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.

While the game itself is technically proficient, nothing about the gameplay pushes it above and beyond that base level of proficiency. Its biggest problem comes from a clever premise with poor implementation. There's some replay value here in the multiplayer and the collection of data cells, which unlock the weapons from the campaign in a weapons testing area, but even those can get old very quickly. Once you get past the limited use of the terrain deformation you'll find yourself searching for anything new or exciting in Fracture's take on the sci-fi third-person shooter.

While I can usually get behind forgiving some problems in the face of quality fan service, Deadpool's fan service is highly specific to those who want the character taken to the most hyperactive extremes imaginable. Maybe that particular subset of fans will be able to look past the game's issues more easily, but anyone else will likely find Deadpool intensely grating and largely frustrating in equal measure.

Blood Stone isn't bad, but literally every single thing you can find here has been done better elsewhere.

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.

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.

This should have been a superior sequel, but there's not enough here to make it anything than a mildly enjoyable but ultimately underwhelming action game.

If you're just a regular Joe looking for a great action game, you could do better. But if you've still got a special place in your heart for the Transformers series--despite what Michael Bay may have done to it in recent years--the game is fun enough to be worth taking a look at.

Combine those problems with the game's generally chuggy, unattractive visuals, generic-as-hell soundtrack, painfully obnoxious late-game difficulty spike, and breezily short campaign (I beat most of it in a single afternoon), and you've got yourself a game that really doesn't offer much to anyone, outside of the most dedicated fans of the Merc with the Mouth.

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.

Fancy whiz-bang 3D effects wouldn't do much to rescue the clunky, mundane action here anyway.

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.

The whole thing is just so gosh darn British, too, which I imagine is less of a selling point if you are British. That pervasive sprinkling of refined, humorous nonsense makes The Journey feel a little more like one worth taking, even when some of its nuts and bolts are less appealing.

A weak story, boring platforming, and dully recurrent gameplay ensure that Captain America doesn't step outside of Batman's long shadow. Super Soldier is a decent enough action-adventure game, but it's completely inessential.

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.

A weak story, boring platforming, and dully recurrent gameplay ensure that Captain America doesn't step outside of Batman's long shadow. Super Soldier is a decent enough action-adventure game, but it's completely inessential.

Ryse makes a good showpiece if you've bought into the Xbox One early, but at full price it feels a little thin.

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.

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.

Crackdown 3 shows very little in the way of learning from the past or learning from the other open-world games that have graced consoles over the last nine years. Instead it feels slight, mindless, and dull. It feels like a gussied-up first-generation Xbox One game. Like the sort of game you might have expected to hear about back in 2014. In the here and now, though, there's... way less room for this sort of game on store shelves.

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.

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.

Metal Gear Survive is both a bad survival game and a bad Metal Gear game.

The core elements in Dark Void are well-designed and fun to play, and it tells an interesting story while setting up a world that's developed enough to deserve a sequel. But with its technical problems and a lack of enemy variety, Dark Void starts to feel like the game is getting in the way of its own universe.

The game puts on a pretty good facade, affecting many of Saw's stylistic flares. There's lots of jarring camera shake, motion blur, and patchy focus effects, and the soundtrack is all industrial clangs and squeals, but in the end it's all window-dressing for a game that has more in common with Professor Layton than Condemned.

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.

Whatever steps forward NHL 15 has taken in visual presentation hardly make up for the alarming gutting of many of the series' best features.

Given how loveably other classic arcade fighters have been treated recently, the problems and omissions make Arcade Kollection nothing but depressing. These games deserve better.