Deadliest Catch: The Game is dull, hard to operate and looks awful. Most importantly, the way that the controls operate manage to suck what little fun going crabbing has out of the game. The result is a mess that you would do well to avoid.
Jurassic Pinball offers up a depressingly bland pinball table with almost no redeeming features. Aside from the fact that the delays and dodgy physics are such that your turns will be over very quickly.
Hunt Ducks 4 is a racket, a grift. The developers have carefully peeled the label off of Hunt Ducks II’s bottle and then sold it again as Hunt Ducks 4 instead.
You could viably use Ground War: Tank Battle as a form of torture. Whisper “120 levels of tank-battling action” in our ear and we’ll spasm to the floor, the trauma of multiple hours with it still fresh in our memory.
In the past few months, we’ve experienced a traffic jam of top-down racers. And right at the back, way behind the rest of them, is Retro Pixel Racers. It offers no excuses: it flicks the bird as it passes, with no multiplayer, no game modes, no track variation and a top-speed just north of a shopping trolley.
There are people who will be suckered into Doodle Escape: Room Escape Game, like a moth to a 79p flame. We get it: they can barely feel the money leaving their bank account. But we worry about them: we worry about their wellbeing, should they play it, because it achieves a level of frustration that causes physical pain. It’s gaming tinnitus.
What a hollow carcass of a game MiniGolf Tour is. Fourteen holes. No ability to play multiplayer, local or online. Nothing to do but hit the ball hard down grassy corridors, and the grotesque remains of a monetisation store still just-about breathing, offering you cosmetics that you can’t show to anyone. ‘Mini’ golf is correct, but it’s giving it too much credit. ‘Mangled Golf’ better covers it.
Gallic Wars: Battle Simulator is a game that takes an interesting idea and smothers it under a pile of bad controls, dubious design decisions and poor gameplay. If you like Asterix, or strategy games, I can’t recommend this game to you.
At the start of Alfonzo’s Arctic Adventure, it’s not quite clear where Bob, the ‘damsel in distress’, went. We can imagine him walking away sheepishly, looking back at the puzzle-platformer he was leaving behind and sighing, sadly. That’s because this arctic adventure is a dismal, weary one, and Bob’s only option was to never think about it again.
Whenever and wherever gold is found in the world, the mining folk home in. This surge of people, upon the unearthing of gold, is known as a gold rush. There’s also a popular reality TV show on the Discovery channel called Gold Rush, which follows the exploits of mining companies looking to make a fortune. Given its sheer popularity, a mining simulation game has arrived in the form of Gold Rush: The Game and now you too can reap the rewards of being a miner. Will you strike gold with a purchase of Gold Rush: The Game, or is it just pure dirt that only brings disappointment?
Visually it looks bad, the controls are shonky, and rarely can any fun be had. A lack of tutorials, confusing menus, and errors popping up all over the place sees Heliborne spiralling to earth, totally out of control. If you are a fan of helicopter games, after playing this, you won’t be.
Boom Blaster on Xbox left a bad taste in the mouth. In fact, the only blasting I wanted to do by the end of it, was blasting this game off my hard-drive. Don’t bother picking this one up, because it’s frankly unplayable. There are far too many issues to overlook and it’s an all-round horrible experience.
Another Dawn on Xbox is a very strange game; one that could have been a decent survival-based first-person shooter but fast turns into a mess due to bad mechanics and awful gameplay - it goes wrong from the first minute and you’ll need a whole host of willpower to even attempt to carry on past that moment.
Air Bounce – The Jump ‘n’ Run Challenge on Xbox should be avoided at all costs. An already challenging platformer is made unnecessarily difficult with the X and Y axis being far too sensitive, and then made a complete joke with inconsistencies in almost every department.
Teratopia on Xbox is a gross, poorly optimized, poorly designed, and disastrous product. I regularly have more fun with the mazes on the back of cereal boxes. Maybe if there were some kind of actual direction, it could have been a fun little 3D something. Instead, Teratopia is yet another example of a weird name being tied to a horrendous game.
Drunken Fist is built on a very thin foundation, executed in poor taste, and poorly created in general. It's very much what I imagine a drunken brawl to be like. Slow, painful and not particularly enjoyed by anyone.
