Tearaway is cheerful, clever, and colorful, but never quite attains the masterful blend of art and gameplay exhibited by developer Media Molecule's previous efforts, the LittleBigPlanet games.

Perhaps the biggest source of frustration, however, is the antiquated user interface.

Dark Moon is a bit like Luigi himself: charming, goofy and utterly affable. The core mechanic of catching ghosts is solid and exciting, and the environments are absolutely worth seeing and exploring. It's got heart, but after trudging through all five of its locales, you may wind up feeling a little like a bedraggled, battle-worn ghostbuster yourself.

If you're well-versed in South Park history and can imagine cookies as a "health potion," you're off to a good start. If you can also forgive the repetitive nature of combat and some uninspired quests, it's worth taking up arms – or dildos – for The Stick of Truth's hilarious, disgusting adventure.

For all its good looks, Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- is ultimately disappointing. What the game does, it does very well, but the sum total feels lacking.

Though it plays it safe in terms of mechanics, TxK is challenging and thrilling throughout. It's a treat for anyone who enjoyed any previous version of Tempest, and it's especially worthwhile if you missed out on Tempest 2000.

It's sad to see the game lose sight of its assassin role-playing ideals in favor of bombast, bomb blasts and pig herding, so I hope this is but a momentary stumble while the franchise regains its balance. Trim the excess, remember the central thrust (hint: it's with a knife) and then you'll have a great game again. Assassin's Creed 3 is the kind of game that's just good enough to make you wish it was better.

No amount of 3D waggle can change the fact that the Killzone 3 campaign is a miserable experience. Killzone 3 certainly offers more bells and whistles than its predecessor -- it's just a shame they've been affixed to an inferior game.

Paradoxically, New Vegas doesn't make good on much new on any front, and it takes a hit both as experience and product for it.

If you can look past some of the more awkward elements – especially if you can do so with a couple of friends – there is definitely some meat to be found in Trine 2. You'll just have to crack a lot of shells to find it.

So long as it's consumed in an environment where all you're doing is playing offline, like at an arcade or in someone's living room, Street Fighter X Tekken's excellent engine is enough to carry the game. Delve any deeper, however, and that excellence serves only to highlight each tragic decision that frames it. Capcom has spent countless hours meticulously crafting the gaming equivalent of a Ferrari 458's V8 engine, only to shove it under the hood of a 1987 Chevy Caprice on cinderblocks.

Like the combat, the story starts off strongly, intertwining threads about Red's past, the history of the Camerata and the true purpose of the Transistor, but it doesn't come together in a satisfying way.

It's a good game, but Sleeping Dogs mostly leaves you remembering the media that inspired it and probably won't remain in your thoughts over time.

There's simply no soul in Child of Light, no emotional attachment to keep you pressing on into the darkness. There isn't even a good addictive hook – the story makes a few feeble tugs at your heartstrings, but doesn't create any great mysteries that you'll be desperate to solve, and the combat, while solid, never quite achieves "just one more round" status. It's all lovely and pleasant and well-crafted – and hollow.

Though Okamiden hits a pretty satisfying stride in the middle, it is a bit of a marathon... OK, yes, an adorable marathon.

When SSX wasn't trying its best to push me away, I loved every minute of it. From a mechanical perspective, it's the best treatment the "extreme sports" genre has received on the current generation of systems thus far. Unfortunately, it's wrapped in a dirty old program from X-Games '98 and punctuated with frustrating moments.

Push through its uneven beginning and you'll be rewarded with clever level layouts that stretch a solid mechanical framework to its limits. Getting to that point may be more frustrating than you'd like, though, thanks to its sharp difficulty curve.

On the ice, NHL 14 is the best the series has ever been, and that alone will be enough for many returning fans. I love playing it and I'll keep playing it. Between the face-offs and outside of the rink, however, NHL 14 shows a laziness that is not befitting of a franchise that proudly touts its accolades on its sleeve.

Renegade Ops is adequate for what it attempts to be, but it's more conformist than the title suggests.

Dream Team does a lot of things right, and is a satisfying detour for a franchise that is risking too much predictability it its main guise. It's hard to shake that feeling of a missed opportunity, of a premise not fully realized that therefore exposes some comparative shortcomings.

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy feels like as good a way to sign off as could be expected.

It's hard not to feel that the game would have been better served by slightly slowing down the pace of its basic shooting elements. At times, it feels as much like a spatial puzzle as it does a test of your reflexes. The best spatial puzzles, though, allow for a measure of patience and consideration. As a twitchy shooter, Super Time Force never lets you catch your breath and stand firm in time, leaving you under ceaseless pressure.

There's just not a lot of "there" there - my first playthrough, which included every side-mission and several job board assignments, took me 9 hours and 15 minutes. My second, where I completed every side-mission, every job board assignment, every courier mission, and most of the races, took eight hours and 50 minutes. RAGE ends so abruptly that I didn't realize it was over until the final cutscene began. I was left wondering what had happened.

Wasteland 2 is so packed with stuff to do and things to see that the game demands multiple plays, yet its story options are so intricate that replaying the plot never seems like a chore. But all of that is overshadowed by omnipresent bugs.

Danganronpa 2 is wildly uneven, with an engaging story and disjointed action elements, but solving its mysteries provides more than enough satisfaction to make putting up with the bad bits worth your while. It's weird, aggravating and gruesome, but it's also undeniably charming.

Though Uncharted: Golden Abyss brings a little too much reality to Drake's day-to-day by making him polish artifacts in gimmicky touchscreen nonsense, there's still a good, if formulaic, adventure to be had. In other words, this might just sell you on the Vita ... whenever it's not selling you on the Vita.

A curious thing happens when From Dust stops getting in the way and tells you to just have fun...You have fun...From Dust is finally able to dazzle, however briefly, by stripping away practically everything that makes it a "game" and leaving only its base mechanics behind.

Ascension is a car riding in the spectacle slipstream of its predecessors, never quite able to surpass them.