To say there’s a lot to hate about Concord implies it has a lot of anything. While not strictly skeletal in content, it nonetheless offers little of note in a market that’s already saturated with similar games all vying to dominate the finite time of their players. Sony’s delivered the perfect picture of a game nobody was asking for, an impeccable example of the nonessential product. Even if I didn’t hate it, I sure as hell wouldn’t find enough to love.

The word “slop” has recently been overused to the point of death, and that’s a shame, because I’d very much like to call Double Dragon Revive slop. It baffles me how you can put out something this ugly and unenjoyable without attaching an apology to it instead of a price tag, but that's videogames for you.

I’m so tired of this manipulative garbage. I can't wait to stop being addicted to it.

Cloying adorability is Unravel‘s saving grace. Propped up on a crutch constructed from mawkish sentimentality, it gets away with a fair few missteps and manages to claw together a smattering of memorable moments. This pretty shell, however, is undeniably a shell, and no amount of pretty little animations can make up for a total drought of engaging game design.

The sequel nobody asked for turns out to be the game nobody needed to play.

It’s got “Part One” slapped onto its title, threatening further installments, and it does feel like a threat. My advice? Cut your losses, and I say that to the developers and paying customers. Play Isolation for scares, play Dark Descent for something buggy but unique, play Fireteam Elite for straightforward (thankfully patched) shooting, but don’t bother with this thing. Following the past few years of Aliens games, for all their flaws and foibles, Rogue Incursion is just sad.

If you took out the branding and populated it with generic creatures instead of marketable pocket monsters, Pokémon Legends: Z-A would be rightly seen as a sub-mediocre and sloppy RPG, the kind with 115 "mostly negative" user reviews on Steam. Game Freak knows how much grace the public affords Pokémon and has taken the absolute piss with it, churning out a cheap budget game with a premium price, expensive DLC, and a ten buck markup to get a decent framerate...The audacity of this exploitative cash-in is honestly quite disgusting. At least Ekans is in it.

When it comes to simply chewing through yet another open world game, Mad Max does suffice. It’s a substandard but largely competent “AAA” game in a sea full of them, and those who do value the idea of content above all else will find more than their money’s worth here...There’s simply no reason to pick it up, however, if you’ve yet to try The Witcher 3, Shadow of Mordor or Batman: Arkham City. There are tons of better games that go for what Mad Max went for and do so in a superior manner.

Dementium is not unforgivably bad. It’s just excruciatingly mundane, and so very unoriginal. I wish it wasn’t that way, as I would love to see great horror on the 3DS...Dementium Remastered is not, however, great horror on the 3DS, and it would be more honest to call it Dementium Regurgitated.

It should be nigh impossible to f.ck up releasing Doom at this point, but trust this collection of utter clowns to find not just one, but several ways of doing so. DOOM + DOOM II oozes carelessness and ineptitude all wrapped up in an attitude of apparent contempt. Still, the remixed soundtracks absolutely slap.

If you’re the kind of person who thinks videogames peaked with Fallout 3's launch version and they’ve required neither evolution nor improvement since, this game is absolutely for you. If you believe Bethesda doesn’t need to exhibit growth as an artistic outlet and hasn’t had to change a thing about the way it’s made games since 2008, I can safely say you’ll adore Starfield because it’s all that a Bethesda game has always been... and literally nothing more...Starfield is a shallow ocean, hiding its lack of creative ambition behind the physical size of a universe that’s minuscule where it counts...In short, it's everything a fan of these games could love.

A grim part of me actually looked forward to this. Good or bad, I thought we’d get something provocative or remarkable in some way, shape, or form. Instead, we got a prosaic and outmoded little pile of cynicism. Perhaps worse than that – we got a damn boring game.

The Tomorrow Children is bland, clumsy, and monotonous. A fantastic core idea wasted on yet another cumbersome burden of a game.

Enjoyment can be finely sliced off of ARC Raiders like edible shreds from a doner kebab smeared in shit. That these slivers are entirely dependent on its players is hardly a triumph of the base experience, which is generally boring, flavorless, and lacking much of a point. If not for one intensely fragile hook, this is a sub-mundane peashooting box breacher that, despite a lack of originality or quality gameplay, still needed help from an algorithm.

I adored the first Alan Wake, and I’ve either loved or liked every Remedy game since then. This is the first time I’ve felt so displeased by the studio’s work I’ve actually been angry about it. The pompous writing, the shoehorned mechanics that push a tiresome narrative conceit over the quality of the narrative itself, the archaic combat, the amount of time it spends doing almost nothing, Alan Wake 2 is fucking insufferable most of the time...It’s impossible to tell where the stylistically bad writing of the title character ends and the inadvertently bad game of Alan Wake 2 begins. The difference, at this point, matters not.

Much like an anime fan on prom night, I would rather be at home playing Mega Man than here. I would rather be playing Shovel Knight. I would rather be playing most games in this genre...Mighty No. 9? More like Shitey No. 9!

Anomaly Pools has jumped on the liminal bandwagon with a game best released under the guise of a freebie “experiment” rather than a game that charges too much even at $1.99...Sorry. Having finished critiquing this, I feel like I’ve wasted all our time.

Helldivers 2 struggles to appeal after stripping out so much of what made its prequel memorable, and if that’s all that was wrong with it I’d be sadly grateful. Miserably, it’s such a wreck of a product that it spends significant amounts of time in a near-unplayable state while the rest of the time is typified by frequent crashes and other technical difficulties. You're supposed to expect a certain level of quality in a Sony-published game, and Helldivers 2 is a reminder that such expectations are naive as all f.ck.

Transformers: Galactic Trials is overpriced and full of nothing. The gimmick of switching between vehicular racing and robotic shooting might have worked if both halves weren’t so thoughtlessly welded together like a shoddy cut-and-shut car. Then again, its meager content and technical sloppiness suggests it never had a chance...Also I’m still seething at the lack of Starscream.

It’s the kind of game that believes plonking players in a brightly lit space is enough audience engagement to satisfy.

This is not so bad it’s good. It’s just plain bad, and there aren’t enough giant insects in the world to convince me otherwise.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is outwardly hostile to its audience, embracing everything that made the original such a hassle to enjoy. A game designed with the purpose of wasting a player’s time, which makes Capcom’s “time saver” microtransactions all the more sickening. It’s a glorified xerox that you will adore if you believe Dragon’s Dogma was literally perfect when it released in 2012 and absolutely none of the progress within games development in the past twelve years meant one fucking thing. Indeed, if your idea of a good time is having a terrible time, you’ll love this malignant resurrection of ideas and implementations that should have stayed long dead.

The First Descendant is the last thing I want to play right now, nauseated as I am by how much of a swindle it is. Designed entirely to frustrate and trick money out of players, it gives nothing in return but the same “live service” mundanity that’s soaked the market in an ocean of filth...It’ll probably be dead within a year like so many of its sordid ilk. That would be a genuinely good thing for the industry and for the players it’s trying to scam. I hope it dies on its toxic vine.

Due to poor funding or a bankruptcy of talent, GODZILLA is a sad excuse for a game desperately attempting to be a worthy adaptation of the beloved monster series. Cheap, bumbling, and interminably boring, it’s a bargain basement budget release with the unbelievable gall to present itself as a major “AAA” release.

By selling Gangs of Sherwood, Nacon is robbing from the gullible and giving to the inept. I’d have worked on a better closing analogy, but this game isn’t bloody worth it.

GameMill Entertainment continues its run of rushed, cheap, utterly contemptuous scam jobs. Yet another game where you can see how the developers at one point hoped to make something good until reality hit them in the face, forcing them to spray some vomit onto storefronts and call it a day...It’s only marginally better than Skull Island: Rise of Kong because I can f.cking laugh at it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan is one of those games that avoids being truly deplorable despite my having nothing nice to say about it. It didn’t infuriate me the same way Star Fox Zero did, and it’s not a broken pile of junk like Homefront: The Revolution. It is, however, lacking a single noteworthy highlight, and the only positive point I can make is that I didn’t completely hate it...I didn’t like it. I could barely stand to stick with its overwhelming mediocrity...But hey, I didn’t hate it...I didn’t hate this disappointing little waste of time...Well done, game!

Dear Esther may have played a huge part in the growth of interactive drama, but it remains an acorn compared to the trees it helped grow. It’s an ultimately shallow game, one that rattles off a story directly without any finesse or attempt to integrate it with the gameplay. Its disparate elements are boldly segregated, and there are none more filtered from the production than the players themselves.

The Callisto Protocol isn’t scary. It isn’t fun. It isn’t entertaining, fascinating, or mildly enriching. It lays a self-entitled claim to Dead Space’s stylistic and mechanical elements yet wields not a single one with grace, instead performing a crude pantomime. It’s mechanically unpleasant, bereft of a single original idea, and hostile to its own players. There's literally one jumpscare tactic reused at a rate best described as pathological. It's got some damn nerve wanting to be seen as a worthy successor - it can't even rival the weakest of pretenders.

Mythforce is shallow and inauthentic, hiding its creative mundanity behind the insincere promise of retro silliness. This lack of artistic integrity is matched by a lack of quality control, awkwardly bolted together as it is with unrefined controls, dreadful performance, and archaic gameplay. At its very best, we have a boring and bland dungeon crawler of a distinctly unrewarding stripe, but it’s almost always far worse than that. Masters of the Universe was a show made as cheaply as possible, reusing the same backgrounds and animations about twenty times an episode. It was high fucking art compared to Mythforce.

I admire the honesty of Senran Kagura, if nothing else. It knows why it’s here, and it knows why you’re here. It’s all about that sleaze and it doesn’t try to hide it. That, I can admire, even if the game itself is rubbish.

Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires is everything a Dynasty Warriors hater thinks about the series made real. It’s a contemptuously assembled recycling project, and I’m sick of it.

At $29.99, the price is frigging obscene for just how little you get, and how little of that is enjoyable....Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a short, flimsy, and overpriced beat ‘em up that offers so much less than its contemporaries in the genre. Skating by on brand recognition, it’s amazing how tired of it you become despite being able to finish the dire campaign in almost no time at all. The game’s barely done wiping its feet on the mat before outstaying its welcome, and it’s ready to leave soon after. Awful shite.

Can we turn one of these 80s horror films into something with some substance now? This asymmetrical online shit has clearly reached the barrel’s bottom if this is what we’re getting.

Vogelsap created a purely frustrating product – something that could have, and indeed should have, been something special, only to squander its opportunities at every step...I’d love to see everything The Flock tried to do in a better game, but I fear the failure of this one will only dissuade others from attempting it.

Redfall is a sorry skeleton of a game that meets the lowest bar possible to be considered a functional, sellable product, and it manages to bungle even that elementary task. At its very best, this embryonic embarrassment almost aspires to mediocrity, but such heady heights are too frequently beyond its reach. If it were interesting enough to inspire any emotion other than boredom, the humiliatingly cretinous enemy AI, recycled assets, lack of basic features, and laundry list of glitches would be laughable. The quality of this game, however, isn’t funny. It’s exasperating. Arkane Studios is so much better than this, and be it through a lack of time or a lack of money, they’ve made something a studio of such pedigree could rightly be ashamed of.

It’s cheap from both a visual and combat standpoint, it’s unpleasant to control, and the incentives for enduring multiple “runs” are among the worst rewards and unlocks I’ve ever seen. All it accomplished was getting me to replay Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4, two games that completely embarrass this sorry little thing...Damn fine soundtrack, though.

It’s not enough to say that Resident Evil 6 is poor as a Resident Evil game. That alone implies there could be a quality experience if fans can get past their preconceptions and feelings of betrayal. No, Resident Evil 6 is poor by the standards of any game, not just the high ones set by its own legacy.

These glimmers of entertainment, however, are not frequent enough to make up for the number of times I’m left shaking my head at another “Failure” screen, wondering exactly what the hell just happened.

I’d call Skull Island: Rise of Kong embarrassing, but I’m not sure you can be capable of feeling such an emotion if you’re able to sell this thing. Ultimately, Skull Island is a scam. It’s not even bad in a funny way, it’s just insulting - it’s not been finished, it was roughly stitched into the vague shape of a videogame and given the price tag of a legitimate product...It’s the kind of game that makes the case for some sort of independent trading standards body in the game industry. I say this with all due gravity - The Game Mill should not have been allowed to sell Skull Island: Rise of Kong. In an industry with adequate customer protections, it should be recalled.

If you hated Operation Racoon City, I urge you to try it again after playing Umbrella Corps. You’ll think it’s fucking amazing...At least it doesn’t have microtransactions, weirdly. At least not yet.

With an actual hint of production value, Garten of Banban IV is better, but it’s nowhere near acceptable. The larger environments lead to obscene amounts of backtracking, while the story and scares are as sad as ever. It is every bit the ugly, exploitative commercial its predecessors were.

Gotham Knights takes the concept of inconsequential open world busywork to a ludicrous extreme, exquisitely culminating years of creative laziness in the genre. Nothing can adequately convey how monotonous, how unimaginative, how fucking banal this thing is. It manages to be offensive in its structural mediocrity, and that’s before we consider its enervative combat, inadequate controls, and threadbare world. Wearing the flayed skin of a live service and managing to be worse than any one of them, this sorry mockery of the Arkham series will rightly be forgotten in a year’s time - sooner if we’re lucky.

Daedalic had an opportunity to prove the cynics wrong when so many people wondered what the hell the point of a Gollum game would even be. Instead, they handled this with such utter clumsiness they likely ensured a game like it will never happen again.

This is something we’d make fun of if it was on Desura for ten bucks, and that’s when this stops being a funny game and starts becoming offensive – because it isn’t on Desura for ten dollars. It’s a full-priced, $59.99 MSRP, retail “AAA” production bearing Tony Hawk’s name and proudly published by Activision...It’s really, atrociously unacceptable once that sinks in.

Nothing I wrote here in 2008 applies to the ugly, sh.tty, port job with woefully poor controls and instances of the whole thing being plaing f.cking broken.

Poorly made and ineptly designed, MindsEye cosplays as an open world game to its own detriment. The lifeless cardboard realm we could generously label a "world" is aggressively closed off, its sandbox appearance nothing more than desperately shallow dressing for a cover shooter so bereft of features it’s bloody embarrassing.

For all intents and purposes, it is PSVR’s official demo – Sony just wants to ensure it makes some extra money off the thing. Not exactly a great look, kicking PSVR off with something so nakedly cynical, but that’s business for you...Worlds includes five games, barely any of which are worth playing more than once, and only one of which I genuinely enjoyed

Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection is really rather sad. It looks and feels cheap, the drought of available options is stark, and the fact they couldn’t even include save states or rewind options without being extremely frugal about it is audacious at the very least. To top it off, all six games - masquerading as seven - are garbage. Pure, utter garbage. Yes, even the ones you remember...Especially the ones you remember.

An incomplete, creatively bankrupt vacuum. If we’re so starved for nonviolent experiences that this is what we champion, the industry’s in worse shape than I thought.

Yooka-Laylee is a game out of time, clinging so desperately to past glories it doesn’t seem to understand the Earth kept spinning after the N64 was discontinued. It’s everything wrong about the formative years of 3D platforming and it somehow retained none of what made the genre’s highlights endure...Yooka-Laylee is, in a word, rubbish.

Star Fox Zero is just plain rotten. An otherwise run-of-the-mill space shooter that couldn’t be content with its own mediocrity and subsequently mutilated itself in a desperate attempt to stand out.

One thing I’m sure of is that Sega ought to be embarrassed for pouring so much hype, so much marketing money, into this project, only to have a sad, miserable little dog’s dinner of a product to show for it. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. It’s an idiotic baby’s game for children, and it exists to sell toys. It also thinks you’re all dumb, and it wears its contempt for you on its sleeve. A sleeve covered in bandages.

A shoddy product all the way through, Super Slam is a sneering grab for ad revenue and microtransactions that weakly trades on nostalgia and brings nothing else to the table. Unappealing on its own and doubly distasteful to anybody who actually knows what Pogs are, it’s safe to say this is not the big Pog comeback it pretends to be...I’d rather play with fucking Tazos, for God’s sake, and a diehard Pog expert like me should not be saying that.

Terribly balanced, broken in several ways, and barely able to support the online mode it’s pushing, Sker Ritual is a waste of time. If you like Maid of Sker you don’t need this poor follow-up, and if you like COD: Zombies you don’t need this poor facsimile. Nobody and nothing needs Sker Ritual’s bullshit, least of all Sker Ritual.

At best, it’s a curious relic from a bygone era of videogames in terms of both mechanics and attitude. At worst, it’s an ugly and boring game where the most interesting aspect is the prevalence an of inconsistent framerate despite looking like garbage. The worst part is, I have the horrible suspicion that Valhalla believes it made something really, really good. And that just makes me incredibly sad.

Vaccine is shit, but it does say its own name in a creepy deep voice when you start it, which is the single thing it has over Resident Evil 7.

I smiled when I first started playing this thing. I was directly controlling Unimarutchi, exploring the world with literally my favorite character, but my smile faded within seconds of realizing what Namco had dared to shovel in front of people and charge for. There’s nothing to explore, nothing to enjoy, just the grinding menial filth of a game that doesn’t give a f.ck.

Trap... that's actually the perfect word...So much about Scorn feels like a trap. It’s designed to cost you progress, to waste your time, and some might think this burdensome despair is some sort of brilliance on the part of the developers. To someone who values their finite time on Earth, it’s snide crap that shows contempt for its audience at every opportunity...I have nothing but contempt for it in turn.

I take no pleasure in admonishing this remaster. Sacred 2 occupies a small but precious space in my heart, and I’m shocked to see how disastrously this has turned out. There’s still fun to be salvaged from the wreckage, but I can’t ignore the fact that Sacred 2: Remaster qualifies as a defective product. I have so many questions about how this came out in the state it’s in, but one query stands above them all.

The Last Oricru is a masterpiece of bad design. When a game has to warn its players not to invest in half the available skill points because they’re worthless, you know you’ve got something special, and that’s what Oricru is - special. It’s so profoundly wrong it deserves to be studied, dissected, remembered for years. Its creators should tour universities and give talks about their artistic philosophies so future generations can learn how never to make a videogame. If you’d told me aliens had developed it, I’d struggle to argue, such is the incomprehensible absurdity on display...I am in awe of such a marvel.

Sonic Frontiers is broken beyond belief with mechanics that barely work and a camera so disastrous it’s literally sickening. The “Open Zones” are disjointed, unpopulated wastelands that do less than nothing to justify their depressing existence. An unpleasant mess, looking and feeling like a mishmash of disparate assets duct taped together, and that’s before we consider the damning amount of recycled content. It’s honestly embarrassing that any professional studio could have made something so cheap, so sad, and so thoroughly incompetent. Even by Sonic Team’s low standards, this is pathetic...Yep, that’s the word for it...Sonic Frontiers is fu..ing pathetic.

The dreadful studio that brought you Quantum Error has delivered a game very much in line with its library of shameless trash. It is legitimately sad that not enough people knew of its lineage before Code Violet benefited from a whole lot of ill-gotten hype.

Ugly and threadbare, both mechanically and aesthetically, Garten of Banban has spread its lumpy legs and given birth to one of the most cynically manufactured franchises of all time.

Puzzles are more tedious, scares are more pitiful, and for all its expanded gameplay, this sequel manages to be no better than the last.

Life of Black Tiger is a massive piece of f*cking shit. Also it has multiplayer.

The only worthwhile thing to say about TAKEN is that its name is quite meaningful indeed – it’s taken peoples’ money, and it’s done nothing to earn it...Oh, and the “scary” little girl looks shit.

I wish this game had a head so I could stamp on the back of it and push it mercilessly into a pile of sick and guts.

Simply put, Homefront: The Revolution is outclassed in its bracket by every other big-budget game released this generation. And that’s without getting into how shockingly shit the PC version is...This game made me feel unwell, it bored me to tears, and it irritated the piss out of me. Also, it has co-op.

Here They Lie smacks of cynicism – a game designed with the knowledge that horror works really well in VR, without anybody involved knowing how VR games should operate. It’s distinctly unpleasant to play, and I fear it’ll be only one of many horror games that pull the same stunt as virtual reality continues to hold sway.

It’s certainly nothing professional, and it absolutely does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as a real Dark Souls game. That anybody thought this monstrous garbage was a good way to promote an upcoming game speaks volumes about the disconnect from reality videogame executives suffer from.

Alone in the Dark: Illumination is ugly in every sense of the word, not just visually – though it is about as attractive as an anus in an eye socket. Hideous both inside and out, it’s the consummate fraud that hides behind a recognizable name to deliver interactive poison.

Something ugly to the point of actively affecting gameplay, something that requires multiple reloading of saves to fix glitched doors, something that crashes when given a chance and boasts a user interface that actively fights the player. That this saw a release and expects to sell for real human money is lunacy. Then again, that’s this game all over – sheer, unbelievable lunacy.

It’s disgusting on almost every level, and the fact Topware is selling it for $54.99 is unforgivable.

Cynical doesn’t even begin to describe such a poisonous display of IP leverage. There’s something actively nasty about the thing. It’s a reminder that creativity is not owned by the creators, it is imprisoned by the least creative among us, those of us who force others to dance but can't carry a tune.

This appalling paid-for tutorial is inexcusably lazy on top of being just plain inexcusable to begin with...The only thing Welcome Tour has welcomed us to a brand new breed of garbageware.

This could have been good. A dungeon crawler in the Overlord universe has some promise, but there’s just nothing here. No satisfying loot drops. No expanding combat ability. Nothing but braindead, horrifically designed combat. Oh, and a few utterly insipid pressure-plate puzzles. Because those are always fun...I fucking hate it...That is what I’m trying to say.

They say familiarity breeds contempt, and the more time I spend in this series’ dismal world, the more relatable a statement that becomes.

Zenith isn’t just badly made – it’s appalling. A boorish, cynical failure of a comedy game broken in ways I’ve never before seen. The fact it somehow – everso rarely – manages to show a glimmer of wit under all the misery only worsens the deal, highlighting how this could have perhaps been something decent before it was run through whatever thresher led to it becoming the mangled carcass it is...There is no cure for the disease this game carries. The kindest thing to do is take it out back and put a bullet between its glazed, gormless eyes.

Stray Souls is easily one of the worst horror games ever made. The fascistic interests of its director aside, this is a defective product duct taped into a barely coherent mess of prepurchased assets, algorithmically generated art, and bargain bin genre tropes...To play it is to cringe at a rare extremity of creative shamelessness. This stunning example of maladroit artistic negligence struggles to achieve the deeply grounded bar of “playable” yet has the insulting nerve to try and claim a desperate connection to Silent Hill. The temerity of this crime against spookiness is off the charts...How dare Stray Souls? How f.cking dare it?

It’s one thing to rip another game off, but to only pretend to rip one off for attention while doing something so threadbare it doesn’t even clear the low bar of plagiarism truly is deceptive on a whole other level. The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival is not a forgery of The Last of Us - it’s a forgery of a forgery, it’s something so completely fucking fraudulent that it sells the idea of a counterfeit and delivers instead a handful of minimally functional assets structured just barely enough to resemble half an hour of navigable gameplay.