If killing the undead in a Russian oven heated by fire’s breath sounds appealing, you might give this DLC some consideration. Otherwise, feel free to take a pass.

So there’s definitely no shortage of stuff to do. The campaigns alone will fill at minimum a few weeks of nightly play...The question is whether it’s any fun.

I can’t help but think, though, that Sacred Citadel would have failed to maintain my interest had it not managed to induce such strong Golden Axe nostalgia.

Sunset is that rare game that endeavours to challenge players to be entertained by something other than action.

So while I can’t really recommend Minecraft: Story Mode to adults casually acquainted with Mojang’s hit game (like me), or even those who generally tend to enjoy most Telltale adventures (also me), I suspect just about any tween with a passion for Minecraft will have a fine time (like my kid).

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is, in other words, an entertaining toy that can spark the imaginations of Mario fans young and old, but it’s not necessarily a great game. Proceed accordingly.

If you happen to have fond memories of mid-aught nights spent exploring green fields and fighting whimsical fantasy creatures – and you don’t mind learning to cope with a crappy camera and frustrating navigation – then by all means, spend away. There’s still a good, lengthy, old-school RPG buried under all the problems introduced by this iOS edition.

Ronin is fun, innovative, and worth a go – especially if your tastes lean toward both strategy and cool ninja high jinks – but there is untapped potential here that could have resulted in a serious Steam standout.

It might not be my first pick if I were in the mood for something to put my grey matter to the test, but I don’t regret the time I’ve spent with it.

Ultimately, Liberation features a fantastic premise with an evocative heroine that sadly doesn’t measure up to any of the games in the main series. If you are an Assassin’s Creed nut who really wants to see the fictional universe from another perspective, give Liberation a whirl. If you are just looking for some more Assassin’s Creed action, the other six games are better than this one.

Maybe it’s just because I lack the nostalgia necessary to make the plodding pace and trial-and-error puzzles click, but if I’m to be convinced to continue investing my time the next chapter will need to pick things up a little.

Alien Rage suffers from its lack of world building and its inability to go beyond genre conventions, but it’s backed up by competent design, great use of the Unreal Engine, and a story that keeps players driven until the end. The gameplay is frantic and varied, but slowly becomes repetitive and monotonous.

This is another app that will hound you to spend real money in order to buy things like better punching bags and balls to play with, but you can have a lot of fun with the basics and not spend a penny. So it’s worth a download, even if you never get serious about levelling up your blundering ninja.

Avid Halo fans who already have a Windows 8 device may want to give it a try, but Halo: Spartan Assault isn’t likely to draw many iOS or Android gamers into the Microsoft fold.

If all you’re after is a lot of shooting and exploding and collecting set within a stunning tropical milieu, you’ll find it here. Have at it. If, on the other hand, you’d like a little more in the way of innovative play and nuanced commentary, best keep hunting.

I’ve been a die-hard Star Wars guy for decades, so I’m always happy to get a new movie, book, or game. I just wish this one turned out a tad better.

Kinect Sports Rivals isn’t quite the revolution in motion-controlled sports gaming that we might have hoped for.

It’s a busy game that’s a failure in many ways, but its art direction and story perfect the eerie atmosphere of the genre, and make the experience tolerable, even when the writing and game design let it down. Like the crack of moon through a black-cloud storm, White Night is a game as fragile as the light.

Hitman feels like a typical big-budget game that’s been fragmented solely to more easily fund its middle and end bits. Whether this is in fact the case matters little. That’s the way it comes off. Even if the rest of the episodes deliver levels on par with the excellent Paris mansion mission, separating them by weeks or months dilutes the experience and diminishes the already spotty narrative.

Dragon Quest Heroes 2 adds a substantial amount of traditional JRPG-ing to the Musou formula, Overworld-like areas allow you to explore more freely than the in-story battle missions. Equipment and skills customization rival anything seen in a mainline DQ game. It’s a passable, mostly mindless foray into the DQ universe, which is never a bad place to visit thanks to the colourful, buoyant art and character design from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama. But more than anything, its best features made me want to play a regular Dragon Quest game instead.

The problem is that in the few hours I spent online with the PlayStation 3 edition about a week after release the number of people playing at any one time seemed to hover around 700-800, with the bulk of them engaged in death matches rather than any of the more interesting, innovative game types (such as the new Hunter mode, which pits a minority of nanosuit-wearing, permanently cloaked hunters against plain old human troopers).

This is a rare case of a game better played on phone than tablet, since the smaller screen lets one alter the beam line much more quickly.

Much as I hate to admit it, strong storytelling – which is so rare in big games – is often only half the battle. It’s a shame to see it tarnished by mediocre action.

It might be the closest the game industry has yet come to imagining the mix of tension and monotony of routine life in a world of undead.

Terraria may be flawed and unapproachable by mainstream standards. However, it challenges you to become the master and director of your fate rather than a simple pawn moving along a preset path. Interactive entertainment would be better off if more games aspired to such grand ambitions.

Disney Infinity 3.0 could end up being a lot of fun for Star Wars fans willing and able to shell out for all the content and figures that will eventually be released over the next several months, but budget-conscious players – especially those who aren’t all that interested in diving into the Toy Box – would be wise to wait until the starter pack can be grabbed at a discount.

I even occasionally found myself skipping through the all-important court dialogue without reading, then using hint coins to solve the case just so I could get back to Layton’s puzzles.

It feels a bit like a Metroid Prime game – no surprise, since Armature employs some of the same people – but with better controls and a (slightly) more intelligible story. It’s not exactly bursting with new ideas, but it does a good job breathing fresh life into old ones...At least when it’s not making you want to pull your hair out with its technical issues.

NaissancE is a beautiful game, but without much direction it can feel like a never ending mire of running, jumping, and falling. That being said, is the game worth spending $20 on? Certainly.

Amplitude is destined for most people to become that slightly off record from their favourite band. You spun it a few times the day you bought it, and you really did try to love it. But now it just sits there, rarely played, a reminder that even those you admire most are capable of mistakes.

This short series ought to be all about its mesmerizing heroine and her struggle to harness her regrets. Instead, it seems to be shaping up as a short-form version of a story we’ve already seen plenty of times over.

It’s also small and sometimes frustrating, has little personality and no real ambition. There are better ways to kick up some digital dirt.

BioWare has created a sufficient foundation of story and play mechanics. Now it just needs to figure out a way to properly meld and symbiotically grow both elements.

I had fun with it for maybe a dozen sessions spanning a total of a couple of hours.

It makes me wish for the return of the good old days of game rentals. Because yes, Farpoint is worth a try if for no other reason than that it shows that a traditional first-person shooter can work in virtual reality – especially if you’re lucky enough to play with a purpose-built gun peripheral. But I doubt many people will get more than a night or two of fun out of it. And they’ll likely become pretty bored by the repetitive level design and unimaginative selection of enemies faced along the way. And frustrated by the wonky cover system. It’s hard to convince myself that might be worth $100.

I want to love Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, but the best I can manage is to appreciate its aspirations and intentions.

After a tantalizing serving of polygonal freshness in its predecessor, it’s disappointing to see Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars not just tread water but actually move the series backward.

Saints Row IV: Gat Out of Hell is basically a sandbox with only a couple toys. It’s fun to drive a yellow dump truck into castles you made with a pail a couple of times, but it wears thin – and quicker than you’d like.

Pneuma: Breath of Life wants to wedge its way into this lofty club, but it’s simply not as elegant or consistent as the best games of its ilk. The observer theme makes for some memorable puzzles the likes of which I’ve never quite seen before, but others are either frustrating, unfair, or both.

A special kind of frustration swells up from playing a game that delivers pristine action mechanics set within a creatively vapid world.

For a moderate increase in price, you end up getting a lot less in terms of content.

That said, if you’ve already got a shelf full of Amiibo there’s no reason not to at least give Mini Mario & Friends Amiibo Challenge a go. It’ll cost you nothing and requires just a wee bit of space on your Wii U hard drive. No point looking a gift horse in the mouth. However, if you’ve yet to pick up at least a few Amiibo or have shied away from collecting the core Mario characters, this is one free game you can skip without losing much sleep.

Despite its finely crafted and quite enjoyable drawing and physics puzzles, I found Max: The Curse of Brotherhood to be more frustrating than fun.

Given that the best part of the game is the show – and that the vast bulk of the creative work had already been done prior to the game’s development – it seems to me that it ought to have a price more inline with a season of a kids cartoon TV show than a game.

Mario Party fans will likely find themselves wishing for something more.

Even a bit of appealing Amiibo functionality isn’t enough to make Zip Lash a must-have for anyone, save perhaps the little guy’s biggest fans. If you want to play a platformer, plenty of better options exist on 3DS. And if you want to know what Chibi-Robo is really all about, best go back into his quirky past and do a few household chores or give life to some park plants.

Nebulous will help you kill a lazy Sunday afternoon, but not much more.

There’s a great game in Street Fighter V, but only if you’re willing to learn the hard way. Capcom will need more than the few thousand competitors following the Capcom Pro Tour to make this game, and the series as a whole, sustainable for the future.

I went into 101 Ways to Die hoping for a clever cross between Pain and Lemmings and came out with what felt like a gorier version of Mario vs. Donkey Kong that tasked me to kill rather than save. There were moments of giddy fun at the start, but they petered before too long.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a fun game skillfully made. But families on a budget (just about all of us these days) would be better served spending their gaming dollars on something a little more substantial.

Gotham Knights isn’t really broken, it simply falls short of what has come before. Superhero games come with lofty expectations these days, and it’s unlikely this entry will meet them for most players. It’s safely skippable for now, but maybe check it out once it arrives on your favourite subscription service.

You soon realize that control, like your city, isn’t all its built up to be. So much has been smoothed out that it doesn’t always feel like you’re running the show.

Battleborn has laid the groundwork for a decent online cooperative and competitive shooter, but most players would do will to hold off until it rectifies its balancing issues and dearth of content.

Telltale's take on Guardians of the Galaxy probably isn't what most fans of the film will expect, and the differences may prove off-putting.

Does this game deserve a 10/10 because of its ingenuity, or should it be scored a 7/10 because it lacks modes and variation? Is it a 5/10 because it’s not really a game? Or is it a 0/10 because, really, who would pay good money just to run around as a digital goat? In the end, Coffee Stain Studios delivered what it promised, a ridiculous game featuring goats and explosions.

The only truly game-changing ability I encountered is a jump pack that comes available early on and greatly enhances your ability to quickly move around the battlefield and dodge enemy fire. Beyond that there’s just not much driving us to keep growing our avatars.

I don’t doubt that Yooka-Laylee will push some buttons for players of a certain age who possess the predilections it was designed to sate. I, myself, have one foot in that group. But my other foot rests in what I can’t help but think is a much larger pool of players conditioned by modern game design who are now unwilling to put up with the problems of games past.

Arguably the main theme of the game is revenge, like many of the games in the Kill The Past Series, but it’s wrapped in an incomprehensible package.

Trion Worlds’ game, on the other hand, seems simply to offer yet another big open world filled with weapons to collect and creatures to kill. I won’t deny that I’ve had moments of fun blowing holes in Hellbugs over the last week, but it was of a flavourless variety I could have derived from any number of other third-person shooters.

Unrest is a bold, powerful, and interesting game. I’m just not sure how much fun it is.

Resident Evil: Revelations on living room consoles isn’t any better than it was on a Nintendo 3DS. It remains a reasonably fun retro-themed game that’s striving to be something more. But upgraded graphics and more robust controls aren’t moving it any close to that goal. Revelations is what it is, and that’s all it’ll ever be.

Like so many other early virtual reality games, Eagle Flight feels less like a game and more like an experiment that was polished up and given a price tag. It’s a fun experiment worth experiencing, but it’s not worth $60.

It would have been nice had the game connected all five of its activities in some broader way, perhaps a story or multidisciplinary tournament. Alas, the only thing tying them together is a card collection activity. You’ll earn coins in each event as you play, and those coins can be spent on blind card packs that gradually flesh out an album of cards sorted by rarity. Collectible cards have become trendy in games, and they can act as an enticing carrot – if they provide in-game advantages. But the cards here don’t seem to do much at all.

Despite being won over by its personality – a catchy minimalist electronic score and simple but endearing aesthetic give it a feel all its own – I just never found my groove in Dustforce.

If you imagined the Wii U’s excellent Lego City Undercover and the Nintendo 3DS’s Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins as actor siblings, the former would be Alec Baldwin to the latter’s Daniel...Not Stephen, and not even William...Daniel.

In most platformers, the running and jumping – the movement – is a huge part of the fun. It makes you feel skilled. In Snake Pass, movement amounts to a big fat ball of stress over which I rarely felt like I had firm control. Or at least that was my experience. And that makes it hard to recommend – certainly for the kids towards which it seems to be aimed, and even for die-hard 3D platformer fans.

Dead Rising 4 is a passably entertaining and wholly unnecessary return to a series that’s growing more redundant with each succeeding release.

Star Fox Zero is a frustrating experience because it has the potential to be a great game – a fantastic game, actually – but fundamental flaws not only hold the game back, they make it downright unplayable at times despite relatively easy fixes.

A sloppy camera, meanwhile, adds frustration to the proceedings. Players rarely have a good handle on distances involved in jumps to swinging platforms or teleports through 3D mazes or any of the other dangerous maneuvers frequently required. Expect plenty of aggravating deaths.

None of it is essential, nor is it inspired.

If you’ve yet to try Forza Horizon 2, this standalone expansion might prove a good way to figure out whether you want to – especially since it’s free through this Friday, April 10th. I’m not sure, though, what existing players will get out of it that they didn’t get playing Forza Horizon 2.

Unless you have better luck acclimating to the traversal mechanics than I did, Dying Light is hard to recommend.

As is, it’s hard to recommend spending $80 on this quirky but erratic crime saga. There’s fun to be had, but best wait for Saints Row to make its way to your subscription service — and maybe receive a few much needed patches in the process.

Any kid who can play this has the chops to play a Mario game, and I’d be shocked if they ended up preferring this substandard adventure to just about any Mario platformer released on any recent Nintendo system.

I really wanted to like Daylight, and at a basic level it works; it’s just the execution that bogs it down. What the game sort of feels like is an early beta with a lot of small tweaks yet to be made to the gameplay, environments, UI and engine performance.

Airtight Games’ supernatural gumshoe adventure manages to deliver an interesting enough tale, but most of the systems meant to make it engaging on an interactive level fall flat. As a game it just doesn’t work.

A pretty big disappointment.

Despite being instantly engaged by Aaru’s Awakening‘s artistry and intrigued by its innovative teleportation mechanic, I came away frustrated. I had no desire to keep playing, no need to better my times or scores. Each completed level led to a sense of relief rather than satisfaction, and if all I was after was a sense of relief I could achieve that by taking an Aspirin rather than subjecting myself to scores of irritating virtual deaths.

An inventive game with plenty of potential and some truly original concepts that somehow failed materialize into something that can be fairly described as entertaining.

There’s a very human pleasure in the mysterious. It encourages thought and excites our imaginations. But people are smart. We can tell the difference between legitimate mystery and something that is left unexplained simply for the sake of being unexplained in a vain attempt to fabricate depth and hidden meaning...The initially promising Transistor is, unfortunately, a case of the latter.

Somewhere along the line, Nintendo Co. Ltd. reckoned there was enough to Intelligent Systems’ collection of 16 mini-games to turn it into its own full-blown and nearly full-priced ($39.99) retail game...As it turns out, this may have been a questionable decision.

With four maps that only vary in looks, two characters who are without character, no online multiplayer, and four traps out of twelve that are actually fun, Knight & Damsel makes for a fun diversion, but little more.

It’s not a bad game so much as a small one hardly worth the price. Unless you (or, more likely, your kids) are diehard Kirby fans who feel compelled to own every game in which Nintendo’s pink puffball appears, there’s really not much reason to invest.

With the storytelling of Mass Effect, the fighting system of the Witcher, and environments taken right from Dragon Age and the Elder Scrolls, Bound By Flame is perhaps the least original game ever made.

Problem is, even the spectacular action grows tedious in short order thanks to lazy mission design. It seems nearly everything we do is based on simple math. Kill X number of bad guys to make them retreat. Blow up Y number of power sources to unlock a door. Destroy Z number of this type of facility in order to draw out the next boss. It’s about as basic as it gets.

I can say, though, is that it feels very similar to the Dynasty Warriors games I remember playing a decade or so ago. I don’t feel like I’ve missed a lot. I’m not blind to the fact that there is an outrageous amount of content here, including a huge array of playable characters, multiple campaigns to work through, and even a camp-building mode that gives some creative purpose to your killing. I suspect the right player could invest scores of hours in this game and still find more to do. But I’m pretty certain that player isn’t me.

The best I can say of it is that it’s left me curious as to what might come next. If nothing else, it illustrates how the unparalleled immersive properties of virtual reality make possible some truly unsettling interactive horror experiences...Now someone needs to create a horror game that’s not just scary, but also fun to play and has a good story.

Traverser is a game with a few alluring elements that never manage to fuse into the sort of smart and memorable 3D physics puzzler Gatling Goat Studios intended.

The controls are too tricky, the action too dull, and the time spent preparing and waiting to actually play is too long.

In buying a game like this we’re rewarding Techland for maintaining their own status quo and, worse, encouraging what might be a talented studio to just keep making the same mistakes.

Loads of interesting ideas and plenty of good intentions, but nothing sticks. It’s like it was made by a team of people with super short attention spans. They’d come up with a good idea, carry it half way, then get distracted by another thought, and do it all over again until ending up with an unfocused, unsatisfying, incomplete product.

Serious golf fans looking for a game capable of scratching their itch to hit the links through Canada’s long, cold winters aren’t going to find it here.

Sadly, Entwined never manages to deliver much beyond art and beauty.

Tennis fans should wait for Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash to hit the bargain bins. Everyone else can safely skip it, and hope Nintendo takes our collective refusal to purchase as a message to fatten up future versions of its Mario sports games.

Fellowship of Evil is a mediocre stopgap between now and whenever Codemasters gets around to releasing Overlord III.

About 60 per cent of Trials of the Blood Dragon is wicked barmy brilliance...Alas, the less said about the remaining 40 per cent the better.

The Drowning is free to play, but the unrelenting focus on upgrades aggressively pushes players to buy virtual currency so they can upgrade faster...Kudos to the new controls, but the overall experience left a bitter taste in my mouth.

But the real problem is that – as with most free-to-play games – the developers don’t really want you to stop playing. If you did, you’d stop making microtransactions. So there’s not really an end. And progression – as already noted – is painfully slow.