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.