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.