Authenticity comes at a price—Star Wars: Battlefront is beautiful but makes too many mistakes when it comes to maps, balancing and spawning. These issues cause anger, and anger leads to hate.
While the atmosphere in Fort Solis is excellent, backed by great visuals and understated horror, the ambiguous story, poor ending, and cumbersome interaction means that this walking adventure does not always put its best foot forward.
Although faithful to the 1997 movie, Starship Troopers: Terran Command as an RTS is not consistently enjoyable. Despite some good defensive sequences, its path-finding issues, bland missions, and excessive micromanagement bury some of the fun.
Despite the alluring and violent art, Happy Game is dragged down by simple and random puzzles, annoying screen flashes, and awkward interactions.
Torchlight 3 is a passable action RPG with decently crispy combat and satisfactory classes. But the workmanlike boss runs, unexciting gear, dull story, bizarre Fort design, and multiplayer issues all keep it below both its predecessors and competitors.
Peregrin's simplistic puzzles, technical quirks, and uninteresting combat hold back an adequate tale of a hero's desolate journey into a lost and fractured land.
FlatOut 4: Total Insanity is a valiant effort and a modestly satisfactory sequel. Its track design and relative speeds help make it a much better destructive racer than the last effort. However, it still requires tuning when it comes to stunts, visuals, physics, and vehicle damage.
Despite some witty dialogue and a few poignant moments, OXENFREE II: Lost Signals is an unexciting talkie-walkie with conversation interruptions and dull gameplay.
With a slightly different driving model, that is less enjoyable, and a severe lack of new content, WRC Generations is not much more than a compilation of previous entries with a different coat of paint.
While the bunker in Paradise Lost is interesting to explore at first, it is not packed with enough narrative content to match its ostentatious surrounds. This brief walking adventure quickly becomes frustrating as you wait for the mostly unsatisfying story to reveal itself.
Maid of Sker is a competent horror adventure where the player explores a well-designed 19th-century hotel. But its clumsy stealth, forgettable puzzles, and lukewarm scares prevent it from hitting the high notes.
Victor Vran offers basic dungeon crawling action with limited replay value. The online portion may be enough to sustain some players.
Alien: Isolation could have been a superb experience if some components were better balanced or removed. There is still enough tension to make you fear the dark.
Children of Silentown is a nice-looking but bland adventure game due to basic puzzles and mundane objectives, although its second half shows more potential.
Although lacking refinement, Winter Ember is an adequate isometric stealth game that might spark joy for fans of the Thief franchise. With a more robust story, tidier stealth, and narrowed focus, Arthur might have given Garrett a run for his stolen loot.
DIRT 5 takes the series back to a more arcade style but the career lacks variety, the vehicle handling is often sluggish, and the basic multiplayer setup is a discouragement. Without a rally mode, the only strong feature is the ability to make and share tracks, but that is not enough to stave off some technical issues.
Conarium's fascinating world is closely based on a Lovecraft story, taking players through ancient tombs abandoned for eons. The adventure puzzles are a bit too simple and its rough edges needed smoothing, but it is still a faithful adaption.
Even with the Exo Suit, the campaign is more derivative than any previous Call of Duty game. The multiplayer action is frenetic, but various shortcomings prevent it being a leap forward.
Despite its wonderful atmosphere and interesting locations, Alan Wake 2 is a middling third-person survival-horror game with sluggish pacing, a lackluster Mind Place feature, and lazy jump-scares, too concerned about being obscure and filling itself with quirky meta-references.
Battlefield 2042 changes the franchise formula considerably but brings no real improvements. While it has added flexibility with specialists and the Portal mode, the balance issues, poor maps, technical problems, and missing features keep it from reaching the heights of its predecessors.