In the end, it's the price that serves as Brain Age Express: Math's biggest enemy. At 800 points, this slice of Brain Age is nearly half of the retail price of Brain Age or Brain Age 2, both of which would be a more valuable purchase than this downloadable edition.

A good, solid scrolling shooter. It's tough, but not so tough that it will only appeal to genre crazies who can only feel emotion when it's filtered through a bullet hell pattern.

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]

Even as the level designs seeks to frustrate you beyond measure, the game remains strangely addictive. If this were simply a bad game, you'd give up and move onto something else. But something at the core of Swarm keeps you coming back, despite all reason to the contrary.

I love the deliberate left-field designs of the monsters, and there's a purity to the way it approaches first-person shooting action that I wouldn't want to change, yet the game is so brutally intense that my frayed nerves and trembling hands can only handle it in half-hour chunks at most. Maybe that's Serious Sam's fault, or maybe I'm just not serious enough.

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.

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.

As a Mario game, Mario Super Sluggers feels kind of cheap; as a baseball game, it fails to capture the finer points that make the sport interesting in the first place. Its accessibility is probably Mario Super Sluggers' most well-realized characteristic, but what you're getting access to simply isn't much fun.

Some late-game issues not withstanding, Dadliest Catch is a charming, bizarre, genuinely likable little game.

The new quests and areas, combined with a "best of" lineup of characters from the other DLCs and other parts from the main game make for a good, exciting mini-adventure. If you're at all interested by the idea of returning to Borderlands, Claptrap's New Robot Revolution is absolutely solid.

Most disappointing is the game's conclusion, which lacks the kind of all-encompassing, universe devouring qualities of some of the series' best entries, switching instead to a sort of Rainbow Road-esque fantasy land that just tosses a bunch of random giant things from the other games together into a technicolor slurry.

It's not a completely disappointing experience, but I felt like too much of my time with Burnout Crash was spent almost having fun. In a way, that's almost more frustrating than if Criterion had whiffed it completely, since you can see the game that you'd want to play right in front of you, and yet it remains just out of reach.

A good, solid scrolling shooter. It's tough, but not so tough that it will only appeal to genre crazies who can only feel emotion when it's filtered through a bullet hell pattern.

If you have a soft spot in your heart for any of these old big-cart classics, you’ll probably be able to overlook the emulation issues and load times, but some of these early Neo-Geo games don’t hold up so well today, so make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into before you commit.

Web of Shadows opens strong, but it seems like it runs out of interesting and varied ways to put them to use well before you get to the end, and it turns into a bit of a grind.

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.

The structure of the game is decent, but it's brought down by issues both large and small. The largest one is a simple lack of content. With eight maps, a lackluster arsenal, and a campaign mode that is, by default, populated with terrible AI-controlled bots, Brink just doesn't have enough going for it to justify a full-price purchase.

With faster and more responsive controls, a better multiplayer framework, and a smoother character progression system, this one could have been surprisingly competitive in its category. But with so many problems holding it back, Lost Planet 2 is hard to recommend against all the other great shooters already out there.

The problem is that everything is counterbalanced by a quest that quickly grows stale and repetitive after its first third. Even the final boss fight is just a minor twist on an encounter you’ll have done at least five times before.

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.

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.

I think it speaks volumes to just how low the level of quality in most Wii party games has become that all it took was Nintendo putting together a competent, though still largely familiar package, to put everyone else to shame.

The focus on occasionally tough boss fight patterns and cutscenes goes a long way in making Ninja Blade feel old.

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

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.

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.

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.

The fundamental flaw with Insect Armageddon is that is simply doesn't capture the sheer scale and explosive chaos that made its Japanese predecessor so memorable. Couple that with a shooter backbone that's too simple and too repetitive to rope in fans of the genre and you're left with Insect Armageddon, a game that will fail to entice either fans of the genre or the series.