The game is aesthetically rich, but it lacks heart.

More isn’t bad just for its faults and repetitions. It’s worse than that: Bloodborne was pure—and The Old Hunters dilutes it.

As a game, Star Fox Zero isn’t so much broken as deeply and disappointingly lacking in inspiration. Shiny but not smooth, it’s a game about a space-faring fox in a spaceship that turns into a chicken without any sense of joy, and that might be the biggest disappointment of all.

By trying to optimize it, the brave/default system inadvertently lays bare the arbitrariness structuring the player’s relation to the game, the role one ostensibly plays becoming repeatable and, indeed, automatable in yet another striking parallel to the looming “new economy.”

We can see in its lack of substance a reflection of a disturbing social complacency when it comes to exploring complicated issues like police violence and systemic racism. We can also recognize what little faith it has in its players to wrestle with difficult concepts, to find something meaningful and troubling behind using a digital badge and police-issued firearm in equal measure to solve our crime problems.

It ought to remind us of what’s so good about the maximalism of other JRPGs.

Just the sheer amount of detail put into each aspect of world-building, from the designs of the planets to the religion of an alien species, is incredible.

Slain! is a poser, well-dressed and intentioned but vacuous, contributing nothing to the scene. It has the spiked gauntlets, the long hair, the denim jacket; but the house lights are on and everything’s out of tune.

The fighting game here is fun and engaging, but its wrapper is so, so flawed.

The best adventure games have an engaging story and interesting puzzles. Tesla Effect doesn't have either.

I’m relieved to get to the end of it not because I’m looking forward to playing all of the bosses again in one try, but because it means that if I fail—if I die to a boss repeatedly and run out of lives—I don’t have to go back through the exact same level full of the tedious, non-threatening enemies again, and again, and again; I can just play the bosses, which is what this game should have been about from the beginning.

Perhaps with its ensuing acts A Maker’s Eden will find its. For now, it rests as something kind of cool, slightly interactive, and mostly, an unfinished journal.

Without the weight of tradition behind it, flattening out your finger hitting “Fight wisely” just feels like cow-clicking. Personally, I’d rather spend that time elsewhere.

“Kooky” is a good word for Albino Lullaby.

Submerged is skeletal and unoiled. It is damned by competence: a short story that checks the boxes, but in doing so leaves no mark.

DreadOut revels in cliche, sometimes quite smartly.

An exceptionally uncreative piece of schlock.

But Heroes’s oddest design choice is surely its violation of a Zelda tradition since time immemorial (i.e. 1986): Link can’t jump.

So much of Bound by Flame induces boredom or irritation that it seemed the best recourse to seek out a style of play that facilitated, if not outright enjoyment, at least an absence of hostility.

All in all, the game feels like a tourist trap rather than a destination.

But without the dexterity to give its gaming forebearers the same level of faithfulness, it ends up being hellacious for all the wrong reasons.

Not being able to connect with Baby, to think of her as more burden than child, soured me on Murasaki Baby. With poor touch controls, the designers have turned a small, cute game into a bit of a mess.

The developer put in details that make the game virtually impossible.

In the end, it’s kitsch. It’s a Soviet-themed Lego set that renders a monumental socio-political phenomenon into little else but a toy. And an exceptionally boring one at that.

The repetition of tasks, activities and missions is presented to the player as the lone way to achieve rewards, and yet within the constructed system of randomness and uncertainty that the game offers, these rewards are never certain. This is how it presents the enterprise of self-improvement as content in itself.

Had the realization of that universe been more fully fleshed out—expansive and deep rather than restrictive and boardgame-like—Spaceships could have found success as a kind of post-human strategy game. Instead it feels lifeless. But not in the existential, gazing-into-the-void-of-space way. More in the way that an aging child realizes that her blanket is just a blanket, and promptly stops caring about it.

The creators of Pac-Man CE 2 had the difficult task of remixing a game that has already been expanded upon and reworked to the point of refinement, and they chose to pile on the complexity anyway. The result is a Frankenstein’s Pac-Man—a mess of features and modes that, despite all the power pellets and fruit and ghosts, still left me feeling hungry.

I won’t remember my time with The Girl and the Robot feeling like a magical fairytale. I’ll recall it being a poorly designed, stressful videogame. And that’s a shame, because that initial art sure was cute.

Attempting to bring your two arms together to ready a shot as your aggressor charges blindly toward you is beautifully simple and absurd. In any other shooting game, such an opponent would pose no threat whatsoever, but the balance between the ludicrous distance the sword-wielding apple-man has to travel in order to reach you and the exceptional difficulty of lining up a shot combine to create a fine piece of participatory humor.

In a stone-cold RPG like Etrian Odyssey you want to minimize the crazy shit happening, but in a Mystery Dungeon you want to revel in it, like a surfer in search of the biggest wave. You would hope in spite of this the game would manage to branch off and do its own thing, but it doesn’t, unless that thing is needless complexity, endless grinding and conscripting dreary-eyed anime children on a plodding adventure.

In the annals of dungeoneering, Necropolis stands out for its lack of imagination.

The game's environments have the appearance of a 3D sandbox but you quickly discover how linear they are. From time to time you'll find a dead-end path with a gameplay-irrelevant collectible doodad perched at the end of it, but the environments offer little of interest outside of the straight-line path to the next platforming segment.

Lord knows videogame characters could stand to be quieter, but Virginia can’t convey the necessary emotional depth to make its story stick. The ideas at play piqued my interest pre-release: two women of color as its leads, the promise of a new spin on enduring cop show tropes, surrealist touches. But Virginia is selling points all over, a mood board of ideas—some cool, some musty—that take the player’s interest as self-evident. Anyone who’s seen a movie before should probably just watch another.

If The Wire was a conversation with an audience about culture and society, The Detail seems content to converse only with other fans of the show; to speak in excited tones about their favorite parts.

By day 100, you’re starting to lose sight of the goal. They gave you 180 days to finish out your tenure as chief; at first it sounded like a death sentence, now it’s more like a prison sentence.

At times it seems like Only If might actively hate its audience, that it resents being played at all.

It’s this tradition that gives us Dambuster’s lamentable Homefront: The Revolution, the sequel to THQ’s Homefront (2011) that neither critics nor players asked for.