This is most definitely a lazy, slapped together, overly expensive waste of time that nobody need bother play. And yet, for some bizarre reason, all I could think about while playing The Expendables 2 was that it didn't have to be this way.

The game itself isn’t much fun, regardless of the number of players. With its plodding, monotonous pace and scattered presentation, Rocketmen doesn’t do enough to separate itself from the seemingly infinite number of other dual joystick shooters available via Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network.

The entire game feels lifeless and old. The presentation fails to capture the excitement of the real thing. The gameplay doesn't match the product it's attempting to emulate. And the layers upon layers of plain-looking menus feel like they were ripped out of a PlayStation 2 launch game.

Save for some occasionally witty banter, this generally generic brawler is too concerned with the window-dressing of time-travel to capitalize on Spider-Man's character, abilities, or mythology.

Nothing about the gameplay feels broken, it just feels soulless this time around.

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

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.

The game itself isn’t much fun, regardless of the number of players. With its plodding, monotonous pace and scattered presentation, Rocketmen doesn’t do enough to separate itself from the seemingly infinite number of other dual joystick shooters available via Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network.

Instead of making excuses for Lost: Via Domus, I would just recommend that everyone but the most die-hard of Lost fans take a pass on this one.

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.

A dreadful combat system brings down an otherwise beautiful and funny Mario adventure.

It's as if it was plucked from the earliest days of downloadable gaming, back when digital games often relied more on single-minded gimmicks than the fully fleshed-out concepts of late, and $10 seemed like such a great deal for any game you could play with buttons on a console. That era has long since passed us by, and we're better for it.

Moments of true thievery are frequently left to side missions, which leaves roughly 10 hours of story in which you navigate bland mazes of narrow corridors, dull traps, and dimwitted A.I. foes, all for an end result that does nothing but underscore what a colossal waste of time the whole endeavor ultimately was.

Humor is entirely subjective, and maybe some of the stuff I found to be a little easy and dull will get you going. However, I'm a lot more certain about the quality of Matt Hazard's gameplay, which almost feels like it's going out of its way to be mediocre at best. Hey, maybe that's part of the joke!

I'll admit that my fondness for Need for Speed Most Wanted colored my expectations for Need for Speed Undercover, but this game's general failure as a racing game ends up being so significant that its inability to recapture the fun of Most Wanted in particular is kind of a moot point. There's no shortage of street racing games on the market right now, and there's simply no room for a game that can't nail down some of the basics.

The Just Dance series feels like it's headed in the right direction with Just Dance 3, but it still has a long way to go. If you were satisfied with the Just Dance experience on the Wii, and you find the soundtrack to Just Dance 3 appealing, you probably won't be disappointed. But you should know that you can do better.

It is a dull game that fails to offer more than passing enjoyment, hitching and glitching all along the way. It offers a middling co-operative mode in a field filled with games trying to innovate in that space. It struggles to say anything--even something bombastic and cartoonish--about crisis, nationality, or revolution. It tries to roar America, but instead coughs out a few, unintelligible grunts.

Between the dreary action, the sluggish movement speed, and the seemingly tacked-on multiplayer, you’ll probably want to pass on the whole thing.

As with the original Skate, Skate It manages to feel authentic and it comes with some sharp ideas. But the game's presentation and control just don't pan out, and it seems like a game that'll frustrate players more often than not. If you're a Skate fan looking for what's next, do yourself a solid and wait for Skate 2.

It is a dull game that fails to offer more than passing enjoyment, hitching and glitching all along the way. It offers a middling co-operative mode in a field filled with games trying to innovate in that space. It struggles to say anything--even something bombastic and cartoonish--about crisis, nationality, or revolution. It tries to roar America, but instead coughs out a few, unintelligible grunts.

Homefront may look pretty, but it's a monotonous and confused slog.

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.

An improvement. It's a better looking game than NBA Live 14, and a better playing one, but "better," in this case, does not directly translate to "good." Live 15 is still too shallow to hang with 2K's game, but it represents a glimmer of hope that this series could eventually provide some legitimate competition to 2K Sports somewhere down the road.

Killing the combat system that made this franchise so enticing, and robbing it of any modicum of challenge was so far beyond what was necessary that it leaves Ninja Gaiden 3 feeling like little more than a stripped-down husk of its former glory. If the previous Ninja Gaiden games were like carefully built, brutally fast hot rods, Ninja Gaiden 3 feels like it should be up on bricks on somebody's lawn.

Re-Shelled is stuck in this weird in-between place where it does no nostalgic service to the original game but also fails to bring anything new whatsoever to this simplistic genre.

All of this would have been welcome in the early 2000s, but the years of disappointing follow-ups and the overall progression of industry standards leads to Star Fox Zero having the impact of an HD rerelease rather than a full sequel. Being able to beat the game in 2-3 hours doesn't help, no matter how many branching paths or lackluster challenge missions are included. Even the moment-to-moment action doesn't have anywhere near the impact that it had almost two decades ago, as this limited style of gameplay feels dated in 2016.

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.

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.