BAPACop

The gameplay itself is fine. Stealth mechanics are rather simplistic but understandable. The downfall is that the game is highly story-focused and that story derails in Episode 4 and never gets back on track, getting more and more insane until it ends with a giant middle finger to the player.

Technically forced PvP; it can be avoided through counterintuitive measures. Graphics are pretty, especially during character creation, but load times are ridiculous. The game crashed three times before I could even get to character creation, then twice more trying to join the server. Even the launcher was unstable, occasionally failing to load the login form.

Jobs that have been in the Sims series since the first game inexplicably went missing from Sims 4. Oh, wait, here they are, in an expansion pack for $40 on top of the $60 base game. And the Origin store site has the sheer unmitigated gall to call them "all-new". This is just despicable.

Game includes always-on DRM. An internet connection is required for singleplayer mode. This review must be 150 characters long, so here is some padding.

In their rush to say "look, we're next-gen now!" the developers seem to have forgotten to include the game along with the graphics. Like in the 360 and PS3 versions, the creation suite has been destroyed, with most of the custom animations gone along with custom stories, finishers, and even music. Somehow the current gen version has managed to go one step forward and not only remove that but also custom arenas, belts, and female CAWs. But at least the last-gen versions have matches in them. There are over forty match types that were present in 2K14 but are missing in 2K15. There have been more match types REMOVED than actually exist in the game. There's a reason this game was review embargoed.

In their rush to say "look, we're next-gen now!" the developers seem to have forgotten to include the game along with the graphics. Like in the 360 and PS3 versions, the creation suite has been destroyed, with most of the custom animations gone along with custom stories, finishers, and even music. Somehow the current gen version has managed to go one step forward and not only remove that but also custom arenas, belts, and female CAWs. But at least the last-gen versions have matches in them. There are over forty match types that were present in 2K14 but are missing in 2K15. There have been more match types REMOVED than actually exist in the game. There's a reason this game was review embargoed.

If you thought other yearly sports franchises like Madden tended to lack innovation, wait until you play WWE 2K15! Just take last year's WWE 2K14, remove 50% of the features, and you have WWE 2K15! Amazing!

The story mode has a match where you have to defeat a certain tag team partner, but not only will the AI character not tag out but it won't so much as move around. This is the kind of experience you can expect with this game.

Unskippable cutscenes. Incomprehensible QTEs. Bizarre mouse and keyboard controls. Awkward combat. Broken combo system. Constant crashes to desktop.

This game is 50GB. 35GB of that is audio. The developers haven't figured out how to compress audio files and they're trying to sell a $60 game. Hold off on buying this game until the development team learns how to use Audacity.

I sincerely hope that whoever decided that fancy animations should have priority over responsive controls never works in the game industry again. The number of times I have lost matches because the game felt the need to play a fancy windup is far too large, and that's not counting the times the game waits a full second before even registering a button press, if it bothers to register it at all. Even attempting the special move performed by filling your meter simply does nothing more than half the time. Even ignoring the fact that World Tour is based solely on your luck with the RNG, this game is basically unplayable because every time you try to do anything you have to cross your fingers and hope the game is going to bother to register it.

Multiple match types are broken to the point of unplayability. The AI can take control of your character if it feels like it. The game crashes on a regular basis. Random Universe cutscenes consistently mix up characters. Limited slots for custom content despite remaining hard drive space. The positive aspects of this game are completely overshadowed by bizarre design decisions and near-incompetent feature implementation.

Racing games aren't exactly a complex genre, but any company that isn't even competent enough to properly implement a pause menu shouldn't be trying to make one.

The computer is a cheating bastard. Computer getting whatever roll it needs 99% of the time? Check. Computer always performing the battle action that is best against yours? Check. Knowing what type of random event is on every space? Landing directly on the Darkling space every time? Getting a Contract the same turn they become eligible to do so every single time? Check. Check. Check. And that's against an EASY AI. I recommend this game only to game developers as an example of how NOT to program computer-controlled characters.

The computer is a cheating bastard. Computer getting whatever roll it needs 99% of the time? Check. Computer always performing the battle action that is best against yours? Check. Knowing what type of random event is on every space? Landing directly on the Darkling space every time? Getting a Contract the same turn they become eligible to do so every single time? Check. Check. Check. And that's against an EASY AI. I recommend this game only to game developers as an example of how NOT to program computer-controlled characters.

I can't wait until gaming technology is advanced enough that developers will be able to implement a button that freezes the action to allow you to go to the bathroom, or answer the phone, or perform other basic real-life tasks. Oh wait...

This game uses an anti-cheat system known as PunkBuster. Unfortunately, it doesn't bother to tell you that and so installs two services onto your computer and goes so far as to accept PunkBuster's EULA on your behalf without so much as a prompt. I don't even think that last part is legal, but both parts are certainly unacceptable.

The computer cheats; it can reverse your attacks the second you press the button to make them. Attacks and grapple attempts consistently visibly pass through the opponent without connecting. The computer can and will stunlock you for several minutes at a time. In tag team matches, the AI's partner will routinely run into the ring to break pins and holds but your partner will just stand in their corner and watch you lose if you're being held, and if the AI's partner decides to hang around in the ring afterwards don't expect your partner to do anything whatsoever. Considering these are basic issues that occur very consistently, and since this is the same developer and even the same engine as the SVR series which does not suffer from these issues, I can only conclude that this game was not playtested at all. This lack of effort from the developer means the game receives a zero, which is sad because the game is actually fairly entertaining despite being unfair, but I'm not about to reward a lack of effort from a developer. (And speaking of the SVR series, anyone complaining about the clothing in this game has clearly never seen any of the WWE games. The Rumble Roses characters wear, on average, several times more clothing than the characters in the WWE games.)

There are so many things wrong it's hard to decide where to begin. The controls seem to be intended as context-sensitive but fail miserably; holding left on the control stick and pushing X can mean either getting out of the ring, tagging in your partner, bouncing off the ropes, or picking an item off the ground. The game usually picks whatever is most inconvenient at the time. Second, Career mode demonstrates that the developers are utterly incompetent; not only does it completely ignore the basic concept of a difficulty curve (everything is entirely too easy until the Championship, at which point the difficulty gets stupidly-high) but they apparently can't even do a simple conditional check (none of the balance settings in the Options menu are used). Finally, while the AI can reverse your attacks 95% of the time you'd be hard-pressed to do it yourself; my video recordings show that the reversal prompt is visible for, on average, 4 frames. That's 0.06 seconds. For comparison, the average human reaction time is approximately 0.2 seconds. As if making it literally impossible to hit the prompt wasn't bad enough, I used an emulator to slow down the game to 5fps and it turns out at least 50% of the screen prompts are simply lies and pressing the button while the prompt is on-screen does literally nothing. To summarize, this game is an unplayable mess.

Mirror's Edge has a fantastic concept. It's a shame the final project is so... mediocre. The concept is that of a free-running game over city rooftops, which is unfortunately where the game almost immediately begins to waver. The level design, filled with an entirely too bright art style, is designed to appear open while remaining linear; this is done a bit too well. Most of the time it's hard to figure out where you're supposed to go next, and when you figure that part out the method you need to use to get there is often completely unintuitive. The fact that your character will sometimes simply not grab onto things that she really should have doesn't help the frustration. Many times you'll be stuck for quite a while only to discover that the first thing you tried was right and you were just off to the side by an inch or two. Later on, the game throws the running thing to the side and basically tries to become a shooter, and while with one exception it's theoretically possible to play through the game without ever engaging in combat, in reality you're unlikely to be successful if you were to try that. Even considering the inevitable delays and numerous restarts, the game still clocks in at under eight hours of gameplay. To top it off, the game's attempt at a plot falls horribly flat, throwing you into the middle of it too soon and ending rather anticlimactically, complete with characters that we are given no chance to gain interest in and "plot twists" that would make M. Night Shyamalan cringe.

This is the first and only X-COM game I've ever played, so I'm not rating it down because it isn't the same. I'm rating it so low because it is not a strategy game as it is billed. There are several major reasons for this. First, the "random" aspects are not actually random. I'm not talking about how savescumming is prevented due to the random seed. I'm talking about how the computer is a cheating bastard. I had a mission once where the first enemy to fire scored a critical hit every time. It didn't matter which enemy was shooting, where they were shooting from, who their target was, where their target was, the cover their target was in, or if the enemy that was shooting took their shot before or after another enemy moved. I tested this by retreating continually and forcing the enemy to follow me to take their shot. I crossed the entire map back to the start point, and without fail the first shot taken by the AI every turn resulted in a critical hit. Second, the cover system is absolutely horrendous. There are four levels of cover. 0 is no cover. 1 is "half" cover. 2 is "full" cover. 3 is "full" cover with the Hunkered Down ability active. These aren't the actual numerical values as the game uses them to calculate anything, they're just my observation. Okay, now that I've explained that, forget about it, because the game will. Enemies can and will shoot you through walls. The shots will visibly pass right through them. They will shoot you through floors. They will shoot you through bus stops. They will shoot you from fifty feet into the adjacent room behind a solid wall where the only way you can see them is from their red outline because even the camera can't see them. A car provides the exact same amount of cover when it's intact as it does when it is a smoldering wreck. It's very annoying to get hit by an enemy who is making a shot that is simply not physically possible. Third, the computer is a cheating bastard. Yes, again. They don't follow any movement rules, it seems. When you encounter enemies they immediately interrupt your turn to move into cover. Floaters can teleport onto your flanks at will. Berserkers can interrupt your turn to move. Thin Men will literally drop from the sky on your flanks. Sectopods can take three actions per turn. Enemies will spawn right in the middle of your squad. Groups of enemies will teleport around the map if you lose sight of them. In other words, there is no strategy involved in placing your units, you just need to hope the game decides to be nice. Fourth, squad panic is simply awful. XCOM is supposed to be the world's most elite military force. So why do they act like they've never been in a firefight before? One of your units takes a hit, and your other members of the world's most elite military force turn all the way around, take aim on the person beside them, yell "HELP ME!" and shoot them in the face. Losing a squad member because they got shot through a wall is bad enough, now you're just rubbing it in for no good reason. Fifth, global panic. The first thing I want to point out is how incredibly stupid this sort of conversation must sound. "Hello, is this XCOM, the world's most elite military force focused on fighting the alien invasion? This is the President of the United States. We have decided we are being invaded by too many aliens to require the help of the world's most elite military force focused on fighting the alien invasion. Please stop saving our citizen's lives." The second thing is that the system is simply broken. Not taking a mission in a country increases the panic levels of all the countries on that continent for some reason, not just the one being attacked by aliens. This means that no matter how well you are playing the game, you will eventually lose. A game where you are guaranteed to lose is a very badly designed game. Sixth, I have an underground complex filled with advanced technology, soldiers who can practically blow things up with their minds, multiple satellites over every continent, multiple heavily armed interceptors stationed on every continent, but when three cities get attacked by aliens at once I can only send one group of six people while the other ninety-three soldiers twiddle their thumbs in the Barracks. To summarize, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is not a strategy game. It fails at the most important element of a strategy game: Rewarding strategy. It would get a 0 for that reason, but it's actually quite entertaining once you realize it's not a strategy game and start to play accordingly. That, and it changes the lights on my keyboard to coincide with the enemy turns and I think that's neat.

This is not a game. If you're looking for anything approaching gameplay, go somewhere else. Anywhere else. Go watch someone play it on YouTube. It'll be the same experience, but you'll still have your money.