When the controls decide to work in Random Heroes, the game comes together and can be a lot of fun. However, the frustration from times when it doesn't work outweighs the good, making Random Heroes a tepid recommendation.

There is very little reason to recommend R.I.P. Rally except for those who absolutely must have every game involving zombies. And even then, there are much better options out there.

What we have now is a Sonic game that takes a step forward from Episode 1, but is still a step back from a game half a year old. Sonic 4: Episode 2 certainly isn't the worst game to grace the series over the years, but not even the most steadfast Sonic fans will fondly remember Episode 2 as one of their favorites, if it is remembered at all.

While Beatdown is high on nostalgia, it is hard to play it without wishing it had released on nearly any other gaming platform.

Jet Set Radio is a beloved classic, but the iOS version does not do it justice. It is an impressive technical feat that the game can even run on iOS, but that novelty quickly wears off once you actually hop into a level and attempt to skate around.

If taken in quick bursts, Party Wave can be pretty fun, but once you've seen the first four or five levels, there aren't going to be many surprises to keep you going.

At its best, Cloudberry Kingdom is a disjointed retread of what other more interesting platformers have already done better before it.

As the first part of a planned game trilogy, it ends on a cliffhanger, leaving plenty of room for the developers to improve future iterations. However, if this first outing is any indication, perhaps The Doctor isn't quite ready for primetime gaming yet.

By no means the worst movie-based video game we've ever played, Battleship: The Game has some nice ideas, but fails to follow through on the concept. The marriage of real-time strategy and first-person action should elevate the title beyond the dreaded movie tie-in, but ends up feeling massively underdeveloped. One for the weekend perhaps, but Battleship: The Game's redeeming qualities are lost among a sea of mediocrity.

Nostalgic fans of the 1999 original will get a much-welcomed visual overhaul in Colin McRae Rally. Racing games have come a long way since then though, and this rally racer just doesn't keep up with what else the iPhone and iPad have to offer.

It's ironic that Telltale's biggest success with TWD: Michonne is in how it perfectly projects Michonne's detached mindset onto the player, albeit unintentionally. Just as Michonne is hardened and unsympathetic, you'll meet lots of new characters and learn of their troubles and motivations, but you probably won't care.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 atones for the sins of its predecessor by offering a more polished and playable experience. But equally, it commits its own transgression by throwing up generic, linear gameplay in the far-too-short campaign, accompanied by a weak multiplayer. This is one shooter that is certainly not sharp.

Ultimately, however, it feels like going on an island tour in a hot and cramped bus that's traveling at 10mph. There are things to see and fun to be had, but only if you're prepared to wait for it.

There's precious little sign of excitement, imagination or progression, the weapons are weedy and the storytelling poor. Given that there are plenty of other twin-stick shooters with better gameplay and graphics out there, you'd be mad to buy it were it a fiver. At over £30, however? That's the biggest joke of all.

This would be fine if much of the action was not just so vanilla. This is a solid shooter, but not the game that Aliens fans had long hoped for.

Overall, NCIS feels like another procedural tie-in, attaching a well known property - this time a hit US TV show - to a procession of rather dreary mini-games that becomes a long advert for the show.

It is really little more than a demo though, albeit a clever one.

On paper it seems like a solid tactical game, however after a few matches it all starts to feel the same.

One thing you can say about MUD: FIM Motocross World Championship is that it's not short on in-game content and activities, even if they're poorly executed. But MUD: FIM Motocross World Championship fails to appease arcade enthusiasts or simulation fanatics, muddying the waters between two gameplay styles.

Blitz Brigade is nearly the go-to online fist-person shooter on the go, but the servers behind it just are not anywhere near ready yet.

Farm Heroes Saga offers a new scoring system to differentiate itself from Candy Crush Saga, but that new mechanic is ultimately undermined by level goals and pacing that is meant to challenge your wallet more than your mind.

Perhaps Line of Defense Tactics fares better on PCs where hotkeys can take the place of the needlessly frustrating iOS control scheme. But for the iOS version, Line of Defense Tactics is a blunt instrument when the situation called for finesse.

It's heavily inspired by the first game but doesn't understand what made the original enjoyable, and is further let down by imprecise movement and forgettable level design. Meat Boy's 3D adventure is little more than a generic platformer, and that's disappointing.

Go ahead and replay Smash Cops or Smash Cops Heat, but Smash Bandits feels like a wrong turn for the series.

Unfortunately, the randomly changing target sums really bring the whole experience down, making Koozac a mediocre number puzzle good for a few rounds before being completely forgotten.

And while an overarching storyline makes a valiant effort to tie the whole experience together, it's hard to make up for the unsatisfying puzzles.

Even though the controls were adapted for shorter rounds, the fundamentals of the game remain unchanged. As a result, every round feels incomplete, leaving you wanting more, but more of something other than Tetris Blitz.

Strike Suit Zero feels very much like a product of the time when space combat games flourished on PC. Your enjoyment will greatly depend on whether you think of that as praise or a condemnation.

Digital Extremes clearly set out to develop a game that is more than a mere licensed cash-in, but Star Trek is a title with big problems, from camera issues to ropey cover and platforming mechanics.

Pacific Rim is almost a decent Infinity Blade clone, but the lack of balance and odd spikes in difficulty make it hard to recommend.

Amazing Spider-Man 2 does little to dispel the negative reputation that licensed video games have garnered over the years, coming across like a project that was kicked out of the studio doors to coincide with the movie's release.

The stealth mechanics are truly awful.

Littered throughout the whole game are collectible hats, which completionists will appreciate, but ultimately, the controls in No Time to Explain are too imprecise and drag down the experience too much.

Farming Simulator 2013 is unintentionally entertaining at times, providing retrospective moments of amusement with its dodgy physics and tedious activities. But while it may capture the long, gruelling process of maintaining a farm, it doesn't do enough to maintain your attention.

Unfortunately, Shadowgun: DeadZone is a technical mess. The game crashes almost as often as it works, and when it does work the online lag will make it seem like players are practically teleporting across the map.

Broken Age tries to end on a heartwarming final scene, but its an ending that it doesn't feel like the game earned, with Act 2's stagnant characters never maturing or developing in any way that would give the scene the emotional weight it seems to think it evokes.

Ragnarok Odyssey is a polished offering with tight controls and nice graphics, but a little innovation would have gone a long way. In terms of both style and gameplay, this is little more than a generic RPG offering that fails to build on solid foundations.

It feels like a missed opportunity, arriving a couple of years too late to take full advantage of Beth Harmon's popularity and the mass numbers of new players that came from that. But even if the release were more timely, as a learning tool it falls significantly short, lacking a clear enough vision in its puzzles and features to steer players in the right direction.

The bottom line feels as disappointing as the game itself. Rocksteady has a game on their hands that’s 20% filled with flair, flourish and joyous moments, but is bogged down by the other 80%, with braindead live-service stuff that no one really asked for and that might have been influenced by the publisher. With the current state of the industry, hopefully Rocksteady can come back with their next title and deliver the quality sort of game that they're more than capable of making when they're left to their own devices.

Stripped of its namesake, Flashback is a middling action game rife with bugs and small annoyances that add up to an experience that is perhaps best wiped from any player's memory.

The Game of Thrones video game takes a while to get going, but perseverance is rewarded with an engaging story full of tough choices and interesting dilemmas. Unfortunately, the plot is let down by poor storytelling, sloppy visuals and mediocre gameplay, despite a relatively deep combat system.

Even when everything does work properly, which is rare, AVP: Evolution is little more than a straightforward brawler. The movie license is about all it has going for it, and it uses that license poorly.

Purists and fans of the original will get their nostalgia's worth with Spy vs Spy but it was clearly made with only the most ardent of original fans in mind. Even they may wish to leave their memories in the past, as some of the rough edges that were forgiven 29 years ago are downright jagged today.

Even fans of the sport will find the lack of game modes and the absence of multiplayer difficult to overlook.

Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno is ultimately a mediocre side-scrolling action game that could have been much greater had it actually tried to invoke its predecessor instead of just referencing it through the art style.

The gameplay remains a weak imitation of a third-person shooter and the enemy A.I. is extremely poor. The lack of variety in the set pieces and the sheer number of dopey Death Eaters makes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 a tedious experience, riddled with repetition.

A frustrating and unremarkable video game experience. The game never really goes above and beyond the call of duty, offering only mildly attractive locations, bog-standard third-person gameplay and a relatively insignificant plot.

The potential is there for Defiance to be more than a half-decent console MMO marred by technical problems.

Though not without its charms, the mediocre gameplay and unambitious level design makes Brave feel more like a downloadable release than a fully-fledged retail title.

Faif feels like it could be used as the foundation for an excellent and interesting take on the RPG genre, but in that same vein it also feels like it is incomplete, and only a small part of what should be a much bigger whole.

Saints Row is ultimately an underwhelming missed opportunity. It's a shame, as this was a chance to do something big, bold and different – showing us where the franchise could be heading in the years to come. But instead, the end product is a basic and fairly tedious experience that is stuck in an era of gaming long past. There are a handful of fun moments, but these are fleeting and it's difficult to suggest anyone picking the game up.

Perhaps it shouldn't come as such a surprise, though, that a once-praised game inspired by minimalism would falter so completely after being heavily built upon and expanded.

The big problem is, the pack is in an alarmingly terrible state. So much of it is downright broken to the point where it's truly surprising the release was not further delayed. Dream weddings turn into nightmares. For clarity, all issues we're about to describe are from our time with the content post-launch, after we installed the release-day patch.

Redfall isn't as unplayable as some of the most intense reaction might lead you to believe. That said, we found it to be a rather mindless experience, often finding ourselves going through the motions. And when considering how it falls short in ways we wouldn't have expected from an Arkane title, the game is sadly a disappointment.

Fans of the original will enjoy seeing Lost Wages with high definition backdrops - and may understand more of the jokes if they played it when they were young - but the wit is not nearly as sharp as you remember it. New players, on the other hand, will simply stare at the screen incredulously, wondering why the remake's Kickstarter was embraced so enthusiastically.

Despite the butterfly effect's premise, a ham-fisted story means you won't care about who might live and who might die. It's not enough to save the game from disappointment, and in the end, Until Dawn is its own self-inflicted nightmare.

For the right audience, perhaps one with a history of ballet training, Bounden may very well be the best dancing game experience of their lives. However, poor design choices make most of the game's dances feel inaccessible, with frustrations that far overpower Bounden's brighter moments, making it more likely to start a fight than a friendship.

If you're going to attempt to make a mark on a genre that already boasts an exacting pedigree you must - one, introduce new ideas, and two, execute the established rules better than your peers. Code Name S.T.E.A.M does neither and, as a result, fails to secure itself a place in its turn-based landscape.

On the surface, Halo: Spartan Assault is a solid twin-stick shooter, much better suited to consoles than mobiles and PC. Ultimately, however, it feels like a mobile game, containing breezy missions that aren't much to look at and provide little in the way of a challenge. Oh, and it costs twice the price to access.

The problems with the computer AI make the single player a bit of a chore, and while the online co-op action is frantic and fun, it's also chaotic and lacking a bit of flow. There are quite a few glitches in the campaign, including zombies disappearing into scenery, or just disappearing entirely, and the set piece battles are hardly jaw-dropping.

Farming Simulator 2012 provides a slower pace to gameplay, but the controls make it more frustrating than relaxing.

Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar shows promise in its expansive world and character progression, but a pay-to-win economy and connection problems keep this from being the return to Britannia fans have been hoping for.

For those who do stick with it, there are an absolute ton of weapons and items to unlock, and a variety of locations with both arena and base defense missions. But the game's ambition and the slow burn for progress may have been more than The Drowning can handle.

Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game full of missed opportunities. The concept is great and some of the ideas are clever, but it doesn't use them in an interesting or satisfying way.

Lost Planet 3 isn't a lost cause. There's some genuine emotion to be found in its storyline and a spattering of variety to its combat, but this is marred by unoriginal core gameplay and lackluster level design.

Unfortunately, enjoyable multiplayer modes and what feels like a fresh approach are negated by restrictive gameplay, dull presentation and poor combat.

The unimpressive visuals make a mockery of the HD moniker, while the lack of extras and bonus material does nothing to entice long-standing fans. Silent Hill HD Collection isn't short on scares, but it's lacking in almost every other department.

Extra polish would have gone a long way to improving Flame Over's fortunes, but as it stands it's a few embers short of a fire.

Oddland has a solid idea behind its take on mobile fist-person shooters, but control difficulties with reloading make the duels more frustrating than fun. Shaking the device is never a great control option, and even less so when under fire.

Dungeon Keeper is structured in such a way that you can go several days without making significant progress, and at that point the enjoyable invasions just aren't enough to make the game worthwhile.

Bloodstroke is a stylized collection of half-realized ideas that don't quite live up to their potential.

The result is a game that looks and plays the part of Madden on the go, but fumbles terribly when you look beyond the surface and try to play for any length of time.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories fails miserably at capturing the core attributes of its series predecessors, namely the effective psychological horror and captivating storylines. It doesn't exactly excel as an original dungeon-crawler either, bogged down by repetitive gameplay and generic mechanics. This is one book you will be able to put down.

Gold Diggers is fun in short bursts, but slow progression and a general lack of the titular gold means most players won't keep digging for long.

Unfortunately, Demons' Score is marred by some unforgivable issues. Most notable is the repetition, which has you playing through the exact same song and tap sequence dozens of times to reach each of the more entertaining boss encounters.

SingStar is yet to be dethroned as gaming's number one karaoke franchise, but its latest installment is a lazy update that skimps on features and playlist variety.

Technically it is possible to complete all of the levels without using any of the power-ups, but with so much of the game based on chance the game is designed to try and make players reliant on power-ups to squeeze a few more dollars from players.The insidious design sours the fun of Papa Pear Saga's vibrant and cheery stages, making it a far wiser investment to just play through Peggle again instead.

There is absolutely no way to obtain more health potions without paying up or waiting until the next day, making the game either impossible to progress in or very expensive very quickly. Either way, it's a broken design and should not be played by anyone with respect for their own time.

Square Enix has finally embraced the free-to-play model with Final Fantasy: All the Bravest, in what is almost a parody of the worst examples of free-to-play games.

To the game's credit, the new visual style is the best that the original Contra has ever looked. Had Contra: Evolution been released as a downloadable game on a console or handheld with proper buttons, it might actually be a decent game. But Contra: Evolution is not a decent game. It isn't even close.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of having to rip the PS VR headset off mid-session to hurl up chunks of your breakfast, or having to spend the next hour feeling like the room is spinning. It was frustrating enough reviewing the experience - we dread to think how angry we'd be if we'd just spent 30 quid on it...Avoid.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile employs business practices that would come across as underhanded even in a free-to-play game. The fact that Atari expects players to pay up front for it is shameful.

The developers clearly wanted to pack a lot of variety into the game, and to that end they have succeeded. But all of the variety in the world is meaningless if the controls to play through it are excruciatingly imprecise.

It is quite clear that Devil's Third was never intended for the Wii U. It feels completely out of place. It's fitting that the only Wii U-specific feature Devil's Third uses is the GamePad's poor battery life, because it gives you an excuse to turn it off.

Toy Story Mania lacks charm, personality, a challenge and perhaps most importantly of all in a mini-game collection, variety. While we appreciate that it's aimed at a younger crowd, it's hard to imagine it appealing to anybody, regardless of age. Perhaps we could be more forgiving if it was packaged as a budget app, but as a full priced game Kinect game for kids, Kinect Disneyland Adventure and Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster offer bags more entertainment.

And that's what it feels like to play Godzilla - you're a man in a giant suit, blindly bumbling around a fake cardboard city, swinging your arms and trying not to pass out - not because you're exhausted, but because you're bored out of your mind.

There is a decent if repetitive kart racer here, but no game could be decent enough to excuse Rovio's tactics of extortion.

The one saving grace is that die-hard Star Wars fanatics can collect cards of all their favorite characters, even the more obscure ones like each individual alien from A New Hope's cantina scene. But even that novelty isn't enough to make Star Wars: Force Collection worthwhile to suffer through the insultingly unintuitive menus and boring, non-interactive card battles. It's a free download, but even then it's overpriced.

Whether the game is just poorly thought out or a cynical cash-grab to prey on children and their parents' wallets is debatable, but either way The Croods demands far too much time for too little reward to be worth a download.

It's also still an undeniably good game, and despite awful controls players can still have fun with it. But really, until a developer figures out a better way of adapting the controls to a touchscreen, this version of Metal Slug X should be avoided.

There is surely scope to make a decent Family Guy game - just imagine an adventure or puzzle title littered with acerbic humor and smart observations. But as a shooter, Back to the Multiverse is a hopelessly moronic, completely pointless experience that will please neither Family Guy fans nor people who enjoy games. In this case, the joke is most definitely on us.

To the game's credit, there is a nice adrenaline ability that briefly puts the action into slow-motion for easier shooting. Unfortunately, that ability was not attached to a better game. Rather than a fun tie-in with the action flick, the game becomes a literal interpretation of its name and dies. Hard.