After giving The Bee Hive a chance, it unfortunately proved to be a dull experience full of bugs and glitches. Despite its potential, there are too many ideas that simply do not stick the landing.

Morsels is an ambitious indie roguelite that just doesn’t deliver. The game shines with a distinctive aesthetic identity, but between shockingly unclear mechanics, poor game balance, and unsatisfying moment-by-moment gameplay, it otherwise has little to offer.

Dead Static Drive has glimmers of interesting Lovecraftian art, but fails to captivate with floaty driving, broken quests and game-breaking bugs further brought down by a general sense of aimlessness and lack of cohesive vision.

Hotel Barcelona is an underwhelming roguelike with lopsided design that simply doesn’t nail the fundamentals that make the genre popular. Head-scratching design choices regarding stingy mechanics that are almost tailor-made to extract joy from your life, mixed with a lack of fluidity and unity of vision make this a hard sell. Even in you love Suda51 and Swery 65, this is not what you hope it will be.

A clumsy and mechanically inert effort to capture the majesty and thrills of mob cinema, Mafia: The Old Country finds no promised land in either its routine tale of crime or its linear, hyper-focused gameplay. Impressive facial capture and a unique setting can’t sustain this poor, if well-intentioned, emulation of far greater works.

An initially wonderful return to Max Caufield comes entirely undone with competing narrative priorities and nonsensical attempts to build Life is Strange into a cinematic franchise. Despite the game’s stunning animation work and sincere queer writing, Double Exposure is an overexposed mess.

Funko Fusion’s biggest success is how well it matches the vibe of Funko’s uber-popular line of vinyl figures as a whole – joyless, soulless representations of beloved franchises that capture almost none of the charm of the source material. The most culturally-relevant thing here might be the collectible KFC buckets.

The reward for my perseverance with Goblin Stone would be a well-narrated bit of storybook exposition and perhaps a new combat class or weapon tier, before heading back to base to find missing inventory items, goblins, and stats being reset to the impossibly low 0/0/0. It’s just boggling stuff, making for an arguably unplayable late game that kills any curiosity and goodwill that the first impressions made. A disappointment, as there is genuinely a heap of interesting ideas here repurposed from turn-based indie greats, but Goblin Stone forces its implementation onto rails with no fanfare and no incentive or reward for player experimentation or even investment.

A repetitive and dull gameplay loop that’s thematically allergic to the game’s cast of misfits only begins to describe how heartbreakingly disappointing Kill the Justice League truly is. Rocksteady should’ve died a hero, instead, it’s lived long enough to see itself become the villain.

Quantum Error is a flawed, frustrating and unfun slog that collapses under the weight of its lofty ambitions to blend multiple genres and mechanics on a limited budget and developing skillset.

An impressively intuitive control scheme and accurate ball physics hint at an enjoyable tennis experience, but a lack of meaningful content and a busted online mode end up costing Tennis On-Court the game, set and match.

Enchanted Portals copies almost everything about Cuphead, except for the precision of its mechanics, the tightness of its design and the enjoyment gleaned by mastering it. All the good bits really…

Layers of Fear is an admirable remaster that uses the fresh coat of paint to bring the series’ art direction up to modern standards but the bones of the experience remain fractured. Tedious and exhausting gameplay loops and tasteless writing make even this package a nice frame on an ugly painting.

With dated design, LotR: Gollum is a slow and tedious slog through Middle Earth that even the staunchest LotR fans will struggle to enjoy.

A disappointing take on open-world first-person shooters, Redfall has none of the flavour or mechanical finesse that we’ve come to expect from Arkane Studios.

An unsatisfying shooter brought even lower by an exhausting and all-encompassing script, High on Life can’t commit to its satire or ideas long enough to do anything of value.

Soulless yet almost serviceable as a light hack ‘n slash Valkyrie Profile spinoff, Elysium is a 15-hour chore of ugly visuals, repetitive combat, and a mundane plot.

If you’re in it purely for the single player content, you’ll find a lot to love in Splatoon 3. It’s disappointing that there’s pretty much nothing else for you if you’re completely offline – without live servers we haven’t even been able to access the included Tableturf Battle card game or spend any time customising anything – but we’ll have more to say once we can actually get stuck into the rest of the game. [Review in Progress]

Riko and Reg's descent to the netherworld is a classic in existential dread and worldbuilding. Playing in this broken world imparts an even worse sense of dread.

With a little more polish and player-driven feedback, The Cleaner could well emulate a proper first-person John Wick experience. However currently, it feels a little more like a frustration emulator designed to inspire rage quits.

The optimist in me hopes that, for everyone else, there’s a future in Switch Sports’ competitive online play and regular updates. That’s in spite of the pessimist in me seeing this staggered approach as nothing more than a grab for more long-term Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, but that’s beside the point. If it all comes together, I suppose there’s something decent if not overly special here, but that’s a big ol’ question mark hanging over this review for the time being. As it stands Nintendo Switch Sports is a fun, nostalgic collection of motion-controlled sports that are sure to be a hit at gatherings in much the same way that Wii Sports was, but it’s an awkward package that’s hard to justify forking out for right now. [Review in Progress]

A quaint art direction and an occasional well-conceived puzzle are not enough to redeem this painful slog through a child's living nightmare. Trial-and-error instakill sections and some of the worst hide and seek stealth since Sanity of Morris ensure the greatest nightmare will be your own.

I can in no way recommend Babylon’s Fall. It’s the most disappointing experience I’ve played in years, a combination of poorly defined ideas and a lacklustre sense of visual identity that does nothing to feel like a PlatinumGames experience. That’s the most frustrating thing of all, that a studio with such a strong back catalogue could release such a basic, uninspiring title in this modern era, as if they just handed the project to the interns and forgot about it until it was too late. Whatever positives there might be are few and far between in a title that likely won’t get a chance to fix itself before Square Enix eventually pulls the plug.

The saying that everything deserves a second chance should not have applied to Elex. Elex II takes so many steps backwards from an already poor game, it’s astounding. Its writing, optimisation, combat, and game systems all stand as a new benchmark on what to not do.

Martha Is Dead fails to deliver any meaningful semblance of the story it wants to tell and ends up being nothing more than a colossal and tedious disappointment.

An excess of disparate systems and RNG do little to hold one’s attention, Home Behind 2 is more interested in playing itself than rewarding your time.

Rustler brings classic Grand Theft Auto to a twisted version of the European Middle Ages, but its reliance on other media for laughs and a finicky release build makes it a title worth trying only for those nostalgic for the vintage entries of a now-juggernaut series.

Necromunda: Hired Gun features a stunning art direction, but with a garbled story and more technical and design blemishes than you can poke a space stick at, this one's bound to be buried in the under-hive.