Right from the beginning, Silent Hill 3 tells its story with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The all-important sense of pacing that the first two games had is completely lost.

It's a tossed salad of good ideas and cliché concepts that veers wildly between extremely polished and inexcusably sloppy.

The control scheme deserves high praise, as does the evocative portrait of outer space. What doesn't deserve praise is its cloying use of randomly generated content, lack of creative mission design, and generally awkward narrative ambiance.

The changes Kinetica introduces into the formula are so miniscule, for the most part, that only a true connoisseur would notice or care.

Their gameplay was unlike any that came before, and it followed a comfortable rhythm. Okage: Shadow King has its charm. But it is, ironically, too off-kilter for me to consider it a cult classic.

Very plain and ordinary, and without the Nemo license there wouldn't be much reason to actually own it.

Like a fast food menu item, Champions of Norrath isn't going to be an experience for the player to relish and pontificate upon later, but it will serve excellently as a quick nosh for those hungry for mindless action.

Lacks the cohesion, pacing, and spirit the others possess. All else being equal, those missing qualities put Jak II squarely at the rear of the pack.

The game's difficulty curve is totally thrown off balance. I can only assume the intent was to provide a greater challenge than player-friendly Armored Core 3, and not outright sadism.

No game in recent memory serves as a better example of style over substance.

It might have been possible to deal with such a ridiculously bad setup if melee was limited to bosses and occasional encounters, but in a wicked bit of irony, the miserable perspective is paired with an insanely ludicrous amount of battling.

With multiple endings, several unlockables, and a nice difficulty curve it's an enjoyable play. What frustrates me about Neo Contra is that it could have been another "Gunstar Heroes" had it taken the quality of its humor more seriously.

Dungeon Lords provides solid, if glitchy, Action-RPG experience.

I was just plain happy with Terrorist Takedown, and given the cost, and I think there are plenty of action game fans people who'll feel the same way.

It gets halfway there with an elaborate backstory and interesting premise, but it gets too stuck in standard FPS design conventions to ever really distinguish itself as anything special.

Were it just another faceless GTA free-roaming clone I'd say EA did a pretty good job, despite a few minor shortcomings. But as it is, The Godfather has a hard time living up to the standard set by its license.

It's sublimely complex and bursting with potential on one hand, unbelievably limited and shortsighted on the other.

All in all, it's just a game that works some of the time but doesn't have enough drive and ambition behind it to vault it to the upper echelon of must play experiences.

It has moments where it's genuinely fun, but these are too soon replaced by a sense of tedium as the "been there, done that" element comes to color later races.

There's nothing "next gen" about this title other than the graphics and sound. The gameplay would barely pass as mediocre on the last generation of consoles.

I'm very sad to see that the developers have lost the magic that the first Shadow Hearts had. It's clear that they've nailed the technical half of the formula (and have had it down for a while now), but half a game is still half a game— I would have preferred that they spend less time tweaking something that wasn't broken and instead focus on the intellectual side.

Entirely competent in all technical respects, Commandos is a passable FPS, but absolutely nothing more.

Manages to be engaging thanks to its rich storyline, and the typically luxurious cutscenes provided by Square Enix. I found it challenging enough for my level of twitch skills (or lack thereof) in the genre.

The inclusion of the power-ups severely cheapens the game, changing it from a competitive fighting game into a wannabe party title.

Episode 1 is strictly for the fans. Anyone hoping that this expansion would explore some new gameplay elements or even improve on the old ones is up for a disappointment. It's good stuff—hey, it's Half-Life!—but it's the same stuff.

I for one think console gamers can handle a real tactical sim, but I suppose that in this increasingly competitive industry, taking even the slightest risk has become passe.

Based on the evidence, I believe that Deadline Games is capable of putting out something more satisfying—but in its current state, Chili Con Carnage is more like chips and salsa than arroz con pollo.

It's fun and violent and asks nothing at all from its player than to spend a few minutes blowing things to pieces whenever they feel like it, rewarding them with epic levels of blood and gore when they do.

This slowdown often results in accidental death and having to start over, but not before sitting through the game’s load screen, which consists of the now-seared-into-my-brain image of the words “now loading” slowly revolving around an open book.

Without the distraction that lovable licensed characters provide, I was faced with the inescapable conclusion that Mercenaries 2 was a mediocre title, suitable only for those who fantasize about using attack helicopters to slay entire countries.

Patient racing fans will find things to enjoy, but everyone else should weigh both the game's pros and cons before making a final decision on whether or not this one is worthy of a purchase.

In the end, Mirror’s Edge is a great set of core mechanics wrapped in a mediocre game. When everything is going smoothly, the experience can be exhilarating. Unfortunately, the flow is cut off too often by frustrating gameplay (e.g., dying 20 times in a row on the same jump).

Although Prototype sports several great ideas and a main character that wows, imagination, inspiration, and a strong guiding hand were lacking in every other aspect of the game.

Given the length of the game—around 12 hours or so at Normal difficulty—Brütal Legend gets more tiresome the further in you go. Stage Battles (the official name for the RTS sections) kill the pace, and the side missions are repetitive and boring. Somehow, all these negatives don't counterbalance an amazing artistic style. R

Ultimately Ninja Gaiden II retains everything from the original, for better or for worse, and makes a few small but very noticeable improvements.

If you hadn't figured it out for yourself already, allow me to reiterate—Tales of Vesperia is sort of like an RPG treadmill. For every step forward the game makes with its use of characters or social commentary, it follows up with a step back in the form of an over-reliance on genre clichés and a meandering narrative focus.

The song selection is a great change of pace from the standard rock fare found in Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but in the end the controls just don’t cut the mustard.

The experience is a give and take: you'll certainly take some enjoyment out of Lara's latest adventure, but the game will give you unnecessary grief almost every step of the way.

As a new music game, Helix sounded like a fun concept and I wanted to enjoy it more than I did. I just had a hard time staying with it. Taken on its own terms, the game definitely provides a challenge and some sweat—for the gamer that gets into the spirit and avoids cheating with mini-waggles.

Nostalgia cheerfully opts to evoke our memories of other RPG experiences, most notably Final Fantasy X and Skies of Arcadia, but because it lacks the coherence and originality of its predecessors it never develops an identity of its own.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 basically accomplishes what it sets out to do, but doesn't move the series forward in any significant way, even feeling like a minor step back in certain aspects.

NSMBW isn't unfun. It's uninspired. Like the games that came before it, New Super Mario Bros. Wii evokes concepts and imagery presented in its predecessors. Unlike those games, it makes no effort to expand upon any of those ideas.

I certainly understand that it's unrealistic to expect a developer to fill an entire "universe" with stunningly unique content, but while DarkStar One's heart might be in the right place, it needs a top-down overhaul before I can recommend that anyone climb aboard for the journey.

Ultimately, any gamer who loves Harry Potter is going to enjoy themselves immensely with this game. While older gamers might not find many reasons to give it more than a good weekend's worth of play, the younger ones will have hours and hours of spell-casting fun.

The innovations are few, and the unskippable story is outright destructive of the series' heritage.

There's no real creative risk being taken, and while that might be just fine for sales figures, it doesn't bode well for Call of Duty: Black Ops' ability to stand out artistically in the immensely flooded FPS market.

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a good experience, and in parts it can be quite clever-I particularly enjoyed that the game made the existence of its multiple endings an explicit part of its plot. Unfortunately, the weak prose doesn't justify the time investment, and the puzzles don't hold up through the mandatory replays.

It can be said that the game is made for players to start over, but it doesn't seem like a fair or enjoyable trade-off that a person should be willing to go back to square one of the story mode as a result of experimenting with and enjoying the item-crafting.

Those who can't get enough of Red Dead's wild west action or zombies might want to give Undead Nightmare a spin. There's a lot of game here for 800 Microsoft points, and while it's rarely as compelling as the main title, there's still some fun to be had in watching John Marsten shoot zombies in the head.

By far the worst thing about Driver is its inability to really draw me into its universe.

Pleasant graphically, but disturbing as a more complete experience.

If anything, Revival did more to ruin my memories of the old Street Fighter games, because I don't ever remember playing a Street Fighter title with controls as poor as this one.

This remolding of the classic action hero was a big departure from the traditional action the series was built on, and stood as a highly enjoyable, solid, and creative game worth getting into.

While my attention span is getting short and Rave Master: Special Attack Force! never really amazed me, I had fun playing it. I liked the button-mashing.. I liked experimenting with new moves.

With so many puzzlers available online, why should I pay $20 for something I can get for free? To turn a profit in this day and age, a puzzle game needs to be divine-and Zooo, unfortunately, is just a diversion.

The obvious incoherence of many of the design decisions allows the player to see past the realistic graphics and to observe the unrealistic logic that underlies the game.

There's nothing revolutionary to be found here—no innovative play mechanics, no stunning graphics. This is a rock-solid Nazi-blasting FPS, and nothing more.

Since innovations in this series seem to come in microscopic increments, it's safe to assume each subsequent game will not only feature the elements that made the main game fun, but also the flaws that marred the experience as well.

I was disappointed that The Great Escape opted for a more conventional action-game route rather than challenging the player through a sim-like game of socially-based puzzle solving. But it's still a game that is varied and sophisticated enough to be fleetingly fun and worthwhile for any fan of the film.

It excels in creating a gripping narrative that lends a strong contextual backdrop to the gameplay.

Finest Hour is a heavily-scripted experience, almost to the point of being completely on rails. Things happen because they're scripted to happen, not because they're an organic outgrowth of the gameplay.

A decidedly mediocre game. There's nothing really new here, and nothing that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

While competent enough to satisfy hardcore fans between better games, Pariah never really takes off and brings its ideas to fruition. It is at best at second-tier shooter that rides the waves of its peers instead of making them.

It doesn't try to accomplish very much, and it succeeds at almost all of its very modest targets.

Despite some improvements, the navigation is simply too clunky and unnatural for Revelation to appeal to anyone but fans of the series.

If video games were running shoes, Cold War would be the designer lookalike sold on the streets of Chinatown for nest to nothing.

From its Lego-inspired visual style to its deceptive elegance, there's a certain undeniable charm-yet the actual play is disappointingly shallow, not to mention having one of the worst camera setups I've seen in quite a while.

To say that the camera in this game is atrocious is like saying being kicked in the teeth kinda hurts-it gives the person an idea about how bad it is, but it doesn't even begin to describe the agony in detail.

No matter how many games I played, I regularly gave up shallow bloop and in-the-gap inside-the-park homers because I couldn't gel with the computer's logic of who should be fielding the ball.

What should have been a fast, flashy, light-hearted affair is somehow grim and joyless. There's wonderful content here, but unfortunately most gamers won't ever see most of it because it's locked away behind a series of near-impossible challenges.

A glimmer of the first game's superb design and balance remains underneath these missteps, but the bottom line is that instead of building upon the solid foundation from the first game, they undermined it.

I think Sonic Team needs to focus on its core values and technical competencies, to deliver the sublime experience I believe it is capable of, especially when working with the prestigious Sonic IP.

Knights Contract reminds me of that friend from high school-I think maybe every guy might've had one like this growing up-who was way too into wrestling. For the most part he was a great guy, except for the times when he'd decide that a casual conversation was a perfect opportunity to throw me into an inescapable armbar, on which occasion I found myself wishing he was a dead person.

As it stands, it's a fairly empty, unfocused experience that will find a number of fans regardless thanks to the power of the truly killer visuals.

As the first entry in a planned trilogy, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has technically done its job. The game has built my anticipation for the next installment, in spite of itself. Granting that, I'm not interested in a rerun. A clever battle system can distract for only so long, and the value of semi-persistent society is limited by the appeal of the world in which it exists. I'm sure that it's hard for creators to not fall in love with the product of their labor, but navel-gazing is only entertaining for the owner of said navel.

Need for Speed: The Run was designed to raise the bar for the racing genre, but while setting up the supports, the game must have slipped and wound up with the bar clonking it on the head. While there's great fun to be had in online competition, everything that was supposed to be different and special about The Run is flat-out garbage.

After finishing the game, I can say that The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was not what I expected. I thought it would be a good (but not great) practitioner of the Zelda formula hampered by unnecessary motion controls, much like Twilight Princess was. Instead, I got a game that's cripplingly hamstrung by its controls and even falters when presenting the basic Zelda recipe.

Choplifter HD certainly does its predecessor justice, faithfully recreating the original's highs and lows, and offering beautiful graphics to make up for the lack of original thinking. While there may not be much depth or replayability to Choplifter HD, it's certainly an entertaining diversion which serves as a testament to the solid gameplay mechanics of a title from thirty years ago. Maybe Choplifter was never a top-tier game, but it's certainly one that warranted a second look, and inXile gave it the update it deserved.

That being said, the game still does have its issues-and some of those issues do really mar the experience. The foundation of a solid current gen SSX game is lurking right beneath the surface of this title-let's hope EA unearths it for the potential sequel.

Unfortunately for those returning after an absence (like me) or who are brand new to the series, Soul Calibur V does little to bring a player up to speed with the new characters and mechanics beyond throwing them into the fight and letting them wade through as best they can. Factor in the scarcity of offline single-player content, and this means that multiplayer is the only thing granting Soul Calibur V any longevity; players looking for long-term offline play will be better served with Soul Calibur IV.

It would be easy to not recommend Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 since it's so repetitive and not very pretty, and players spend a lot of time reading scripted events. That said, I love the women-one of the villains included-and these weaknesses are part of the game's charm for me.

This collection is an easy recommendation for fans of the series, who will find it every bit as playable as (and far more attractive than) the PlayStation 2 versions-but it doesn't feel like a definitive edition of the games, and with its near-complete lack of a manual and insufficient in-game tutorials, it makes no effort to ease players unfamiliar with the franchise into the DMC world.

Yes, Max Payne 3 may be a thrilling game, but the most shocking, slickly-produced, well-written cut-scenes in the world can't get a player to fully humanize a character who can magically heal from the same bullet wounds that explode his enemies into red mist.

However, the overall design and experience of Spec Ops: The Line is too heartbreakingly conventional to do anything more than wander distractedly towards the general direction where new ground might be broken.

On the whole, Resonance is serviceable entry in a genre where very few games are being made. The plot's not stellar, but it's still pretty good. The animation was fluid, and some of the scenes are quite gorgeous. The music also does a good job of setting the mood for the various locales and situations. Despite how harsh I might be, it's solid enough for being a ten dollar indie title and I do recommend checking it out for adventure fans.

The game is easily short enough to finish in an afternoon even if you're doing other things at the same time. Its finale feels even more abrupt than it is, because there's no crescendo of difficulty or complexity, no "boss" puzzle. With little warning, Unmechanical simply ends, and without a strong story or memorable puzzles to hang its hat on, it fails to leave a mark, despite its lovely visuals.

In its current form, it seems like more of a test case than a fully finished product since many of the bosses are repeats and the special abilities earned don't share common levels of functionality. The graphics are nothing to write home about, either. However, taking those things into account, Raid Leader still offers a unique experience and presents some ideas that I would love to see expanded on in the future.

The core of what's here is great and the concept is pure gold, but without a greater variety in gameplay, it doesn't begin to tap its full potential. My fingers are crossed for some substantial updates or an improved sequel.

Speaking frankly, there are certain levels of expectation associated with any given piece of hardware, and games which don't live up to that standard will inevitably suffer. Legasista is a solid title that knows what it wants to be and hits that target... It's just that the bullseye isn't hanging in the right place.

Deponia looks lovely, but it squanders its wonderfully screwball setting on unremarkable puzzles and unlikable characters. In the end, that all adds up to a game that's completely disposable.

For what it's worth, if I wanted a simulation of being crammed into a tiny, metal, low-tech claustrophobic coffin while people yell and attempt to kill me repeatedly while I struggle with basic controls, then Heavy Armor offers up quite the war experience. However, that's not what I was looking for, and I suspect that it's not something anyone else is after, either.

While trying to revitalize the Zelda formula with modern developments is an admirable goal, Darksiders II's developers just can't seem to get a handle on how to make such a thing work. For two games now they've tried adding hi-octane combat, a Western-style story, and ability trees, but it's never managed to gel. The things that made games like Zelda, God of War, Prince of Persia, and even Shadow of the Colossus great are all on display here, but the Darksiders series still hasn't figured out how to use them effectively enough to stand on its own.

The Unfinished Swan isn't without its charms, and there were moments in the abandoned city, with the vines overgrowing walls and bridges in all directions, that I almost loved it. However, in its very short runtime The Unfinished Swan introduces too many different ideas and doesn't sufficiently explore or refine any of them-not even the bad ones. That might suit the theme, but it makes for a game that feels frustratingly incomplete.

At least the petty indignities of the multiplayer are optional and situated around gameplay that's solid and unique, if frustratingly stagnant. In the single-player campaign, however, it's impossible to escape the ham-fisted manipulations of the Assassin's Creed III development team.

Chaos on Deponia has enough charm to salve the wounds of its worst design flaws (a delightful quest to hatch a team of platypus guardians is a great example) but there's no getting around its narrative problems.

Gamers looking for an art-house experience would do well to spend a couple of hours soaking in what Suda 51 has served up. Those more concerned with gameplay they can chew on might want to think twice.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is caught between two worlds. The game can't quite decide if it wants to be an arcade or a simulation racing game, and it takes a lot to get used to this in-between zone it occupies. That said, once the adjustment period is over, there is a lot of enjoyment to be had when it's not being frustrating.

Transcripted's mashing of genres does work despite its hiccups. As a game to play here and there, it is a nice distraction with plenty of ways to change how it's played.

Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy starts off as a celebrated adventure through the musical history of the long-running Final Fantasy series, and the fanservice is apparent and appreciated. However, after only a few hours, the nostalgia wears off and the experience loses its luster. There's just too little to drive this title forward, and without more substance, even the best fanservice in the world will start to lose its appeal.

The game's real mistakes were made at the design level, and that's a pity, because it contained the potential to be a much better experience than it ended up being.

A lot like the middle-class, suburban kid in high school that tries to make everyone think he's cool by wearing nothing but black and listening to Metallica. It's all an act; a dark pretense put up to hide a depressingly normal game that doesn't really know what it wants to be.

The Geo Mod engine provides mere window dressing to what is nothing more than your standard FPS, complete with big freaking guns and explosions.

Much like Dr. Frankenstein's creation, this game possesses too many flaws that are hard to ignore and that prevent from appreciating the enigma it offers.

The crucial fear-factor is missing, the sense of fight, flee or die that makes survival horror so effective.

I may be a novice when it comes to playing this type of game, but even I know there's more to a good RTS than this.

Yes, the EyeToy has potential. Groove is an example that the potential has yet to be realized.

While developer Cavia has done a fine job of aping what makes "Panzer Dragoon" so much fun, the "Dynasty Warriors" elements of the game are sorely lacking.

Even if its opinion is a little simplistic ("Drugs have short-term benefits and long-term consequences") and awkwardly included in the game, at least there's an attempt at a message, which is more than most games manage.

A game about toy-car-racing with a unique although not spectacular racing system that chooses to imbed this racing, like an egg, inside a pretty bland and lifeless RPG that features toy cars that yell at you for coming into their house. It's not for everybody.

Indeed, Fullmetal Alchemist 2 has proven to me that its parent anime is a good show. But I've yet to be convinced that Fullmetal Alchemist 2 is a good game.

The kinetic running and gunning is there and it has the right style, but Coded Arms in its present form seems more like the first few pieces of something larger, rather than a complete product.

Sadly, anything good about the game gets bogged down in the mindless, repetitive blasting.

After the credits rolled I sat in my dim room feeling like a betrayed lover, staring at the title screen with empty eyes and worn down by exhaustion. Disbelieving and frustrated, I once again expressed a wish: blue pill, please.

These characters deserve a bigger canvas on which to tell their tale.

While a good effort is made, nothing in the game can match the inspired lunacy of Metal Saga's opening minutes.

It's shame that the ending is so inadvisably abrupt, opting for a limp 'shock' finale rather than a satisfying closure that would have sat so much better with the game's slow-burning narrative.

Final Fantasy III was fun while I played it, but now that the world's been re-harmonized and the credits have rolled, I feel no need to dig it out of my closet again.

The Club's greatest flaw is that it thinks it's a whole lot more revolutionary than it actually is. Despite the game's claims to the contrary, there's nothing new about any of this.

This feels like an alpha build of a game: the point in a game's development cycle where engine is in place, and the world has been built, and a few bad guys running around for testing purposes. Unfortunately, the actual meat of the game, the story and the missions, haven't been added yet.

At fifty dollars, and with significant locked away on the disc from the people who paid for it, it's the biggest rip-off since Crackdown, and shouldn't be purchased by anyone for any reason.

But for those of us who play games with the controllers that came with the system, NASCAR 08 is just too flawed to be worth playing.

Trauma Center's developers need some serious interventional design therapy before the series's prognosis degrades beyond hope of recovery.

Lego Batman represents the first real misstep from developer Traveller's Tales in their moderately popular Lego franchise.

Although it's possible to rattle off a list of bullet-point features that imply Assassin's Creed II is head and shoulders above the first game—more missions, more story, more collectibles and extras—I simply didn't find them to amount to much.

For once gamers can honestly believe the hype. Dante's Inferno lives down to expectations in spectacular fashion

Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom doesn't fail because any particular aspect of it is poorly made, it fails because its components don't fit together.

Saw II: Flesh and Blood is certainly a huge improvement of the first game in the series, but by no means is it perfect, or even especially good.

For a time-rich audience, I can see Lords of Shadow being well worth the investment.

The Phantasy Star games are classic RPGs (yes, even the third one…which everyone seems to hate), and they deserved at least a little updating.

A fine 2D platformer, but a rather undistinguished and disposable specimen.

As average a game can get, with plenty of things going wrong for it, as enjoyable as it might be at times.

And the compelling nature of the online game is thanks to the same simplicity that makes the single-player game utterly forgettable. Simple to pick up and understand, the game mechanics allow the player to concentrate on the strategies of the various online games and immerse themselves in an action-based flow.

Both the humor and the flight mechanics are poorly implemented, and that provides too much of an obstacle to the success of the game.

Incredibly high production values can't mask a central lack of compelling gameplay.

I was once again left disappointed, unfulfilled, and betrayed.

A textbook example of a game that wasn't ready to be pushed out of the nest. What could have been an exceptional game founders in mediocrity because of an artificial timeline.

The one glaring error in Worms Blast is the overly complicated and sluggish (or, uh, worm-ish) gameplay.

I think most disappointing for me was how Transmission lost a great opportunity to expand on the concepts "Battle Network" was built on.

While it does indeed take a few steps in the right direction, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings doesn't live up to its own ambition.

The setting, urban art theme, and gravity-shifting mechanics give Sideway: New York plenty of opportunities to stand out, but it squanders all of them. Instead, Nox navigates bland levels and takes out repetitive bosses with a set of generic powers. With so much potential, it's remarkable that Sideway ended up being so ordinary. Unfortunately, that's the only remarkable thing about it.

While the gameplay mechanics are a blast, the level designs are so questionable as to make me wonder about Croteam's reasoning.

Time Machine: Rogue Pilot is interesting for its plot and its sense of danger and momentum. These things aren't exactly groundbreaking, but for seven dollars, it's decent (and different) enough.

It's a great idea and proves the case that there is potential for stealth play on the iPhone, but Robbery Bob doesn't feel like it's quite there yet. Still, it's fairly interesting and there isn't much like it on iOS. It sort of wins the genre by default.

Aesthetics aside, there's a certain level of patience and stubborn belligerence that will probably be needed to best Kung Fu Strike: The Warrior's Rise, even on Easy difficulty. The target audience, those that love old school brawlers, would probably be happiest here, but the sharp difficulty will certainly turn off anyone looking for a casual affair.

With its limited customization, uniform enemy AI, and ineffectual weapons, Cargo Commander tightly constrains the player's tactical and strategic options, no matter the mode. The game may be set in deep space, but Cargo Commander's gameplay feels like it's trapped in a box.

Anyone looking for a deep, complex brawler is best be served elsewhere, but fans looking for some Super Saiya-jin action or younger folks that just want to button-mash will find something here to like.

In a way, that latter ending fits Mars: War Logs best. It's a competently executed brawler-style RPG, with a political story at its core that actually has some potential. Irrelevant mechanics and sidequests get in the way of the game's best aspects, however, and Mars: War Logs never manages to focus on what's important.

The lack of ability to control the pitch in the air is incredibly frustrating.

Anyone going into it expecting the bells and whistles of a "Half-Life 2" is going to be sorely disappointed. Anyone going into it expecting it to play anything like the table-top strategy game will be even more letdown.

Spyhunter 2 isn't intolerably bad; it's merely average and uninspired.

Perhaps all of the limp comedy wouldn't be so offensive if the game did anything new in the gameplay department.

Where Jet X20 falls short is in providing a single, consistent experience. The way racing and tricking are implemented, it is impossible to concentrate on both at the same time.

It's more fun than "State Of Emergency" (but then, what isn't?) and more interesting than "Hunter: The Reckoning" (if only because Ash is a more identifiable character than anyone featured in that game), but most gamers will have to ask themselves if that actually means anything since neither of those games were classics to begin with.

The game, like a movie trailer, provides various disjointed snippets of action without delivering the complete picture.

As the central deficiencies (car physics, handling, lack of challenge) also become more and more prominent with each race, most players will simply tire of its blandness, and decide to save the time Namco wants them to spend tuning their cars for an altogether better racing game.

Instead of finding innovative means to explore new narratives, they are content to rely only on its effective control scheme and Jet Li's face to drive the core experience. Everything else falls back on tired videogame conventions and that makes Rise to Honor an acceptable game, but a deeply flawed next generation model.

Transformers might be a good purchase for crazy, obsessive fans of the license (like me), but for anyone who demands rich play experiences and balanced design, this is one of the few times that Optimus Prime has failed to complete his mission.

Newcomers or devotees to the RPG genre may find some basic value in it, but my feeling is that most players who've been there and done that probably won't want another helping.

It's a short and mildly engrossing action romp that, while probably not worth the price of a full game, will make a nice time killer for those long Saturday afternoons when the big game of the month hasn't hit shelves yet

It's a shame because the art style attractively breaks away from the typical anime-esque lines and also sports some gorgeous animated cutscenes more interesting than the game itself. Despite these meager positives, there's nothing to recommend it outside of the fact that it's an RPG on the PSP.

Sadly, I couldn't get past the use of the stylus on what is supposed to be the main event.

Parts of LostMagic are brilliant. But that brilliance gets bogged down in physical awkwardness and bad artificial intelligence.

As an admirer of all things unusual and unusually entertaining, Rico's bizarre parachute tricks justify the four to six hours it takes to complete the campaign, but once the novelty wears off, there's not much here to merit a second glance that hasn't been done better by other games - mission accomplished, but just barely.

Although it acts as a wonderful selling point for anyone considering developing an FPS for the Wii, Red Steel is too much of an unsatisfying tease to succeed as much else.

There is simply no way to play this game comfortably while turning and moving forward.

I hope that Nintendo sees the error of its ways soon and pulls Fox & Co. out of this interminable nosedive.

I can understand the logic in trying to craft a sequel that does more than its source material, but the end result is that Mercury Meltdown lacks the simplicity and clean design needed to establish itself as a solid puzzler.

Everything except Altair's athletics feels underdeveloped and painfully shallow, making the end result an overhyped attempt to recoup the development costs for something that's little more than an extended tech demo.

In short, I was satisfied with the game, but not overly impressed. The faint thrill of Jedi-dom was indeed there, but in the end it's just another action game in a vast, overflowing ocean of them.

Although Borderlands seemed ready to be one of the next big things, the overwhelming focus on grinding and gun-collecting can't carry the entire game, in either co-op or single-player.

There is inspiration underlying this game; it's just too bad the promising first thirty minutes wind up buried under hours and hours of mediocrity.

Although I got a few good laughs out of the first hour or so, the appeal of calling men in turbans "bitches" while plowing through repetitive environments ran out long before the credits rolled. I walked away from the game bored and left it unfinished, having no regrets.

Being average isn't a bullet-point for the back of a box, and if someone's going to play a potentially punishing, definitely repetitive roguelike, I can't imagine that they'd want to put that kind of serious effort out for something that's just average, at best.

All in all, Luminous Arc 2 is a game that feels like it should've been a manga or anime instead.

Although the mechanics are nothing revolutionary, I will say that I appreciated the graphics for their old-school flavor and intense pan-Asian iconography.

With the whole formula on display in the first hour and no real surprises or variation to look forward to, the golden premise and clever situations can't save My World, My Way from being a shallow, incredibly repetitive experience that could have been much, much more.

Shattered Memories is an uneven mess, most favorably described as a kernel of greatness wrapped in a husk of wrong-headed design and iffy implementation.

At the end of the day Vertigo seems to be a decent core idea for a game wrapped in a lackluster package. There have been other successful games in this genre but for me, Vertigo doesn't live up to that legacy.

For those who thrive solely off of the thrills of putting points into stats and watching numbers go up, Hexyz Force leaves little to be desired. For the rest of us, Hexyz Force has equally little to offer.

It's not a terrible bargain and certainly not the outright robbery that some DLC can be at times, but Return to Ostagar can't compare with the quality of The Stone Prisoner or Warden's Keep DLC missions.

As a side-story to the series, The Conspiracy falls utterly flat—so it's lucky that it fares much better as a game than as a spin-off.

Players who enjoy the adventure genre in its most traditional format will likely be pleased with Secret Files: Tunguska, but my take is that this type of approach is simply past its time.

Although I can genuinely say that I have great affection for the Disgaea characters and I had a blast going through the game once, the drive to unlock every ending evaporated almost immediately. Watching a game made of cut-scenes isn't bad if they make you laugh and bring a smile to your face, but watching the same scenes over and over and over and over and over because you can't figure out how to get to the new ones isn't an appealing proposition.

Let's Tap!, with its bright, accessible aesthetic and peppy, J-pop soundtrack, has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, I can only evaluate the game as it exists, and Let's Tap! has a few shortcomings too many to wholeheartedly recommend.

After playing through both The Signal and The Writer, the biggest impression I'm left with is that these two chunks of game (hateful combat aside) are better than anything that came on Alan Wake's retail disc. They illustrate Alan as a character, they immerse him in a world of his own internal madness, and they play to the strength of the premise in a way that actually makes sense. I can honestly say that if these levels had been included in the main campaign, my overall evaluation would've been significantly higher.

Rather than representing a revitalization of the Sonic brand, Sonic 4 is a failed, desperate grasp at recapturing its former glory.

Breach isn't terrible, but I don't see anything here that hasn't already be done better by another game, resulting in an instant recipe for mediocrity.

Venetica has a few good ideas and a couple of characters that deserve further examination, but it just doesn't seem to be at all interested in them. That, I suppose, is why I wasn't all that interested by Venetica, either. Ratin

All I can think about is its similarity to FF7, and how stale and unoriginal the whole experience is. This game is such a rip-off of Square's FF7 that I can't believe Sony hasn't been taken to court for copyright infringement.

It never builds on the gameplay or aesthetic qualities of Doom in any meaningful way—it’s merely content to cover the same old ground and hope no one notices.

Under pressure of shapes coming at the block from multiple sides, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between the bluish-green hexagon and the greenish-blue hexagon, and to position them accordingly.

It seems a shame that this inferior sequel makes us all take turns.

So the game doesn't have any real characters at all, the graphics are nothing special, and the story actually gets in the way of the gameplay... Now if someone would just make a game where these wonderful play mechanics made some sort of logical sense, we'd be cooking with gas.

If Quantum Redshift achieves anything, it’s to make us aware that this genre is in serious need of some new ideas.

It is a mere sheep in wolves clothing that uses only the most socially timid and comfortable clichés like cigarettes-for-trade and prison escape maps to paint a PG-rated teen-friendly novelty amusement park interpretation of prison life.

Another shortcoming is that the game's world is relatively engaging with its cotton candy color scheme and map hinting at tons of locations to explore, and yet the real world of the game is little more than a series of interconnected pathways with arbitrary roadblocks to keep players progressing in the most linear fashion possible.

Just a decent sci-fi story mixed with some rather unambitious gameplay. Nothing is done gratingly poorly, but neither is anything done with any sense of innovation or panache.

Heck, if this game had been released in 1996, it would have been a classic. But it was about eight years too late, and ends up only being good enough not to be a complete wash up.

Enemies in Return from Darkness are dumb. They're not so bad at visually spotting a character, but when it comes to chasing a spotted ninja down, they suck.

The game's aesthetic design choices are great, for the most part, but they can't entirely overcome the clunky control system and overly simplistic A.I.

The bottom line is that Resident Evil Zero's title perfectly describes the content and play value of the game itself.

Maybe this DX is redefining film grammar for videogames. Because in this case, director's cut means the same damn thing, complete with glitches and issues of the first game.

Developers looking to break into the platform genre these days have to go above and beyond the standard requirements while completely nailing the technical side at the same time, which is no easy feat. Billy Hatcher is a perfect example of a title that fails on both counts.

The potential of a ghostly character capable of leaping from soldier to soldier, causing chaos in the middle of a firefight has barely been scratched, not to mention the poltergeist scenarios that could be crafted around possessing exploding lightbulbs, flying bedsheets, rattling pots and pans, or any number of other things that could be employed for the purpose of haunting.

The game is perfectly, almost proverbially, meh.

Fans of hand cramp-inducing button mashing or extensive weapon combos might find a lot to like here, but for everyone else there's just a pretty face and some scattered body parts.

Efforts to align Moon Diver's classic gameplay with an environment 20 years removed from its progenitor have only done it harm. The greatest shame is that the game did not fall victim to the caprice of an indifferent natural order; Moon Diver is betrayed by the deliberate adaptations of rational designers.

It's not that Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is a worse game than the first Lego game I played. It is, however, the same game, which means that the wonder is gone for me. Pirates of the Caribbean is still magical in a way, but I've seen all these tricks before.