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.