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.