The blandness of the gameplay might have been somewhat forgivable if the game’s narrative didn’t suffer from an identity crisis.

Everything truly good in Marvel’s Avengers is compromised by its mercenary feature set.

Players would be better off firing up their Hulu apps if they want to get a sense of Samurai Jack’s breadth and wonder.

Even when Fall Guys is working perfectly as intended—no server issues, quick matchmaking, good teammates, balanced levels—its appeal is limited.

These survival horror sequences are neither scary nor fun, and the most challenging thing about them, beyond their forcing you to try to auto-adjust your aim in order to account for the stuttering lag in the frame rate, is how you have to push past boredom. Consider, then, these sequences not so much a premonition but a warning born of experience: Turn back all who enter here, for there is nothing good awaiting within.

Irritating though they may be, few of these problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative. But like countless other pretty games trading on emotion, Röki drones on about feelings, namely grief—all of it documented in Tove’s illustrated journal, and complete with occasional asides about Dead Mom or Sad Dad. Repressed memories, shadow selves, and mysterious environmental sicknesses rear their tired heads. Beyond the trappings of Scandinavian myth, there’s precious little to set Röki apart in an already overcrowded space.

It retreads the same ground of the prior games’ fetch-quest-driven, backtracking-filled action-adventuring.

The original game’s cast of characters already lacked personality, and the new visual redesign is most successful at bringing that deficiency into sharper relief.

Take away the characters, myths, and other connections to the Dark Crystal universe and it’s easy to see that Age of Resistance Tactics has no real identity of its own.

The game’s themes feel like facile wallpaper over mechanics that feed into the ideas being critiqued.

Breakpoint’s fixed nature is at direct odds with its open-world design, and ultimately results in a game that less about realism than it is about imposing limits.

Perhaps its efforts to fit in with the big dogs of the gaming world would be more tolerable if there were more variety to its challenges.

All that’s cool about flying a giant world-saving robot has been executed in the most leaden, user-unfriendly, nonsensical manner possible.

Not only does Blair Witch cheapen the idea that a dog is man’s best friend, it also falls apart like a cheap chew toy.

Even when the game isn’t actively shooting itself in the foot, it never entirely succeeds.

As the game never really switches up its formula, it’s not long before fatigue sets in.

The game’s first-person-shooter sequences aren’t just dull and familiar, but also clunky, given the touchy VR controls.

It experiments with all the weakest parts of the series and ties them together with a new, tedious progression system.

So much of the game feels only slightly more cohesive than someone scribbling the word “depression” over, say, a picture of a person being eaten by a shark.

The similarities between SolSeraph and ActRaiser are unmistakable, but it’s a joyless facsimile that lacks a single spark of innovation.

Even the few inventive stretches of the game are ultimately driven into the ground by a punishing sense of repetition.

The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience.

Though it’s abundant in hyper-realistic visuals, that isn’t enough to disguise its lack of polish in almost every other way.

Its boss fights highlight the contrived lengths that FromSoftware has gone to in order to satisfy players’ thirst for difficulty.

If New Dawn is as mute and monotonous about the issues that led to the nuclear war and the philosophies that shape its vision of America, that’s because it’s only interested in serving up a gamified version of survival, logic be damned.

It doesn't matter how cool an individual set piece looks if all the smaller scenes leading up to it are marred by unresponsive vehicles, dumb AI, and shoddy physics.

There's little to love about Darksiders III, even for longtime fans.

Imagine reaching the final minutes of an hour-long mission only for your connection to drop and, in turn, your progress to be lost. Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.