Your castle itself may look unique, as you build eccentrically-shaped rooms and staircases, but your courtiers look like Wii-era Miis, and the fundamentally uncreative nature of its gameplay makes it a depressingly pedestrian experience.

In summary we don't think we've ever seen so many good ideas in such a bad game. The spell and crafting system really is amongst the best the genre can offer, but everything else is amongst the very worst.

An outdated and uninteresting Soulslike that takes an already flawed original and makes it even less compelling, with unengaging storytelling, bland visuals, and repetitive action.

There’s probably no way to make After Burner interesting again without turning it into a completely different game, but there was no need for Sega to prove that fact yet again.

Hopefully the future of Fable won't be any more downloads, as this is another waste of both time and money.

The game is as compelling as ever, and this is an interesting opportunity to compare it with the TV show, but at launch this is one of the worst PC ports from any major publisher in a long while.

While its fun to see how absurd those distractions get that only makes it harder and harder to pretend you’re playing a real game, with consequences and genuine danger. Despite all that we’re curious to see what Violation will do for their first next gen-only sequel, but for now this second expansion is probably best left to burn.

The laidback atmosphere and gentle flower tending hide a game that is far too predictable and frustrating to offer any lasting entertainment.

A class BioWare download: short, pointless and missing everything that made the original interesting.

Despite graphical sparkle, the lack of depth and vapid gacha mechanics rob the game of both charm and longevity, leaving the long slog only to those obsessed with completing their trainer roster despite the crushing tedium.

The Drudge are a sadly appropriate named for the enemy in this artless grind of a first person shooter.

Another disappointing Silent Hill revival, that gets some of the visuals and tone right but is let down by a hackneyed script and frustrating chase sequences.

An open world massively multiplayer online racer with a decent handling model and an okay car list, that’s hampered by dated graphics, some baffling design choices, and a clutch of technical issues.

The real survival horror here is enduring the repetitive scares and gameplay all the way to the end.

Insanely repetitive, horribly shallow, and pointlessly easy – this is the absolute least interesting thing to do with Zelda on the Switch 2 and bad even by the low standards of the Dynasty Warrior franchise.

For reasons unknown, Pinball Masters fails on the most basic level, its blurry, low frame rate visuals look like an early 90s FMV game. That makes it hard to tell where the ball is at any given moment, which in turn ruins the subtle timing necessary to play. Despite the number and complexity of tables on offer, the fact that you can’t see any of them properly makes it a frustrating disaster of missed chances and late reactions.

As is traditional, the opening hours provide rapid upgrades, before slowing things down to encourage you to spend money. You and your alliance will also regularly find yourself at the mercy of bullying, big spending whales, but at least you’re not forced to watch any ads.

Even if you love the game’s sense of humour and art style, the quality of the interactions is so wafer thin it’s impossible to draw much satisfaction from them. Randomly surviving may be marginally less irritating than dying through no fault of your own, but neither is much fun.

As long as you don’t turn on 3D mode this is almost as good as the original Wii U game, the only problem being the Wii U version wasn’t very good at all.

The laziest HD collection yet, with just two titles from an eight game franchise, neither of which have been recreated with anything like the effort and care they deserve.

There's plenty of potential and good ideas here but very little fun, in a game that tries to make a pirate's life seem as frustrating and repetitive as possible.

Old school to a fault, the worst thing about this Japanese role-player is it doesn’t seem to have any idea just how clichéd and outdated it really is.

Rarely has such a big budget game been based on such a thin gameplay premise, with this bafflingly dull first person action adventure that begins to run out of steam by the end of the tutorial level.

The weapon-crafting is great but given the manipulative microtransactions this free-to-play shooter is not worth your time, let alone your money.

After the career high of Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team return to their usual routine, with a Frankenstein’s monster of other people’s ideas – all of which are expressed better elsewhere.

A remake of a rehash of a disappointing sequel… that only hints at what Earth Defense Force could be if the series would only show some forward momentum.

As a quick and dirty port this is no disgrace but it doesn't make any meaningful use of the 3DS's functions or the concept's potential.

Unwanted and unnecessary, but despite the bland third person shooting there’s an unexpectedly light touch to the script that hints at other lost opportunities.