Yes, this is just like Raccoon City all over again: stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, tedious. Except for the parts where it's like Call of Duty, which are equally stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, and tedious, but with more NPC soldiers milling about. Resident Evil 6 is thoroughly oblivious to so many of the things that make a good game these days.

It knows how to infect a gamer for the long run.

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.

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

In the 80s, these choose-your-own-adventure books were novel and exciting, particularly on your way to discovering some of the well written Infocom adventures. But today, on an iPad, Blood of the Zombies is a tedious relic, not unlike playing Adventure on an Atari 2600 emulator. It might sound like a cool idea until you're actually doing it. Some things are better off remembered instead of experienced.

Oh, and my sweet Lord, this game does wonders in the space battles department. You’ll fly around Star Destroyers and through Death Star debris, zipping between laser blasts and missiles. Eventually, just as in Galactic Assault, in Starfighter Assault games, you’ll spawn in hero ships like the Millenium Falcon and Slave I. Or that one green ship that looks like a bathtub turned upside down. Is it Bossk’s ship? Regardless, you can fly in it, if the cool ships are taken.

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.

Defiance is mostly lacking meaningful connective tissue. It fails at the fundamental task of feeling like a thoughtfully designed and polished game. It fails at feeling like a world. It fails at giving you much to look forward to once you’ve realized you’ve seen most of what it’s ever going to do. You can only get so far with “it’s fun to shoot stuff”. About Defiance far.

This game is crazy Neapolitan through and through, with a sense of mad glee for how frequently and flagrantly it breaks the rules.

If Electronic Arts is going to make a game with the basic premise being that no city is an island, if they're going to stress the interaction among cities, if they're going to make playing alongside other people a cornerstone of the design, if they're going to force my creations into tiny boxes that cannot exist past a certain point without the help of other tiny boxes, they're going to have to do the hard work of making it actually work. And ideally, that hard work should be done before they sell people the game, not after they've been caught flat-footed for botching it so completely.

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.

It’s clever enough, I suppose. But is it worth 100 floors of bare-bones rogue-like? Hardly.

Sir You Are Being Hunted has revealed all it has — much of which is tedious or repetitive — after a few hours.

A creative new take on space-themed videogames that merges the deep, thoughtful gameplay of real-time strategies with the intuitive accessibility of physics-based games.

Features writing so sophomoric, so unfunny, so stale, so trite, and so unskippable that it all but kills the game underneath.

Someday, maybe, the Mafia series will find its footing. It will stand tall, secure in its own skin. Until that day, Mafia III will sit at the back of the bus, waiting for something braver to defy convention.

Painkiller's nutso violence meets Titanfall's nutso nimbleness meets Doom's nutso pacing, all in a grimfuture Warhammer world cobbled together by a nutso French studio.

The lack of variety is just another bad call in a series of bad calls. With only a single faction, with nothing resembling a tech tree or upgrades, with maps having only a single shape (a sphere inside a sphere) that negates terrain, Planetary Annihilation misses many of the elements that make a good RTS a good RTS. It instead is so in love with its concept, which isn’t very good in the first place, that it never gets around to the vital business of being a good game.

Since there’s no way to play the campaign multiplayer, you’re stuck beating up the sad confused AI players in space, while falling prey to its ruthless efficiency planetside.

Unfortunately, Betrayer falls apart quickly, and it can’t afford to do this given how short it is.

A little Startopia, a little Bridge Commander, a little Don’t Starve, a lot of FTL. But it’s all so awkwardly strung together, so charmless, so spreadsheety, so plodding, so dry.

Procedural generation is not an end. It is a means to an end. But there is no such end in No Man’s Sky. It’s endless randomness for the sake of endless randomness. It does what it does because it can, not because it should. I would describe it as procedural generation in search of a game, but it’s worse than that. It has found its game. And the game is hollow and awful.

A nice, boring, middle-of-the-road review score just to ensure no one will ever read this.

It feels disappointingly slight, partly for the writing, partly for all the repetition, partly for the weirdly useless local multiplayer, and mostly for the smallness of it, hemmed in as it is by doors for the inevitable DLC. Suddenly it's over and you're left to grind if you're so inclined.

Without a more effective delivery system than a single checkpoint overwriting all your other progress, the Faction Pack is a frustrating example of death by linearity.

The real problem is that your $30 gets you a shameful assortment of bugs, glitches, and control issues. You can’t control flying vehicles with a mouse. It doesn’t play well if you try to split control between a mouse and gamepad. The keybinds are listed incorrectly. Some of the graphics are clipped in half, as if they’re hiding behind an invisible wall.

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?

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

This glee is where Marvel Heroes has enough pull to make up for its various shortcomings. It might take time.

An open-world waiting for you to conquer it, with varied types of areas offering varied types of gameplay. You don't even have to pay attention to the silly story! You just have to want to take over the map.

Because it’s trying so hard to be a Metal Gear game, and falling so short, Metal Gear Survive is the wrong kind of off-kilter. Sometimes a Kojima game without Kojima just isn’t a Kojima game. Sometimes it’s just a snack to tide me over.

It's the latter-day high-octane car smashing ped mashing antidote to racing games.

Inversion drinks deeply from the Gears of War well, including the same basic combat model, the same generic space marines, and the same overwrought investment in its own bad story. But there's none of Gears' heft or kick. Instead, Inversion has that lightweight feel usually reserved for the first level of a game before you get the useful weapons.

A colossal disappointment for how it takes something I really want - an iPhone version of Pandemic - and manages to screw it up completely, reducing me to frustrated stabbing at impossibly tiny icons.

The best action RPGs are carefully calculated to go directly from the lizard brain to the index finger. Krater, an action RPG from a small Swedish studio, instead meanders, gets lost, and ends up in a quiet cul de sac somewhere around the cerebellum.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is one of the worst games I've really liked in a long time.

You can't take up the slack for the miserable AI by playing multiplayer, because there is no online multiplayer support, asynchronous or otherwise.

Saints Row 3 is a tough act to follow, particularly given how much awesome over-the-top stuff is already in there. But dribbling out forgettable and pointless content like Genki Bowl is exactly the wrong way to follow it.

Utterly flubs the fine art of shooting cool guns at freaky things in space dungeons. And it has a terrible weapon progression system and cut-rate production values, to boot. Plus, there are no predators, which is apparently what it takes to make an aliens game that isn’t awful.

A mess. This is no surprise given Egosoft’s penchant for releasing messes and then tidying them up after the fact. But the problem with X Rebirth is that it’s a different kind of mess than the previous games, in new and terribly wrong ways that are beyond tidying up. X Rebirth doesn’t seem to understand what people liked about the previous games. It is a game based on misguided assumptions.

I don't mind in the least the game's modest production values, but I do wish that Illwinter was more hip to certain modern game design principles, like how to play us out of a game.

The game is designed for me and my friends, except I can't play with them because there is no multiplayer. And when I play by myself, the AI commits suicide. The presentation and art sure are slick. They get five stars. The rest of it gets zero. Average it out.

But I love that someone is still making - and putting onto the iTunes store - something so barely this side of the theoretical stages. Fertang has about as much dressing as it can bear before becoming something else.

As an iPad game, Small World is a big disappointment. But as an advertisement for the boardgame…well, I've just ordered the basic set and two of the expansions. Mission accomplished, Days of Wonder! There aren't many iPhone games that end up costing me another $50 after I've bought them, much less disappointing iPhone games.

If you play shmups because you like to wrestle with cool scoring systems, there's not much here for you. But if you play shmups for the mindlessness of dodging bullets and watching things blow up, this is a viable choice: crisp, lively, loud, busy, obligingly World War II.

One of the brilliant touches in maniac mode is how Bug Princess 2 literally fills the screen with your score. When you convert bullets into points, the number appears on the screen where the bullet used to be. When you pull this off correctly, overlapping 9999s fill the screen. It's one of the most gratifying experiences you can have in a videogame (Cave's Espgaluda works similarly, but it's no Bug Princess).

I suspect Zen Studios intended it to be player friendly, designed to appeal to casual players unaccustomed to pinball. The result is minimal opportunities to lose the ball, lots of extra balls, frequent multiballs, and liberally activated kickbacks.

In a game where experience points and stress levels are role-playing elements, not visually presenting your earned experience or a level up screen is a serious omission.

After the utter genius of Bug Princess, and the inspired lunacy of Deathsmiles, and the sleek clean action of Espgaluda, I can give Cave a pass for the generic robotery of their other Dodonpachi, subtitled Resurrection. But whatever's going on in Dodonpachi Maximum, a sprawl of sterile color and rote action without character, is perhaps the first Cave game I can easily do without.

Campus Life clearly wants you to come back more often so you sit through more full-screen ads.

A solid idea that needs a bit more work to be a good game. Right now, it’s as merely clerical as the name implies.

Totems is also the perilous guesswork of calculating who has how many of what left, with some brinksmanship about who will hold out with the last monkey or wolf. It’s not over until it’s over, and in the context of its clean simple gameplay and evocatively primeval artwork, there will many reversals of fortune along the way.

Hypatia is already far more interesting than anyplace I’ve previously settled in Sins of a Solar Empire. And that’s even before finding any of the new artifacts Forbidden Worlds introduced.

One failing of Shelter is that it takes a while to truly get underway, and it’s too simple a game to take so long to get less simple.

Amber Route is nothing if not educational.

A terrible iOS port.

There’s no game like State of Decay for dropping you into a zombie apocalypse, and now there’s no survival game quite like Breakdown’s score-based challenge with its inevitable failure bearing down on you. it’s all futile, but what a grim drama you’ll unfold on the way to your demise.

Cute stuff, this is definitely the B-side table of this pack.

Fantasy Flight went to all the hard work of porting Battlelore without giving us a meaningful way to enjoy it.

Rocket science, orbital trajectories, and gravity wells are a terrible milieu for guesswork. It’s like a bunch of kids on a merry-go-round hucking rocks at each other, and then setting off fireworks at each other, and eventually shooting guns at each other. All the while the merry-go-round goes round. Did you miss?

For such a smart design, it’s got an appallingly bad implementation.

It all comes down to one burning question I have while I’m waiting for stuff to happen in Cosmonautica: why aren’t I just playing Space Colony?

Battle it out in virtually any engagement on the Western/Eastern/Mediterranean Front using detailed American, German, Russian and British armies.

So after that third attempt (my fifth attempt overall), I threw in the towel. Not because I don’t want to know what happens. I sort of do. It’s an intriguing story and for all its frivolity, the plot has at least a couple of exciting reveals. The simplistic characters are appealing enough and their forced conflicts are no worse than something you’d see in the average TV show. But I learned my lesson after six seasons of Lost. Sunken cost fallacy is a terrible reason to watch a TV show or play a game. I’ve learned that it’s okay to bail on a story once the storyteller has betrayed your trust. I’ve learned that uninstalling The Next World is the choice to make instead of playing it a sixth time.

The tutorial is great, the matchmaking system works nicely, and the game even knows enough only to send you an email reminder about your turn when you are not logged in. It’s like Playdek thought of everything...It’s not so much about whether the game is any good. It’s whether it’s any good for you. It’s more than just good for me.

Carmageddon: Max Damage is unique, hilarious, a little long in the tooth, and a comedy Charles B. Griffith would be proud to have inspired.

Rearranging ingredients is a viable way to make a different meal. And the Last Roman campaign is an edifying alternative to all that tasty Warhammer junk food.

for a throwaway tower defense game, Alien Shooter TD does what it needs to do: pass the time by slathering a map in alien gore.

It’s mostly a numbers-heavy realtime party-based dungeon crawl combat extravaganza. Sci fi, to boot. You’d think the developers at Quadro Delta would come up with a more thematic title to distinguish it from their previous game, Pixel Piracy. That one wasn’t sci-fi. It was your garden variety Caribbean pirates, but in pixels.

A remarkable essay about history and game design. Also a damn fine game.

It’s delivering a quick sharp jolt of gore, profanity, and arcade-induced dexterity. It will last maybe two minutes if you’re good. Three or even four if you’re really good or lucky. At which point it doesn’t even ask you if you want to restart. It knows you do. So it just does.

The gameplay appeal of Caladrius Blaze is its variety and progression within each match.

One of the smartest things about Age of Rivals is how strikes a balance among separate but interrelated systems for armies, economies, art, religion, espionage. I especially like how it handles military strategies. Armies are important, but they’re not dominant. Your opponent can go all-out aggressive on your ass, but you can still win a cultural victory. Try that in a 4X.

Ponder the lushly informative and sexily Sumerian visuals as you bake bread and make beer for a cooing fertility goddess who peers in from above like someone’s mom asking who’s winning. It’s going to be close.

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.

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

Thaumistry is exactly what you want if you’re an Infocom fanboy like me. It has that thoughtful, funny writing Infocom spoiled us with, dozens of just-hard-enough puzzles, a cast of characters with enough personality to be interesting, an over-the-top set-piece climax, and all the refinements you expect from a modern adventure game. You can’t break it and make it unwinnable. You can’t die, with one obvious exception, blatantly telegraphed several turns before it happens. But this isn’t posturing, hipstery “art house” interactive fiction — it’s a hardcore, puzzles-first design. The heart of a 1980s text adventure throbs beneath all the 21st-century niceties.

This is what pinball should be, but unlike most pinball tables that have to fit the subject matter to the gonzo mechanical gravity-powered contrivances of pinball, Adventure Land is already there. Who cares about Star Wars or Skyrim or Spider-Man when you have tables like this!

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

When the puzzle elements fall away and you’ve established a rapport with the hardware, and perhaps even an affection for its idiosyncrasies, you’re sitting in Dan O’Bannon’s chair. Now you’re Pinback. Now that galloping finger jab — right-left-right-left — actually does something.

If I had to pick one thing Space Tyrant does best, it would be pacing. Because this is how a game has to move in order to cook a Marie Callender chicken pot pie in 20 minutes.

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.

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.

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.

This is state-of-the-art for action RPGs in Soldak’s fantasy worlds.

The premise is cyberpunk, the parameters are thoughtful, and the payoff is worth the bother.

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.

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.

Creeper Worlds are basically puzzle games. But with the new sense of scale that comes with 3D, with new visuals to show off the ocean as sullen pools and looming waves, it’s enough to make it feel like a new world and, therefore, a new game.