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.

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.

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.

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.

If you’d like to play a limp amalgamation of Deus Ex, Crysis, and BioShock with a multiplayer mode you’ve been able to play eight times in as many years, then Call of Duty: Black Ops III is definitely for you. For the rest of you, it’s just another condom of a game to be spunked into and thrown in the trash.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I love State of Decay, and that needs to be communicated with all the sincerity in the world. I love that bloody videogame...State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition is a cynical rehash that needed to be much, much more.

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.

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.

Dying Light desperately tries to be all of the videogames in a bid to impress everybody. If only it had tried as hard to be its own thing, we’d have had an amazing horror game on our hands. Instead, we just have another indistinct jack-of-all-trades to throw on top of the ever growing pile.

It commits perhaps the worst sin a horror game – or indeed any game – could commit. It is boring. Once you’ve made the audience yawn, you’ve lost your ability to frighten them forever.

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.

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

Assassin’s Creed Unity is a beautiful game that’s fun to play with friends. It’s also an outmoded mess that incenses with its dated controls and shoves Ubisoft’s executive-minded priorities directly in the player’s face.

It’s just so completely, exhaustingly boring. There’s nothing to it. It plods along, doing very little to ever annoy its audience, but doing precisely diddly-squat to ever entertain it, either. It’s just… there. From beginning to end, Escape Dead Island is a game that’s simply… there.

As an early foray into free-to-play games, it shows that Nintendo at least isn’t willing to fleece customers with a kind of reckless abandon showcased by the locusts of the mobile game world – but it’s going to have to do far better than this to justify its monetary desires.

While it’s still playable, and even enjoyable in a fair few instances, its baseline problems combined with the PC’s unique setbacks make Arkham Knight fit for the price drop list.

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.

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.

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.

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture really is a walking simulator, and possesses all the traits associated.

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.

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.

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.

Activision chose overwhelming mediocrity.

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.

As a big fan of Telltale’s work, and a Game of Thrones aficionado, I found this to be a dismal letdown. I expected better – hell, I at least expected to feel something at the end of this chapter. Instead, I feel nothing. I’m just completely apathetic to the whole thing, and I feel no reason to be excited about a second season because, well… it’ll just be more of the same, if past experience is any indicator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At this point, the whole game is in desperate need of something big.

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.

The episodes have frequently quoted Franz Kafka to serve as a running theme for its ineffectual storyline. I’d like to end my review of this episode – and the game overall – with a Kafka quote of my own. “Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” If Capcom had done that, maybe Resident Evil Revelations 2 would have been good.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t like it, okay? Stop it, Sonic Runners, stop doing everything you’re doing. Well, except that part where you allow yourself to be a game, buried under mountains of distasteful gibberish...Also, the loading times are crap.

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.