Demon Stone may entertain in its straightforward nature as a button basher with cinematic pretensions and presentation, yet it?s also let down by a camera that often obscures the action and by the repetitiveness.

It’s enormous fun if you’re a fan and atmospheric in a way very different from "Doom 3" - a horror of another kind. Although slightly shorter than before, the end is just as dramatic and intense as Stalingrad, and is perhaps a campaign with better flow overall.

Both an exciting action RPG and an involving social simulation, Fable is a luscious folk-fantasy adventure teeming with clever details, hidden secrets, and moral possibilities. It may be too short but boy is it sweet.

A very well designed game despite the so-so battle system. It runs smoothly on most systems and is seemingly bug-free.

When you begin to fear the tedium of yet another awkward, uncoordinated fight sequence more than the unspeakable evils themselves you know something’s not quite right.

Its ugly presentation and poor execution are an insult to both the recommended system specifications (one gigahertz for this?) and to all the progress that's been made in designing shooters over the last few years. This is one to avoid.

An absolute must for Hockey fans as well as anyone who likes sports games.

The most frustrating thing I found with it was an autosave that occurred just as I destroyed the engine on my plane right at the end of the first mission.

While it looks beautiful, and often immerses the player in a very effective way, some of the repetitive fighting sections really undermine the considerable work that has obviously gone into this game. I only wish that the controls had been tightened enough to create a more functional game.

Right out of the box (no patch needed) the game ran smooth, looked awesome and kept me both terrified and unable to walk away. The pacing is perfect and the production value unmatched.

It will grab you, but you'll have to make an effort to reach out and hold its hand for a while through the rough spots. The problems are the times when it lets go, leaving you lost without a hint of what to do. Or when it just turns on you and beats you down after hitting the same boss twenty times straight.

The breaking of the missions into arbitrary short sections doesn't work for me, as I would prefer to see a large mission with sub-goals rather than what feels like lots of really short missions.

Yes, I’m still disappointed by the lack of opportunities for the creation of chaos, and yes, the graphics do reek of things from ye olden times of management sims.

A thrillingly tedious experience.

The dialogue and the one-liners are simply inane. This and other aspects give you the feeling that the game was rushed out in time for the movie.

Let’s be brutally honest, the Olympics is nothing more than a repetitive set of action events compressed, in this modern world, into tedious technical fine tuning of human machinery, buoyed only by ancient tradition rather than entertainment value.

Perhaps the only questionable aspect might be the length, but given the game's pacing and the gradual addition of new elements, characters and locations to the gameplay, this never becomes a drudge.

At present, the online community is visible, but it's hardly expansive. Without it, Trackmania is good entertainment for a few afternoons, a short game not due to a lack content, but simply a lack of serious challenges.

The main culprit here is the bad voice acting and bad Japanese-to-English translation. It’s like playing cowboys and Indians except that there’s one noisy kid who never really gets into character.

Plenty of gloriously explosive action is complimented by depth and variety.

I think this is a lateral development for the genre. I hail the ambition, I commend the experimentation and I recognise the potential. However, I wish it still didn't sport some of the genre’s silly little annoyances and the whole thing is a little too unbalanced in its execution.

It can’t possibly sustain its ardour, but nevertheless, purely for reasons of bringing Spider-Man to life in the best way possible, this is a spectacular experience.

Regardless of the often frantic pace, there’s bountiful strategic potential here, which should keep potential Sun Tzu’s happy.

On the whole, the extremely variable difficulty level, the bugs, the graphical pop-up that makes the driving so infuriating and the overall poor standard of the on-foot missions mean that this is, unfortunately, Driv3l.

In trying to be both a realistic squad based game and an arcade shooter, Rainbow Six 3 has sub-machine gunned itself in the foot, making too many concessions to each style to play very proficiently in its own right.

If you’re the patient and careful type it’ll suit you. Otherwise, you’ll have to put in a lot of effort.

So if you’ve always dreamt of playing golf with frogs, you probably need some kind of therapy, but are likely to enjoy Ribbit King in the meantime. The rest of us will probably find it an amusing curiosity.

The 2D graphics engine also allows resolutions of up to 1600x1200 and thus suits even the biggest screen.

While tennis games do have a set type of person who will like them, Smash Court Tennis Pro Tournament 2 performs so well that I can’t imagine anyone disliking it unless they want a much simpler version (in which case buy the original Smash Court Tennis for the PS one).

If you’ve never seen the draw of Harry Potter, then perhaps this game isn’t for you, although with nothing too complex to get your head around and the ability to out-magic Malfoy and his troop, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban spells more fun than a lot of movie-to-game conversions.

If you’ve been searching for a strategy game that really puts you in the line of fire and in which you always feel the consequences of your actions, look no further than this.

Unlike many other games, there is little satisfaction in the subtle degrees between the player's success and failure, only the obstacles in the way of the next point in the plot.

If games were right-angled triangles, Pythagoras would teach us that the value present on the 'quality' side would be directly related to the 'design' and 'execution' values on the other two and, without a particularly remarkable presence in either, Spartan is an also-ran.

A taut, atmospheric and engrossing experience. The only real gripe is that The City sections become long-winded, lacking as they do the focus of the story missions and as a result make the game feel a little bloated.

It seems like this project has received more loving attention than Deus Ex 2, and this is why it is still a pleasure to become a master thief, even though the game is rough around the edges.

Of course, the game improves enough on the past titles in the series that it will appeal primarily to existing fans and they certainly won’t be disappointed.

At the very least, it allows you to drive a truck through your enemies, jump into the air as a robot and come down fighting again. It must be said that this will be enough for a lot of people.

There have been many games of this type, but Samurai Warriors is undoubtedly the best.

It’s little more than a clone of a more successfully designed game, produced as a good idea for garnering a license respect rather than a good game in itself.

It chooses not to innovate in the racing genre but smartens up its looks and sounds enough to look like an evolution.

If the setting and atmosphere were any different, say a sci-fi or fantasy setting, I doubt that the experience provided by Red Dead Revolver would seem anything more than mediocre, if that.

Beyond Divinity is like a rigged slot machine; you always win the same amount you put in, but the jackpot never comes. You’ll continue to play because you have nothing to lose, but it’s not as exciting.

But as a longtime player of MMORPGs myself, I love being able to log on for fifteen minutes and actually get a feeling of progress at any level. It is about time MMORPGs started to look at themselves as games, not time sinks.

It may seem like Onimusha 3 lacks ambition, but even though it fails to provide any solid innovation to a tired genre, it makes great effort to keep what’s familiar interesting and engaging - going to great lengths to cater for its audience’s needs, even if they seem run of the mill.

Forbidden Siren’s greatest strength is that it hints at depth, even giving brief unnerving glimpses, but it still fails to express itself well enough for many of us to understand, and for the rest of us to bother.

And when atmosphere is the only new thing that you bring to the table, it had better be damn near perfect to make a good impression. Hitman: Contracts is just short of that, but is more than enough if you haven’t played Hitman 2.

It's about being scared out of your wits one minute and then bellowing with laughter at something gruesomely humorous the next.

While the game itself isn’t too short, the lather rinse repeat style gameplay is only rarely challenged and you’ll never get stuck wondering what special gadget to use next.

It’s fun, fast and furious. Play single, against your friend or online, it’s all good.

Surprisingly, for a game with such attention to finer details and apparent depth, the commentary gets a little flat and repetitive after awhile, even if it does have (perhaps because of) the EA Sports “attitude”.

It's good, yes, but not brilliant.

It’s not as good as any of the “proper” stand alone Resident Evils, so unless you’re a hardcore zombie fan this can be quite quickly crossed off your shopping list.

If Desert Rats can address its most severe problems - a very variable AI and a rather stunted mutliplayer - then it might be able to up itself to an [80] rating.

Although it doesn’t offer anything new, Sacred wields a metaphorical mace of monster mash with pride and panache. This is slick action adventuring with a lack of ambition but no shortage of charm.

Blade Warriors could have been a simple guilty pleasure, if it didn’t insist on constantly reminding us that there are better games to be played.

It has more good points than bad though, at the least it will tide you over until the next generation of MMORPGs hits the streets and at best you will have fun for months, even years to come.

The tacky mutants, the fact that your opponents become almost anally accurate towards the end (or on high difficulty levels), the slightly disappointing finale - all these things may mar Far Cry to various degrees, but they cannot dull its shine.

To cut to the chase, this is more a new episode than a new series, with what little changes there are related to updated graphics and a slightly modified search system.

Pandora Tomorrow doesn't mark a substantial evolution of the stealth genre but it does progress from the first game.

Its playability may be assured simply because of its clone status to "Resident Evil," but the overall package just isn’t that well put-together to warrant more than an average recommendation.

Without doubt the ultimate release in the Unreal series. Smooth gameplay, great graphics, and mountains of content. Epic has released a game that may well be able to dominate the online gaming scene for the next couple of years.

If nothing more than an interesting footnote in the evolution of gaming ideas, it would be a real shame to let this game fade into obscurity without at least coming to your own conclusion.

Water effects are much prettier and the added bump-mapping makes the massive tanks very impressive. It’s not much, but it’s nice to see that the graphics have evolved.

It feels very much like a first attempt, although this is in fact the third in the series.

All the factors that make a good survival horror game are here; the story, the ambience, the tension, the scares and the gore. The formula has been slightly changed though, this game is more of a shooter than its predecessors and there is less puzzle solving, but it works.

Mafia looks, sounds and feels dated on the Xbox, maybe because we’ve been spoilt and we know what the machine is capable of this just doesn’t satisfy.

A big bonus is that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously.

If you manage to at least enjoy killing hundreds of people in Drakengard’s world, you can enjoy killing thousands to make it to its end.

Ultimately, Tecmo have created a game that recreates, and in a none too shallow way, the martial arts action movie experience.

A decidedly average title which doesn’t really try to reach beyond that. Everything about it feels, not rushed or not completed, just poorly designed, almost as though it’s been designed for the budget range.

This is one title that could have… should have… would have…. been better without its similarly irritating controls. Rent it if you’re a Jet Li fan, pass completely if you aren’t.

The camera, for instance, is more often than not pointing in entirely the wrong direction. It points in the direction that you were last moving but rotates very slowly.

While it may be a fun little jaunt with the appearance of a clever strategy/action game, if you attempt to play it that way you soon find out that it is fundamentally broken. A lesson from history, one hopes.

In a very narrow sense, Champions provides a set of features and a whole lot of polish to keep things interesting for its audience and the online modes go a long way in extending things even further.

Square have tried to give us a chance to tell our own stories through this game, but their rules and prerequisites are often too restricting and the rewards not always enough.

This is adequate entertainment that does nothing terribly wrong, but never manages to shine in any one particular area.

The aspects it draws on do add a new element to the genre although they do slow down the action, making you work even harder to build your railway. The presentation makes the game feel half complete and the learning curve on the interface is unnecessary and sloppy on the tutorial.

Far from disappointing, it’s just not the best in its series and not the innovation that some people might have hoped for.

If all you want is a well-executed platform action game, with no innovations, you can have a really good time with Maximo vs. The Army of Zin, but otherwise steer clear. You’ve seen it all before.

The awkward controls mean that the other problems with the gameplay probably won’t be noticeable as you wrestle with the controller.

It's funny, I had a feeling all that development time would've given us something more.

As for actual challenge or feeling of gaming accomplishment it doesn’t always succeed in making its mark and it falls all too readily into genre clichés that are already beginning to look stale. A finger across the lens really.

The game does, basically, offer lots of variety, a flat learning curve and a decent story mode for those that aren’t just looking for the latest in car physics.

It may not be the worlds greatest game but it still brings a lot of funny perspectives into the world of massive multiplayer online games.

Judged on its own merits, Invisible War is a great example of a game that offers meaningful freedom of choice, that rewards different approaches and that creates a coherent, intelligent world wrapped up in a very well paced and expertly written plot.

It’s difficult to convey a story in first person form without the use of heavy scripting and this is something that Warren and the boys haven’t gotten quite right.

It’s sad that the game doesn’t use Todd McFarlane’s artwork more effectively, because a Max Payne approach to the story telling would definitely have resulted in a better score.

It isn't a bad game at all, and is fairly entertaining - but it is also very simplistic and has a tendency to annoy you and get repetitive fairly quickly.

Perhaps a little more variety with the fighting, less of the annoying ‘trapping the player in a glowing circle until he has killed all enemies’ gameplay elements and more opportunity for clever exterminations like pushing enemies off ledges with telekinesis would have worked better, but it still remains a good game.

The learning curve, hampered by comically poor documentation and badly-executed tutorials, is almost vertical.

It has more good points than bad though, at the least it will tide you over until the next generation of MMORPGs hits the streets and at best you will have fun for months, even years to come.

It’s difficult to avoid recommending the game, when I honestly had fun, but £30 to £40 is too much to pay for such a short game.

If you have a little Turtle fan running around at home, or if you want a trip down memory lane, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes heartily recommended. You get exactly what the game promises and in this case that is a good thing.

I’ll briefly abandon my objective viewpoint and daringly say that I love Disgaea. But I can find very little to strongly recommend about it.

Ikaruga is the best shoot-em-up on the current generation of consoles. With perfect gameplay, perfect difficulty curve, and beautiful graphics, it provides an intense experience like no other.

It’s certainly not going to convert RPG nay sayers, but fans of the genre should find something new here.

Those that criticise and vindicate the linearity of the one player game are misunderstanding the central theme. Atmospherically, the game is without rival and the sense of community is absolutely charming.

Even if you already own Football Manager 2005, I think that this new version is an absolute must-buy. It’s got a lot of cool new details, and you know you want them.