aside from establishing a villain, it was lost on me. The only way I got anything interesting out of it was to start searching for web pages devoted to Baldur's place in Norse mythology to see how many liberties Silicon Knights is taking with its fiction and to see what sorts of things could lie ahead in the next games. As a game, the action is a little too straightforward for its own good.

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is definitely more a game for those familiar with the series than players looking for a deep, competitive fighting game. While it's visually engaging, those without an interest in the actual Dragon Ball Z franchise will find the fighting too simplistic to be rewarding.

Maybe if Starfy had been around in the Western market for years and engendered the same sort of nostalgia that we older gamers feel for franchises like Mario, I'd be more forgiving of this game's simplistic nature--but as a newcomer to the series, I found myself wanting for a platformer with a little more meat on its bones.

While you could say that there's nothing quite like The Last Guy--well, beyond the Work Time Fun minigame that the whole thing was based on--its unique feel doesn't make it a great purchase at $9.99.

While the mission mode and various attack modes can certainly keep you occupied for a time, Meteos' real legs come from human competition. Unless you're planning on playing with friends and don't care about random encounters in ranked matches, Meteos Wars is pretty tough to recommend.

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

Once the game stopped stunning me with new outrageous depictions of slaughter, the repetition of the combat started to set in, and I started noticing some of the game's other shortcomings, like the dodgy frame rate and buggy collision detection. These issues aside, if you've come to see Wolverine at his most brutal, this game does not disappoint.

The story is the main thing that I'll remember about The Force Unleashed--I found it to be more satisfying than the last three movies combined. Though you go in sort of knowing how it has to end, since it has to lead into Star Wars, there are plenty of significant events occurring throughout. It's enjoyable to watch it all unfold. That said, it's unfortunate that the game isn't a bit more even, because the constant flips from too easy to too hard really drag things down and prevent The Force Unleashed from being great.

That simple control style makes the multiplayer feel flat.

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.

Afro Samurai achieves a decent balance, providing enough style and combat to work more often than it doesn't. But considering how short it is, and how annoying parts of it can be, you'll want to approach this game with some caution, especially while it's being sold for full price.

There's something so audacious to me about stacking aliens on top of the apocalypse, and Mothership Zeta does it well enough that I'm willing to excuse some of its structural bluntness and over-reliance on combat. It's not the best Fallout 3 DLC, but it's still pretty interesting, and not a bad way to spend four or five hours.

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.

It's a short game, but if it were longer, the excitement of bullet curving would probably wear off. That said, it's got some cool concepts and it compliments the film fairly well. If you can find it for less-than-full price, it's worth checking out.

There's some great design in here and the game is genuinely entertaining in short bursts, but its weaker aspects add up over time to produce an experience that's less satisfying than its best ideas deserve.

There's some great design in here and the game is genuinely entertaining in short bursts, but its weaker aspects add up over time to produce an experience that's less satisfying than its best ideas deserve.

Final Fantasy XIII just needed to be about half as long as it is, with tighter pacing and a faster ramp up to entertaining combat in its first half. But at least whether it's entertaining or boring you, it's unflinchingly gorgeous from one end to the other.

PowerUp Forever is a pretty good dual-joystick shooter that stands out, even though there are now around a billion of these games available on various digital download services. If you felt that Flow was too soft, or that you wanted more guns in the first stage of Spore, you'll certainly dig it.

The fighting at the center of King of Fighters XII is totally fine, but with everything surrounding that action coming off so half-cocked, there are a lot of annoying little barriers to enjoying that fighting.

Enemies don't require much strategy in All 4 One. Especially towards the end, crowd control demands the game boil down to endlessly cycling between rockets and grenades. Yawn.

It's hard not to wish there was just more of Child of Eden to experience.

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.

Parts of this 50 Cent adventure are downright enjoyable, but I think the most enjoyment I got out of Blood on the Sand came ironically. The action is pretty generic, but it's functional enough to keep you moving from one bout of unintentional comedy to the next.

It's a technically competent shooter with co-operative play. For some, that's plenty. But if you're more discerning about your shooters, you'll probably get bored of this one before you've seen the end credits.

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.

Above all else, Splatterhouse is a game that screams "competent." Specifically, it screams it with a guttural heavy metal growl over the deafening din of grinding power chords and machine gun blasts of double bass, while simultaneously vomiting a fire hydrant's worth of blood all over the screen.

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.

New Kinect owners will undoubtedly have some fun early on with it, but Kinect Adventures seems destined to be more or less forgotten by the time the next wave of titles hits store shelves.

Its campaign is only worth seeing through if you're extremely curious to see how it ties into some of the other Transformers lore out there, and the multiplayer is solid, if perhaps a bit uninspired. It's a good diversion that'll keep you engaged for a few days, but don't go in expecting long-term excitement.

The gameplay, as singular a combination of gameplay styles as it is, suffers from being a jack of all trades and master of none. Like most teenage metalheads, this game has got issues, but if you're willing to look past some very uneven gameplay, Brutal Legend will rock you. Hard.

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.

It can be hard to look past the game's technical issues, which include insane pre-race load times and a frame rate that tends to rob the traditionally breakneck hover racer of its sense of speed. Toss in a UI that's a little too slick for its own good and you end up with something a little more ho-hum than you might be expecting.

The game feels like it's stuck between two worlds, and it doesn't execute well enough on either side to fully satisfy any type of racing fan.

It's a predictable entry in the series, and it's also competing in what's still the most competitive genre on the platform. I ended up liking UT3 for its constancy--at times it feels like a warm handshake from an old friend. But it also feels totally routine from start to finish.

Space Siege is genuinely fun for a while, but at some point in the dozen-or-so-hour campaign it became more tedious than entertaining, and I just wished there was more depth in the mechanics to hold my interest.

Fumbles by stretching what little story it does have much too far.

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.

Trajectile assembles aspects of some classic old games into a unique and interesting puzzle experience, but it's limited enough in some ways that you may bump into some frustration with its trial-and-error approach from time to time. Then again, for $5, what have you got to lose?

There are moments of multiplayer thrill to be had here, but they're infrequent, and sometimes tough to get to.

Its campaign is only worth seeing through if you're extremely curious to see how it ties into some of the other Transformers lore out there, and the multiplayer is solid, if perhaps a bit uninspired. It's a good diversion that'll keep you engaged for a few days, but don't go in expecting long-term excitement.

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.

There are definitely some quality songs on the list, but I think I would have rather been able to pick and choose a few of them as downloadable content for World Tour than be forced to buy them as a package.

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.

There are some neat ideas of how to effectively use the various touch screens of the Vita, and the art is gorgeous enough to make the game an able showpiece for what the system can do visually. There just isn't quite enough to the game beyond that to make up for some of its more irritating aspects.

The story of double-crosses and revenge feels pretty inconsequential over the course of Wet, but it manages to get the game's sharp dialogue across, so it certainly has its place. But that's probably the best thing that can be said about Wet, because the rest of its interesting moments get driven into the ground through repetition over the course of its 12 chapters.

There's something so audacious to me about stacking aliens on top of the apocalypse, and Mothership Zeta does it well enough that I'm willing to excuse some of its structural bluntness and over-reliance on combat. It's not the best Fallout 3 DLC, but it's still pretty interesting, and not a bad way to spend four or five hours.

There are worse ways to spend a lazy Sunday morning.

Its campaign is only worth seeing through if you're extremely curious to see how it ties into some of the other Transformers lore out there, and the multiplayer is solid, if perhaps a bit uninspired. It's a good diversion that'll keep you engaged for a few days, but don't go in expecting long-term excitement.

Above all else, Splatterhouse is a game that screams "competent." Specifically, it screams it with a guttural heavy metal growl over the deafening din of grinding power chords and machine gun blasts of double bass, while simultaneously vomiting a fire hydrant's worth of blood all over the screen.