PlayMagic's XIII may get better after several patches, but right now it's a broken, buggy mess that plays like a generic shooter and looks worse than the 2003 original. If you really want to play XIII, go play that instead.
Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance has good ideas, but poor enemy variety, samey levels, bad puzzles, a shockingly poor story, the lack of local co-op, several quality-of-life issues, and numerous bugs that affect every aspect of the game make it hard to recommend to anyone, no matter how much they like the source material.
Daymare has some good ideas, but it has too many flaws to do anything besides remind survival horror fans of better games.
Fade To Silence's cool weather system and interesting ideas can't make up for a derivative combat system, samey open world design, poor story, and several severe bugs. This is an adventure you won't want to survive.
In an era of standout fighting games, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT's lack of content and character customization and mediocre gameplay mark a step down from previous games in the series and an unacceptable lack of effort from Square Enix. Fans of Dissidia should stick with the PSP games. They're better.
Mighty No. 9 is not a good video game. It's is loaded down with lots of cool ideas that it never fully explores, and frankly it feels unfinished, unpolished, and unplaytested. It has potential, but right now this game serves as a warning about the dangers of stretch goals and crowdfunding, and only the most die-hard Mega Man fans will find something worthwhile here. Everyone else is better off sticking with the Blue Bomber.
The irony is that Aspyr has done a nice job with remastering the visuals in both games and we enjoyed seeing the results. But the reality is that these games often feel old, they're extremely buggy, and the online play is hit-and-miss. This should have been a slam dunk. Instead, playing Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection made us feel sad. If Aspyr can fix the slew of technical issues, this might one day be worth picking up on Switch. Until that happens, though, the Force isn't with this one.
NBA Live 2014 marks EA's return to the basketball sim, but there's little reason to play it when NBA 2K14 exists.
When everything clicks, Anthem is great. But it is a game with major flaws, and how much you enjoy it will depend on both your ability to tolerate them and BioWare's ability to fix them.
When Verdun works, the mixture of tension and uniqueness it provides is unlike anything else and utterly engaging. Too often, however, the game gets in its own way, either due to technical issues or poor design decisions. It’s an incredibly interesting and unique game, but its tedium and technical issues should be considered before you enter its trenches.
EA Sports UFC will undoubtedly appeal to fans of MMA, but a convoluted control scheme, poor tutorials, few modes of play, bad acting, and an offensive use of DLC make this a game for hardcore fans only.
NHL 15 may be a step forward in terms of gameplay and presentation, but it's a step back in nearly every other way. New players and those dedicated to the franchise will probably find something to like here, but everyone else will be left with a huge sense of missed opportunity.
Toren is an imaginative game with an interesting narrative and beautiful game world. For every moment of striking art or good design, however, there's something wrong with the game technically or in terms of its moment to moment gameplay. Ultimately, like Moonchild herself, Toren would have benefitted from a bit more time in the tower, exploring its own design and ideas before rushing to the top. There's very few things that are more ironic than a game that plays with the notion of time feeling incomplete.
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Zoe may be the chosen one destined to save the world, but the game around her never really feels like it's convinced of it — or itself. And if you can’t persuade yourself of the story you’re telling, it’s damn hard to convince anyone else.
Street Rumble isn’t terrible, but it’s not good either. Sure, it looks good, but the music is boring, the gameplay is bog standard, it has serious design flaws, and in a lot of cases, it just isn’t interesting. Yeah, there’s an arcade mode, boss rush, and so on, but you need to beat the story mode to unlock them, and if I hadn’t been playing this for review, I would have stopped around thirty minutes in. Beat ‘em up fans deserve better. Licensed games deserve better. And The Karate Kid deserves better than to be resurrected as a coat of paint used to gussy up a mediocre beat ‘em up.
Grime is a beautiful, well-designed, challenging game with a ton of content, but it runs extremely poorly on Switch, to the extent that it's hard to recommend this version of the game if you can get it on another platform. It's disappointing, because Grime does so much right, and developer Clover Bite has clearly put a lot of love into it over the years. But all of that love can't save an action game that just doesn't run well. In this genre, that's a deal-breaker. It's a shame Grime's Switch debut is so rocky, because playing as a rock creature with a black hole doubling as its cranium is really cool. Don't get us wrong: Grime is playable on Switch, but until (or if) things get ironed out with updates, this brutal world is one you might want to avoid.
Wild Blue Skies is a decent rail shooter when it finds the courage to be itself, but too often it’s simply Star Fox 64 But Worse – worse flying, worse story, worse difficulty tuning.
Painkiller is a game about nothing for no one, a mediocre resurrection of a classic trying to put a new cover on an old book and hoping it still has some relevance 21 years later
Star Trek: Infinite does a great job of capturing the look and feel of Star Trek, but those enticing bones splinter under the weight of its bugs and glitches.