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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair has some neat ideas, but a lot of it's hidden behind a bevy of poorly explained menus and user-unfriendly mechanics. The expectation that you'll grind your way through the six chapters over and over again, only to do it all over again in hard mode is kind of ridiculous, and there just isn't enough of a reward there to make all of that grinding feel like anything other than, well, a grind.

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.

The game's combat feels limp, the quest design is immediately monotonous, and the whole package manages to make being a superhero or villain feel like the most mundane thing in the world. Considering the game's "everyone's a hero/villain" plot, I suppose that makes perfect sense.

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.

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.

A boring dual-joystick shooter that lacks the speed and intensity that the best games in the genre all share. Throw in a generic zombie theme and you're left with something that feels like it'd be a neat free Left 4 Dead mod. As a standalone commercial product, though, it's lacking at every turn.

There’s a real lack of enemy variety, as well.

It's certainly mechanically sound, but you should probably attempt to find it at a slight discount.

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.

The way this game depicts Frank going through nearly the same story you've seen before sort of cheapens the existence of the original Dead Rising 2.

There’s a real lack of enemy variety, as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Uneven pacing and a handful of poor design decisions can't bring down Cradle's unique, sci-fi mystery.

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.

A passable shooter in a world that's filled with much, much better ones.

It took me about 12 hours to finish The Godfather II, but I felt like it just ran out of steam about two-thirds of the way through. There are definitely a lot of interesting ideas at work here, but the game was never challenging enough to make any of the decisions I had to make feel very weighty.

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

The presentation goes a long way towards making Defend Your Castle a worthwhile experience, but after a few hours of fending off hordes of DIY enemies, I was done with it.

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.