An incredibly customizable experience from top to bottom, but it has enough problems to keep it from ever becoming anything.

Whereas the characters, gameplay, and stages pack a fair punch, overall it suffers due to dire loading times and a stale state of a single-player experience.

Thanks to a story that gets a bit confusing, boring combat, and poor animations, Risen 3 is simply not a good game. The huge worlds, beautiful visuals, and large number of character skills do fight hard to make the RPG worth your money, but in the end, I think it’s a game that most likely should be avoided.

There isn’t much here that feels fully developed. While The Caligula Effect: Overdose has some interesting ideas, none of them really work.

Though there is plenty to like in the art style and core level design, there are many other key elements like merely passable controls and unfulfilling combat that drive home its lack of polish and balance. On paper, enthusiastically diving into a sophomoric world of teenage angst seems like an fun concept. However, it doesn’t take long to realize that there’s a damn good reason why most people grow up. Maybe Drawn to Death should do the same. It needs to report to detention, immediately.

While the concept of Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator is undoubtedly novel, it is disappointingly lacking in its execution. Its charm, which in itself is already given to subjectivity due to differing tastes in comedy, wears off pretty fast and the game soon degrades into a repetitive and predictable slog.

Skelattack is a game of exceptional mediocrity, a frustrating adventure with an identity crisis and a balance problem. It screams potential that it never even comes close to reaching as it draws obvious inspiration from numerous places, but fails to capture the charm and intention behind those progenitors. Its story and art is its strongest aspects, but the stagnant gameplay drags down what could have otherwise been a pretty good concept. There’s a core of a good idea here, but like it’s lead character, there’s simply no meat on these bones.

NBA Live 14 isn’t a broken or unplayable game, it’s just not in the same league as the 2K series yet.

I typically don't mind short campaigns, but an experience just over 5 hours that doesn't leave you wanting more is certainly not a good thing. As a whole, Syndicate is a functional shooter that employs some interesting concepts but fails to really flesh them out to their fullest.

You can forgive the shoddy dialogue and lame jokes as that is what they were going for, but you cannot forgive rather boring combat, a short game, and absolutely zero replay value.

There is a wacky, multiplayer racing game in there, but it feels more like a side effect of a notepad full of gags than a gaming experience that can entertain a group of friends long enough to make them briefly forget about Super Smash Bros., nor does the single-player experience do much after you understand what’s happening in front of you.

If you've played the PlayStation Move version (which is easier to control and doesn't have fingers getting in the way of the screen) on the PS3, then leave this one be. It's the same 60 levels, plus a few Vita exclusive levels added for good measure. But it's not enough for warrant a second purchase.

A game that, while technically sound, doesn't have near enough content to draw in the average player. Add in the fact that there are really only 3 environments in the game and it can be beaten in under 4 hours, and you have a recipe for a perfect weekend rental.

There’s nothing wrong with the aesthetic of the game or its reliance on tired clichés to tell a story. It’s truly done a decent job, but that’s the crux of the problem – it’s just okay. It’s a fun title to whittle away some time with, and you may even find yourself warming up to your party members’ impenetrable plastic hearts. However, it lacks a compelling narrative, balance, and combat variety necessary to make it as engaging as it should be.

The cinematic slicing and dicing of enemies, with arms flying around haphazardly makes the game fun to watch, while the repetitive nature of the combat can make the game boring and tedious to play.

The game isn’t terrible by any means, with some fans of the show sure to enjoy reliving Elizabeth’s quest, but there is too much wasted potential here. If you don’t mind the obvious lack of depth here, you can have some fun playing the game, just don’t expect that fun to last.

This might have been fantastic as an anime series, but the lack of real choices in how the story goes kind of kills the interactive vibe a visual novel is supposed to have. Even though the text messages and phone calls alter the story, the length of the full story, complete with monotonous gameplay, doesn’t make replaying it for all the endings very enticing.

If you’re fan of Hotline Miami, and are looking for something that puts a few twists on its gameplay, even if it doesn’t quite succeed, you may find LA Cops to be worth checking out on sale. But, if you are looking for a game that is polished, with a narrative to tie it together, than you should probably leave this one behind bars.

Frustrated as I was during a few Form Ball matches, I was still invested and focused on them, and prancing through a few opponents to pop the ball into an empty goal is an incredibly satisfying feeling. So is smashing into another Form and sending their soon to be carcass miles into the air will never get old, but these moments are exceptions to the rule. Deformers has a broken and inconsistent core, and I can’t fathom how any future patch or update can change that.

I don’t think that Super Bomberman R Online is a bad game per se. After all, the game is free to play. And winding down with a few silly, low-effort games online with random people, pointing at the screen and saying “haha, that person got knocked out in a funny way!” or “I’m so stupid, I just ran into my own explosion” might just be the thing that you’re looking for. Personally, I think that’s been the core of Bomberman titles since it began in the ’80s. Maybe that’s why the battle royale, always-ranked competitive style of Super Bomberman R Online just doesn’t feel right. Or, maybe it’s just the long matchmaking times and frequent glitches. Yeah, that’s probably it.

In the end it all boils down to whether or not you are a fan of mobile games that offer you a virtually hands-off sort of experience.

It’s an unoriginal platformer built around nostalgia that plays an awful lot like Mega Man, except it’s not 1987 anymore.

Max & the Magic Marker makes for a decent kids game to add to your Move enabled collection, but despite having some interesting gameplay points it stops short of doing anything deep with the mechanics at hand.

Perhaps if Conception II added some challenge to combat and handled the plot and characters less like side attractions and more like plot and characters, the game could have been an above average title.

A game that could’ve been so much more, and barely does enough to justify its existence.

The graphics are moderate, but the controls can be clunky and may prevent you from enjoying the short experience.

Babylon’s Fall seems like it needed a lot more development time. The core combat feels stiffer than my left wrist, which is currently recovering from a broken bone. Combining that with lackluster graphics and limited multiplayer options would be bad enough, but locking out key features of the game behind ten or so hours of gameplay makes Babylon’s Fall a very tough sell. Stacking microtransactions on top of it all leaves a nasty aftertaste that Platinum Games is going to have to wash out for a long time to come. Babylon’s Fall is good for some mindless, repetitive dungeon crawling, but certainly not for the launch MSRP of $59.99.

An average game. It offers a quick pick-up that will entertain you for a few hours at best. Once experiencing all the modes that the game offers, it most likely will not be played again any time soon.

Overall, Sniper Elite 3 does have a fun kill-cam feature, it does have online co-op and it does have an interesting multiplayer. But, almost everything about it feels like a rushed product that simply cannot be ignored.

A Rose in the Twilight has some interesting ideas, but poor execution turns it into a massive disappointment. Players won’t find brilliant puzzles to solve like in Inside or Hue, and instead are stuck playing a game that only has a strong atmosphere to offer up. That might be enough for some players, and the game is certainly gorgeous, but when the genre is filled with brilliant games, there’s little value in such a flawed one.

John Daly's ProStroke Golf is a realistic golfing experience hampered by limited content and horrible presentation.

A funny twist to the console war, diverse characters, and an interesting take of healing are the positives. However these are far outweighed by bland dungeons, overly easy combat, and a rather boring story.

Assetto Corsa may succeed as a simulation, but it fails as a game. Clearly a ton of work has gone into making sure the cars handle correctly and that the tracks are as realistic as possible, which just makes the end result even more heartrending. It has a terrible user interface, isn’t fun to play and doesn’t feature any of the helpful tools that make Forza such an appealing game.

There’s a hardcore fanbase out there that loves this game, but there’s an exceptionally high learning and enjoyment curve that will keep more casual players from getting invested enough to explore its deepest content or even wade around much in the shallow end.

A strange bug meant that I twice lost control of the golems, watching helplessly as they plunged into the nearest hazard. Sometimes when climbing vines, Skully would fall off for no reason. There were invisible walls, times when Skully deflected off platforms at an unnatural angle, and times when the lava would just disappear. A lot of players will likely give up before they reach the end of the game. It’s a shame but completely understandable when the game has a heart that’s let down by myriad problems.

It does its job, but doesn't go above and beyond to give that wow factor that we have seen in the past from other titles in the same genre. Though, this is still one of the better puzzle titles offered from the miniS selection on the PlayStation Store.

ONE PIECE: Grand Cruise feels like a trip aboard a dinghy rather than a pirate ship. Even simply allowing for free travel around the boat as the show’s various characters react and move around would’ve given players something more interesting to do.

It’s a shame that Labyrinth Life didn’t choose to go the route of Criminal Girls 2, where it released with mini-games in tact but had artwork that was redrawn by the original Japanese team to be a bit less smutty. Releasing the game without many of the naughty mini-games means that you see it for what it truly is; an uninspiring dungeon crawler that, apart from the challenge dungeons, is a bit of a dull slog to play through.

Developer Clever Beans started with a great idea in Gods Will Fall, it just doesn’t seem like they fully worked it out. The game could have been more than what it is, and right now it just felt like a simplistic dungeon crawler that would feel right at home on a mobile device. It played well, it looked fine, it just could have been much more.

It doesn't have any particularly horrible problems or glitches, but at no point is any part of the game especially impressive or enthralling either.

Every aspect of the single-player campaign is poorly executed and designed. And when you finally push through it, the ending leaves far too much open to feel any sense of closure - you can tell that a sequel was always planned from the get go. Bad news Kaos and THQ, if this is what you give us, we don't want anymore.

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos isn’t a terrible game, it just manages to be mediocre in almost every aspect.

The game could have really benefited from coming off its wheels and really opening up the exploration to give you more to do.

Forgettable.

When taking a step back to holistically look at Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD, the word that comes to mind most prominently is “underwhelming.”

The online trouble, coupled with the lack of spice in the campaign, leads to a very average game that drags on for a few hours too long.

Secret of Mana is an entirely skippable remake of a game that was the progenitor for a number of JRPG conventions. That’s a shame. The greater failing, however, is what happens when fans will inevitably pick this title up in the hopes of recapturing some of the feelings of grandeur the original game contained so much of.

Puzzle Agent is too short, and not memorable enough to warrant our stamp of approval, and there are far better games on PSN, and from Telltale Games.

Gungrave VR is a generic shooter wrapped in the new-tech allure of VR. For fans of the 16-year-old PS2 series, this will no doubt bring up some nostalgic feelings. But the incredibly small amount of content on offer will turn off most gamers looking for a fuller experience.

With a multiplayer option that is severely lacking in polish and depth, Dungeon Siege III sets itself as a mainly single player dungeon crawler. With a campaign that was over at around 11 hours and very little replay value, the game is very hard to recommend at a $60/£40 price.

Any charm Rage! has is hidden under thick and ugly jungle, and undermined by its weak execution and a narrative that is at its best boring. Save yourself the rage, and look elsewhere.

There’s a lot of potential to really have Theseus be a great adventure, but it ends before you can get invested at all, a slow burn with an all too rapid conclusion. It feels like the whole middle part of the game is missing, with a long intro leading right into the climax.

Arc of Alchemist is an RPG that most people who play will forget about it shortly after finishing it. Given an average finish time of 6-8 hours (without new game plus), the journey is over before it really feels like it’s begun. What’s here isn’t really impressive to look at, either. The Lunagear concept is slightly interesting, but mixed with the blandness of the rest of the game it doesn’t make this a must-have release. If you really like building bases, you may have some fun with Arc of Alchemist. The rest of us can wait on a meatier RPG to take up our time with.

I give Blue Estate a little credit and weigh it more on the side of challenging instead of on the side of failure, just because there were some fun parts and some people might love the long levels, testy controls, and the crazy story.

It is an interesting take on an off-road racer with some seriously breathtaking jumps, but lacked basically everywhere else.

While the battle system is decent, especially when done on the Vita, the parts in between lack any kind of draw to keep me interested.

Strength of the Sword 3 has a fairly decent set up, but the game is hampered by a lack of tuning with input, camera, and a fairly awkward dashing mechanic.

The London Heist and Ocean Descent are good VR experiences book-ended by mini-games that range from the woefully mediocre to the staggeringly dull.

Eat Them! could have been a truly amazing game – the visuals are impressive, the destruction based gameplay is very enjoyable, and the customisation can add depth to the title. But Eat Them! misses the mark, and sadly by a long way: repetition, a lack of variety, and a faulty health mechanic, make the game often more painful than enjoyable.

Despite providing an interesting showcase for the equipment, it is blatantly devoid of anything that’s unique to virtual reality as a platform. Even in two dimensions, this is a title that would be hard to recommend due its mediocre story and bland puzzles.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood has a good premise, but suffers from poor execution. If you’re looking for a game that allows you to live out the fantasy of being an overpowered werewolf and kill everyone around you in bloody fashion, Werewolf provides that, but only just. Unrewarding combat, dumber-than-a-doorknob AI, dated mechanics, and an uninspiring presentation mean that this is a tough recommendation at the launch MSRP of $49.99 US.

Hyper Void is not without its fair share of fun, producing some eccentric and vibrant experiences with its procedural environments. Unfortunately, it’s still very light on additional content and offers next to no incentive to continue the fight once you’ve exhausted the short run of levels.

When bugs derail an experience so dramatically, it is extremely unfortunate.

Reloaded is a game that doesn't do enough to win over gamers who never played the classic and for those who fell in love with this N64 classic, you might be better off wiping that dust off your old N64 console. The game feels like it was stuck in the middle of modernizing the experience too much and sticking true to the roots, opting to stay around the middle.

Eternity: The Last Unicorn is not a great game. It’s a game that takes from Norse mythology, but doesn’t really go deep enough to make you feel like you’re on a viking adventure. You can’t skip the cut scenes, the camera is the hardest boss in the game, and it just doesn’t live up to the games it emulates. I like you Eternity, I just wanted better.

Unless you are a passionate fan of pre-historic underwater exploration, Time Machine VR is not worth your time. Despite the premise being interesting, the gameplay and overall design fails to deliver on any of its promise. The resulting experience feels like a soggy slog through a minimalistic proof-of-concept, that somehow managed to make its way onto the PlayStation VR.

Milanoir provides pleasure in its own roundabout, corny, lighthearted way. Sure, its combat is very obtuse, awkward, and confounding. I became emotionally detached from Piero as his dense, cocky attitude drained my soul. But with a few neat mechanics and a well-rendered art style, this whimsical crime-film imitation flatters some of its ancestors and lightly entertains with the same campy charm.

SolSeraph is a game that was made with good intentions and a lot of heart. The developers wanted to pay homage to a classic, but unfortunately missed the mark on almost all fronts. The platforming bits are frustrating with enemies coming out of no where to knock you off. The city-building parts never get deep enough to challenge you or force any decision other than stacking barracks and watchtowers along the roads. As someone who loves city-builders, I just wish it was a better game.

It’s a game that, on the surface, seems built for you to ask questions about what it presents, but once you dig a little deeper you realize it was never prepared to give you the answers. It’s not a conversation; it’s a speech.

VROOM KABOOM has big ideas, but I don’t think it’s a matter of execution. I think these ideas are just disparate enough that it makes putting them together naturally problematic.

It's a shame where the series has headed lately, and fans should skip out on PlayStation Move Ape Escape altogether.

Cyberpunk 2077, when it works, is a shallow popcorn flick of a video game, not an industry shaping experience that redefines the open-world RPG genre. Perhaps the bigger problem, particularly for console owners, is that Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t work. It’s a mess of half-baked ideas and rough gameplay that should have never been released in the first place. While the PC version faces criticism for various issues and praise for others, the PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 feels and looks like a whole different game that simply needed a lot more time.

It often feels like bits and pieces of Skorecery are missing. The concept is there and the Breakout-style gameplay works, but it is so rudimentary.

Duke Nukem Forever is the result of what first began as perfectionism that slowly snowballed into mismanagement.

There’s an element of fun here, but it’s hardly the type of game people bought their PS4s to play. If you’ve got an inkling of interest in the Bridge Constructor series, might I recommend trying the series for free on mobile, or even the far superior Bridge Constructor Portal? Bridge Constructor Stunts for PS4 just ends up landing on its head.

With a vaguely intriguing overall story that never shines through the juvenile and sexual drama and a remotely interesting battle system that gets old due to way too much grinding and lack of variety, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory buries what could have been positive aspects under the sheer ridiculousness, annoyances, and poor craftsmanship of the rest of the game.

A game that attempts to sneak into an era that has long passed it by. While a minimal amount of enjoyment can be had listening to the wayfarers and tradesmen across the many worlds that the hero visits, there are too many problems that stem from the game’s now ancient design.

The matchmaking is currently a mess, ranked play is currently inaccessible for many, and there’s no semblance of a campaign to keep players busy while the online is being worked on.

Farming Simulator 16 accomplishes its goal of allowing you to manage a virtual farm, pretty well. But it sadly falls apart as a game due to the lack of options, as the Vita version is severely limited to console versions. It isn’t quite as boring as watching paint dry, but it will only hold your attention for as long as you want to watch grass grow.

While it has some good ideas that are well-intentioned and will surely provide some entertainment to die-hards, NASCAR Heat 3 is missing all those things and, in the wider scheme of racing games, is still several laps behind.

That is the problem with Bladestorm: Nightmare – it loses its appeal too quickly. Between the monotonous battles, boring story, and ugly visuals, there isn’t much there to hold someone’s attention. If you want to have some fun with it, rent it for a day or so. After that, Nightmare is pretty much worthless.

Edge of Eternity just sort of is. There is nothing really memorable here, just a bunch of ideas that don’t really deliver much of a kick. The UI is just disastrous, turning any task into a kick in the privates and the combat is just flat, with nothing really exciting about it. The basic premise of the story is strong enough and the characters aren’t horrible, but the dialogue felt rushed far too often.

Friday the 13th: The Game shouldn’t have been released in the sad state it currently is in. From glitches that make players invincible to terrible matchmaking that had me waiting over 10 minutes to get into a room, it’s putting it nicely to call the end product a mess. It’s really heartbreaking to see since there are still positives that manage to shine through if one can look past the galling lack of polish. The core gameplay, when it works properly, can be fun when played with friends, and there are some refreshing ideas underneath the jank. Several months from now it may become the multiplayer hit it strives to be, but right now it’s an embarrassing release that can’t be recommended.

Extended loading times, washed out textures, and an unobtainable online infrastructure crucify what could have been a fresh start for the franchise. Worst of all, the personalities behind the sport have not transcended whatsoever – taking away one of its greatest assets.

When you’re doing the same and cruising downhill through the beautiful countryside or fighting and clawing to get your wheels in front at the top of a grueling climb, Le Tour De France 2018 is enjoyable stuff. But outside of those times, it’s yet another buggy and undercooked update for a title that had fallen off the pace a few iterations ago.

New Gundam Breaker does little to continue the good faith the past few Gundam games have worked so hard to garner. It’s a charming game at times, and its characters are refreshingly simple. That’s not enough to save it from itself, though, and the gameplay is well below what a game based entirely on building and piloting a Gundam should be.

A thoroughly disappointing release. It’s pretty bad when PlayStation 2 games were more fully featured and fun to play than a new release in 2016.

Jungle Rumble is a classic example of a game that’s best left to a smartphone.

Soul Axiom is an incredibly uneven game that feels disjointed and unpolished. Moments of beauty in its futuristic overworld are only temporary, as half of the game looks completely out of place. It’s incredibly disappointing that the game isn’t able to come together since some of the puzzles are delightful to figure out.

Nobody is playing this game because it’s a technical mess, and I can’t recommend it to anyone due to that. If you want to play Verdun, then pick it up on PC. Sadly, the PlayStation 4 version is an inferior version that launched dead on arrival.

Perception is a game of wasted opportunities and poor execution. It presents a unique mechanic only for it turn stale as it lingers without any evolution, it introduces a character that the player has empathy for only to make her unrealistic and unlikable, and its inconsistent design decisions turn a promising adventure into a frustrating one.

Zombie Army Trilogy may only be a patch or two away from being a decent co-op affair, but in its current state it is a mess of a game.

It would be hard to say that Kill Strain isn’t at least ambitious. The game was a studio’s first outing in a relatively immature genre, which attempted to take a dramatically different approach to many of core mechanics that define MOBAs. Though carefully calculated, these risks fall flat in execution, resulting in a confusing and joyless experience.

The problem with Whipseey and the Lost Atlas is that it doesn’t do anything to differentiate itself from the platformers it has clearly been inspired by. And despite looking, sounding and controlling wonderfully, Blowfish Studio’s two dimensional platformer invites unflattering comparisons due to its lack of originality.

Mulaka has some neat ideas and a sometimes gorgeous look to it, but little else to offer. The individual locations fail to stand out, and the game quickly becomes overly formulaic. The combat is too sloppy to impress, the platforming is plagued by a stiff moving character, and the puzzles are never captivating. It’s a completely forgettable experience with a few really nice sights that are better experienced as screenshots.

Medieval Defenders boils down to nothing more than an unremarkable mobile port. As tower defense games go, it is a paint-by-numbers affair, offering little to veterans of the genre aside from another game to conquer.

KOI is a game that almost went somewhere. While it has a pleasing aesthetic, and peaceful ambiance, what’s on offer is woefully short. So the score earned here, for the first game developed in China and released for Western audiences on the PlayStation 4, should serve as a sign for any other developers in China to strive for something more.

Gal*Gun: Double Peace has a surprising amount of heart for a game that has its head lodged firmly in a gutter full of panties. The characters are likable, the plot is goofy in its seriousness, and the premise is so over the top that I couldn’t help but laugh. Sadly, the gameplay simply doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain.