Kirby Star Allies is a fun, but short romp that doesn't do much to push the franchise forward.

Unfortunately, Mass Effect: Andromeda picked up some unwelcome visitors on its long journey to your gaming machine. Though it has some stellar moments, “Andromeda” tries to cram too many ideas into one package, turning its obsession with the bigness of space into a crutch for uncharacteristically shoddy workmanship.

Its mysterious world, artful narrative and moving character work is the reason we play games. It’s depressing that its singular vision is hampered by the most basic video game building block — the ability to control your experience — but beneath its finicky handling and aggravating programming lies the same magical hoodoo you find in great Pixar films. It’s fitting, really, that a game this difficult to birth would be equally difficult to enjoy. But if you take the time to love it, it will love you right back.

It struggles to get out of its own way, featuring perhaps its most complicated buy-in system yet. Creativity knows no bounds, but your checkbook certainly does.

For all its brilliance – and there are undoubtedly some very special moments here – Mafia III never manages to maintain its initial momentum. There are too many other open-world games that do what it does better, smarter, and with more stability. Like its motley cast of gangsters, Mafia III is simultaneously likable and unpleasant, a tempting offer that all but the most dedicated gamers would do well to refuse.

We buy video games to play them, not simply marvel at what they can do. Its technological advancements and sheer scope may indeed be incredible, but No Man’s Sky’s repetitive world and gameplay are decidedly less than stellar.

This kind of thing only works when you’re invested in the characters and plot, and with little emotional payoff, the branching narrative feels more like a fun gimmick than anything else...And despite its impressive vision, “gimmicky” is a pretty accurate description of Quantum Break. I give Remedy credit for having the stones to actually follow through on its promise of combining a TV show and a video game, and perhaps there’s indeed a future here. But in a world crammed to the gills with great shows and great games, an experience that does neither particularly well just isn’t worth your precious time.

Despite its frustrating lack of modes and features, I freely admit that I have had a blast playing Super Street Fighter V. It’s a genuinely fun fighting game that has a bright future. But its troubled present gives this mighty combatant a black eye.

Unravel might look like LittleBigPlanet, but in practice it’s the kinder, gentler Limbo.

Despite its casting issues, Marvel Avengers is a decent enough LEGO romp — better than the disappointing Jurassic World and Batman 3: Beyond Gotham but not quite as good as Marvel Super Heroes. Fans of its spandex stars should certainly suit up. The rest of you might want to wait for another hero.

Too often while playing The Witness, I realized that there were a lot of other things I’d rather be doing than playing The Witness. I respect it; I admire it. I just didn’t enjoy it all that much.

Though it’s not the best game in either series, Paper Jam delivers enough well-executed turn-based combat to please fans of both Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi. It’s unfortunate that the writing and humor aren’t quite up to snuff, but fast-forward through the dialogue and you’ll soon find yourself staring at another gang of bad guys just asking for a fire flower to the face. That’s a jam worth playing.

Despite its supernatural trappings, this is a game very much about the human condition, about love and loss and how even the most innocuous decisions can leave the deepest footprints. There’s some great work here, and while Oxenfree isn’t without flaws, like its teenaged cast, it points to a promising future.

Underneath the silly cash grab lies a genuinely fun multiplayer game. Siege took me back to the early days of Counter-Strike, when I would lose weeks at a time to endless late night sessions with friends. Find some buddies and Siege really settles in as thrilling game of calculated chaos. But between the paltry offline offerings and the slow, microtransaction-gated drip of goodies, I wouldn’t advise breaching this door alone.

I appreciate that developer Vicarious Visions has tried to steer Skylanders in a new direction, and there’s certainly plenty to do here. But I’m not sure the future of Skylanders lies in mediocre kart racing, and unfortunately, there’s just too much of that in Skylanders SuperChargers. Hopefully the next entry will get the series back on track.

Most egregiously, this game costs $60. That’s about $50 too much. A better choice? Go crank Goldfinger’s “Superman,” fire up your old PlayStation or Dreamcast, dig up a copy of the original game, and relive the glory days the right way.

Overall, the first episode of this family-friendly adventure is engaging enough to keep you playing through its brief 90-minute run time. The cliffhanger is also a doozy that nicely sets up the next episode.

Guitar Hero Live is a classic rock star: talented, interesting, bipolar, and filled with questionable ideas. The new guitar is a hit and the streaming mode is plenty of fun, but the full-motion video fail and annoying song rental model mar what could have been a legendary comeback album.

Rising Tide sometimes feels all wet, but Civilization’s ship can still be righted.

Despite its good intentions and ocassional co-op fun, Tri Force Heroes lacks the depth — and charm — we’ve come to expect from the franchise.

Considering its wallet-friendly $40 price point, Sword Coast Legends’s core campaign is easily good enough to warrant a recommendation — provided you’re content with a rather leisurely, low-stress stroll through the Forgotten Realms.

Need For Speed’s solid driving and fantastic graphics are worth experiencing, but I wanted more darkness, more danger out of this game. I wanted consequences. Without it, we get an odd Need For Speed that presents a strangely empty, Disney-fied version of an “underworld” — one with guardrails on the sides of the road.

An artistic triumph, Star Wars Battlefront poses a difficult question: Do features make a game? If they do, this one’s got problems. Stand Battlefront next to most other multiplayer-oriented shooters and you’ll find it lacking in variety and depth. But none of those other shooters let me blast Slave-1 out of the sky from the Millennium Falcon, or take out an AT-ST with a well-timed thermal pod, or block ten laser blasts and force push a stormtrooper into a pool of lava.

Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash is a reasonably solid game of arcade tennis that’s accessible for newbies, yet challenging enough to give more experienced players something to chew on. But despite the glitzy visuals, it’s a predictable serve that lands well inside the line, rather than a decisive, smashing ace. Tennis fans — and Matthew Perry — deserve a little more.

The good news is that you'll have some fun with NFL Tour, especially with friends. But the joy will be short lived when you realize that the feature set is comparable to the original NBA Jam -- just pick a team and play. It's a thin package that comes off as more of a $30 budget title than a full-fledged effort.

A satisfactory update to the franchise, but still has yet to really hit its stride on the next-gen platforms. It took the FIFA team years to get it right on the PS2. Let's hope we don't have to wait quite so long for this FIFA to reach its amazing potential.

It can be a lot of fun -- but anything that has "Sims" in the title should probably hew a little closer to the franchise.

It's not the most sophisticated of offerings. There's not much here other than the destruction -- the levels are repetitive, and most encounters play out similarly. Little differentiates the game's weapons, and the plot is threadbare.

The game is very pretty, yes, but it's far from pretty enough to warrant punishing yourself with this one-two blow of poor controls and terrible targeting.

If you're content playing pretty much the same game in pretty much the same place with pretty much the same toys, GRAW2 is a good way to recapture the same fun you were having a year ago. And you'll get the cool new multiplayer mode thrown into the bargain.

By modern standards, it's decidedly lacking, but it's still a classic.

Pure movie tie-in fodder.

Pure movie tie-in fodder.

Pure movie tie-in fodder.

The game's biggest problem is all the filler between the reasonably exciting combat sequences. This New York City consists of two subway stations and about eight neighborhoods separated by long loading screens. You'll get sent back and forth across them all. Get this key. Visit that character. Trigger this sequence. Kill that guy. Along the way, we counted exactly two (2!) optional missions.

As if mocking its own pompous title, Pokemon Battle Revolution is, amazingly, a step back for the historically reviled console Pokemon games - there's plenty of style, but less substance than ever before.

Is Harry Potter a good game? No, not particularly. The story's vague and badly realized; the characters aren't especially likeable, and the tasks you're given are tedious and involve a lot of plodding about Hogwarts. But does it capture the feel of the franchise? Absolutely, and if you really get involved in the game you'll forgive it its flaws.

Is Harry Potter a good game? No, not particularly. The story's vague and badly realized; the characters aren't especially likeable, and the tasks you're given are tedious and involve a lot of plodding about Hogwarts. But does it capture the feel of the franchise? Absolutely, and if you really get involved in the game you'll forgive it its flaws.

The low system specs are a nice deal and The Sims Pet Stories is a well implemented gateway into the Sims world, but EA has definitely skimped on the full gateway functionality by not allowing Stories to play with other releases in the series. In other words, if you really get hooked, be ready to cough up for the full-sized version.

But we can't get behind playing it for very long, even as fanatics.

Big brains are certainly desirable, but big price tags are a different matter, and Wii Degree's standard $49.99 asking price is a little hard to stomach. While the game is tons of fun, there's just a handful of minigames and not much else, which puts it in a different class to other full-priced options.

Dawn of Mana looks the part, but fails in most other aspects. If you're hankering for some role-playing on your aging PlayStation 2, pick up "Odin Sphere" -- which released the same day. It's even more beautiful, captures the essence of old-school, and you'll be having too much fun to feel the need to convince yourself that you're having fun.

You'll run into bugs and questionable design decisions that make it feel rushed, and the gameplay elements themselves are nothing you haven't seen before. It's better looking than you would expect, however, which is probably enough to please movie fans.

Both movie fans and general gamers should get a few hours of fun out of it, and frustration is kept at a minimum -- preventing you from becoming an irate pirate.

It doesn't quite work. Although it's hard to see how the controls could be improved, at the same it's not hard to see that improvements are necessary if console real-time strategy games are ever going to be an easy alternative to those on the PC.

It's disappointing that Spider-Man 3 goes from exhilarating to budget-ware production levels so quickly and dramatically. Part of the problem down at street level is the combat. It's drawn with terrible character models, bad animation, and inconsistent AI that makes it easy to win fights by spamming a few basic attacks or taking advantage of the fact that bad guys can't figure out how to get around a park bench.

No matter the console, Meet the Robinsons is a darn good video game. The game is smart, vast, and really does offer something for everyone.

This is the wartime equivalent of a slow year's "Madden" update, with only the most basic changes and additions to justify a purchase. And with only the most bare bone offline multiplayer offering, even a bad edition of "Madden" has more to offer.

Go ahead and say that EDF is repetitive, but we had more fun trying out the 150 weapons than in almost any other recent shooter. Every level is packed with pure, nerdy fun, and the five difficulty levels prodded us into taking new weapons back into early levels to see how we'd fare. Weak-kneed animations and silly dialogue made it that much better, just this once.

It's an easy bump for 360 owner's GamerScore, but otherwise the full experience is not very satisfying.

This is decent but minimal new content that you'll want mainly because you're sick of the few maps you were given in the original game.

Def Jam's most damaging flaw is the single-mindedness of the combat. Unleash all the punch and kick combos you want, but in very short order it will become obvious that environmental hazards are the only way to take an opponent down.

If Dominator is a Greatest Hits package, however, where is Crash mode? That's like Michael Jackson releasing a Best Of without 'Beat It'.

You can get through the game in probably about five or six hours, and there's not much incentive to replay it. This march to glory might be short, and it's sometimes awfully low-rent.

Long time fans of the game will grumble about its flaws, while new players will be put off by the lack of direction in Quest mode. In the end, it's a game that suffers from "jack of all trades, master of none" syndrome.

Many of the tracks and events have simply been lifted from earlier entries, and the controls aren't reliable enough to consistently deliver the elation that characterized the best SSX titles.

Using the Wii remote just feels natural, too, and although it's not a monumental success, this is a Sonic console game you can feel proud to own. It's been a while since we could make that statement.

There's certainly plenty of action here, but with dull, monotonous settings and boring sound design, it's easy to slump into tedium, bashing away at enemies simply because they are there.

And unless you're a SPF fanatic, we'd advise waiting for the inevitable download to be offered, as Capcom Puzzle World isn't a compelling enough product to trade for thirty hard-won dollars.

The stylus aspects were better left out, fun is barricaded by a need to complete Adventure mode, and the overall vibe is even more painfully sugarcoated today than it was a decade ago.

While free of crash bugs, problems in interface, gameplay, and content abound. But if you're an old-school player, or a WoW player who's ready to delve deeper into a more complex MMORPG, then Vanguard was made for you.

As is so often the case in this genre, the minigames miss as many pitches as they hit. We'd actually recommend the Xbox predecessor over this one, if it didn't suffer horrible performance problems when running on the 360.

Most of the massive problems that have plagued next-gen versions of Live have receeded, leaving a game that's fun, accessible, and while flawed, full of enough personality.

Despite Justice For All's flaws, the game really does offer a rather goofy series of brain-bending challenges. There's a wonderful sense of accomplishment to be had when, during the courtroom scenes, the stupid psyche-lock system is abandoned and players, using only their wits, tear the heart out of a witnesses' testimony.

It's at its best when you can just wreak havoc and tear apart a room, tossing furniture with abandon and scattering objects wildly. But the amount of tedium you'll have to wade through along the way isn't worth it. Frankly, Elebits is a great idea in search of a better game.

It's too bad that the entertainment value is still skewed by the lame arena battles, but overall this is a much more viable diversion than the original Full Auto.

Despite its long, long list of lazy omissions it's still a game that Trek fans will enjoy -- if only for the voices, fire-photon-torpedoes ambiance, and graphical effects. They'll just have to grit their teeth while they do it.

A solid, easy platformer that's colorful, fun, and full of variety. Kids and casual players should love it, but hardcore players may gulp it all down too fast and be left hungry for more.

Sonic Rivals feels a little like a mini-game to a bigger game. We expected more content than this. The cards are utterly useless in their attempt to milk replay out of the title, and seemed thrown in at the last minute.

In general Star Trek looks and sounds better than it has in recent console incarnations. The graphics are a little jagged, but the ships look great and the interface is well designed. And the sound is excellent, from the sweeping symphonic score to the spot-on weapon systems.

The design and presentation make this release more palatable for non-gamers than Konami's series, but the limited track selection and unfortunate forced vocal tracks remove some of that value.

It's disappointing that the few effective minigames are piled under a heap of mediocrity.

Square Enix's attempts to modernize the title go a long way towards making it more enjoyable on the Nintendo DS, and it's a good game overall, but you'll still find that it lags behind more recent RPGs in some respects.

One of the biggest drawbacks with this version is the lack of any multiplayer support. Not only is online multiplayer the strongest feature in this sequel, but it's the only claim it has to replayability.

As an entry level title, Downhill Jam makes a good introduction to the possibilities of fast-paced gameplay on the Wii, and is definitely more approachable than "Tony Hawk's Project 8," the series' other current entry.

As much as we're sometimes awestruck by Genji's eye candy, we're more frequently struck dumb by how unwieldy the camera is. Isn't this the next generation? Wasn't the irritation of being attacked from off-screen and being unable to control your perspective distinctly last-gen?

The quick races, time trails, and drift challenges aren't much incentive to pull your nose out of the career mode. And the multiplayer is hardly worth booting up. You can only play splitscreen, and without AI cars.

A good game still lurks somewhere under all this garbage. Gothic's approach to the open-ended RPG is a good deal more compelling than Oblivion's, and it surpasses it in other areas too. But if there was ever a game in need of a few more months of development, Gothic 3 is it.

If you've already grown weary of the series, Unchained definitely won't change your mind; but if you have a few more fatalities in you, pick it up. Who knows? Its unique, cathartic brand of violence may prevent a road-rage incident.

Graphics bump aside, little has changed since we clicked the mouse one million times in "Diablo."

A bit too by-the-book to have the magic of the original, but it's still a good game.

Mastering Ridge Racer 7 feels more like a mathematical exercise than a game. Technophiles may love it for exactly that reason, but other audiences may wonder where the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat have gone.

Much like "Lumines," however, Every Extend Extra rides the line between flash and total sensory overload, with flashing colors, oversaturated backgrounds and that omnipresent musical accompaniment. It can almost be too much at times. But the concoction works, if only for the relatively short play time.

Despite a few dodgy-looking moments, however, the visual presentation is praiseworthy. The sensation of navigating expansive, violently scarred landscape remains impressive.

Less Dragon-Ballsy gamers may get frustrated, but are encouraged to stick it out as well, until they get the hang of this deep -- albeit slightly convoluted -- fighting feast.

Killzone isn't able to fulfill its own potential in the end. More variety in the gameplay would make this the killer app it's ready to become.

Root of Evil puts itself across as a lighthearted, if slightly demented, kid's game. But it can be much more challenging than such a presentation implies, and the disconnect is sometimes jarring.

One notable difference is that the frame rate is a lot better than it was in "Most Wanted." But the price you pay is graphics that are considerably worse. Carbon is missing atmosphere. You're still driving through the game strangely un-populated city, but it's got a lot less detail and ambient effects.

No, it doesn't have the depth of its PC granddaddy, but barring a handful of unfortunate issues, it's perfectly good at what it does: pass the time.

Dark Messiah gets points for being unique among shooters, but it loses points for not being unique enough. It's the same old dungeons, the same generic monsters, and some uninspired gameplay that doesn't make for a very memorable game.

We can grouse about the same-ness of the textures and design, but in motion F.E.A.R. continues to impress. It sounds even better, with most of the shocks this time delivered through an excellent sound design.

It's a perfectly serviceable war shooter offline, and turns into a strong SOCOM rival when you're gunning with 31 other players, which is just the sort of action the PSP has been missing.

All of Contact's charm can't save it from the tedium that bogs down a lot of RPGs. But it's still as solid as they come, not terribly spectacular, but the perfect fare for devotees of the genre.

This game lacks Batman's attitude, Green Lantern's gadgets, The Flash's quickness, and Superman's strength. It's a mediocre action-RPG through and through.

If you think about this game too much, then playing it can be disheartening, as it takes the feeling that you're completely wasting your time and really drives it home. However, some of the simple little mini-games are oddly addicting.

This game lacks Batman's attitude, Green Lantern's gadgets, The Flash's quickness, and Superman's strength. It's a mediocre action-RPG through and through.

Think of it as the medieval version of being an air traffic controller: hard to recommend to everyone, but if you're up for a challenge, and can handle all that micromanagement, give it a shot. Just be prepared to go take a long lie down in a darkened room when you're done.

An entertaining and occasionally even deep role-playing experience able to stack up against classic entries in the "Final Fantasy" and "Dragon Quest" series.