As great as it looks, EA Sports UFC fails to capture the high stakes excitement that makes MMA such a great sport.
There's definitely some decent meat to chew on in The Division, but it's usually surrounded by too much gristle to enjoy it for long. Both in combat and out, there are some clearly good ideas, especially the tense and dangerous Dark Zone. But they're not spread evenly or interwoven cleanly enough to form a cohesive, consistently enjoyable loop. Ultimately, The Division's overly busy, conflicted design philosophies drown its best ingredients in a bland slurry that never quite comes together into a cohesive dish.
A lot of effort was clearly put into Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, because almost every aspect of its gameplay has an underlying set of properties and nuances to come to grips with. While I usually love that kind of complexity, here it rarely felt meaningful or even coherent. Paired with a story that lacks the stakes and urgency of the source material, it leaves Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization feeling pretty tepid aside from its enjoyable combat.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China does a lot of the hard stuff well, but can't convey the rush of being an assassin.
LocoCycle earns its name with a metric ton of crazy, but its inconsistent, monotonous gameplay ultimately derails it.
Short on content, and long on grinding, The Dark Below fails to meaningfully enhance the Destiny experience.
While the gameplay foundation here is still competent, Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India just finds too many petty, annoying ways to keep me from truly enjoying it.
Underground delivers a streamlined Division experience, but nothing new enough to warrant the grind that comes with it.
Despite its pedigree, Mighty No. 9 doesn't seem to have a good sense of what was fun about Mega Man, or 2D action-platformers in general. There are brief moments where its pieces come together, but even then it's hamstrung by its visually joyless art and animation. The soul of the Blue Bomber just isn't here, and worse yet there's no endearing personality of its own, and as a result, Mighty No. 9 feels much more like a second-rate imposter than a spiritual successor.
Liberation HD is a better way to see Aveline's story, but it's still riddled with too many issues to be enjoyable.
Despite a great cast of characters, J-Stars Victory Vs.+ fails to leverage their charm on or off the battlefield.
With weak combat, useless violence, and pay-to-win multiplayer, Devil's Third is not worth your time.
I am certainly not immune to the charms of 80s and 90s game design, but the NES version of Double Dragon wasn’t a great example for Double Dragon 4 to follow. It’s not just that this simplistic beat-em-up formula didn’t age well graphically or mechanically, it’s that it simply isn’t very fun or engaging to play in 2017.
Blue Estate is a by-the-numbers rail shooter with gameplay that's just as outdated as its social politics.
Shallow, unresponsive, and unoriginal, The Fighter Within embodies the worst of what Kinect has to offer.
Battlezone looks good and controls well, but offline there’s nothing to think about besides shoot, shoot, shoot, which in this case just doesn’t provide enough of a good time to be enjoyable for long.