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!