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.