As entertaining as Toxic Commando can be, I dare say the next time I want to replay a Horde Shooter I’ll go back to something with a proper structure like WWZ or even Aliens: Fireteam Elite. In fact, my enthusiasm for replaying it is petering out already and that’s a real shame. The shooting and driving feel really nice while the bigger battles are genuinely great, but they’re framed in an overall package that fails to stand out, has no real identity, and few compelling reasons to keep returning. A classic case of being equal parts good and forgettable.

I’m willing to bet High on Life 2 does not reflect whatever Squanch envisioned for it. I could practically smell the cutbacks and downscaling as I traipsed through a world that promised much more than it delivered, unraveling a story full of setpieces that didn’t come close to reaching their potential. It has funny moments, some great concepts, and it's better than the original in a few key areas, but the substance is in short supply. It's a step forward for something that's a step back.

What we have here is a bare bones remaster of Fighting Force and its crummy sequel, featuring only the most obligatory of modern conveniences. The paltry options menu, meager archive material, and total lack of border imagery demonstrates little of the love shown to other Limited Run releases. Fighting Force itself still has something to offer a very niche audience, but as a member of that audience I already have a version of Fighting Force, one with more options for fine tuning and without a $19.99 MSRP

Blood: Refreshed Supply is Blood with a bit more Blood, and I’ve always got time for Blood. I’m happy to see it on console, but that feeling’s been tempered by the introduction of significant bugs and a questionable value prospect. It’s a shame I can’t be completely positive because there are welcome improvements. With some patching up and marking down, this could be the definitive experience Nightdive wants it to be.

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition does a basic job of presenting the 2013 classic on Nintendo’s latest hardware, but expecting anything more than that will lead to disappointment. In fact, expecting exactly that may still be a letdown if you think it’ll look anywhere near as nice as it should. This is a game being pushed on how wonderful it looks, but it just doesn’t look good on the Switch 2 at all.

We’re on the fourth game and series fatigue has kicked in, that much is true. We have four games maintaining the same consistent pitch and tone, with the same structure, the same feel, the same missions. I can still play Dynasty Warriors and stay awake, so my getting tired of this routine should be a pretty strong indictment...Borderlands could have done with a shakeup, but a substandard grappling hook and an obscene number of fetch quests in which players take luggage for walkies isn’t it. Such banality permeates what is otherwise a decent enough shooter, impacting so many other elements that it wrecks things. Adding to that is a one-note tone and huge technical difficulties, making Borderlands 4 a far from “premium” game.

I can’t fault the work that’s gone into making the collection, but it is a collection of clapped out garbage. They put in way too much effort to make the videogame equivalent of those novelty VHS tapes in the 90s that nobody was ever really expected to watch but got as gag gifts on Christmas. That’s all Bubsy is if we’re brutally honest - a fucking prank.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is an old game with an obscene new price tag that doesn’t offer anywhere near enough to convincingly get away with it. The original game was great, but this package is a cash grab from a company intent on selling its flagships out. It's really sad to see Kirby, my favorite Nintendo series, used to normalize this exploitative new price point.

Mafia: The Old Country could easily have been phoned in but the effort is evident - it sincerely does its best, and its best is good enough. Will it make a huge mark on history? Unlikely. Is its “pseudopen” world a vestigial albatross? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it? Perfectly adequately.

An utterly ill-advised redub is just one of several puzzling disappointments. The House of the Dead Remake wasn’t perfect, but it tried a lot harder, with better controls and more features. By stark contrast, this is a wonky and flimsy followup that has no excuse for playing worse and delivering less...Oh, and the first remake’s on sale for $2.49 right now, so if you wanted just one of these games, the choice is bloody obvious.

Unfinished Business is pretty much a full game in an expansion’s clothing, likely not billed as one due to the single location and lack of story relevance. The premise and new toys are cool, but the brevity of touted additions like ED-209 is disappointing and OmniTower can get too samey. Lovers of Rogue City will get good mileage out of it though, even if it won’t blow anyone away.

It would be great if Bendy and the Dark Revival was the BioShock-inspired horror production it wants to be, but that would require more than cheap jumpscares and thoroughly awful combat alongside equally impoverished stealth. It’s not just undercooked, it’s bloody raw.

I won’t accuse FBC: Firebreak’s developers of not caring, but I fear that may be less of an insult than suggesting they actually tried. Everything about it screams obligation, like nobody involved had their hearts in it, and I almost hope that’s the case because I'd feel truly gutted for anybody who thought they'd made something terrific. What a shame.

A lot of flash and some substance, it’s a very fun game in a package that doesn’t live up to its massive potential, much less the massive price tag it’s introduced to mainstream gaming.

Fantasy Life’s biggest problem is a complete lack of ambition, being interested only in replicating what was done ten years ago despite how much should have been done to update the gameplay and make something truly worthy of a promising concept. It’s definitely got its enjoyable side, and its aping of Nintendo games gives it some longevity, but otherwise this is a so-so retread of an archaic game that was always far too limited compared to what it claimed to be. And its NPCs need to just glue their mouths shut. Stop. F.cking. Talking.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is doing its little best, and if Skyrim is a hallmark of roleplaying quality, then Tainted Grail’s best has to be good enough.

Days Gone Remastered is an entirely basic upgrade that feels every bit like an attempt to shake some loose change from a dormant product. I’m sure the original has fans who are less ironic about it than me, but they’re the only people this’ll really speak to. If Days Gone didn’t win over enough people for Sony’s liking the first time, a slightly better looking reproduction probably won’t change matters much.

Croc: Legend of the Gobbos needed much more than the veneer it’s received. It was dated out of the gate and aged like milk thereafter. With visual upgrades that inadvertently make it look worse, and no improvements to the clumsy gameplay beyond fixing its abysmal controls, this is the definition of an unnecessary product...Some retro games require a little work to bring them up to standard, and Croc required far more than that. Without the extra effort, we’re left with a reminder that, honestly, Legend of the Gobbos just wasn’t a good game.

As an accessible alternative to radioactive shooters with an endearing British flavor, Atomfall provides a good deal of fun. Sadly, it offers self-defeating design choices and literal eye pain alongside it. All the elements of a truly great FPS are here, all the potential in the world is waiting to be realized, and if not for a pile of dropped balls, it wouldn’t have tripped and fallen off that course...Plus, again, actual f.cking eye aches.

Avowed ought to have been a more linear action game. Combat is good enough that a streamlined and direct experience could serve it well, but as an RPG there’s simply not enough of anything. It feels like vast chunks are missing, with an initial promise of adventure that rapidly shaves off expectations until you’re left with a toothless story and a frustrating dearth of material...It’s fun to create a snowstorm and jab lizard men with spears, but the shallow trudgery between fights is consistently disappointing. I don’t think it’s unfair to have expected far more from Obsidian. Thanks to Avowed, I know I can expect far less.

WARRIORS: Abyss wants to be a Warriors game and a Hades game at once. The best way of doing that is not to duct tape the disparate elements together and hope it all works in the end. That’s what this thing does though, and the result is a visually stressful, mechanically conflicted mess...It can be enjoyable at times, but only in two cases - when a run starts and it feels like a Musou game, or when the thing’s nearly over and you have a power rating in the millions so the chaos becomes hilarious. Even then, however, the sheer tedium and frustration that characterizes the majority of the experience makes those fun bits simply not worth the effort.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins is one of the best disappointments I’ve ever played. The groundwork it lays could’ve been the basis of a genuinely amazing Dynasty Warriors game, but this one is so obvious about its corner cutting, and conflates “realism” with a lack of personality. The huge battles are impressive, general combat’s rather fun, and the parrying system works way better than I thought it would, so there’s a good wad of stuff to enjoy. I just wish Origins was an actual Dynasty Warriors game and not something so flavorless.

Marvel Rivals is a good time. Its large cast of characters has something for almost everyone, and they play quite differently outside of a few redundancies. Despite this, gameplay is fundamentally standardized, and things become routine once you’ve found your main picks. It’s not a game I can see myself sticking with for a very long time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a go - indeed, for a way to spend a few hours at a time, it’s a fine enough choice.

If one were to judge it purely on a remastering job, The Thing is one of the most impressive games released this year. To preserve the feel of the original while enhancing so much about it is an incredible feat performed to an astounding degree. It’s a game of the year contender for as long as we don’t look at what the game is. Sadly, we have to, and that game is The Thing. Sod it, let’s just slap an inoffensive 7/10 on it. S’only a game, innit?

I no longer feel like I missed something when I gave up on the original as a kid. The streamlined controls got me further than I ever did in the 90s, but all to be found was tedium. The remake does little to liven it up, but at least there’s some crude entertainment in marveling at how shockingly buggy it is. It serves neither as a polished update nor an impressive reinvention, and confirms more than anything that Little Big Adventure is best experienced by watching a Longplay of the bloody thing.

Slitterhead is full of great ideas and some truly memorable examples of body horror despite not feeling like much of a horror game. Perhaps with more of a budget behind it, those positives could’ve been done justice, but sadly this isn’t the case. The possession gimmick allows for imaginative action scenes that are let down by repetition, lacking variety, and a bunch of less thought out gameplay that bogs the action down. Someone throw some money behind this concept, please. It deserves to be in a much better game.

It’s just one of those games - the ones you like but have to acknowledge are riddled with things to complain about. Fun and frustrating all at once.

It’s a potentially great experience brought down to decent by its enthusiasm for trudging bollocks.

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn isn’t a particularly necessary addition to the Soulslike genre. It doesn’t stand out in any major way, and it’s certainly rough. It is nonetheless amusing in its own scrappy way, the many tools at the player’s disposal are well presented, and after a touchy start it develops into a decent bit of fun...Just a shame they didn’t stick with the trench stuff. Quite a missed opportunity to separate itself from so many similar games on the market. Oh well.

Clickolding is quiet and calm in spite of its unsettling undercurrent. Through straightforward interactions and a lot of clicking, a tone and subject is strongly established. I found it affecting enough to power through moments of monotony that my ADHD really didn’t care for, and I won’t forget that weirdo mask in a while at the very least.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space is just another intellectually lazy application of a horror movie license. Well done game, you made murderous space clowns boring… that’s one hell of an achievement.

All the way down, the theme of “not enough” pervades Princess Peach: Showtime! The costumes Peach wears look cute but their gimmicks are limited both in terms of their abilities and the game’s implementation of them. The lack of imagination is unbecoming of Nintendo, and it’s a real shame because Peach deserves a much better game. It’s like nobody’s heart was in the making of this, and while there are some entertaining moments, Showtime! simply has very little to show for itself.

There are so many of these bloody games on the market now, all vying for attention, all doing the same thing, and none of them doing enough of anything good. This is just one in a line of flimsy “service” games, light on original content but plenty heavy on microtransactions. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has its moments of messy fun, but those moments are entrenched between gulfs of numbingly inane “looter shooter” nonsense...I'm just over it.

The “remastering” is of highly questionable value and the extra content is weak. No Return is a cheaply recycled and tawdry take on roguelite gameplay, while the Lost Levels were lost for a reason. Worse, such additions hammer a final nail into the coffin of this game’s creative ambition, definitively invalidating an already flimsy story with the kind of combat-focused experiences that communicate only one thing to the player - violent videogames are cool.

There’s a truly great game desperately trying to emerge from Darktide. It just never quite gets its head above the water.

Immortals of Aveum is so derivative as to make me question the accuracy of the word “uninspired” - this game absolutely is inspired. It’s taken so much inspiration from so much existing media there’s not a single unique element. Less of a story and more the creative slag oozing from a smelter full of adventure tropes, its narrative is matched in banality only by its gameplay. A bog standard, repetitive shooter that offers nothing new and does none of the old stuff well enough to justify doing it.

My Friendly Neighborhood offers a unique execution of a conceit that’s otherwise become trite among horror games. Taking the “spooky kiddy thing” idea and pulling it onto a framework built from equal parts BioShock and Resident Evil smartly separates it from the ocean of similar concepts in the genre, even if none of its individual components are particularly original. It’s sadly let down from a lack of variety and consequently runs too long, unable to stay fresh or surprising enough to sustain its runtime. However, it’s a fun ride while it lasts, and it’s story is charming enough to be worth seeing through to the end.

Aliens: Dark Descent is well designed and badly built. At once a brilliant collection of wonderfully presented ideas and a defective debacle, it could have genuinely been a Game of the Year contender were it not such a shambles. I love this game to the point of being enthralled. I’m angry at this game for costing me hours of progress. I adore what it so often is. I despise what it so often does...Eh, I guess these days that’s enough to qualify for a seven, right?

Amnesia: The Bunker is a pleasant step up from its predecessor Rebirth, but it all too often falls into the problem many horror games have - resource management and monstrous harassment are balanced in such a way as to inspire annoyance more readily than fear. For much of its campaign, The Bunker is an absorbingly gloomy experience with a nice sense of rhythm to its progress and an effective illusion of dynamism in both its monster and environment. This is somewhat offset by enforced backtracking, a piddling inventory, and an embarrassingly rubbish flashlight. If it had expanded its promising ideas and balanced its threat-to-tedium ratio better, this could have been a fantastic experience. But, y’know, it didn’t do that...It still did well enough though, and for the average horror game these days, well enough is pretty good!

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is indeed a game with two faces - one welcoming and the other viciously hostile. While it features a wealth of content, brilliant innovation, and genuine incentives to play with its toys, the spectre of its predecessor’s pernicious encroachment on fun is dispiriting in its ubiquity. The neat new tricks this sequel pulls simply aren’t enough to make Hyrule’s realm of brittle weapons, slippery surfaces, and tedious chores any more welcoming.

I don’t know if it’s a credit or an indictment that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s best stuff is entirely ancillary content that doesn’t represent its core gameplay. While all the lightsaber twirling and space magic is serviceable enough, it’s the side corn that appeals most, and it’s not even particularly rich corn. Simply kicking back with NPCs at the cantina, filling its aquarium and customizing its garden, was not only a relaxing break from the main game, it’s what I’d rather be playing. The general jankiness, technical setbacks, and consistently unfinished feeling doesn’t help anything, and I can’t say the huge amount of slow paced platforming is enough to coax one out of the comfort of the saloon either.

As a mindless distraction played while mentally checked out, Dead Island 2 has merit. It is enjoyable for good periods of time, and it’s done a solid job of refining the messy hack n’ slash of the original game while improving ranged combat alongside it. As fun as all the zombie slaying can be, however, an intense lack of variety coupled with dreary exploration is outright exhausting at times, and I wouldn’t blame any player for moving on long before finishing the story. It’s not a game that’s entertaining while it lasts - it’s entertaining while you last.

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is an interesting snapshot of a time gone by, but that’s essentially the only intriguing thing about it. More an historical curio than a game worth playing on any kind of merit, its torturous pace and general lifelessness absolutely murder any sense of tension or basic intellectual involvement. A plodding narrative, as well a disgraceful amount of backtracking, serve only to enhance the ennui.

Everything good about Dead Space 2023’s basic gameplay, combat, and narrative is a result of what Dead Space 2008 built. Most of what this remake adds is either less appealing artistic alterations or side content that generally amounts to unnecessary padding, and quite frankly I’d have been more interested in a remaster than a glitchy new take that’s less enjoyable and costs more. When you add the repulsive context of EA benefiting from a series it once destroyed right down to the developer, you get a game that leaves a sour bloody taste, even if it’s an acceptable mimicry of its predecessor...Dead Space 2008 is fifteen quid on digital storefronts.

This damn thing should have been linear. It absolutely, positively, should have been linear, and in decades past, before the game industry had boiled everything down to a handful of trends, it would have been. You could have had the parkour, you could have had the combat, and on top of that you could have had some real direction, pacing, and a streamlined experience without so much self-defeating fluff. It should have been linear.

Choo Choo Charles reminds me of a movie by Full Moon Studios - like Demonic Toys, Hideous, or Head of the Family, it’s an entertaining “what if?” concept that just isn’t enough to support an entire piece of media. With basic gameplay comparable to any number of low budget horror titles, it’s a fun idea and absolutely nothing besides. I wish it had more to offer, but like so many joke games before it, we already got the punchline when we saw the trailer and there’s nothing the gameplay adds on top of it. To be brutally honest, Choo Choo Charles would have been better as a fake game, or at the very least nothing would have changed if it was.

The most fun I had with High on Life was watching the entirety of Tammy and the T-Rex on an in-game television, and that’s not a compliment. It’s indicative of a game that doesn’t know how to exploit the interactivity of videogames and settles instead on yelling ideas as unsubtly as possible. With its relentless avalanche of jokes and screeches, it’ll talk your ears off but has exactly zero bite to go with its cacophonous barking. Its best ideas are borrowed from elsewhere. Its worst ideas are borrowed from elsewhere. The aggressively layered comedy is a smokescreen for the fact it's got nothing else going for it. It’s a clamorous joke delivery vehicle in which your role as a player is to passively observe and occasionally shoot stuff. You might as well sit down and watch TV.

Scarlet and Violet is a pair of obviously rushed products that look so much poorer for following an excellent refreshment in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Regressive and outmoded, the ninth Pokémon generation still boasts some enjoyable content but I couldn’t in good faith say it’s a quality experience. The utterly shameful performance issues hammer home how crudely made it is. It’s staggering just how terribly it runs. We’ve pilloried games for less, but we’re supposed to just accept it here because it’s Pokémon...It’s still fun, sure, but that fun is not enough to excuse its many, many failings. Not at all.

Scarlet and Violet is a pair of obviously rushed products that look so much poorer for following an excellent refreshment in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Regressive and outmoded, the ninth Pokémon generation still boasts some enjoyable content but I couldn’t in good faith say it’s a quality experience. The utterly shameful performance issues hammer home how crudely made it is. It’s staggering just how terribly it runs. We’ve pilloried games for less, but we’re supposed to just accept it here because it’s Pokémon...It’s still fun, sure, but that fun is not enough to excuse its many, many failings. Not at all.

Fundamentally, Signalis is an accomplished emulation of PSX survival horror. Its graphics are both authentic to the era and perfectly disturbing. Taking place in a fascinating world and populated by threatening creatures, it’s a game I very much wish I could enjoy more than I did. The crushing limitation on the player’s inventory coupled with a reliance on memory puzzles that represent a genuine accessibility issue put me off wanting to ever play the game again to get an ending more satisfying than the rather unfulfilling conclusion I got. That’s a real shame, because it’s still one of the best retraux survival horrors out there. It’s just not good enough for me to love it like I want to.

Bayonetta 3 is a good time when it allows itself to be. It consists of an excellent core experience buried under superfluous bilge, an otherwise quality experience interrupting itself to such a degree as to drag down the entire experience. The high notes are high enough to ensure a genuinely quality game, but the incessant sidetracking into mediocre stealth gameplay, mundane alternate characters, and half a dozen other deviations holds it back from being truly great. Thank god for trainsaws and spider women though, because they do a heck of a lot to keep this game entertaining.

the core of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is there, but it feels significantly held back by its adherence to only use MCU marvel characters. It hampered the roster and character design, two constant elements of the experience, and it’s hard to overlook those and see the strong fighting system underneath.

A quickly-produced cheap spin-off.

Nothing in this game feels quite finished, which is the overbearing problem. Agents of Mayhem is brimming with potential and can be quite a bit of fun, but it's inevitably dragged down by the fact that every little element, no matter how much promise it has, always consistently feels so half-baked.

What I have experienced is at least seven hours of good, quality gameplay, that was scuffered by the worst luck imaginable and the unfortunate decision to do the whole single save file auto-save structure...Even with the game ending the way it is, I have to admit that it was a good bloody time and there are a lot more expensive games out there that offer a lot less.

It's a good game... but lacking that dazzle of the first experience.

I had fun going back to Crash Bandicoot, even if I found myself wanting to toss my controller at certain points and that notorious sky bridge level is still one of the absolute worst pieces of interactive crap you could ever suffer.

Perception is miles better than the myriad “me too” horror games saturating Steam, but it’s certainly not exceptional. Underneath the visual style – and it’s ultimately just an aesthetic choice – is regular ol’ walk-and-talk horror game that manages a little panache but contains no material of substantial value, be it narratively or interactively.

Arms is a really weird game. At its core it’s a simple, accessible fighting game with a really strong gameplay loop and room for player growth competitively, but a pair of fundamentally flawed control schemes, a lack of decent modes and a glacially slow random unlock system for items that fundamentally change how characters can function make it a really tough package to recommend. Which is a shame, because there’s such a good game in there

Honestly, Tekken 7 is a content predictable fighting game surviving off the back of it’s relatively unchanged combat system.

That’s Prey all over. It works, it’s well made, and polished, and all those things we expect “AAA” games to be. What it is not is exciting. At all...It’s an also-ran that I was quite frankly happy to see the back of once I was blessedly finished.

Outlast 2 might have had a better shot if it released years ago and hadn’t followed Outlast. As it stands, it’s a lower quality photocopy of itself, with any attempts at improvement acting more as defacement of an element that needed no correction.

The remaster itself, tragically, is really quite good. It runs beautifully in 4K at a smooth 60 frames-per-second, with characters and environments that still look striking today. Aside from some occasionally buggy ally A.I., it’s polished up nicely, and I wish I could say it was worth rushing out to buy...At $59.99 however, with launch-day DLC besides, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition is little more than a pisstake. And that’s that.

Andromeda is an undeniable mess, one that is now being hurriedly fixed after it already “enjoyed” its most effective sales period. The state it released in – considering the money and publisher behind it – is hard to conceive, let alone forgive, but a game can be a buggy mess and remain fun. Andromeda is fun… sometimes. Other times it’s a dreary slog through recycled cutscenes, infantile character interactions, and a lot of badly masked loading screens.

At its absolute best, Breath of the Wild offers some of the most absorbing experiences a Zelda game ever has. Unfortunately, it makes you work harder for it than you should, buried as it is under a pile of small but constant irritations that collaborate to form a thick crust of frustration around a delectable center. Breath of the Wild is a delightful adventure, one that tries its utmost to be as big a pain in the arse as possible.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk isn’t a bad time, but it’s not quite the Berserk Warriors I was hoping for. The story mode is great fun for a while but soon falls apart, character unlocks are tantalizing until you realize how thin on the ground they are, and generally nothing good the game does comes without at least some minor caveat.

Ultimately, For Honor doesn’t focus on making sense or being historically accurate, it just puts cool stuff in a field and tells it to go out and fight. Everything outside of playing online sucks, like microtransactions, customization options and single-player. Hell, the multiplayer itself sometimes sucks when it pairs you with a badly selected host player...However, when the game is working and you’re murdering a single human player while screaming “FOOOOOOOOOOOR HOOOOOOOOOOOONOOOOOOOOOOOR” at their corpse, it’s pretty damn rewarding...It’s just a shame the single player couldn’t capture the soul of playing online.

I’ll end my review of Dynasty Warriors: Godseekers by saying Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends Complete Edition was a crown in the jewel for the series and I highly recommend anybody interested in Tecmo Koei’s sprawling franchise consider it for a starting point.

Super Mario Run would have been better if it had committed to a single idea. Instead, we’ve got a lacking runner game melded to a half-baked city builder that relies on repetition and artificial setbacks in order to pad itself out. With a premium cost – as well as a data-hogging always-online requirement – this is a game that’s worth neither the time nor the money it’s demanding.

It’s definitely worth the time, especially being free to start, and I would recommend anybody with a PS4 and a love of brawling check it out. It’s a well put together little game with a good dash of trademark Grasshopper oddity. As a throwaway bit of violent action with some clever online features, it’s a good time...A good time, but not a particularly enthralling one. At some point, as with everything involved in this production, you’ll eventually just have to Let It Die.

I wish I could say I love the game, that its plagued by only minor setbacks, but I cannot honestly do that. I can’t look back at how much time was spent not enjoying myself, at how much time was spent actively wrestling with the game to wring anything worthwhile from it, and say I played the masterpiece many are going to say it is. Maybe, a long time ago, that’s something I’d have been able to say. Not today though. Not today.

Feels like a tiresome retread – enjoyable enough when it sticks to the old script, but frustrating in its disappointment when it does attempt anything new. With a rushed story, colorless characters, and total misuse of a whole new playable character, the best I can say is that I didn’t hate it. I didn’t particularly like it, but I didn’t hate it. Dishonored deserves more than that.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is very much like Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate in that it’s a promising show of energy for a series that desperately needs a break. Despite alternating studios and the claim this game took Infinity Ward three years to make, the backbone of this series is tired and needs a considerable rest. Incremental updates just aren’t cutting it, especially not so soon after the financially less successful but creatively superior Titanfall 2. Still… good campaign while it lasts.

The worst that can be said of Mafia III is that it’s tolerable. This is also the best that can be said. A perfectly sufficient game that does nothing unique with a unique setting, providing instead hours upon hours of predictable, uniform material. Likeable enough, but nowhere near as gripping as it should have been.

The campaign is flimsy, and despite claims of signifying a new generation for the series, Gears of War 4 is ultimately an upholder of the status quo.

In spite of everything dragging it down, it’s a fun ride packed with stuff to do, from optional areas to replayable dungeons to passive “hunting” quests that reward players for taking out certain enemies using certain attacks. New Eden isn’t as big as No Man’s Sky‘s universe or even Far Cry 4‘s mountainous terrain, but it’s got far more compelling reasons to stick around.

In short bursts, Attack on Titan can be a fun distraction. It definitely looks and feels like the animated series, runs through its narrative nicely, and features lots of stuff to unlock, upgrade, and play through. Sadly, almost every mission feels just like the last one, and with very little to shake up the process...Such is the curse of an Attack on Titan game. Unless someone gets really creative, attempting to emulate the way that world works is looking set to produce some enjoyable games undermined by the fact that cutting a giant man behind the neck really isn’t thrilling enough to sustain hours of gameplay.

Mother Russia Bleeds is fun, but that fun costs patience as well as the time lost when dealing with some of the nastier checkpoints. While nailing the simplistic amusement that comes with a little digital sadism, Mother Russia isn’t shy about showing a sadistic side of its own in ways that don’t always feel reasonable. Still, it’s a good afternoon’s distraction if you need a quick fix of something vicious..Oh, and it’s a shame that its representation of kinky behavior is a little bit backwards.

I dare say I’d have had a lot more fun watching someone else playing it as opposed to playing it myself. Simply soaking in the color and music is captivating. All that splendor, however, is balanced with equal weight by the troubling truth that it’s just really, really not that enjoyable to play.

Even with my expectations guarded, however, I did not expect just another survival/crafting game that used randomization as a crutch to the point of losing all potential personality...And I at least expected more to fu..ing do.

It could have – and should have – been far better than it is. Held back by a lack of ambition and never daring to crawl from the shadow of better games, I Am Setsuna stops itself being something special...But at least it’s not garbage, and I sincerely hope Tokyo RPG Factory has something bigger in the pipeline, because I see a hell of a lot of promise.

Spiders is a developer with its heart in the right place, and one can tell it wants to make good games. For some reason it struggles to pull out the stops needed to make something great, save for the time it outdid itself with Of Orcs and Men. With The Technomancer, we have a game trying to be a sprawling sci-fi adventure while paradoxically not trying much at all.

Despite being a pedestrian and uninspiring experience, it’s still conquered the hearts and minds of millions, and while I don’t know why, I’m still firing the thing up every time my dog goes out to take a shit, because there could be an Ekans out there.

Dead By Daylight is a fantastic concept that, in practice, needed much more work put into it.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst was an answer to intense fan demand for a new game, and that seems to be all it is. Catalyst has nothing to say and less than nothing to add to its genre. Unimaginative and repetitive, with a story that goes absolutely nowhere, Catalyst serves only as a way to waste some time if there’s nothing better to play...It’s not offensive, and it’s not an actively bad time, but it’s so very bland and uneventful. I can’t really speak for the developers, but Catalyst certainly gives the impression that they’d rather be working on literally anything else.

It’s inspired, but turgid. Brilliant, but flawed. Fun, but infuriating. If you’ve never played it before, the Definitive Edition may just provide you with enough of a laugh to be worth picking up.

It’s okay, but it just doesn’t do anything anywhere near special enough to make it little more than an aping of games and sci-fi media that have come before.

Sega 3D Classics Collection is a fantastic presentation of mostly mediocre games, like a beautifully shot and directed movie featuring David Duchovny in its leading role.

If you’re hoping for another Souls experience, this is too tepid an offering to satisfying. That said, it’s still worth playing if you want an amusing, silly bit of action.

In several ways, Miitomo is the perfect kind of app for Nintendo to bring to mobile devices – it’s unexpected, silly, and it doesn’t make any sense.

Tom Clancy’s The Division is a “playable” game in the same way Anaconda is a “watchable” movie. As adequate as entertainment gets, it’s capable of providing solid amusement while it lasts, but it’s not something worth remembering beyond the scope of the time spent actively utilizing it. It’s something you can use to waste time, and it’s good at that, but it’s not particularly brilliant at anything else.

Ultimately, Heavy Rain is an experiment that both succeeded and failed, when it could easily have been a total success if the brains behind it weren’t trying so hard to be smart and cared more about providing a sensible plot as opposed to a shocking one.

Layers of Fear is well made, but commits a potentially greater sin than a game that’s simply bad. It’s dull. It’s dreary. It’s got as much bite as a beach ball.

When it comes to fighting against someone, it’s one of the most polished Street Fighters to date. When it comes to everything outside of that fight, it’s a huge steaming turd that I look at with a scrunched up, grossed out face.

Since 2013, hacks have inflicted upon the world such dross as Grass Simulator, Tea Party Simulator, and Yohjo Simulator. In comparison, American Truck Simulator remains an authentic and gratifying production, one of the few simulators out there still worthy of positive attention.

Halo 5: Guardians is okay. Its campaign is rubbish, but the multiplayer is solid thanks to the foundation it’s built upon. Warzone is a really enjoyable experience, and while combat is still mostly about tossing grenades and hitting the melee button, the whole Requisition gimmick adds some much-needed flavor to proceedings.

It’s Resident Evil 0. That’s about the size of it. If you dug the old GameCube version, then you’ll dig this. If you didn’t, Capcom’s fresh coat of paint won’t be enough to draw you in.

Being an indie Kickstarter project, I get why Harmonix couldn’t get us Bowie anymore, but the original compositions are nowhere near good enough to replace what used to be on offer.