With only about ten hours of gameplay (give or take), it feels too long in all the wrong ways. I’m optimistic, however, that KeokeN Interactive can finesse development to bring quality to future titles.

Rainbow Six Siege‘s core concept, namely its destructible world and reliance on communication-based strategy, is strong, but everything surrounding it seems to falter.

While its concept is unique, its execution leaves an incredible amount to be desired. Unfortunately, the mystery of Ronan’s murder is not nearly as thought-provoking as the mystery of when Murdered: Soul Suspect will be offered at a discount.

Strike Suit Infinity is not a game that is terrible by any means. It’s just a game that had some really high hopes for itself but failed to deliver those things in a way that was organic and a little bit more fun.

This game is strictly for DBZ fans who, in addition, are crazy about the early Budokai games. [June 2007, p.63]

There are far better uses for both your money and your time.

It’s been a full four months since Episode Five ended on a massive decision that left players reeling. Given Telltale’s past work on the series, it was hard to imagine that Episode Six would actually do right by that decision and manage to wrap the season up in a remotely satisfying way. Sure enough, huge chunks of Episode Six are just as middling as everything else in the season, and on a technical level, it’s even worse.

Fallout 76 tried to take the series in a new direction, and while Bethesda has done great things with the franchise in the past, this ultimately feels like a misstep. Fallout has always excelled as a single player experience, so hopefully we can see a proper Fallout 5 in the near future.

Milestone delivers on its slate of upgrades introduced in Monster Energy Supercross 4, but the racing remains frustrating and unapproachable for new players. The Career Mode is a welcome addition even though it may not match up to other franchises that are out there, while The Compound gives players a new location to free roam around in, but is ultimately the same thing outside of the location. The PlayStation 5 version allows for better visuals and the inclusion of the DualSense Controller, but the engine that everything is based on is old. Those that are hardcore fans of the series will enjoy these additions if they continue to overlook the legacy issues. The next-generation version is basically an improved version of the previous-gen version by default due to the hardware, and outside of the Career Mode, Monster Energy Supercross 4 is more of the same.

Good level design and challenging gameplay sadly end up getting hindered by cheap shots, questionable controls and an underdeveloped premise.

At the end of the day, unless you’re an agriculture fanatic that is interested in the rush of cultivating and harvesting fields for hours on end, you’re likely to feel cheated by a lack of content, boring gameplay and unimpressive visuals. Ultimately, the farm life is exactly what I expected — a lot of hard work for very little pay off.

There have been plenty of outings over the past few years that take the basic template of golf, as a sport, and manage to transform into something else. Whether it’s deep in strategy or surreal in delivery, fans of golf have been well serviced. Golf With Your Friends, by contrast, comes across as the antithesis of this approach. A game that goes out of its way to antagonize, despite its variety and ridiculousness in course design. In some parts, that philosophy does find a way to delight and entertain, without descending into an unnecessary leap of faith or threading the needle-like situation that most of its holes unfortunately end up forcing players into. Those who can find joy in such random, unearned chaos may get a small ounce of fun here, but for everybody else, Golf With Your Friends‘ unpolished, finicky and messy delivery takes little time to put even the most patient of mini-golf enthusiasts off completely.

Despite keeping an open mind with the title, its concept is flawed in its execution and it lacks a sense of identity and purpose for its characters and story. What seemed like a title that could reinforce the reason not to judge a book by its cover proves to be the exact opposite in almost every aspect.

Controlling gravity is fun and the game’s charming art design is well worth noting, but Constant C never gives the player a sense of command over its design, leaving puzzles that rely more on careless experimentation than thought-provoking logic to solve.

It’s a game that tries too hard to be vague and ambiguous that it ultimately leaves the content that is there to process feeling disproportionately stagnant.

With bargain basement production values, mediocre visuals, boring gameplay and a substantial lack of features, there’s no reason to experience it. Adding salt to the wound is the fact that it’s for all intents and purposes a threequel to a mediocre clone of Super Smash Bros. Melee released the same month as the current-generation version of that series will debut.

Unfortunately for all the minor smiles and well-orchestrated music that accompanies one’s travels, The Longest Five Minutes feels mostly like a sterile assembly of classic JRPG’s least-appealing necessities. Its premise of losing one’s memory and the relation that has between past and present occurrences could have been an interesting twist on RPG mechanics to uncover, but it ends up being little more than a stale alternative to what is a rather unaltered series of common JRPG affairs. The Longest Five Minutes heralds some pleasantries and quirky moments of respite at points, but with a near-offensively easy combat system, brief dungeons and a lacking overworld to trudge through, competently made it may be, The Longest Five Minutes sadly ends taking up a much shorter breadth of your attention.

This is a showcase for the graphical power of the PlayStation 4 and nothing more. Rudimentary gameplay, a poorly executed story and an unwelcoming visual palette make it come off as cold, uninspired and most importantly not all that fun.

Active Life Outdoor Challenge is mildly entertaining from a game standpoint and features beginner level physical activity from an exercise one. It’s not a bad form of exertainment, just not a remarkably good one. In small doses it can be fun and could lead to enjoying more strenuous exercises, but ultimately it’s updating the Wii gimmick of using the floormat with a Switch gimmick of using a leg strap. There are better games out there that incorporate physical fitness into gaming. The main selling point is probably for people who have strong nostalgia for the Wii original, but that’s likely a niche market.

Hitting the right buttons in the right order in time to the beat isn’t a terrible way to spend a bit of gaming time, but there’s just not enough meat on KickBeat‘s bones to keep the music flowing.

PacaPlus excels at being a strange visual novel with a girlfriend turned into a fluffy alpaca. It falters when attempting to create a tale which is joyful to read, through. With middling writing, readers will most likely find themselves playing simply because of the silly premise rather than because they care at all about Kazuma or Yukari’s plight. That’s not awful — but it would have been fantastic to see the second English version of this game offer immensely improved translation quality. Instead, we’ve got a bare-bones effort which reduces the Engrish-ness but otherwise leaves the mechanical script alone. In some respects, the game is far funnier in the PacoProject translation and as such may be worth grabbing from DLsite instead of Steam. Still, if all you need is ridiculous sequences with a goofy alpaca, PacaPlus has you covered.

Just Dance 2016 should (and probably will) be the franchise’s last physical release. While the core gameplay remains fun despite some questionable choreography, the overall package reeks of complete and utter apathy.

PIQ2 is themed around measuring intelligence, but all it ends up doing is testing rote memorization and dexterity. [July 2007, p.63]

Charming as it might seem, Krillbite’s attempt at horror turns out about as scary as a brightly-colored bed sheet.

The Inpatient’s short duration and lack of entertainment value doesn’t warrant its forty dollar price tag. For fans of Until Dawn, it does a decent job of filling in important information prior to the events of the original game. For everyone else, it’s a dull experience that never quite feels like it’s going anywhere worthwhile. Horror and VR are a natural fit, but with The Inpatient, it’s clear that the pairing doesn’t always work quite the way it should.

With such an interesting story and a great narrator, Kholat truly dropped the ball in what could have been a great narrative, instead delivering nonsense dialogue and an incomprehensible plot.

Taking in the picture that Arcade Islands Volume One paints for itself as a whole, this isn’t a very good game. There’s enough that more than half is a mix of filler, retreads and just plain bad games. When one gets more granular, though, the value proposition begins to appear. The fun titles that can be appreciated as is would warrant between one to five dollars on their own. Adding those together exceeds the asking price. When factoring in a better than average use of PlayStation and Xbox’s metagame in the form of trophies and achievements, and the fact that it’s a safe title to introduce the youngins’ to video gaming as a concept, there’s a good reason for it to exist.

Put pure-and-simply, it’s a game that tries to win you over solely on its distorted aesthetic, but ends up losing you (and annoying you) moreso.