Redux: Dark Matters on Steam isn’t worth getting excited about given the wealth of better alternatives, and even if you’re a Dreamcast collector, there are far better shooter releases for it in recent years.

Unfortunately, Flock is hard to recommend. The game design is repetitive and confusing, not leading players enough to where they're supposed to go or what they should be doing. There's a lot of beauty to be had with Flock, which will attract many, but don't expect a fun game behind its beautiful exterior. This is a game I wish I could have liked more but found myself scratching my head, even raising my voice for a few moments.

The puzzle design misses the cleverness that made the previous chapters so much fun, rendering the penultimate chapter an extreme disappointment as a game, doubly so as the previous chapter was the best in the series.

Virtual reality is an incredibly exciting technology. Unfortunately, The Assembly follows safely along the path of other VR games with a functional, but absolutely cumbersome, movement scheme.

Simply put, Call of Cthulhu is a game of wasted potential. Its investigation system is fun, and something that could have easily carried the game on its own, working perfectly with the world of Lovecraft. And even any of the other gameplay elements could have made for a good adaptation. But when they mix together, the end result is a mediocre, cluttered mess that’s over too soon for anything to make an impact. Maybe hardcore fans of Lovecraft or the tabletop game can get some enjoyment out of things, but you’re better off waiting for The Sinking City instead.

Daedalic must be held accountable for the negative impact their sales model has had on the game. Even without this factor marring it, this overly random, poorly written adventure can’t hold a candle to its competition.

Laserlife had immense potential. Choice Provisions created a game that only they could make, but they did so in a way which doesn’t feel complete.

Probably the most disappointing thing about The Edge of Fate is how skimpy it is on new content. With just a campaign, location and raid, The Edge of Fate is the worst value proposition of any piece of Destiny content since Destiny: The Dark Below. Ushering in a new era, the next Destiny release needed to be bold, hook players and continue to show that Bungie can release quality products each go-around. A Destiny 3 might have been able to do all that. As an expansion, Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate doesn’t accomplish any of that outside of introducing an intriguing concept. This is one fate the Destiny franchise might not be able to escape from.

An enhanced version of a game that is, objectively speaking, a sub-par experiment at niche game design. The newly-added characters, uniforms, animations, tutorials and so on add to what was present originally in a highly beneficial fashion. In fact, many of these things should have been considered and added before the original released. The problem is that the original formula wasn’t great originally. Adding honey mustard to a wilted lettuce wrap might make it taste better, but it’s still not good.

Developed by an unproven developer with no marketing push, Lost Planet 3 is dead on arrival. It’s almost as if Capcom sent the franchise to die, as even if Spark wasn’t so inept at staging combat, it would still seem like an unessential imitation of the first game.

Whether it’s the indulgence of its presentation or simply the lack of reason from its players to really care about such a dire portrayal of modern-day life (implying harsher truths or not), Mosaic seldom lands any sort of balance between involvement through gameplay and artistic direction for the journey to feel worth trudging through. For a game all about trying to break out of a cycle and changing one’s perspective, Mosaic seems oddly content in the same drab pretense that in the end, through needless repetition, still arrives at nowhere meaningful or memorable.

Designed to play in short sessions, Pylon Rogue attempts to straddle the line between catering to casual or hardcore gamers and doesn’t quite deliver to either. Challenging games can be enjoyable, just look at Dark Souls, Nioh or any number of NES classics, but in Pylon Rogue there is no sense of progress being made to make the challenge rewarding and the shallow, accessible design doesn’t generate enough interest to continue trying.

Saint Seiya: Brave Soldiers feels like a rushed game with a very small budget.

All in all, it’s hard to recommend Tiny Token Empires for the PS3. Even though the puzzle portions are a lot of fun, they’re not so much better than other games on the market that the frustrations caused by the strategy portion are worth putting up with them for.

Starship Troopers: Extermination is a frustrating game. Not because of the challenge, but because it’s so close to being good only to crash into the ground in a heap of green blood and mandibles. The technical glitches, poor lighting and unrewarding progression system interfere with the moments that capture the feel of the action from the film. With some patches and expansion, this title could be fantastic. In its current state, players would be better off going back to Earth Defense Force or Helldivers II.

When a game’s stated goal is to distill role playing games down to nothing but combat, the combat needs to be really exceptional to carry the whole game by itself, and this is where QuestRun comes up short.

Epic Dumpster Bear isn’t terrible. It runs smoothly with no frame rate hiccups or annoying glitches, but the controls are counterintuitive and the first few worlds are a bit of a drag. You’ll start to have some fun if you can manage to hang around until the fourth world, but the game hits its stride too late in the adventure, making it nearly impossible to warrant a replay.

Existing fans of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series may feel a bit like lab rats being consistently subjected to different genres while the next main RPG is in the works. It would be acceptable if every game were a masterwork of its respective genre, but of course that isn’t the case here.

With its stock-reliant appearance and seemingly uncombed delivery, Hyposphere feels like a game hurriedly rushed out for presentation sake, with little else put into refining the experience underpinning it.

One Night Stand feels more like a think piece than a proper game. It’s strongest on the first playthrough and slowly loses its allure with each subsequent one. Perhaps the most poignant experiences to be had with this game would be playing once or twice and then having conversations with friends about how you felt and what different choices led to what ending.

For a game like this to have this bad of a mystery at its core should be absolutely unforgivable, but it presents itself with such charm and style that I find myself willing to forgive quite a lot. Not quite that much, but a lot more than I’d expected.

Most of this review was spent pointing out where John Wick Chronicles fails fans of the movie, and that is a major issue. While it doesn’t always work out, even the worst licensed game still has hopes of trying to capture the feel of the franchise it’s using. Outside of the Continental, this game doesn’t. One cannot help but think that there were some grand designs for what the game was going to be before the deadline in the form of the sequel’s release reared its head. Anyone who can put that aside and wants a decent gallery shooter can have a good time with John Wick Chronicles. The targets are plentiful and the game likes to use all 360 degrees around the player for their spawn points, meaning it takes advantage of the ability to turn around, something that some other similar titles can’t even state. So, while John Wick Chronicles cannot be recommended at full price, it’s worth snagging when a proper sale comes around.

With some more interesting puzzles and cleaned up controls, Tiny Brains would be an easy game to recommend to everyone, but as it stands it’s best avoided.

The experience of playing this title is one of roller coaster highs and lows. At first, it seems like the new bad game everybody should check out. It’s so gormless in its stupidity that it’s endearing. Through extended play, those scales drop from the eyes and the blissful ironic joy gives way to tedium as the player prays to their deity of choice that they don’t run into a bug that renders the scenario unwinnable. With fixes to the pathfinding and spawning, Heavy Fire: Red Shadow would be an honest to goodness hilarious arcade style classic, intentionally or not. As it stands, only the most patient should climb behind the gun.

Deadly Premonition is a mechanically stiff game that’s fortunate enough to have a compelling and intriguing murder mystery backing it up. Unfortunately, the PC port is mired with issues. It’s not the lackluster visual, repeating animation or the slow and unappealing gameplay that’s the problem; it’s the multitude of technical issues that will push players away.

It stands out the least of the Johnny ____ series, and is hard to recommend given how few things it does well compared to other games in its genre.

The tough reality is, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is an outdated game from top to bottom.

Shelly Harrison sets out on a cross-country action-FPS trek to find the lost artifact of the Demon Core. Intense firefights are interspersed with slower exploratory segments, making it more a late-90s FPS throwback than prequel game Ion Fury's Build Engine adventure.