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.

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.

It’s pretty much just the worst.

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.

If there’s a bright side to all this it’s that playing a clumsy attempt at interactive art can’t help but engender a greater appreciation of games that manage to avoid tragic missteps and create a moving, memorable experience that makes us think about our world and ourselves in new ways...Perhaps Dotoyou’s next effort will be such an experience. I hope it is. Koi, assuredly, is not.

It is an outrageously imbalanced and profoundly dissatisfying system.

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.

Sadly, the game Behavior has delivered is even less ambitious and more forgettable than a straight retelling of the film’s story might have been.

I can’t recommend Fallout 76 to more than a handful of people. A niche few will still be drawn to it, perhaps out of curiosity, a completionist’s need to devour all things Fallout, or, like me, a morbid desire to simulate life after the end of the world. For everyone else, hold onto the hope that Bethesda learns a lesson from this failed experiment.

Double Dragon IV serves as an inelegant reminder that sometimes the past is better left in the past.

For me, leaving a game unfinished is like suffering an itch I can’t scratch. But I don’t think that’ll be a problem with Homefront: The Revolution. I’ve muddled my way through six of its eight open-world zones, and I’m just not interested in playing any more.

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.

It’s so bare-bones it feels like a cheap mobile game knock-off, and the fact that it was released without even a whisper seems like damning proof that Natsume knows it. Lost Valley is a dull, almost offensively boring and watered down version of a normally fantastic series. Do not pick up this game.

Lego Friends may not be the sort of game you steal away to play yourself after your daughter goes to sleep. And it’s not one you can play together with her for a shared and meaningful family gaming experience...But if you want to buy her a game that’s clearly meant just for her, a game that, as a parent, you can feel okay about having her play on her own or in the back seat of the car, not worrying that it will tarnish her developing brain with mindless violence or make her obsess over her appearance, Lego Friends is worth consideration.

These tributes may be enough to see hardcore fans through to the end. For everyone else, Aliens: Colonial Marines will probably be little more than an acid-soaked double-jaw to the chest.

The sad truth is that Digital Extremes’ has given story-starved Trekkies a good little narrative wrapped tightly within a not very good game.

The only part of the game that satiated me on any tangible level was revisiting iconic locations from previous Resident Evil games.

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

Humiliatingly wretched, but still more or less playable (...) Sometimes it takes a bad game to teach us just how good other games really are.

Taken down the bare bones of what a video game can be, Dawning provides players with an experience that is at once dream-like and at other times filled with a horror that lies just below the surface.

Despite falling into a genre and being released on the kind of gaming platform I typically ignore, I’ve found Feeding Time’s gameplay to be surprisingly compelling.

It’s been a bumpier ride than I’d expected – especially given the potential comic goldmine that is the Borderlands universe – but Tales from the Borderlands seems to be back on track just in time for what’s shaping up to be weird and wild final episode.

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.

Tales from the Borderlands: Episode 5 – The Vault of the Traveler is the best episode Telltale Games has produced in any of its ongoing series since the finale of the first season of its iconic Walking Dead series.

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.