An imaginative concept and some strong design are undone by a game that's gruelling in all the wrong ways.

Too much tinkering means Pure barely feels like football and becomes a chore.

The pairing of large-scale online battle game with the thrill-packed Lord of the Rings series should've been a winner, but as it's turned out, Conquest won't possibly satisfying any Battlefront fan or Lord of the Rings buff at all.

New Zealand Story Revolution is a hard unforgiving platform game dressed up like a child's game. Think very carefully before splashing out. We used to love it but playing it again only brings back all the frustrations we thought we'd forgot about.

Sub-standard stuff - its only redeeming feature is the very unlikely prospect of online fun. A bargain bin title.

Immensely hard difficulty levels aside in single-player, the co-op mode is fun and much easier to tackle. Oddly it's painfully slow in places with more than five enemies on screen at once. We didn't expect this at all from our next-gen experience of Double Dragon.

There's very little to recommend with this title, besides some pretty visuals and the concept of being a knight. No, this just won't do at all. I wouldn't play this and you shouldn't either. [PC Zone]

The faster the car, the more jelly-like things seem to become. The gorgeous Ford GT 2005 handles like the entire world was one big bouncy castle, as it bobs and lurches around like it had helium-filled wheels. [Official UK Xbox Magazine]

The AI is predictably primitive and inconsistent, with enemies failing to hear gun battles right outside their windows, yet spotting you with unerring ability at unlikely distances across the map.

Crime Life fails in both gaming and moral terms. What we wouldn't have given for a few shiny rings to collect. Y'getme?

At least the level design in this one is vaguely interesting at some points. As a competitor to the likes of Ratchet and Jak, though, Pac-Man is starting to look ten times his age. [PSW]

It's like people just can't bring themselves to accept the truth here: The Matrix: Path Of Neo is an irredeemable abortion of a game that Atari, Shiny, the Wachowski brothers and anyone even remotely associated with it should be ashamed for ever thinking about releasing in this form. [PC Zone]

After five minutes of this you'll be bored stiff. [PSW]

Text can't be skipped, which may be fine for a dramatic piece of dialogue, but is eminently frustrating when you're having to wait for your character to lengthily tell you that you can't do something for the umpteenthmillionth time.

Considering just how much the FPS genre has progressed, specifically the squad-commanding, war-themed FPS sub-genre, it's really not worth your time unless you're particularly fanatical about the original. [PC Zone]

Okay, so there's two-minutes worth of multiplayer chuckles in "Badlands" and "Super Off-Road," and "Hydro Racer" is marginally better than the terrible "Stun Runner," but that's it. [PSW]

It's almost as if Midway has run out of retro games to repackage, apart from some crappy old driving titles it found in the back of a filing cabinet that weren't good enough to make the first two Treasures titles.

It's so gangsta. It's so street. It's so shite. Painfully forcing every urban cliché going into every line of dialogue, the cutscenes reduced us to fits of laughter. That's laughing at, not with. [Official UK Xbox Magazine]

The ominous Willy Wonka himself, whether it was intended or not, looks and sounds disturbingly like Michael Jackson, and his army of Oompa Loompa slaves are no longer the orange-skinned and green-haired midgets we know and love. [PC Zone]

(Altogether now) Oompa Loompa Doompadee Dah, I'm stunned I bothered getting so far. You will live in misery too, if you play this Oompa Loompa Loompa Doompadee Doo. (Doompadee Doo.)

The combat quickly becomes repetitive, simply involving mouse-clicking on-screen to shoot at the blindingly stupid enemies blundering towards you, retreating if they get too close, then shooting again, maybe using a barrel of explosives for a bit of a change.

The widescreen beauty of the PSP is entirely compromised by the fact that the action takes place in a TV shaped box to the left, while maps and stats fill all that lovely extra space. It's nice to be able to see where you're going, sure, and we appreciate not having the action cluttered by displays and icons, but it kind of takes a way the whole point of having a screen the size of Kansas, doesn't it? [PSW]

There's a smattering of good ideas in Samurai Legend, but they're quickly crushed under the obesity of mindless combat and poor design. One to avoid. [PSW]

For every second of satisfaction, there is a minute of monotony; where cardboard enemies fall under a cloud of red paint, physics offer no value whatsoever, AI is largely non-existent and gameplay follows the worn-ragged formula of coloured keycards and enemies that appear from thin air. [PC Zone]

It left us shaking our heads in utter bewilderment. Fans of EA's other Street games will be rightly embarrassed by the sheer awfulness of this faux street culture. [PSW]

While the game boasts an impressive array of hardware, you're sadly only allowed to play as the forces of the 'right and just' in a linear two-pronged campaign that starts with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and finishes in Iraq.

The premise is certainly unique and brimming over with potential, but the execution is so lazy and ham-fisted if it were a killer it would have shot itself in the foot. Shame really. [Official UK Xbox Magazine]

Despite its smattering of positive elements though, D-Day reeks of being rushed to the table like a pot of undercooked sauerkraut.