The Magnificent Pixel Dynasty isn’t a case where more is better, or even a case where more is unobtrusive—rather, these half-baked mechanics that have been bolted onto the same construction toy as All Glory to the Pixel King! only serve to detract from the core experience that lays at the heart of both games.

The game translates a board game of the same name which itself borrowed very heavily from Kingsburg, a well-regarded Euro. Like the joke, there’s very little about the result which is original, and the new expectations created by the digital format create requirements it fails to satisfy.

In a complex genre where games like Unity of Command and Battle of the Bulge are like precision-engineered Gothic cathedrals, Russian Front comes across like a Las Vegas one-hour wedding chapel. It seems to have the basic form and function of an operational war game down, but it’s missing the nuance and subtlety of a truly good one.

As negative as I’ve been about it, Arcane Magic isn’t far from being a pretty good game. Its card mechanics are an interesting idea, but there’s just nothing of substance underneath it.

The lack of many of the features that we have become accustomed to makes for a disappointing and frustrating experience.

The rogueish elements can't make up for shallow gameplay in the other parts of Dead Age. The combat is dull and long, the survival elements are simplistic, and the story is predictable. The gameplay often doesn't fit the theme, and it is poorly optimized, although occasionally beautiful.

Part of the problem is that, though the characters are pretty interestingly varied, with a variety of effects on movement, action points, damage of different types, teleportation, an array of summoning abilities, healing, and board control, there's a substantial element of linear design.

A decent game that doesn’t make enough of an effort to stand out in any way.

This precision 3D platformer does not work with mobile controls. One control option has you using the gyro in the phone to control your view, which is precise, but awkward if you're in a space where you can't move around. The other option is touch only, but doesn't give you easy access to all of your abilities. If you have a controller, give it a try, but it’s not worth the hard drive space otherwise.

In the time I spent with this game, the hardest part was the fiddly controls—it took a while to figure out that with some care I could control the size of the platforms created by pinching my fingers ever so slowly. The puzzles themselves weren't challenging at all.

While the design is cool and the gameplay enjoyable enough, I Hate This Place is nearly unplayable on my Nintendo Switch, making it impossible to recommend to players on this console, especially at a price tag of $30.

For all its pretension about history, Spirit of War is a disappointingly generic experience that could be set in any time period. Even on an App Store that’s chronically short of hex-based tactical games, it’s not particularly noteworthy.

A3: Still Alive is a confused mess of a game that doesn't do anything particularly well.

It is difficult to recommend The Frostrune to anyone but die-hard mobile adventure gamers and/or people with a passion for Norse mythology.

Regicide features impressive animations of Orks and Space Marines blowing each other to bloody chunks, but is fatally bug-ridden and lacks a strategic core.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure twists and distorts the well-loved series into something almost unrecognizable, playing on fans’ nostalgia to sell a half-baked story with terrible graphical performance.

The lack of content undermines the feeling of exploring beyond the final frontier and the limp combat is an awkward step back from the elegant Ace Patrol.

While Hex Mechs has some good elements to it, ultimately it isn’t enough to make up for sloppy QA, mediocre art and some very quirky design flaws.

Punch Club might have worked better as a card game, or with the immediacy of a visual novel interface.

Quest of Dungeons feels like the barebones of a rougelike game – a stripped down, uneventful, tedious affair. It works and functions perfectly fine, but it is so inoffensive and safe in its execution, that that ends up being its biggest crime.

If you played and enjoyed Aralon: Sword and Shadow then this game is more of the same with a better UI. In any other case, there are much better RPGs available for the iPad.

RPS Saga, if nothing else, shows that jan-ken-pon is best left as a mini-game within a larger game. There is just not enough here to enjoy, and frustrating AI hampers what little there is on show.

An obscure and dull system has drained this all-American pasttime of joy. If you are a devout fan of baseball, slavish repetition or Kairosoft's other works, try the game. Everyone else should stay away.

It’s not a terrible game by any means, but it is uninspired. Made all the more frustrating by the cleverness of the CARROT apps that preceded it.

Super Meat Boy Forever is particularly frictionless on mobile. Combine this with its punishing difficulty and aged aesthetic and it just feels a little out of place, out of time. It’s a struggle to have a good time with it.

Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound and Debriefed on Switch is an odd little title with some really unique and interesting ideas, but overall falls short with its visuals, combat, and clunky controls.

Its market price is less than a hamburger at McDonalds, which is a good deal for a pretty polished and lengthy, if generic, RPG. The in-app purchases, currencies and crafting are ignorable if that's not your bag. Ultimately, though, it’s just too uninteresting to seriously recommend. It's only worth playing if you've somehow already ploughed through all the hundreds of hours of far better JRPG experiences out there.

In the end, some nice visuals and a little deduction can't save a basic gameplay idea that's just too random. Overall, there's not enough deduction and bluffing added to the Battleship formula, leaving the game with a frustrating random feel.

Simogo are capable of making extraordinary things, but this isn’t one of them. The name “The Sailor’s Dream”, it turns out, is apt. Like a dream, this an experience you’ll forget all about soon after leaving it.

AEW Fight Forever on Nintendo Switch has such promise thanks to a fun career mode and unique match-types, but poor performance, dated graphics, and stale gameplay all come together to create a trying experience.

A quick-fire RTS held back by a lack of depth and the inevitable F2P grind. Some smart ideas that hold promise.

Railway Empire 2 is almost definitely a good game on any other platform. But for the same price as beefier competitors, you can get it in a version that looks three decades old. And you wouldn’t know it until you bought it. That sucks.

Space Age loves its endless inane cutscenes a lot more than you will, and it tops them off with a completely discordant endgame boss that fulfills Space Age’s cinematic aspirations while throwing the game bits out the airlock.

It’s basically grinding for 8+ hours with nothing to really show for it and, unlike its forebear, doesn’t even have the humor to hold your interest all the way through

The Detail is often nice to look at, but it’s a game that most adventure fans can safely skip.

Lack of variation in missions and unit's abilities make Battlevoid: Sector Siege just too boring for anyone but hardcore fans of the franchise.

Corto Maltese is a visually diverse, moderately well-designed adventure which simply fails in a few key areas.

The most interesting lesson Pentaction: Medieval has taught me is that there are some game mechanics I genuinely like which respond poorly to refinement.

The biggest issue, outside of the odd UI hiccup and impenetrable mechanical logic, is that TITP pretends to offer a scathing commentary about the human condition, but it’s bite is toothless.

Sheeping Around looks the part, but sadly the game turns out to be as dull as you would expect for a game based on an animal that stands around in a field all day chewing grass.

A tired, lackluster, and watered-down riff on the Alien series that finds players swapping from camera to camera guiding crew members through a xenomorph-ravaged space station.

Colt Express is a well-designed, fun game that is destroyed by a poor online multiplayer experience.

Devotees of the console strategy RPG style of Fire Emblem may find a lot to like in Parthia 3 and its prequels, especially those disappointed by Nintendo's limited Fire Emblem: Heroes. This series was created by someone with a lot of love for a very particular kind of game. Now that the creator is freed of this obsession, I hope his next project can find the audience it deserves.

Grimoire of Souls is a mindless hack and slash title that promises so much, yet delivers so little. The franchise has certainly seen better moments.

Oddly charming, perhaps nostalgic, but pretty shallow and filled with free-to-play shenanigans.

Limited tactical options and offensive IAP structure kills what could have been an interesting mobile alternative to roguelike deck builders like Slay the Spire.

Because of the use of monetization shenanigans, that feels like a deliberate attempt to push players to be more committed to the game so that, when their carefully-developed Dice Monster expertise no longer avails them, they’ll shell out for some extra boosts. It’s like the twist ending of Frankenstein, in which you discover that the real monster is the creator.

It's easy and glacially paced. I could see the gameplay becoming more challenging later on: Don't Bug Me requires constant action since your towers quickly decay and you always have to jump into the fray yourself. It's not a set-it-and-forget-it TD game. For now, though, it takes too long to unlock new towers and enemies and the early levels are quite dull.

From the perspective of a licensor, Coup is just about the perfect iOS adaptation: it’s polished, with some genuinely interesting value added (including probably my favorite game art in memory and a satisfying achievement system), and introduces the game very well without making a physical copy seem superfluous.

It’s a marvelous structure, easily allowing players to learn the game’s basics and discover whether the interface suits them better than it did me.

As it is now Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.apk feels like a simple cash grab piggybacking of the show’s popularity instead of something with actual time and effort put into it.

While the campaigns are nostalgic and fun to revisit, the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection is largely disappointing. The multiplayer mess feels inexcusable, robbing players of the basic fundamentals of a Star Wars multiplayer game. Not being able to finish matches due to crashes, struggling to even get into a game, and a lack of servers make this one of the worst multiplayer experiences I’ve had for some time.

It should be immediately evident to anyone who plays or even looks at the game what an incredible effort went into making it. Unfortunately, the tedious and frustrating nature of many of its puzzles undermine the considerable charm State of Play cultivated through their craftsmanship.

The idea of a video game tied to a concept album has potential. Unfortunately, The Astonishing Game doesn’t deliver on that potential. The decision to implement it as a board game rather than a role-playing game limits many creative options. Even so, I would have liked to see a more engaging storyline or more meaningful ties between the story and the gameplay mechanics.

If this was a 20-30 minute game, maybe, but clocking in at over 2 hours and not being able to save is a death sentence. Knowing that the odds are stacked against finishing a game doesn’t give me much incentive to start one.

Only for a player who can only tolerate simulated standard cards and no opponents would this seem ideal, and it pains me to imagine there are many such people.

Biomutant’s vibrant, post-apocalyptic setting simply does not translate to the Nintendo Switch. Pair this with convoluted combat, shallow morality systems, and a suspect blending of Asian cultures, and you get a very unenjoyable gameplay experience.

A shocking mishandling of three beloved classics, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition on Switch is a poorly ported mess of frame rate drops, popping, ugly characters, and bad decisions. Time to dust off the PS2.

Sports Story is essentially unplayable in its current form, with issues such as softlocking, out-of-bounds areas, and perpetual crashing. Outside of the technical issues, much of the mechanics and story feel disappointing too, with the tongue-in-cheek humour still present but struggling to breathe among the various issues. The disappointment is real with this one.

Unfortunately, Bright Memory: Infinite is swarming with bugs and performance issues that severely impact the gameplay experience, which in itself has a couple of issues thanks to some questionable gunplay mechanics. However, the game is a decent length, features a decent story, and has the makings to be a good shooter should the various problems be addressed.

Not all boardgames need a digital version and Mysterium is best left on the tabletop.

America’s favourite pastime broken down into mindless menus, static screens and drop down boxes, with no learning curve for new or old players.

1775: Rebellion is a fun board game, but the digital implementation needs work.

I always thought my first one star review at PT would be something so offensively bad that it would leave me frothing at the mouth. Head of State disappoints rather than angers as seeing a good idea done badly is always worse than witnessing something that was a failure from the get go. Were it a cake Head of State would be a solid, if slightly underdone base missing all of its top layers, icing and decorations.

Balan Wonderworld is an otherworldly disaster: tedious to play, visually repellent, and – at least on Switch – stomach-churning to control.