Extinction feels like it was onto something great. Fighting monsters that tower above you, soaring through the air and grappling around, but it falls flat in about the same amount of time it takes a giant to knock down a building.
Darksiders 3 has heart, but a lot of the organs around it are failing, detracting from the experience. So much has been stripped away from the other Darksiders games, making it far too easy to stare at the flaws.
Despite going to Mars and robots and aliens and lasers, Lost on Mars is so pedestrian and does nothing new with the setting besides a few platforming puzzles. Saving the world feels rather dull in a desert on Mars.
Fallout 76 added survival and multiplayer elements to the game at the cost of pretty much everything that drew players to Fallout in the first place. No NPCs or dialogue trees leaves the game feeling empty and sterile, with exploration eventually feeling pointless as your tiny inventory and stash hit maximum weight.
The game as it stands is not worth the money or frustration of sitting in a matchmaking queue again and again and again, only to have error messages pop up.
Warhammer Chaosbane looks every bit like a hack and slash contender but misses too many of the nuances that make other games in the genre fun and addictive.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 feels a lot like opening a time capsule. It has so much in common with games from a decade ago that it might have been released back then. Fun moments are there to be found if you don't mind fighting a camera, frame-rate stutter and sifting through menus and load screens as you fight wave after wave of hard-hitting health sponges.
Rage 2's greatest system gets bogged down by a middling experience, making for a forgettable trip through an open world that looks like it came straight out of something a decade old.
Anthem has moments that shine out and feel amazing, but you have to push through too much drudgery to reach those moments.
Sword Legacy Omen has some solid ideas, mechanics and graphics, but gets let down by its levelling system and an inability to undo earlier skill decisions. Some characters end up feeling like permanent fixtures, while others slowly lose their usefulness as you fight enemies with instakill abilities and far too much health. A game with a strong start that loses its way.
If it has the letters RPG in it, I am there. Still battling with balancing trying to play every single game that grabs my interest, getting 100% in a JRPG, and devoting time to my second home in Azeroth.
Gravel takes a fun experience and makes it feel dull with lacklustre AI and a vehicle unlock system that removes any joy from getting a new car.
Star Wars Battlefront II suffers from not knowing where it wants to spend its time and resources. It tries to cover too many time periods and too many battles and ends up boxing itself in a corner due to a tie in with a movie that only releases in a month's time.
For me, it is a losing battle. What started off fun has become shallow, repetitive and sorely lacking in content
Cuphead may look like a fun cartoony platformer, but be ready for the teeth to be bared and your patience to be slowly gnawed away.
This could have been the feather in the Switch's cap, showing that a game as graphically demanding as DOOM could be tinkered with to run on a portable platform. It nearly does, but too much is lost in the execution.
Conan Unconquered presents some cool ideas but doesn't provide enough weight or substance to keep you coming back for more punishment.
Guacamelee 2 gets lost trying to be too edgy, too funny and referential, falling into the pitfalls it tries to mock. Fun combat and smooth platforming lose their energy when you don't unlock any more abilities and end up doing exactly what you did in the first game.
Come for the VHS horror, stay for the twitchy line of sight strafing shooting as you take on armed forces in an experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong. GARAGE: Bad Trip is a B-movie, right to the dialogue and tongue-in-cheek humour.
Strange Brigade's humour and witty writing have a lot of charm, but some camera issues bland boss fights and inconsistent gunplay take away from the experience, leaving it as something fun to do with friends while turning into a slow grind alone.