Absolver had a chance to be something new and fresh. Its combat system is unlike anything else and comes packed with plenty of depth and skill that could get fighting fans pretty excited. The problem is the rest of the game. RPG elements have no place in a competitive action game yet here they’re front and center, granted with muted effect which makes it clear the developers were aware they were hurting their competitive balance and did it anyway. Perhaps worse for those of you who’re looking to play alone, the single-player adventure is dreadfully dull and plays like a short and mediocre Dark Souls. There’s promise in a sequel and I’d happily look forward to it, but this first attempt is better left defeated.

This is a game with no personality despite a can't-go-wrong premise of Nazis and monsters. This is a game with poor design, little depth and artificial intelligence so catastrophically bad that it is inexcusable. I love the genre, but I couldn't recommend this title to anyone.

Super Street is not a good game. It is borderline irredeemable.

At its core, 3on3 FreeStyle offers a basic basketball experience that can be entertaining for some gamers. It carves out its own personality with simple gameplay, cartoonish presentation and cliche-ridden characters. Whether you’re stuck with AI or others, players will constantly find themselves working towards various goals. Unfortunately, gamers are rewarded scraps for their time and effort which results in either a heavy grind, or the use of microtransactions to speed up the process. 3on3 FreeStyle won’t replace other titles and shouldn’t occupy any space on any gamers hard drive.

There is some enjoyment to be had in Sigi – A Fart for Melusina, but that fun quickly dissipates when you begin to feel like an unstoppable force in every level, including boss stages. Searching for hidden caves and grabbing a few hard to reach items definitely adds entertainment value, but the brief 20 level experience is made even shorter by a serious lack of truly fulfilling gameplay.

Planet Alpha's gameplay is terrible, the whole thing goes on far too long, and it's a hodgepodge of haphazard mechanics and encounters to the point where it's impossible to tell what the game was supposed to be.

It's possible to have fun playing this game, but only for one short burst during your very first game. After that, you'll be questioning why you ever spent your time with this one in the first place.

As a saving grace, the game can be fun when you’re throwing out abilities into hordes of enemies and the boss battles are interesting, if not difficult. ZAMB! sounds like an exciting pop, but I’ve come to realize that in this comic book it signals one deadening idea: boredom.

This game couldn’t be recommended to anyone and it only earns a score even this high because it is not functionally broken, but that’s nothing to be proud of.

The best-case scenario for Agony is that patches fix the many technical problems plaguing this game right now. If or when that happens, it will then start to be playable, but even then it will contain a host of gameplay issues. A patch isn't going to redesign the entire stealth system, find new voice actors, or design a vision of Hell that is better than the doodling of a 15-year-old metal fan. There's no fix for much of what hinders this game, and what can be fixed absolutely should have been before this ever hit stores. One thing is clear, it definitely feels like Hell trying to play Agony.

City of Brass gives you no reason to play through it multiple times, and frankly very little reason to play through it the first time.

Outbreak: The Nightmare Chronicles can be a great game if you look at it through a particular lens, that lens being from the year 2000. The game has managed to replicate the original survival horror mechanics that elevated games such as Silent Hill and Resident Evil to success almost perfectly, but its beguiling allure sadly melts away the more you play.

The world is large, beautiful and full of content. The gameplay itself is exciting and fresh, with plenty to offer in terms of depth and accessibility. But TERA on Xbox is not a great MMO. In its current state, it's not even a good one. In a few patches, TERA might be good. As it is, any other MMO on the marketplace will offer a better experience.

Past Cure is a game that tries to do too much at once to the extent that it ends up doing none of it well. To varying degrees, it lacks polish in every area. Shooting needs some help in the options menu, melee is borderline broken, stealth is missing key features, and the story abandons a strong start and gets worse with every chapter, all while it weaves in and out of several genres and forgets to make it coherent by the end. In one light it's commendable for a rookie studio to aim so high by designing a game akin to Max Payne or Quantum Break, as they obviously intended to do here. Sadly, Phantom 8 seems to have rejected reasonable restraint in their design aspirations, which may have been the cure for what ails this game.

Ultimately there's not a lot to say about Drift Zone. It does one thing serviceably, but that one thing is done better in bigger games in abundance on Xbox One. As an Android title, you may have fun on a bus or in a waiting room with Drift Zone, but on your home console, it's hard to overlook just how sparse the gameplay suite is. Diehard fans of tuning and tweaking cars may enjoy a half dozen hours or so here, but for most people, Drift Zone is simply an unremarkable experience that makes a strong case for curation of the Xbox digital storefront.

Asemblance is the type of game worth rooting for because it dares to try things in its own unique way. Having said that, its execution leaves far too much to be desired. You can't commend the game for being weird, because it's so weird that it fails to connect at all. It's one of the shortest games you can find on the Xbox One, which should not inherently be an issue, but in this case it is. There needed to be a few more breadcrumbs to help players care about the bizarre sequence of events that unfolds over the game's 30 minutes. Lacking all resonance and intrigue in its playthrough, Asemblance is a decent story once you look it up online later, but more of it needed to be expressed in the actual game.

Hello Neighbor is a fantastic premise that falls apart in practice in nearly every way. The game was billed to have cunning AI but offers only an overbearing Neighbor with occasional moments of goofiness. It was meant to feature a bizarre and secret-filled house, but ends up wanting to streamline players with little wiggle room. If you're really dying to know what the Neighbor is hiding and can easily forgive the many trouble spots, you might have limited fun here. Alternatively, another hefty patch could undo a lot of these problems. Such a makeover would need to be drastic, however. When simple tasks like reliably picking up and using or placing items are clunky, it's a good sign that the skeletons in the closet aren't worth discovering.

If you are a fan of The Sims and desperately want it on your console, you will probably be able to overlook this console port's abysmal user interface and controls in order to get at what is essentially the same game you've always known. The Sims themselves are still charmingly over-animated and the audio-visual design is pleasing enough. For anyone else, the struggle to overcome the nastiness of even the basic controls and menus only leads to the same old gameplay loop, albeit with a couple of interesting features bolted on. As a series, The Sims has simply failed to evolve enough.

The singular lasting impression of Don't Knock Twice is one of bewilderment that it somehow exists at all. A movie tie-in game for a limited release and poorly reviewed film that wrapped its quiet and brief theater tour over half a year ago is not the mark of something promising. Ultimately, the game is exactly what it appears to be: bare bones, forgettable, and not worth your time. Horror fans have too many better choices these days, and fans of first-person exploration games have a growing list of their own. Put Don't Knock Twice at the bottom of each of those lists and only get around to it when you've exhausted all other options.

At its heart, AereA is a game about pulling levers, opening doors and being really lost, which is the opposite of what anyone wants out of their musical action RPG. You’ll most likely lose interest quickly and quit out without any desire to return to the world of AereA. The presentation is beautiful thanks to the colorful visuals and a delightful soundtrack, but it falls under the shadow of mundane and repetitive gameplay, a complete lack of challenge and a confusing navigation system that forces you to waste most of your time backtracking. It's an action RPG with no action and it’s just not fun.

The Dyatlov Pass Incident is one of the most fascinating real life horror stories of the last century. It's a topic built to be adapted to different forms of media, arguably video games more than any other. Somehow Kholat is given this head start and trips all over itself. The story fails to take off while the gameplay only serves to annoy. It's never scary, save for a theme song that even then is played so often that it loses its effect. Horror and walking sims are my two favorite genres in the medium, but Kholat serves as another unfortunate reminder that they don't belong together.

Although there is a good variety in terms of puzzles in the game, there's very little else to shout about here. The story feels overly confusing from start to finish, and the variety in puzzles is let down by the sheer difficulty of some of them. A peculiar soundtrack accompanies a surprisingly short adventure that finishes way too soon and leaves you with more questions than when you started. Mr. Pumpkin Adventure could have been a really interesting point and click game, but only lands in the average category instead.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is misguided by the unending trend of games going open-world. The idea may have been born with good intentions, but blatantly copying all of another series' structure is a bad look, undone much further by the fact that it does all of those same things very poorly. It's unclear for whom this game was made as it feels more like a middling title we rarely see anymore, possessing neither the polish of AAA nor the admirable quirks of an indie. It's a narrative bore, a technical dilemma, and a structural collapse. If fun was ever in the crosshairs, the subsequent shot is way off target.

A stale experience that can't be recommended to anyone. The game's tutorial is abysmal, leaving new players wandering helplessly until they consult third party resources from outside the game. The core gameplay loop is simple and devolves into the same strategy in every game, severely inhibiting the replay value and even the first play value. Combat is dull and very poorly balanced thanks to blatantly overpowered ranged units.

Eekeemoo Splinters of the Dark Shard is a game of missed potential. All the workings of an action-adventure game are there, like characters, story, and boss battles, but none of them are fleshed out enough to make the game worthwhile. It's a quick and easy jaunt for those who want only gamerscore, and each chapter is unique in design and colour, but no singular aspect of it feels like it does something special or even particularly well. Without the polish and care it needs, it is only functional, never exceptional.

Minimal story, frustrating design, and a revival of all the bad things of which survival horror washed its hands years ago — these all crop up in Vaccine and combine to have the game miss its mark. Instead of a love letter to bygone scares, what we get is a tiresome endeavor for anyone but the most diehard fans for old school horror. What's worse, even such fans might be turned away by Vaccine's blatant ripping off of Capcom's renowned franchise.

Zombie Vikings takes an interesting premise and a beautiful art style and squanders them alongside a bulk of other issues. Bugs that should've long ago been patched out before migrating to Xbox, a sense of humor that only induces cringe, and a campaign that overstays its welcome and rewards button-mashing come together to form something fittingly brainless. Minimal simple pleasures might be found here if you and a few friends are looking for just another co-op game, but even then there must be others you haven't yet played that more often reward you in nearly every way.

While the novelty is good for a few laughs, once that wears off, I Am Bread is a loaf of sourdough that's nine parts frustrating and one part fun.

Dead Effect 2 is a game with big aspirations that simply doesn’t reach the heights for which it shoots. Every neat premise is compromised by shoddy balancing, uninspired combat or strange design decisions. While there is a ton of content with 20 story missions and a bunch of additional game modes, none of it is as fun as it could have been.

This poor excuse for a dungeon crawler doesn't even have enough entertainment value to fall into the "so bad it's good" category. It's a masterclass in lazy design, from the abominable graphics and abysmal soundtrack through to the gameplay that is laughably unbalanced in your favour. Bugs and frame-rate drops are the final nails in the coffin.

While fun for a little while, Bridge Constuctor Stunts ultimately falls short. The game has a simple premise that ends up being a little too complicated at times. What starts off as enjoyable ends up getting repetitive and a bit boring. The actual look and sound of the game is bright, bubbly and upbeat and it's just a shame that the rest of the game doesn't match this. This game is not going to wow you and will only offer a flipping amount of fun for a short while; only the true architects out there will be able to fully appreciate the game.

It is a bare bones game that only just scratches the surface in its gameplay.

Super Dungeon Bros is not the first Games with Gold title this year that seems to have been rushed to release, unfortunately. It's broken in many ways and boring in several others. To the former, those issues can be resolved and the studio at the helm seems intent on doing so, but even if those blemishes are addressed, what shall remain will still be a mostly forgettable freebie that can serve some purpose as a couch co-op game. With better options for sale even in its own genre, it's more likely that SDB will sit in your digital library without a chance of ever actually taking up hard drive space.

If you're aching for a throwback to Belmont's heyday and don't care about your achievement ratio, give Slain a shot, but otherwise, give it a pass and catch some z's.

It's a boring, aesthetically nauseating slog through puzzles that more often annoy than challenge.

Dear Esther is a boring slog with little narrative payoff. Although it does encourage an ideal of "interpret as you will", it lacks the foundation and support to drive discussions of death, life, and grief to the point to which it strives. Fortunately, the experience is short, cheap, and a good boost to an achievement score, but beyond that, is worth a pass.

In short, if you're not a fan, steer well clear of this one.

Unfortunately, the game offers nothing innovative or entertaining; it's simply a way for the company to make a quick buck based on better games in the series.

Soda Drinker Pro, gaming's equivalent to carbonated sugar water, might be enjoyable in very strict moderation, but it's hard to forget that one would be better off to consume nearly anything else.

MagNets: Fully Charged is a dull and uninspired game that will ultimately be overshadowed by a marketplace that sees games pumped out at a constant rate.

The repetitiveness of levels and enemy encounters, the barebones story, and the constantly frustrating fighting mechanics – the game’s main draw – are all a reminder of how far gaming has come. Rather than build on a foundation set by juggernaut titles like The Simpsons and X-Men, ZHEROS copies their blueprints exactly as they were.