It's about time somebody grabbed this licence by the proverbials and created something special. Sadly, this game isn't it. [PC Zone]

It's also AMAZINGLY loud. Random battles erupt with an explosive screech sure to stain your sofa and almost every flick of the D-Pad on menus results in a baffling, ear-smashing clang.

A competent and rewarding game worthy of a couple of days blasting. [PC Zone]

There's no multiplayer action and with a fairly short playing time, this is much more suited to a rental.

Superb car handling is the only redeeming factor for GT PSP. It feels great to drive. But that driving needed to be packaged with an actual racing game and that game isn't here.

Dredd fans will enjoy looking around the levels and laughing at the in-jokes - the rest of you will see this for what it is, a bog-standard FPS. [Nintendo Offical Magazine]

In terms of customisable play, varied and never-dull multiplayer along with a decent co-op mode, there's no doubt that Lockdown remains an attractive and enjoyable package - but it just feels old.

Quite frankly it's an insult to have to pay 35 quid for something that starts getting irksome in under half a day and is only genuinely entertaining in 20-minute bursts. Mindlessly fun and manically intense it is, innovative and essential it seriously isn't. [PC Zone]

Squeezed down to small screen size, it loses a lot of what made the Super NES game a classic.

In all, KOH is a studious and elegant RTS that benefits from a smooth interface and a balanced system of game mechanics. But sadly there's only one way to play the game: slowly. It's really quite a sedate experience, in fact too sedate, and after a few plays, only the committed will want to stay with it.

Unfortunately, the conversion to PC is a sloppy affair, leaving it with a number of issues, such as a frame-rate that's at times slower than a bed-ridden sloth, a bizarre lack of sound effects, an option to change resolution that doesn't work and the fact that the game defaults to running in a small window.

This pair of butt-bashing bints may be big in Japan, but we don't see the game taking off here. Some nice touches, but we've seen it all already.

Sure, you can fly a zeppelin on Mars if you want, but aside from slightly more responsive flap settings, blowier wind (to use the technical term) and a guest appearance from Stephen Hawking as the voice of air traffic control (joke), X-Plane offers very little that Microsoft's doesn't already do both prettier and more intuitively.

The camera has a tendency to misbehave, leaving your troops obscured by mountains during battles and your workers hidden behind city walls. What's more, the linearity of the missions negates much of the game's strategic subtlety, while selecting troops is clumsy.

Newcomers will get a kick out of it, but old fans will find the new Prince unchallenging and slightly shallow compared to the rest of the series.

Its bargain basement credentials are evident in a lack of visual polish, poor mission balancing and dodgy enemy AI. Character animations are clunky, enemies fail to become alarmed by bullets ricocheting next to their heads, and the stealth mechanics are a little hazy.

Missions generally consist of bludgeoning your way from A to B; sometimes you'll have to retrieve an item, sometimes you'll have to flick a switch. Take away the specifics though and it boils down to walking across an island of hungry corpses and back again nine times out of ten.

Essentially a pornographic playground, it's proof that games don't necessarily have to be about sport, war or goblins.

Then there's the dodgy AI that produces identical breaks if you play the same character again, and super-aggressive play from the big boys with not even a nod to a safety game. All of which adds up to a rushed and amateurish job, albeit one that's surprisingly addictive.

While Chaos League: Sudden Death is an intriguing take on fantasy tactical sports, the effort required to get going coupled with the repetitiveness which starts to creep in after a tournament or two will dissuade many. In all, it's a bit of a missed opportunity to polish up a flawed, but novel, piece of entertainment. [PC Zone]

Basically one big collect-'a-thon.

If you enjoy squandering time away on the original title, you're bound to find more joy and excitement from the additional animals and buildings included in this expansion.

Settlers is far from awful, it's just mind-numbingly dull. Which is far, far worse.

Despite its lack of innovation, Septerra Core proves to be perfectly playable, and at times even quite enjoyable. [PC Zone]

If you absolutely must have Shinin' playing on your telly then this could be worth picking up, if not the Xbox Live Arcade edition is a much more solid and prettier looking version of the visceral puzzler.

Regardless of the decent handling, there's no escaping one of MTX's most annoying flaws: heaps of the objectives are startlingly samey.

Made less accessible by its flagrant lack of polish. A cursory manual, a poor tutorial, terrible animations, weak voiceovers and an unsightly interface immediately count against it.

It's basic, it's clichéd, it's blokey... oh, and it's expensive and short, but Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is still a hoot. If you're after a brainless gun-fest with plenty of blowing-up, give it a few months and see if you can pick it up on the cheap. [PC Zone]