The Assassin’s Creed franchise has spent much of the past decade as one of the poster children of everything wrong with Triple-A gaming and because of that, it’s easy to forget just how bold and unique of a game the first Assassin’a Creed game was. Sure, parts of it are similar to games that came before — Tenchu, Prince of Persia, Thief, and even Sly Cooper are all obvious reference points — but the sum of those parts was unlike anything else at the time. There wasn’t exactly an abundance of historical/sci-fi open-world stealth-action games with a focus on parkour and social stealth, is all I’m saying. Assassin’s Creed was also one of the first true “next-gen” games of the 7th generation. It would’ve been close to impossible to do what this game did, at the scale it did, on 6th gen hardware.

All of that being said, how does the game actually play? Not great. It’s extremely rough around the edges, and there are a lot of edges here. Playing this game can feel a bit like you’re stuck in a Groundhog Day loop with the amount of times you’ll be doing the same copy-pasted missions over and over again. The combat never presents much of a challenge and doesn’t evolve much throughout the game, the AI is brain dead, and the modern day sections are by far the worst parts of the game.

Even if much of the actual moment-to-moment gameplay isn’t exactly good, there’s still quite a lot to like here. The Holy Land is lovingly detailed and can be a lot of fun to parkour around. The story is a bit of a mess, but Altaïr is a compelling protagonist with a good character arc. The parkour and social stealth are well implemented, and the music is really good. Assassin’s Creed was a big swing for Ubisoft, and while they didn’t hit it out of the park it provided an excellent concept to build on and plenty of potential to grow. For a time, its sequels began to live up to that potential, which makes it all the more disappointing when this series began wasting that potential.

Bulletstorm has aged worse for me than any other game. I first played Bulletstorm back when I was a high school freshman and loved it. At the time, it was everything I wanted in a shooter. A decade passes and I decide to buy the remaster, thinking it’d be fun to revisit one of my favorite 7th gen shooters, only to feel nothing but utter betrayal. The game I remembered being colorful, fast-paced, charming, and unique was actually this ugly, boring slog with godawful dialogue. I felt betrayed by my own memories, I couldn’t believe there had been a point in my life where I had actually liked this game.

One of Bulletstorm’s biggest sins is how it absolutely wastes the voice talents of Steve Blum and Jennifer Hale. Both actors have done extensive work in children’s media, yet Bulletstorm’s script might be the single most juvenile thing either of them have ever recorded. It’s nothing but ‘shit fuck ass balls’ from the moment the game starts to the moment the credits roll. This shit makes Borderlands dialogue look like Disco Elysium.

Above all else, Bulletstorm is just lacking in any real creativity. The skillshot system seems fun at first, until you realize just how little opportunity you’re given to experiment with them so you’ll just be doing the same basic ones over and over and over again. Aside from that, It’s the same basic 7th gen shooter you’ve played a million of that Bulletstorm promoted itself as the ‘wild and crazy’ alternative to.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with this game and its sequel. As a kid, I was a huge Sonic fan and the Sonic Adventure duology were two of my most played childhood games because I was just so enamored with their music, characters, and general aesthetic. I also never actually beat them until adulthood because I would invariably reach a part where I stopped having fun and turned the game off. While I hesitate to call Sonic Adventure 2 bad because there is so much I genuinely love about it, I don’t have that same hesitancy with Sonic Adventure 1 because I think this game feels like total shit to play. I do commend Sonic Team for what they were able to achieve with this game because there truly was no blueprint for what they were doing, but they still made a bad game.

There is genuinely so little that I like about what this game does beyond its music and aesthetic. Instead of picking one central idea and sticking with it to the end, Sonic Adventure has so many half-baked ideas (sometimes quarter-baked) it throws at you with little regard to how they fit together or if they actually even work properly. The best thing I can say about Sonic Adventure is that the stuff everybody complains about isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, but I can’t say any of that stuff is actually good. Like, sure, the hate for the Big the Cat fishing minigame is extremely overblown, but no matter what defense you can conjure up for it I don’t understand how you could walk away from it saying that it was fun. I’ve said before that I can understand how most Sonic game could be someone’s favorite, and that includes Sonic Adventure. There is some genuinely good stuff here (keyword here being ‘some’) and I think video games as a medium would be worse off if this game didn’t exist. But everytime I play it, I don’t see a gem that’s rough around the edges, but an overly ambitious game that I wish was far better than it is.

Minit’s obvious inspirations are the 2D Zelda games, but what it actually reminds me of most is Half-Minute Hero on the PSP, a game with a similar premise but applied to a JRPG rather than a Zelda-style adventure and with an even shorter time limit. Minit demands you memorize where everything is and the fastest way to get there, and it’s refreshing to see a game that trusts the player to figure everything out themselves, even if some of the puzzles here showed a bit too much trust in that regard. Minit’s real downfall is that while it is a very charming game with a neat premise, it isn’t much more than that. There isn’t much going on here, and having to traverse the same areas over and over again when most of them don’t have anything worth seeing got a bit tiring, even considering the game’s breezy length. After beating it, I couldn’t help but feel that Minit was a bit of a hollow experience.

This one was a disappointment. Control has a premise with boatloads of potential, with it essentially being a big budget take on an SCP Foundation game, but it just doesn’t reach that potential. Combat starts out fine enough but it eventually gets more than a bit tiring once you reach your fifth hour of mowing down not particularly interesting enemies with not particularly interesting weapons and not particularly interesting powers. There is a level of fun inherent to hovering around the battlefield and grabbing chunks out of the surroundings to telepathically hurl them at enemies, but the thrill is gone very quickly. Considering this is the same studio that made Max Payne, one of the greatest shooters of all time, the combat on display here is a giant let-down. You’ve also got a ton of really boring side missions to make your way through, and I’d recommend skipping them unless you really want to get ability points to fill out an extremely uninspiring skill tree.

While we’re talking about things this game does worse than Max Payne, the writing here is pretty weak. I really wanted to like Jesse Faden, the main character, but she’s like if the color beige was person. No wit or charm or anything sort of personality about her. She shares Max Payne’s affection for internal monologue but unlike Max she forgets to say anything interesting. Though I can’t be too hard on her, because so did the rest of the game’s cast. The only character here I actually grew to somewhat like is one you see exclusively through video tapes. The lore about this foundation you find yourself in hints at some really interesting stuff but only just hints, as the game seems more preoccupied with being mysterious than with actually giving you anything of substance.

As for some positives, Control is a very pretty game. The environmental destruction here is great, and if you’re a fan of brutalist architecture and liminal spaces you’re going to love this game’s style. Aside from that, Control gets a big ‘ol “meh” from me. I really wanted to like Control, I pushed through it hoping to find the game that everyone else had played back in 2019, the one that had received so much hype and acclaim. Instead all I’m left with is a forgettable game that wastes an incredible concept. Hopefully Remedy does better with Control 2, whenever that finally comes out.

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how this game made them cry, which makes me a bit wary of being too harsh on it. It can really suck to see someone trash on something that really, genuinely touched you and made you feel seen, and far be it from me to take that away from anybody. Maybe the narrative at play here is worth the hype, but this isn’t just a narrative, it’s a video game and as a video game this one of the worst I’ve played in a while. Buddy Simulator 1984 tries its hand at several different things and fails at all of them. It’s a horror game that isn’t scary, it’s a comedy that isn’t funny, it’s an Undertale-like that doesn’t display even a quarter of the talent Toby Fox has in just his pinkies. This game doesn’t even have the decency to give you any half-decent character designs to look at. I really tried, but I can’t find any sort of saving grace or redeeming value here, it’s just a miserable experience all around.

I might be rating this one on a bit of a curve since it’s a licensed game based on a franchise I really love, but this is one of my favorite games of the 7th gen. It’s the kind of Transformers game I’d been dreaming of since I was a kid, putting you into the mechanical shoes of the Autobots and Decepticons during the final days of the civil war that devastated Cybertron.

Fall of Cybertron is the best kind of licensed game, one that is elevated by its license instead of feeling shackled to it. It’s a really solid third-person shooter that shows genuine appreciation for Transformers that takes a bit of a darker approach to its narrative while not going overboard with it. The game does a great job making each character you play as feel different, and any shooter that has dash gets extra kudos from me. With excellent level design, great mission variety, and a fun (now defunct) multiplayer suite, I feel comfortable stating that Fall of Cybertron is the best licensed game ever made.

Behind the scenes, High Moon Studios, this game’s developers, were very resistant to the idea of becoming just another licensed game mill, so perhaps they went so hard on Fall of Cybertron to convince their Activision-Blizzard overlords they were worthy of developing original titles. Unfortunately, High Moon would meet a fate worse than being a licensed game mill: Being forced to become yet another support studio on Call of Duty, joining the likes of Raven Software and Vicarious Visions. Yet another case of Activision-Blizzard being an absolute plague on the gaming industry.

I’ve always been a Mortal Kombat fan in theory rather than in practice. The world, characters, and style are all up my alley. The only thing that isn’t is actually playing it. The combat is so slow and stiff I feel like I’m posing action figures. All NetherRealm does is make fighting games yet they seem incapable of making one that feels the least bit good to control. The fatalities and cinematics are the only reason to play, but at that point you’d be better off just watching a cutscene compilation.