The biggest problem for this game is every stealth game that has come since Thief: the Dark Project. Thief can’t match the visual flair and supernatural powers of Dishonored. It doesn’t have the lean efficiency and murderous creativity of the Hitman series; it trails the razor’s edge stealth and gadget lust of Splinter Cell; it lacks the vision and bombast of the Metal Gear series. Hell, it doesn’t even have a very good thief.

These canned side quests are a pretty poor substitute for whatever entertainment you and your friends might normally wring from a real-world copy of Talisman.

A middling open-world game can get by if it's well paced. The Saboteur and Prototype 2, for instance, weren't necessarily good, but they moved. Really moved. They pulled you forward, thanks in large part to great progression systems. There is no such sense of progression in Sleeping Dogs. You have a few tracks that gradually unlock moves you may never use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Red Wasp Design seems to prefer detail to elegance, and that's exactly the wrong call to make on the iPhone. It's also a damn shame in a game with such an obvious affection for its own characters and the Lovecraft mythos.

The draw of the Cold War setting, the visual aesthetic, and the soundtrack only last so long. And all too quickly, Counterspy gets left out in the cold.

Less ambitious MMOs break less dramatically. But The Secret World breaks differently, crushingly, almost tragically. There are various explanations and workarounds and excuses, and it mostly comes down to the simple fact that making games is hard and making MMOs is even harder. Funcom is simply unable to make the game they designed.

Grey Goo is a dry and forgettable B-side RTS with no advantage over other RTSs save the fact that it was more recently released.

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.

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.

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

All the cool stuff 1000000 gets right - the strategy, the long-term persistence, the loot, the leveling up - falls apart when I have to back up and align two tiles just so in order to convince the game that I want to move in the direction I want to move. It doesn't happen often. But it happens regularly enough to kill what would otherwise be a pretty cool game.

With its forgettable competence, Dariusburst very nearly turned me off of the entire genre of iPad shmups.

Really, it feels like shovelware.

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.

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.

It’s a dry exercise in competitive mathing that happens to have pictures under the numbers.

This is the same disappointing strategy game it was a year and a half ago, except that it now has two finicky and mostly unimpressive systems shoehorned in.

It’s no surprise Treyarch also has no idea how to establish or develop a character. Which is an okay thing to have no idea how to do. Treyarch is making a shooter, not writing a Chekhov play. But Treyarch’s sin is not knowing this about themselves. Treyarch’s sin is shoving your face into a trough of narrative slop and holding your head down for minutes at a time. And furthermore thinking this is what you want. Long bouts of serious and seriously incoherent story. I have a suggestion for people who make games: if your storytelling skills aren’t up to par, if your game isn’t conducive to telling stories, don’t spend so much time on the story.

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

Van Helsing starts out slow and takes a while to get not terrible.

The campaign is poorly written, poorly acted, erratically paced, full of pointless upgrades and meaningless choices, crammed full of overproduced cutscenes that fail to relate to the gameplay, and without a shred of creative insight into how to use a real time strategy game to tell a story, much less how to get me to click "next mission" without heaving a tired sigh. For all their incomparable game design smarts, Blizzard remains one of the worst storytellers in the business, partly for how hard they try and mostly for how spectacularly they fail.

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

Second Son looks fantastic and from a technical perspective, it’s a pretty impressive feat especially given that the game is out less than six months from the release of the Playstation 4. Unfortunately the gameplay isn’t up to par with the light show. Like the neon that Delsin channels, it’s all light and no heat.

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.