From the character designs and the narration, to the tactical game play and challenging difficulty, there are few games out there quite like what the Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation has framed for us. You’re not quite at the level of M from the James Bond universe, but this might be as close as you get.

The sad truth is that Cyberpunk 2077 is awash with problems. Which makes it all the more miraculous that we were compelled to plod through its litany of tribulations simply to keep experiencing the story, characters, and world that CDProjekt Red has created. Clear away the grit and there remains something special here that’s bound to light up the imaginations of cyberpunk fans. A better option for console players, however, would be to wait for the next-generation versions, which will likely (or should that be hopefully?) look and perform better, and could benefit from whatever retrofits and patches CDProjekt Red sees fit to release based on player feedback in the coming months.

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.

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.

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.

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

This is all fun enough stuff. There’s a nice mix of split-second tactical thinking and deep brutality – I could almost feel each blow through my controller.

None of it is essential, nor is it inspired.

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.

If you are looking to play this game without having to go through the story, the Magnagate feature is a great way of hopping into a dungeon just for fun. Be sure to have good lighting, though, otherwise getting the feature to work can be a little hit or miss.

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.

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.

Mars: War Logs is an ambitious game with a lot of good ideas, and the execution is decent even if the story is a little contrived. For all the time I spent with the game, I felt like it was a good diversion away from the other typical Mars-based games like Red Faction: Guerilla.

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.

EA was so focused on making the gameplay a superlative experience that the company forgot to include a lot of the things that make the series so special. If you’re buying your next-gen console just to play NHL, maybe wait a year. If you already have the console, well, hockey’s hockey, right?

Movement is painfully slow. I must have spent nearly a quarter of my time walking at a snail’s pace down dark and empty hallways with nothing to do except brace myself for the occasional startle courtesy of a cheap jump scare destined to go unexplained.

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.

At best, 1-2 Switch should have been packed in with the console to give the early adopters something to do when they get home and better acquaint them with their new hardware. At worst, it should have been sold alone at a budget price of around $20...1-2 Switch is, in this humble reviewer’s opinion, a throwback to the reviled and little-played party games of the Wii era. I’d have thought that was a time Nintendo would have rather left forgotten.

The very definition of a mindless shooter, EA Montreal’s latest — the third in the middling Army of Two series — is a stripped down, by-the-book, bereft-of-imagination bang-bang that left me less satisfied than a parched man served a salt lick and an empty glass.

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.

All I can really say is that Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris is sufficient for someone like me, an admittedly casual Destiny player. I’ve found it worth the price of admission, and satisfying once consumed. If all you want is sufficient motivation to jump back into the blessedly refined firefights in Bungie’s online shooter for another week or three, Curse of Osiris probably won’t disappoint.

As a spiritual successor to The Neverhood, the game succeeds on all levels, but somehow I don’t think it will gain the same kind of cult following this time.

It’s an astoundingly basic game.

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.

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

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.