Short and light on the puzzles, Darkestville Castle will hardly surprise point-and-click veterans. On the flipside, it has a quirky world filled with quirky, witty characters.

Behind the plain-looking graphics lives an excellent logic game with perfect balance and multiple ways to solve each puzzle.

Monotonous gameplay flow, almost identical towns and quests, and there is just one winning strategy. It’s a good-looking, but brainless game; some solitaires are deeper than this one.

The ending serves as a bridge to a possible 5th installment, but it’s going to be just as bad unless the developers reinvent the series. The "entertain yourself" approach to the open world ran out of steam a long time ago, campaign missions are going downhill fast, and the amount of bugs has skyrocketed.

Announce as many cool things as possible, then, while everyone is distracted by flashy trailers, swap the actual game with a hardly playable dummy. Looks like The Masterplan itself is a con.

No amount of noir stylings and serial killers can save this clunky game. Too bad — the idea itself was good.

A beautiful, unnecessarily protracted, empty shell of a game.

The gameplay mechanics of Ancient Space would have been a good fit for multiplayer, but there are no online modes at all, and the single-player campaign is hardly worth your time.

They say that something is better than nothing, and Pandora is not a bad game. It’s just nowhere near the source of its inspiration – the still brilliant Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

In an attempt to recapture Studio Ghibli’s magic, the creators of Encodya put a lot of effort in amazing visuals, composed excellent music, hired great voiceover actors, and… botched narrative and game design. Without them, Encodya fails on both counts, as a fairytale and a game.

The Thing: Remastered, like the original, tries as hard as it can to be like a good game. Do not believe it.

It's a short, but very intense adventure, with brief cinematics, compact maps without padding or copy/pasted elements. It brings a lot of variety into the world teeming with bland "sandboxes".

Oversimplification is the real joykiller in Disjunction. Its story feels like a rough outline, levels are made out of copy/pasted prefabs, stealth and character progression are just as simplistic, as is everything else.

The soundtrack is the only good thing in the new Rise of the Triad.

At first, TurnOn strikes you as a bolt of lightning. Wow, the first Russian indie game released under the ID@Xbox banner, and with nice graphics and sound to boot. After the initial shock wears off, you notice the roughness around the edges, the lack of multiplayer with leaderboards (for musical levels), irregular checkpoint placement, the hero jumping through textures…

Taking over the series development reins, Paintbucket Games chose a path of imitation by rehashing elements of the first two games without adding anything new. Diligently copying rules, gameplay mechanics and visual attributes, the developers missed the whole raison d'etre of the game — making tough decisions under pressure, because Beholder 3 is incapable of driving you into a corner.

While Heroes 7 shows promise and some good ideas, there is so much mess on the technical side of things that you should wait a few months before opening up your wallet. Although, after what happened with Heroes 6, there is no guarantee that Ubisoft will iron out the bugs.

There are two sides to one’s experience playing Skyshine’s Bedlam. You either feel bewildered when you lose another character in a seemingly unavoidable catastrophe, or grind away, repeating the same routing over and over again. And there is no gameplay between these sides.

Primal Carnage is not a bad game, but you'll get tired of it after a couple of days. If you want to find out what is feels like to be a monster, try Natural Selection 2.

Rainswept calls itself a detective adventure, yet it’s actually not, and those who come looking for clever intrigue and unexpected twists won’t find any. But fans of reflective reading will enjoy this melancholic psychological adventure and dive deep into a multilayered inner world of its characters.

Eight Princes is the DLC for the most devoted fans of Three Kingdoms who pore over patch notes after every update. It invites you to join the same rat race as in Yellow Turban Rebellion, the game's previous DLC, on the very same map, but with a shorter list of available factions.

In many aspects, Elex is a blast from the distant past — antiquated, clumsy, and half-baked. But even with all that, I would often find myself pulling all-nighters in its weird world.

The ever-increasing level requirements force players to grind. These side missions are all too similar in their look and design. Varied, exciting combat could have been the game’s saving grace, but, alas, it leaves a lot to be desired.

The game quickly loses steam, even though at first it seems fun, and its retro-futuristic design is charming throwback to fan-favorite movies of the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, the monotony inevitably leads to boredom as the game has nothing to challenge you with except to repeat the same few actions over and over.

10.000.000 is built on a solid foundation: subtle retro-style graphics, nice music, and, what is more important, the engrossing chaos of a real-time puzzle. At first, you can't put the game down, but then you realize that all that doesn't hold a candle to Puzzle Quest and Clash of Heroes. Bite-sized play sessions and minimalistic gameplay are a good fit for mobile platforms, but as far as time-killers go on PC, this one lacks depth.

All in all, NBA 2K21 still holds the bar, but there is very little incentive to switch to this version if you had your fill of 2K20, unless you’re a dedicated fan of MyTeam.

A chaotic, pretty much useless crossover of Final Fantasy worlds. I’m surprised that this game was made by Team Ninja.

A well-rounded survival game with rich atmosphere and a solid gameplay foundation, even though it adds nothing new to the genre.