The Live Arcade shoud be the home of great new franchises not tired old games like this. [Issue #16, p.73]

It’s not particularly next-gen visually, the loading times are so slow, and it has the most infuriating try-and-die mechanic of any 360 game we’ve played. If you’re a Sonic fan then you might glean some brief pleasure from this, but it is likely to disappoint and infuriate rather than entertain.

Iron Man only just scrapes itself above being a typical movie tie-in title by virtue of some nifty flight controls and the excellent suit. The missions are fun but repetitive and with a lack of a proper checkpoint system and muddy backgrounds, this fails to take off into the stratosphere of a top-quality 360 experience.

There's a good game in there somewhere but it's hidden behind the arm waving loopiness that takes up the majority of the game.

Science Of Evil sits comfortably among the worst games we’ve played this generation. It’s so mind-numbing and monotonous that if you’re not careful, you can almost zone out entirely white playing it and not take in how amazingly poor it is in every single respect– you’ll come to several minutes later to find you’re still tapping the X button (Square on PS3, unless you love jumping), still winning and the top and bottom corners of your telly will have melted to make it look a bit like a sad face. Okay, so the last one didn’t actually happen to us, but at least it would have made things vaguely interesting.

It's relatively cheap at 400 MS points, but even that's too much to pay for something you'll grow tired of quicker than the game takes to download. [Issue 21, p.58]

And while it’s a solid enough shooter that’ll largely cure the itch for frag-heads, it just fails to do anything to particularly excite.

Winter Sports 2009 simply does the job. It is easy to play and offers a fair amount of entertainment – and at a welcome bargain price that will appeal to many sports fans. However, with poor presentation values and only a handful of really fun or challenging events, it’s a game you’ll be unlikely to dig out on a regular basis unless you’ve an unquenchable thirst for competition or a few mates up for some multiplayer action.

There’s just no way to justify spending seven-odd quid on something that wouldn’t be out of place on a mobile phone and that’s exactly what this is – a decrepit and distinctly dull few seconds of gameplay repeated ad infinitum, failing entirely to cash in on what is a potentially brilliant concept. Keep your points in your pocket for now.

Decent stealth elements and a fun Live play can't quite redeem what is a deeeply shoddy game. This is the next-gen era of gaming, so why does this feel like it's from 1997 and not 2007? [JPN Import, Issue 24, p.75]