Overall, Freestyle Street Basketball has the potential to be a neat game. The idea is solid, the graphics and overall style are neat and the gameplay is pretty fun. However, the horrible players you have to get through to eventually play with the decent ones will turn people away and the lag will push even more away.

While the environments, sound effects and music are some of the best that I’ve seen in a next-gen game yet, I can’t say the same thing for the fighting system that seems to lack variety.

The game tries to seriously make you believe that this mohawk-lite-sporting tough guy fits in this sci-fi world, and then expects you to slog through one annoying or frustrating encounter after another.

American McGee, I really wanted to love Alice: Madness Returns, truly I did. And while I can say that in it there were instances of fun and moments of wonder, these were eclipsed by an excess of repetition, a surfeit of crummy-looking textures and a general lack of polish. And so I admit to you with a heart full of regret, that Madness Returns has failed to live up to either my dreams or its own potential.

Get this one for its online action, which moves quickly and rewards those who have the skill and knowledge to play to the strengths of the many weapons and vehicles.

However, if you enjoy building your team more in Franchise mode than you do actually playing the games, give NFL Head Coach a shot – the game definitely has a lot to offer despite some shortcomings.

The combination of free-roaming Manhattan to smoothly swing through, a serviceable (but not wonderful) sequel-to-the-movie plot, and some solid stealth and action to fill out the experience is what makes The Amazing Spider-Man a winner.

It's pure KH fun, and it will immediately remind you why this most unusual clashing of worlds works so well.

It's the perfect example of a video game status quo being maintained if I've ever seen it, and if there's one game series that desperately needs better than that after nearly a decade, it's Call of Duty.

The dialed down difficulty and weak story will be a deal-breaker for some, but honestly, the amazing marriage of combo-heavy combat and acrobatic web swinging, complemented by a living, breathing NYC, culminate in the most engaging Spider-Man game I’ve ever played.

Brink has quite a few flaws, but the most frustrating one is the spawn-die-spawn-kill-die repetition in single player mode. At best it's a little banal and tedious, and at worst, it's downright rage-inducing. Your AI teammates and enemies often act strangely, exhibiting poor awareness of their surroundings, but they will unleash laser-accurate gunfire once they notice an enemy. This makes playing the game, especially at the start of the Security campaign, a real chore.

Class balance is currently way off but is slowly being put back in line - this is mostly evident on the game's two Player vs. Player servers (one of them is a race-based team server, while the other is a free-for-all between any players).

Earth Defense Force 2017 is not really a good looking game, nor is its sound anything to hold in high regard, but it gets a lot of its gameplay right, and somehow this quirky title always seems to show up at just the right time on a system to let us know that yes, loot-heavy action RPGs are still a total blast to play - even if other publishers out there haven't bothered to fulfill our wishes for more of them.

Deadly Premonition, while lacking in the aesthetic aspect, is a surprisingly entertaining game.

The Ball is good effort with some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the good things are undermined by some questionable combat mechanics, a bothersome, half-obstructed first person point of view and a half-baked story concept.

Its elegant simplicity will keep you engaged for hours without shooting, powerups, upgrading, leveling, dialog trees or versus play. The game's artwork delights and its music transports, making for three to four hours of pure gaming bliss.

The ending to Viking is a pretty big disappointment, but at least the game is a ton of fun on the way there.

Aliens, cowboys, robots, zombies (sorta), and samurais are included and do spice up the experience, but if you really want to crank up the craziness, Bethesda, we'll need some pirates and vikings, too.

I really can’t recommend this game enough.

The graphics are about as good as we'll likely get anytime soon on the PSP, and a pretty nice set of songs and the full range of levels are here.

Rebellion had the right idea with AvP, but they just didn't fit all the pieces together properly.

Overall, I found this game to be entertaining with some issues that definitely get in the way of good game play. Hopefully, a future sequel or similar style game will improve on the issues that have been pointed out. Lostmagic has a great core to build a future game around – hopefully Taito takes the chance to do so in the future.

The Run's attempt to use a cross-country road race to break free of conventions comes packaged with a few crippling flaws, the biggest of which is simply that even with its tense moments and high-powered supercars, it's just not as exciting as it should be.

With Fire and Sword adds difficulty without an equal level of satisfaction for winning, and the inclusion of firearms makes the results on the battlefield feel much more random than we've gotten in the past games in the series. If you're looking for a new multiplayer experience unlike any you've played, this is a good place to start, but if you want a complete, exciting, and altogether more "winnable" campaign, you might be better off sticking with Warband.

In closing, I have to say that despite the beautiful graphics, it's hard to ignore the game's shallow narrative which fails to take advantage of its rich, original literary source. That said, RPG fans may overlook this marked lack of fictional creativity and the game's few monotonous aspects, to enjoy its considerable hours of solid RPG play.

While I commend the developers at Ubisoft for trying to do new and original things in this sequel - one that comes only a year after its predecessor - it seems that the Rayman Raving Rabbids idea just isn't quite good enough for a real franchise.

Overall, I'd still recommend this game, despite its higher-than-expected price point. You'll still have a good bit of fun for your gaming dollar.

Despite a few iffy choices and some frame rate issues, this new, fresh version of an FPS semi-classic breathes new life into the classic shooter genre. Even if you didn't grow up playing these games in the early-mid 90s, I think you'll still value the kind of action that Rise of the Triad provides.