Destructoid

As much as I wanted to enjoy Facebreaker, I couldn’t. The game is a bad experience through and through and I’m not even sure if inebriation helps. If you’re looking for a decent fighter, it appears as though Don King’s offering or Fight Night are still the only valid options out there.

So in the end, I do have good feelings about the game, but the unusually-slow pace of the game held me back a little. If you've never picked up a Disgaea title before, feel free to give Disgaea 3 a shot -- it's extremely accessible, and you don't need to play any of the other Disgaea titles to understand this one.

Rock Band 2 is going to feel extraordinarily familiar to fans of the first game, most of them won’t mind -- picking up the game for them is a no-brainer. The software is an incredible value, with 84 on-disc tracks and a laundry list of game-perfecting, albeit arguably small, tweaks. If you’re a fan of the music-rhythm genre (or purely a fan of music, for that matter), you’re running out of reasons not to own the game -- there’s simply more content packed into this series than any game that’s come before it, and by a frighteningly large margin.

Without a doubt, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a masterpiece of storytelling and fits magnificently into the Star Wars universe. Unfortunately, as a video game, the gameplay issues in The Force Unleashed are extremely noticeable and hinder a lot of the enjoyment that is derived from the narrative.

Overall, Tales of Vesperia is a mediocre offering. It never truly captures the imagination nor has the ability to draw a person into its fantasy world. The battle system suffices, but it often stumbles over its own feet when it comes to item and enemy selection. The scripting is poor, and the game is woefully linear. The storyline, while seemingly profound, never reaches a level that requires thought or grabs the player. The one opportunity that Vesperia had to do that was wasted entirely.

It's not what we expected, and it's not what the game could have been: it's not perfect, or even particularly great. Yet what it offers is wholly unique, and there's a lot of satisfaction to be had in small amounts throughout its running time. I'm in no hurry to play through it again anytime this week, but heck...maybe in a month or so I'll create a whole new species and send them out to the stars.

I want to say that Too Human is flawed, but it's not. A flaw would suggest that mistakes were made, but when you see the game in action, it becomes quite clear that everything has been done on purpose. Silicon Knights made no mistakes when it chose unresponsive analog controls, nor was it an accident that the game is designed with regular player death and repetitive unskippable cutscenes in mind.

There's not really much more I can say about Castle Crashers that hasn't already been said by the four of us. The networking issues are known, the repetition in combat is a given, and "All You Can Quaff" still sucks, but at the end of the day, Castle Crashers remains one of the best beat-'em-ups ever created and certainly one of the top games on XBLA to date.

As a whole, the game is improved, even if the Madden IQ cover has been blown. The new camera, net, play disguising and celebrations are good additions. But the real problems still exist in the core of the game. The AI will still consistently screw you on either side of the ball and the same issues like quarterback speed, pump faking, and throwing mechanics are still present.

Regardless of these issues, I think that the entirety of the game far outweighs its minor flaws. While the single-player experience is truly the high point of the $10 purchase, the multiplayer and challenge rooms act like the "sprinkles on the cupcake," giving the player more game than they should ever expect for $10.