With NHL 15, EA Canada has taken its secret weapon and buried it under a thick sheet of beautiful, glistening ice...Though there's some enjoyment to be had on the ice, NHL 15 feels like the first major misstep the series has made in years.

It may look like just another sloppy licensed game, but beneath the surface squirms a dissonant yet introspective deconstruction of the genre (probably).

Ultimately, Moebius feels like an early version of a full game, something that needs playtesting and a keen critical eye before it's ready for public consumption. Even fanfiction authors have editors.

Kinect Sports Rivals feels cheap. A few of the multiplayer games – namely tennis and water racing – are fun in short bursts, but other games – bowling and target shooting – are duds, even with another person. The biggest challenge in gameplay is often hassling with the Kinect and, overall, the games themselves are insultingly simple.

Unlike Deadly Premonition, Earth Defense Force 2025, or other games that hide genuine depth behind an awkward presentation, Magus has no hidden quality, charm or saving grace. It's entirely witless, and none of its mechanics strive for anything beyond mediocrity. Despite its issues, though, Magus is surprisingly breezy to play.

As if getting excited for the involved games wasn't difficult enough, NES Remix's ideas for challenges are repetitive and widely underwhelming. The arbitrary goals friends assign each other for games they've mastered are better than all but NES Remix's few fleeting moments of greatness, and that's genuinely disappointing when considering Nintendo's usual brilliance at reworking its history in enjoyable ways.

NBA Live 14 is a bungled attempt to produce a viable basketball simulation, and its failures are likely to linger in the minds of players for years to come.

Maybe one day hordes of fans will gather in local arcades to play LocoCycle ironically and quote some of its notoriously terrible lines – Mi espalda! – but until that day, it's just a bad game, and there's nothing funny about that.

Knack fails to capitalize on its own ideas and structure, and is successful only in acting as a reminder of the shallow, punishing platformers of a time when we really cared about how many bits there were on your console.

Fans of the comic may enjoy a new way to experience Blue Estate's universe, directly from the creator himself, but the game's pacing is forced and its characters ill-developed. I wonder how many Blue Estate comic fans own a Leap Motion in the first place.

Wii Party U isn't terrible, it's just uninspired. If you're looking for something that can be replayed for months and months, like Wii Sports, you won't find it here.

It sets out to explore a very compelling set of themes, parenthood, responsibility and the casual cruelty of nature, but it ends up doing so in the most straightforward and predictable way possible. It's almost ironic how a game so adamantly about nature manages to feel so unnatural.

Maybe Divekick is the future of fighting games. Maybe the hardcore tournament set really does want a fighter so barebones that it's basically marrow. Everyone else would be better served going elsewhere for their virtual pugilism fix.

In this modern remake, the original vision is lost in favor of trying to reach a new generation of potential fans with some half-baked ideas on what would make A Cool Sci-Fi Game™. And in the process of doing that, Flashback has lost its identity entirely.

It's disappointing to see the once confidently subversive Wario brand perverted into a desperate, flailing mess like Game & Wario.

Fuse's basic mechanics are functional, even interesting, but they're hamstrung by poor AI (on both sides) and boring encounters. Friends make things better, but even then this locomotive doesn't take long to run out of steam. Fuse is satisfactory at best and frustrating at worst, and a bare-bones shooter without any personality or flair.

If, like a zombie on Banoi, you've been absolutely starved for fresh meat, then Riptide might be for you. In my case, it left me with a familiar heartburn and a bad taste in my gullet.

It's as much a shame on 2K Sports for releasing this game as it is for the MLB to carelessly stamp its name on it. Whether it was sheer apathy or contractual licensing obligations that caused MLB 2K13 to exist in this state, it certainly wasn't a love for baseball, sports games, or its fans.

The marriage of a first-person shooter and the Alien franchise should be a perfect fit, especially from Gearbox, a team rooted in the genre. And yet, the pairing eludes a happy ending once again. Aliens: Colonial Marines isn't disappointing because it couldn't live up to lofty expectations, it's disappointing because it turned out to be such an unfettered disaster.

A flimsy, forgettable, phoned-in Call of Duty. The only entertainment value comes from watching the relationship between Activision and Sony, who now seem chummy enough to exchange gag gifts.

The single-player mode doesn't do anything that Rock Band or other karaoke games haven't already done, and the rigid competitive structure of Team mode limits the usefulness of its dual-screen display.

The concept behind Warfighter is sound – particularly its attempt to personalize the internal conflict of a soldier – but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Simply put, 007 Legends is a trap: a poor, uninspired game touting the 007 license hoping nostalgic fans will shell out $60 expecting to relive some of their favorite franchise moments. Bond-lovers will be offended by story inaccuracies and barely recognizable action sequences, while shooter fans will grow bored of the lame level design, lack of variety, and out-of-context story lines.

Whenever the recognition is working, Kinect really does enhance the experience of Steel Battalion, enabling the fantasy of piloting a very real walking tank and delivering a thrill of satisfaction with every confirmed kill. When the tech fails, however, at least in my experience, it fails in such a fundamental way that it's impossible to ignore.

Inversion is so generic that I'd sooner recommend just about any other of gaming's numerous cover-based shooters ahead of it – especially since its anti-gravity mechanic barely even factors into the grand scheme of things.

Levels all feel constrictive, and the dour color palette doesn't help the dull nature of its locations. The start-to-sewer time is awfully short on this one.

Any brief flickers of fun I came across were consistently extinguished by the game's oppressive flaws.

It might be a suitable family game, but there are certainly better family games out there – games that won't leave a five-year-old yawning. For Fable fans distraught about Peter Molyneux's departure from Lionhead, I would recommend pretending this title didn't even exist. And for the unlucky few who can't resist and buy it anyway, I'd wager a nickel that you only ever play the game once.