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.