Like a Quantic Dream game, except good, Man of Medan really shines through in its co-op, where two players work together and sometimes spend large stretches of the story apart. And of course, if someone dies along the way, you can always blame them.

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.

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.

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.

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

Oninaki is a depressingly written game with a creepy story, but the actual gameplay is quite compelling, even if it won't be for everyone...Talking to ghosts, picking up dead souls and using them as weapons, riding on the back of a wolf spirit, there's a lot of fun to be had, even if the protagonist is having no fun whatsoever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But seriously, it's pretty good. Y'know, it's fine.

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.

This is so much more than a bad mobile game in premium skin...It’s also buggy, unfinished, and mediocre “AAA” garbage to boot!

Battleborn constantly pops with a charmingly garish visual style, a small army of exotic characters, and disorderly combat with just enough strategic edge to keep it from being sloppy. While some may find the clashing colors and overall derangement to be a little too busy, I personally felt right at home with its special blend of stupidity and style.

Marvel MaXimum Collection is a decent little package, as far as compilations of old ROMs go. There are a couple of genuine classics and even the lower quality stuff is historically interesting enough to be worth a look.

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.

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.

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.

Lapis x Labyrinth is a sheer joy to play. Rarely does one find a game so hellbent on encouraging and rewarding the player with endlessly positive audiovisual feedback. All the thrill of a casino with none of the evil, this NIS hackyslashy fun fest is well worth checking out.

It’s Jurassic Earth Defense Overwatch War Z and it looks like it should be bad but it isn’t. I can’t be anything but impressed by that.

MediEvil's PS4 release is a remarkably faithful recreation of the 1998 classic, and that's a problem. While the remaster is a near-perfect recreation, it recreates something archaic that, even at the time, was rather clunky....Unfortunately, MediEvil needed a full overhaul or, better yet, a brand new game. An authentic recreation of an old and messy game isn't what the series should settle for.

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.

It’s clear that China took the best bits of its larger siblings and added its own flavor – I feel the big budget work of Ubisoft Montpelier would be served well by returning the gesture.

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.

Repeats itself constantly...If you've got all the time in the world for another desperate, cloying band-wagoning looter-shooter style game...then somewhere deep within Marvel's Avengers, it can sometimes be quite fun to punch robots in the face. It's just not fun enough to last for hours. Maybe just 10 mins a day, for like a week.

Starship Troopers: Extermination may share similarities with Helldivers, but it absolutely does enough to distinguish itself and I think I prefer it. With 16 players and massive hordes of Arachnids, the sheer scope of chaos is both intimidating and enthralling. Building a base from scratch is straightforward and lots of fun, as is trying to keep the thing from toppling over.

Rage 2 is pretty damn good... when it allows itself to be. When it's not being good, it's being frequently irritating and boring thanks to broken pacing and open world busywork. The frustration is that its high points are really cool, but they feel few and far between due to the stuttered pacing. A fundamentally good game actively diminished by poor design decisions.

Words like “repetitive” and “bland” should never really be associated with a Grasshopper game, but Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is a sadly repetitive and bland affair. A humdrum spinoff of No More Heroes, this self referential mundanity is a far cry from what makes Suda51’s work stand out.

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.

Sonic Superstars is the first decent mainline Sonic game since Sonic Forces (an objectively okay game as rated by civilized minds). A distilled descendent of the original lineage, Sonic Team’s rare display of restraint has resulted in a game that succeeds through the purity of its simplicity. However, the stark contrast of convoluted, tawdry boss fights offsets its positives significantly, contributing some truly offputting misery to an otherwise entertaining time...I’d love to see more of this if Sega could resist reinventing the wheel again next time.

When it's not broken, this Left 4 Dead ripoff is actually quite fun and features giant piles of zombies to mow down in a satisfying way. Unfortunately it's broken a LOT.

I’m thrilled it’s on PC, and I’m delighted we’ll finally get to see the series continued – this prologue and two full-fledged episodes are great, but I really need to know what happens next!

Might be worth picking up for the nostalgia. But I wouldn't pick it up expecting an amazing Ghostbusters experience. It's not bad, it's just annoying a lot. It's frequently irritating. And a lot of that is just the dated mechanics.

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.

State of Decay 2 is fine only because State of Decay is fine. As a sequel, Undead Labs’ retread is a letdown.

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.

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.

Knee Deep, Act One: Wonderland at least has me hooked for the second installment, so it’s doing plenty right. Despite its missed opportunities, it still manages to entertain, and I’m eager to find out more about Cypress Knee’s sinister secrets. Hell, I dig it a lot more than Life Is Strange, I can say that much.

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.

Weirdly though, it's not really a bad videogame. It's got several key problems, but the core has real potential... provided players don't get turned off by the balancing issues and lack of content first.

Home Sweet Home is a horror game, and it’s about as “horror game” as it gets. From startling noises to creepy girls, it’s got the lot! Also, Cryptkeeper dingus.

Decent, but held back from greatness by a number of frustrations that masquerade as difficulty.

The removal of some terrific features, plus the lack of effort for the PC version, serves to knock the game down a tad compared to its ZombiU alternative, but it is nonetheless a gruesomely enjoyable ride, and I honestly hope it gets the attention it deserves this time.

Just Cause 4 is another Just Cause game, and that’s okay if you like that sort of thing. I theoretically should like that sort of thing, but the game repeats itself and lacks escalation. Plus, it’s time for the industry to admit that maybe the open world genre is overly crowded and that if you’re not going to give a game an obscene budget, a smaller scale might work better.

An already dated game with an already lacklustre port that can’t even run properly is barely worth a fiver, let alone forty bucks.

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.

Make no mistake about it, this is the worst Dynasty Warriors game of them all, at least as far as mainline entries go.

War For The Overworld is a fixer-upper, and I wish I could lavish it with more praise, but the blemishes it’s launching with are undeniable and numerous. That said, it’s also a damn fine game with a ton of heart, one that’s done more for the good name of Dungeon Keeper than any official source has in years.

This expansion is pretty enjoyable, but not essential. It’s got some great new weapons and provides an easy excuse to dip back into a world of shameless comic violence – it’s also a fairly disposable adventure that doesn’t offer much in the way of essential material. You do get to shoot Satan in the face, however, so at least Volition is true to its word.

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.

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.

The Painkiller of 2025 is not the purist’s Painkiller. It’s nonetheless a great time and it absolutely relishes in exactly the kind of straight shooting chaos I’d want from such a game. Weapons are so pleasingly tumescent that I’ve consistently had fun in the face of flaws and irritating dialogue. I only hope 3D Realms can populate Purgatory with a few more hooks, because I don’t want to see what’s currently there fizzle out too quickly.

Resident Evil: Resistance is the multiplayer game attached to Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and unfortunately it's just that - a mere attachment. It's half-baked, and not very good at all. I also strangely like it, or at least I've been playing it a lot. I wonder what it's like to play as a Mastermind though. Matchmaking won't let me try.

Suffers under the shadow of Super Mario Odyssey...I'd rather be playing that.

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.

Darksiders used to be a damn good copy of Zelda. Now it’s a damn awful ripoff of Dark Souls. Yet another game that doesn’t understand why the Souls series is successful, THQ Nordic’s heartbreaking Darksiders III annoys and exasperates at every turn. On top of that, it’s a stripped down sequel, thoroughly reduced in scale compared to Darksiders II… and the first Darksiders, for that matter! It’s ugly, its performance is horrible, and goes so far in cloning Dark Souls it even starts stealing lore and terminology. Utter garbage.

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.

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.

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.

When it allows itself to focus on action, it can provide a stimulating round of pop-and-fire combat, at least before it allows itself to drown in common distractions and intellectually insulting button prompts. While clearly assured in itself as a concept, it doesn’t extend that same faith to the player, so eager it is to hold its audience’s collective hands and guide them through corridors of patronizing tutorials and arbitrary gates to progression.

I was pleasantly surprised, especially given the series’ ignoble history to this point, to find 2024’s Alone in the Dark is actually really enjoyable. While not the most polished or visually impressive game, it’s a charming one that goes out of its way to pay tribute to the original trilogy with its survival horror elements and shameless lore dumps. An effectively spooky presentation, violent enemies, and clever puzzles round out the package, making this the first Alone in the Dark game since the 1990s to be an Alone in the Dark game.

Cyanide’s back and it’s brought a Call of Cthulhu game based on the old pen n’ paper tabletop RPG. Walk around, investigate things, sometimes hide from stuff, and guess that you need one of several daggers to slash a painting to stop a monster....It’s an odd little one, this. Getting a mixed reception, but I personally dug it.

The game regularly untethers itself long enough to provide some gratifying portable fun – not enough for me to encourage anybody to immediately obtain it, but it’s a decent enough timewaster to be worth checking out at some point in time.

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.

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.

Nothing short of a mega patch will fix everything truly messed up about this game. If you can imagine a game bug, any game bug, We Happy Few probably has it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I regret to inform you that Crackdown 3 is, well, sh*t really. It's not fun to say, but it is what it is. Crackdown 3 is an uninspired, lazy retread of the original Crackdown which they might have gotten away with if this was 2007, but it's not 2007. So this game just looks and feels like something that's over 10 years old. Feels like a budget title at best, and not a good budget title either.

Metal Gear Survive is here, and it’s worse than I expected...I thought they’d at least TRY and make it feel like Metal Gear, but instead it truly is a derivative, irritating, bog-standard survival game...There was so much rubbish to laugh at I forgot to even mention the microtransactions!

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.

I'm a big Dark Crystal fan - loved the movie, adored the Netflix show. The latter has been adapted to videogame form as The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance Tactics, and it's really quite bad....A bare bones turn-based strategy RPG that runs poorly, looks dated, and plays without any of the streamlining and convenience of a modern game, Age of Resistance Tactics feels like a cheap and cynical cash-in...Well, it's hard to call it "cheap" when they want twenty bucks for this garbage.

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.

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

Anthem is boring trash...BioWare's attempt to milk the "live service" cash cow is repetitive, bland, and too focused on lore over plot. Uninspired lore from a vapid world. Anthem wears its desperation to be like Destiny on its sleeve, and it's not a good look at all.

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.

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.

It's no Sonic Mania, but that aside, I had fun with it. I played it and beat it on launch day... As far as 3D Sonic games go, this is all right... Not quite as good as Sonic Generations.

Messy, dirty, and downright smutty, Onechanbara: Z2: Chaos is the very epitome of a guilty pleasure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How f.cking dare Star Wars: Hunters? I really hope it becomes yet another “service” game that’s been shut down in less than a year. It deserves to be burned to nothing.

I don't like this game. I played it. Within the first ten minutes, I was f.. bored of it... I hated every moment I spent playing this game...I think I had less fun playing this than I did Anthem, and I had less than no fun playing Anthem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A dreadful action-platformer bolted onto a pitiful tower defense, SolSeraph is embarrassingly cheap, tacky, and boring. It looks and plays like a mobile game, and is way overpriced. Just play Bloodstained. Even if you've already played Bloodstained.

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