The problem that remains, however, is its lack of anything profound to say, as it tees up complex topics before leaning towards comfortable answers. [Issue#406, p.120]

A fragile container for a tale of such inestimable value, and what ought to be universally welcoming instead must be approached with caution: come expecting revelation on an emotional level, not a mechanical one. [Jan 2014, p.121]

The problem is that, in the areas where Esoteric Ebb differs most from its clearest inspiration, it's imitating something else. [Issue#422, p.112]

Is there any need, on vertically scrolling levels, for your character to die when they touch the bottom of the screen, despite the fact you know there are platforms there? Do bosses have to seem impossible, and then prove tedious when their patterns have been learned? [Jan 2008, p.89]

With its Ikea backdrops and clipart objects, Bright Light has perhaps paid too much attention to functionality and not enough to form. [Christmas 2010, p.90]

Given that Smoke and Sacrifice's end point truly feels like it means something, it's heartbreaking that many will get stuck riding its mundane merry-go-rounds. [Aug 2018, p.110]

Is this the most violent game of all time? Maybe. Its ragdoll physics may not match the flying limbs and broken faces of Soldier of Fortune, but its throwaway approach to life and death is genuinely shocking, leaving a bitter, metallic aftertaste. This is neither a fall nor an ascension. This is an update. [Jan 2004, p.105]

The fifth in the Colin McRae series is still a fine game if - and here's the major caveat - you didn't play last year's update. Those who did will get more fun out of playing spot the difference. [Nov 2004, p.107]

Shiren The Wanderer still has its own charm and deep and lasting individual value that, for all its abstract irritations, surpasses many more modern gaming experiences. [May 2008, p.96]

By the time you reach the end of Blacklist everything has grown so big and so explosive that you’re left exhausted but not entirely satisfied, and maybe after all that incoherent action you’ll recall the time when a single flashlight in Chaos Theory’s Panamanian bank made you hold your breath.

Until these closing stages, though, Relooted doesn't match its cast's bold determination and flexibility. Despite well-laid plans, the execution isn't as slick as it might be. [Issue#422, p.116]

Pseudo may have avoided the formlessness that afflicts so much vehicular combat, but it has failed to play to its game’s strengths. The greasy, weightless, unmodulated handling and largely unimaginative course design aren’t remotely as satisfying as the raw, explosive scraps between racers. [Mar 2006, p.84]

There are pleasures in these moments, and plenty of charm (see: 'A Human Touch'), but the adventure itself never quite satisfies out wanderlust. [Issue#421, p.118]

Only the most ardent grognard will do more than dent the surface of this enormous strategy game, which rather diminishes the overall impact for the rest of us. [Mar 2004, p.110]

Fatal Fury may have to think again before taking on another fight. [Issue#411, p.108]

It is a shame that Konami so overinflates the experience through early chores, especially as it has struck the balance between hardcore fans and casual explorers so well in the past. [Jan 2009, p.88]

Despite deep customisation (right down to the trajectories of your bullets) and some truly striking monster designs, it's impossible to shake the feeling that you're playing an inferior imitation of a better game. [Apr 2011, p.103]

While See the Future undoubtedly delivers on its title, giving you a single feverish glimpse of a potential new direction for the series, this odd collection of entertainments offers far more than a mere early-warning hype machine dressed up with a few free haircuts for your dog. In its cheeky refusal to conform, it’s also a chance to see Albion’s present, and take another look at a game that’s both fascinating and gently flawed.

Final Fantasy XIV’s shine wears off as your level increases.

Mario Golf might just be one of the finest games ever made. It's the only explanation EDGE can think of for how it remains playable despite having so very many things wrong with it. [Oct 2003, p.101]

As nostalgic joys go, though, it's a damning one. [Issue#367, p.106]

There is, after all, something quietly revelatory about a big-budget videogame that has as much in common with the work of Bennett Foddy as Ubisoft's boilerplate sandboxes. Far from a masterpiece, then, but Kojima's first post-Konami release HAS laid the foundations for something greater. Which is fitting, since that's what he's had us doing for 60-odd hours. [Issue#341, p.102]

Ara is at once too shallow and too deep, a 4X game where one of its crosses bears far more eight than the others. [Issue#404, p.118]

A series that, for all its wanderlust, is never truly going anywhere. [Christmas 2015, p.112]

Not quite a serious Pokemon challenger, then, but with pressure on The Pokemon Company to bring in an experienced development partner for future titles, this is a fine calling card for Tose. [Issue#381, p.104]

It is its maker's most successful free-to-play endeavour to date, even if that is to damn it with faint praise. [Sept 2015, p.118]

There's still much enjoyment to be found in the interim grinding between boss fights, but Lords Of The Fallen's greatest sin is that all feels rather soulless. [Christmas 2014, p.116]

A workmanlike effort. [Jan 2007, p.78]

Think of it like fast-forwarding through an action movie past all the poorly written dialogue to get to the good bits. [Issue#367, p.112]

Stuffed with extra modes, supporting character upload to GC Toadstool Tour and bundled with a wireless adapter, Advance Tour is great value, but it's also rather clumsy and bland. Only in the minigames, when Mario and company show up both in person and in spirit … does it really find a life of its own. [July 2004, p.109]

Another decent GunCon arcade experience from Namco, which shoots all of the (now very familiar) lightgun game boxes. Fun for a while, certainly, but there are no surprises. [Dec 2003, p.107]

What it adds to the original formula is essentially redundant, and everything it does that is successful was already in place in the original. [Feb 2008, p.93]

Very much a sidewards step for the series rather than a bold leap forwards for its kind. [Christmas 2014, p.118]

If this is the series' swansong, it goes out in the luxuirous manner in which the series was born – in a well-produced, moderately thoughful and firmly enjoyable instalment of an established genre – a manner that won't go unappreciated but will just as likely go unremembered. [Dec 2005, p.110]

As an arcadey flight game it’s just about on the enjoyable side of average, especially when compared to its still superior genre stablemate Ace Combat 6. [Apr 2009, p.122]

At first glance, Post Trauma appears to be a meaningful iteration on a familiar formula, but in practice it's more like a cover of a favourite song on the radio. You tap your foot, but you long for the original. [Issue#411, p.114]

While it lacks the scope or density of Oblivion’s The Shivering Isles, it’s the most you’re going to get out of Fallout’s current batch of DLC. And as a long-anticipated reopening of the game’s original map, it at least gives you something to live for.

It's a decent enough excuse for some very good times. [Issue#383, p.120]

You could never accuse Strange Scaffold of resting on its laurels. [Issue#367, p.115]

Once again we leave a Nintendo mobile game feeling a little underwhelmed. [Issue#338, p.114]

For the most part the game has been intelligently repositioned for the PC platform, but a lack of polish means that many minor flaws coalesce to make the experience a rather uneven one, often obscuring the creators’ worthwhile efforts. [Sept 2007, p.96]

Fantasia is a novel twist on the music name, then, but one lacking the sprinkling of Disney magic its title promises. [Christmas 2014, p.122]

The title is just painfully apt: never has a free-roaming structure brought so little to improve the quality of a game's world. The mooted open-ended environments of Tony Hawk's American Wasteland feel like a fallacy, a bleak repackaging for hocking the game to a jaded audience. [Dec 2005, p.107]

Unlike in a game such as Limbo, the main challenge is not finding solutions to puzzles but performing them. [Issue#411, p.118]

Within 20 or so minutes, it's all over. [Issue#367, p.116]

An amusing localisation (“he is cleaning his knife with a complex facial expression”) and some enthusiastically squelchy sound effects add charm to a decent challenge, and there’s enough vigour and character here to make it a worthwhile, if fleeting, diversion.

It's strange that players aren't given more time to make decisions. [Christmas 2015, p.122]

As a reminder of the old days of the series, The Serpent’s Curse just about serves its purpose; it sounds the same, works the same and, mostly, looks the same. But as a contender on the modern point-and-click landscape it offers little to drag players away from the new age of superior soirees.

For now, SimCity is good for the reasons it’s always been good, and bad for reasons old and new. And yes, we wish we could play it on the train. But after spending two weeks as mayor of a series of teeming pocket metropolises, we’re still ready to spend more.

It's hard to complain too much about the absence of peril when you're wearing the bottom half of a chicken suit. [Feb 2017, p.114]

Other than some disappointing visuals, there's little to complain about in arcade, exhibition and mutliplayer modes. [July 2004, p.109]

It’s a game of light and shade, sure, but there’s a little too much of the former seeping through the cracks.

If the result sometimes feels more like a robust proof of concept than a complete game, it's a reasonable outlay for an afternoon's fun. [April 2017, p.121]

There's an interesting personal story here, yet when it comes to the work itself, we can't help but feel we've gone a little too far back in time. [Issue#411, p.123]

Umurangi Generation is a game of jagged edged, in many more ways than one. We just with that didn't apply to how it so often feels in the hands. [Issue#361, p.119]

As with any rollercoaster, you can never quite recapture the giddy pleasure of that first ride. [Issue#367, p.121]

It’s insight into what lay beneath GoldenEye’s unforgettable skin is commendable. But the subsequent attempt to update and embellish the formula is, while a gleeful pleasure, not wholly successful. [July 2005, p.88]

Where FlatOut felt like racing in a field, FlatOut 2 feels like racing on a film set. It has been reshaped into the archetype, competent arcade racer. [Aug 2006, p.89]

There was never any doubt that Total Overdose would fall foul of one of its genre's various pitfalls, but it's unfortunate that it ultimately had to be one as irksome as excessive length... At its best, the game still shakes up a loud and spicy Mexican cocktail, but what it’s added to the mix has been more than enough to weaken the taste. [Nov 2005, p.103]

It's an all-too timely (big) mood piece. [Issue#361, p.120]

With better class implementation, carrying through into PvP, it might have been able to assert its own identity. [Issue#333, p.116]

Action Forms’ moments of ingenuity and the sophistication of its writing demonstrate that it could do great and yet more terrifying things with a more intimidating budget. [Apr 2009, p.124]

Dap runs out of steam some way before it wraps up, but this abrasive, distinctive game lingers in the mind, haunting you like the ghosts of so many fallen Pikmin. [Issue#367, p.122]

Among this "grab-bag of myths and masks" are moments of genuine intrigue, but its vague storytelling lacks the specificities that would make it universal. [Issue#361, p.121]

The game is at pains to highlight its lack of tutorials or explanations, but outside an intriguing opening, its conundrums are unlikely to leave you stumped for long, a result of the ship's compactness and the robot's inability to carry more than one item at once.

From bedrooms containing clever and mysterious moving panels to a 'Land of the Giants'-style pool challenge, each section delivers something new and exciting to motivate deeper exploration. [Apr 2004, p.110]

With design lifts from here, there and everywhere peppered throughout, it’s safe to say that the developer has rather appropriately played things by the numbers. [Mar 2006, p.88]

Whether you view the appearance of a game like this on the DS as a crucial step in conserving gaming’s heritage, a convenient nostalgia fix, or a total reversal of everything the machine was supposed to deliver, you’ll most likely greet Bub and Bob with little more than familiar affection. [Feb 2006, p.92]

All too often you’re baffled as to how your slick 180° spin failed to satisfy the marking criteria, only to pass on the next attempt with a clunking three-point turn. [Oct 2007, p.94]

This characterful, sprawling throwback might well have been considered a classic two decades ago. But, as its creators have patently discovered, it isn't 1997 anymore. [June 2017, p.86]

The Warrior's Code essentially has forgotten when to say no. Pulling itself outward in every direction at once, it stretches thin where it should be richest: at its core. [June 2006, p.95]

Ninety-Nine Nights deserves a better score... That's a strange ways to put it, but it comes from the fact that its most grating flaws occur at such a fundamental level that it's a mystery they were ever tolerated at all. [JPN Import; June 2006, p.89]

It's a sparse recipe that makes for a sometimes infuriating, but always compelling, puzzler which is spiced up by the inexorable progress of your dot.

Its scenarios are striking in scope, but its gunplay can’t quite keep pace. It features some moments of truly cinematic vision, but the technology and framework can’t quite do them full justice. [Christmas 2007, p.90]

Approached as the latest work from one of the industry's favoured fathers, The Cave could seem like a tourist trap, packed with old ideas to lure in passers-by. Taken for what it is – a simple, characterful adventure game from an independent developer – it offers just enough to be worth the price of admission.

With its unusual blend of Kinect and controller – of simple missions and complex control – Heavy Armor is a modern rarity: a game designed to be hard work. Whether that translates directly into it being a game for the 'hardcore' is debatable, but From Software has made the best of a bad situation and, aptly, delivered a game that asks you to do exactly the same.

In many ways, Trash Panic represents the kind of inventive, inimitable Japanese release that comes all too infrequently – but here, such creativity has not been enough to turn an interesting idea into a brilliant one.

Reduced to its simplest terms and stripped of its highly aspiring overtones, Rising is essentially a competent shooter with its heart in the right place, and a ton of ideas that never gel into any cohesive whole. [Aug 2005, p.92]

An impressively comprehensive, reasonably captivating though ultimately flawed experience. [June 2005, p.95]

There’s a good game here, but that game was built and finished two years ago. Origins adds little to its mechanics and nothing to the mythology. The story of a raw and inelegant Batman in his early years is better told on the big screen and the printed page, rather than in a raw, inelegant game in a generation’s twilight years.

The game's world of desperate survival is much more effectively painted through its mechanics. [Issue#386, p.112]

The game’s ambition reaches further than perhaps its budget could reach, thus failing to either deliver or explore its ideas as they were no doubt envisioned. [Nov 2008, p.95]

Alienation sort of stops when it really should be getting going, routes closing off as they should be opening up. [July 2016, p.118]

While some poorly designed systems and mechanics chip away at your patience, the feeling of flying seamlessly from space down to a peninsula you spotted from orbit never fails to enthrall. [Nov 2016, p.106]

It's a pity that Remedy seems intent on making you eat your soggy story vegetables before tucking into American Nightmare's only real confection.

Tengami’s world is as rich and stimulating as any you’re likely to find on iOS, but there’s something missing. Like an origami crane, it’s an admirable piece of craftsmanship, but the result remains rather flimsy and lightweight.

This is not, as it needed to be, the Pro Evo of mixed martial arts. [Dec 2010, p.94]

The game's huge assortment of side missions and time trials, along with Gridnode runs, represent its most appealing offerings as you hone your route and - for the most part - focus on nothing but running. [Issue#296, p.108]

There's promise in The Turing Test's constituent parts, but considered as a whole, it fails the imitation game. [Nov 2016, p.110]

Sadly, that fresh new take on combat is hamstrung by a camera that can’t keep up with the elaborate effects, animations and blistering speed.

A little slicker, and Pandora's Tower could have provided a surprisingly effective alternative in the character-action genre. Its blend of pointer controls and button-based combat begs to be further explored. But as it is, this a clunky action title – albeit one with a flicker of genuine emotion at its heart.

That speed and flow, ultimately, is a fantasy - one that's ever harder to appreciate when you're constantly being knocked off course by rockets. [Issue#376, p.104]

Pac ‘N’ Roll is regrettably short and, with few rules to master, its replayability is quite limited. With the DS’s library rapidly expanding beyond minigame collections and touchscreen experiments it’s a tough sell, but as a fast, cheap diversion there’s enough simple fun in exploration to make it worthwhile. [Nov 2005, p.113]

Coupling this mostly successful strategic management to a realtime 3D world is unconvincing. More than that, the places where the RTS bits meet the shooting bits exist on some weird fringe of reality, where the symbolic shorthand of tactical games clashes absurdly with the pavement-pounding veracity we've learnt to expect from open-world crime. [May 2009, p.91]

A frustrating step backwards for a studio that can do better. [July 2016, p.122]

Sure, Three Fields might not have the resources its founders once did, but it feels as if the studio was in rather too much of a hurry to get this one out the door. [Issue#323, p.122]

It's a firstperson co-op adventure that hardly disgraces the Metroid name it should never have been lumbered with. [Nov 2016, p.114]

The waywardness of the physics and AI are easier to forgive in a game with such a taste for ludicrous knock-on effects. [Issue#328, p.104]