It’s a shame, as there’s real potential in Mineko’s setup. It has a strong blend of the fantastical and mundane, and that’s refreshing in a genre where “fantastical” usually just extends to “you can run an entire farm by yourself and not die.” The art direction is also bolder and more striking than we usually see, and it goes a long way in creating a unique, mildly eerie atmosphere that helps sell the island’s mythology.

The atmosphere is close to perfect, and the weather effects are some of the best I’ve seen, but the game that takes place inside the world doesn’t live up to the brushstrokes...I really wanted a win for this development studio. The Ukrainian developer has weathered a pandemic, escaped a warzone, and developed this game while under unprecedented pressure. If I could score a game for heart, it’d be a ten out of ten. Maybe one day it will be, but it’s not there yet. One for the sickos.

The biggest sin is the pacing. Scenes are 10 to 30 seconds long, and then you make a new decision. There is loading between each one that makes it monotonous and boring. The idea at the root of it seems good, but the execution is too poor to carry it out. Harmony makes the classic error of telling me how much I should care about the characters without giving me any reason to.

DeathSprint 66 could’ve been an amazing platformer, but it makes for a disappointing racing game.

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn simply isn’t memorable in any way. It has perfectly fine combat, but it’s filled with little frustrations that bury the few innovations that work. Movement outside of combat is often unreliable and satisfying, and it’s all backed up by a story that failed to grab me at every turn. There are glimpses of good ideas, but none of them ever get fleshed out.

I really wanted to like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League – you can tell a lot of people worked very hard on it. I love the Arkham games and there isn’t another studio I’d have trusted to tackle a concept like this, but everything good about this game is undermined by its games-as-a-service shackles. There isn’t a single thing in here that wouldn’t be improved by the kind of actual level design and quest design you can get in a story-focused single-player game (or even a co-op game, at that).

There’s a saying in the sport: you don’t play boxing. It’s a serious sport with dire consequences. Undisputed treats it the same way - it forgets it’s a video game.

As an introduction to metroidvanias, Disney Illusion Island is fine. At its very best, it is only barely serviceable, and there are far better games to start with if you want to dip your toes into the genre.

After a decade of troubled development, Dead Island 2 fails to offer anything new or substantive. Its middling melee combat, nonsensical story, and awkward dialogue choices all make playing it a slog, and even at its very best, it fails to rise above being merely inoffensive. It may be pretty, but that's not enough to save it from being a dull experience from start to finish.

Madden 25 is an apt representation of the broader games industry. The push for greater realism and immersion leads to some impressive achievements, but it comes at the expense of everything else, including a sense of ambition. Meanwhile, you’ve got EA College Football 25 over here with goofy mascots, over-the-top spectacle, and a greater sense of fun, and it isn’t afraid to do things differently in the pursuit of making play more interesting. There’s only so much you can do to make football play and feel more realistic, and once you reach that goal, you need to start looking elsewhere to make things worthwhile. Madden feels like it’s at that point, and I think for the sake of polish as much as creativity, EA needs to take more than a year between releases to get Madden back on track.

The Va'ruun are beyond boring when you get to know them, Dazra is small in the scope of the grand cosmos, and your ship just sits there beckoning you despite there being no new way to customise it, nor anywhere interesting to go. Combine that with annoying enemies and scant new loot to discover and there’s not really much reason to blast off again.

What’s left is a game with a weird amount of dodgy fan service, an almost nonexistent story, a SRPG battle system that feels largely hollow, and a dicey frame rate on Switch. I’m sure, somewhere, there’s somebody for whom this is the perfect game, but that somebody is certainly not me.

A man might enjoy the story, but I am not a man, and I did not.

I don’t see much of a future for Skull and Bones. Ubisoft has announced its Year 1 roadmap, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio jettisoned the cargo and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean way before that, it certainly feels like they only finished it out of obligation anyway.

It’s disappointing because if the gameplay had any substance or intrigue to it, all that great atmosphere and design work would’ve lifted it up into something worthwhile, but it’s so relentlessly boring that I just don’t care about all the nice bells and whistles it's packaged in.

If Telmari had any level of polish, then it’d be a fun, if simplistic, platformer, but that level of care hasn’t been put in. The result is a game that fails at its core purpose and is a mere echo of far better games.

That’s Forspoken’s biggest problem – everything I like about it gets dragged down by the unrelenting dullness of everything else. The story is boring, the characters are boring, the enemies are boring, and the world is boring.

Peridot may find its fan base of Tamagotchi nostalgists, but as it stands the technical issues are too much for me to recommend it to anyone. Until Niantic changes these fundamental issues, there is no way for people to play Peridot in the way the company envisions. And it could be good. The general gameplay of raising and playing with your virtual pet is one that has been successful in the past. I’m just not sure how the breeding aspect will sit with fans.

Modern Warfare III feels like a content expansion for Call of Duty: Warzone, and if it were sold as that, at a lower price, it could’ve been justified. But by selling this as a premium experience, and crunching developers to create the game in just 16 months, Activision has shown its hand. This game shows that the publisher doesn’t care about its staff, and evidently, doesn’t respect its consumers.