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The game is a bloated monolith that, much like the WWE itself, is due for a much-needed shake-up.
The game's propensity for indulging counterintuitive elements feels like a willful act of self-sabotage.
The sorry "story" segments largely amount to random combinations of the four main characters trading bad jokes, such as running the difference between "who" and "whom" into the ground.
Because creativity comes at the cost of cohesion, the whole adventure turns into one irritating mini-game.
Even at only three-to-four hours in length, Submerged feels padded.
It's interested only in presenting a near-pornographic level of human despair in a warped attempt at edifying players.
It may be a less refined iteration of a Hitman game, but the delivery of its rote narrative is sometimes innovative.
The puzzles often require the player to merely regurgitate a pattern from one part of the world to another.
The cluelessness-as-heroism and over-the-top fighting don't fulfill or complement the infectiously positive tone.
Unfortunately, Sileni Studios, in attempting to present something deeper and more original than your run-of-the-mill artillery title, has painted itself into a corner.
The tiring exposition of the writing and the lack of visual coherence to the storytelling are obvious from the start.
A digital conversion of a physical game is worthwhile, but it might have been best to leave this one on the tabletop.
The game fails to satisfy the natural urge to explore a three-dimensional realm of seemingly endless possibilities.
There may be a good game buried under Gearbox Software's first attempt at a MOBA, but too many of its systems are developmentally in their infancy.
These mechanics aren't broken so much as literally insane, in the sense that each chapter requires you to do the exact same things, somehow expecting different results.
The monotonous clear-this-room-to-move-forward progression speaks volumes as to how much thought went into the structure of Yaiba's core mechanics.
In a year that the Wii U gifted us with Mario Kart 8 and Bayonetta 2, games that displayed what the system could do graphically, Rise of Lyric's graphics are simply unacceptable in 2014.
Creators like Chmielarz need an obvious symbol of false hope to sell (not articulate) their trendy nihilism that, if anything, should vanish.
Neither the artificial screen glare nor actress Viva Seifert's performance lend credibility to the game's lady-psychopath clichés.
We're meant to believe that solving the mystery of the Bell Killer would redeem Ronan and allow him the peace to move on, but nothing about the game gives the impression that he deserves it.