Biomutant is what happens when someone makes an Ubisoft game, but without Ubisoft’s resources, experience, talent, or even willingness to take risks. With the exception of the art design, everything about Biomutant feels safe and familiar, but without the confidence or polish needed to make it effective. Safe, familiar, and hopelessly lost in the detritus-littered wasteland between design document and actual game.

A grand rogue's gallery stuck in a small world and a disappointingly familiar game design.

Cyberpunk’s running time is littered with familiar problems and zero interest in their solutions. It’s a design cluttered with the failings of a hundred other designs. The safe and familiar failings of the medium that can’t be pinned to CD Projekt specifically, but are nevertheless embraced with something that feels like enthusiasm. So I sigh and carry on to the ending of my choice, looking in vain for the actual cyberpunk in a sprawl of contrived and bland sci-fi.

Dirt 5 can afford to be vain, because it’s the kind of game you play because you think the levels are pretty. And you’re not wrong. They’re very pretty. But it’s not the game you play if you want to play a racing game. It’s barely the kind of game you play if you want to play a driving game. It’s the kind of game you play if you just want to move through pretty levels, which is something lots of videogames do these days. So Dirt 5 at least has that going for it.

A group of disparate people with unique strengths and weaknesses come together to try to save London from a high-tech dystopia. Unfortunately, I couldn't care less about any of them.

What could have been a worthy and equally quirky follow-up to Reus and Renowned Explorers is instead a confused combination of soccer management, tax forms, and bad documentation lightly dusted with a flurry of religious words.

Shadow Empire has tons of personality, playing with science fiction, apocalypses, resource management, RPGs, and card games. But everything in Secret Government feels like a dry imitation of a dry Paradox game. Shadow Empire also reveals things as you play. You learn clever systems that interact with each other in interesting ways. But playing Secret Government never goes beyond the feeling of tweaking values in a spreadsheet without any innovative interactions or even meaningful systems. Numbers, all the way down, lined up in rows and columns with all the expected interactions, in a game that lets you do a lot of little things that don’t matter much in the hopes that eventually something’s going to happen that might matter a little. All the while, make sure you keep Ramiro Vazquez’ secrecy topped off.

Valorant considers a standard match as best of thirteen rounds. Thirteen rounds! You don’t know which team is dominating in three rounds, Valorant? Because I sure do. It’s the team running rampant all over the map. Your Spike Rush mode is only slightly better at best of seven, but even that can drag. It’s all in service of the eSports focus. Anything quicker would be too fast for dramatic shows. Riot has made eSports their bread and butter, so it’s no surprise that Valorant is heavily skewed to that audience. Gone are the days of 1v1 arena fights in LAN tournaments with fullbright settings. One match. One result. One mistake and you were done. There were no upset wins or swings. You did a looping run from the railgun spawn and the keg of health and you didn’t dare deviate because it could all be over with one high-ping hit. Anyway, I’m old. Valorant has made me realize that I don’t recognize the landscape I grew up with. I’ll let the younger generation deal with Valorant’s sequel.

Gearbox is at their best when they’re engineering the act of shooting something. If their game would just shut up and let the gleeful gunplay speak for itself, Borderlands would go a lot further. Instead, the gunplay is clogged up with meaningless loot, smugly unfunny jokes, and lots of using the same ol’ gun while waiting for the parsimonious skill point drip to finally drop. Where’s the glee in all that?

In the campaign, white phosphorus is a horrific set-piece accompanied by screams and whimpers. That’s some heavy shit. In multiplayer, white phosphorus is a reward for competent play that brings high-fives and fierce guitar licks. That’s some badass shit, Bro! You can have this cake and you can eat it, Modern Warfare assures us. In past installments, this dissonance would be funny, but here, it’s another reminder that these are really two separate games, and never shall the twain meet.

I don’t mean to make light of someone who’s obviously — maybe too obviously — writing about things that make her sad. I get it. But being sad doesn’t make your poetry worth reading. I’m sorry, I know that’s a dick thing to say, but I’m not your therapist. I’m not even your friend. I don’t know you.

How did BioWare, veterans of making games with fine-tuned progression systems, make this uninteresting slog of bad loot and dull advancement? How could the developers that gave us Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and even Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood create such a technically incompetent mess of loading screens and disconnects?

That’s this boardgame port in a nutshell: an incomplete effort stripped of personality and then a door slammed shut before you can admire your work.

Tomb Raider was personal because it was personal. But now it’s come full circle to yet another vapid videogame character muddling through bad writing, rote familiar gameplay, and fewer features than the last time. Wake me when the next reboot is here.

Remember how good the DLC was in the first State of Decay? Lifeline and Breakdown? If so, definitely steer clear of this waste of $10.

What a delight to re-appreciate The Crew all over again! The first one. Not this underdeveloped and terribly misguided sequel.

Unlike Sentinels of the Multiverse, I’d still rather play this on the tabletop. Handelabra seems so preoccupied with whether or not they could make a One Deck Dungeon videogame (they can!), but they didn’t stop to think if they should.

When it comes to free-to-play games from Russia about fishing, you could do a lot worse.

Really, it feels like shovelware.

The problem is the way the game is balanced. Instead of being a cool rogueishlike clicker with interesting busywork and a coherent, connected storyline, it’s balanced like a level-based arcade game where you need to learn the tricks to beat a particular level, with the concomitant arcade mechanism of arbitrary punishment to make the highs more high.

Why not think of Assassin’s Creed: Origins as a lovely and chill sightseer sim? It only took about forty hours of game tax to get here, but you’ve earned it.

Not quite beer n' pretzels. More like suds n' crumbs. With its hand out for more of your money.

Rapture: World Conquest demonstrates what every other game with a globe-shaped map has demonstrated for as long as they’ve been around. Namely, that a globe is never a good idea for a strategy game. Never. Information is a critical component in a strategy game, especially a real-time strategy game. But a globe hides exactly half the information at all times. That’s a misguided attempt at immersion at best, a dick move at worst.

Danger Zone is good for a couple of fancy crashes, and not much else, before an uninstall. It’s like a mild hit-and-run where it was never really worth taking the other driver’s insurance information anyway.

Ghost Recon Wildlands is what it would be like if Disney World had a section called Shootland. A swathe of geography dedicated to the theme of shooting guns, expensive looking, consisting of simple and contrived thrills interspersed with waiting in line, built to impress in a compressed burst rather than entertain over the long run. Great place to visit, sure.

Resident Evil 7 has a strong opening, a sagging middle, and a disappointing finale. In other words, it hews closely to the arc of most horror. But to Capcom’s credit, this Resident Evil is taking pages from books it hasn’t previously read. I’m not convinced it understands those pages, but at least it’s attempting something other than the usual roiling mass of black goo with bright orange weak points you have to shoot. For a while at least. It’ll get to that. But before it plods through its sagging middle to its disappointing finale, Resident Evil 7 is at least trying.

If I was to make a game that I didn’t want anyone to actually play, it would look a lot like Clockwork Empires.

It’s not my place to second guess game design. As you know, you go to Civilization with the game you have, not the game you might want or wish to have at a later time. But it is my place to note that when I go to Civilization, I’m looking for more than just a laid back single-player cities builder with the AI frittering idly in the margins. I cut my teeth on Sid Meier’s grand strategy without a brain-dead tactical layer drizzled over the top. I admire a lot of what Firaxis is doing to move on from the mess of Civilization V. They’re headed in the right direction, even if they are dragging a lot of baggage.