The game's highlights hint at a more interesting game that never quite materialises; in the end, Mad Max simply isn't crazy enough. [Nov 2015, p.108]

This is a soothing lullaby of a game: a leisurely bit of counter-programming that, contrary to forecasts, doesn't disgrace the series' good name. [Issue#310, p.120]

Ghosthunter is from the same studio that brought us "Primal," and it shows. With so many adventure games on the market, this is an interesting, but ultimately staid example. Like "Primal," Ghosthunter struggles to be fun. [Jan 2004, p.101]

With its best ideas exhausted long before the developer tires of them, some moments of real ingenuity are swamped by busywork. At times, you’ll admire the craftsmanship, but Sky Tourist is often too busy trying to be clever to remember to be fun.

There are neat touches: you've got infinite ammo, brilliantly, and inhaling gas leaves you with a temporary cough that ruins your aim … but it needs a few more tactics to make it more than the sum of its admittedly solid parts. [Christmas 2003, p.116]

Were spirits to play a game while they waited in Purgatory, surely it would be Mario Party. It can take an age to get to the end, and the minigames are interspersed with a turgid board game section that tests the patience to its limits. [Jan 2004, p.109]

While its appeal may have some age restrictions, some of those minigames are deceptively distracting, and doubly so. [Jan 2007, p.85]

The sad fact is that this combat mostly fails to ignite interest, and combined with its cruel difficulty spikes, occasional glitches and a severe differential in graphical quality between 360 and PS3 versions (the latter losing out), Turok's strong contextualisation and smattering of brave ideas get buried. [Mar 2008, p.92]

Conan is a genuine surprise. It’s not innovative in its entirety, but it does almost as much as it can with the central conceit, and thus proves one of the better examples of the hack’n’slash genre. [Dec 2007, p.93]

The game occasionally drags, arguably due to representing the bleakness of its environment and the challenges of existing within it a little too keenly. Autosave points are few and far between, which means that on anything above normal difficulty your frequent restarts will result in much repetition. Likewise, I Am Alive's platforming is occasionally cumbersome and inexact. But nevertheless this game offers a journey worth charting, one of physics, social decline and welcome terror in a market overrun by zombies.

As chaotic and unrefined as it is, however, it motors on with a definite sense of purpose and provides a solid sense of fulfilment, if not necessarily one of accomplishment. [Christmas 2005, p.110]

This is not, then, the kind of game you pick up and play between train stops, but one to sit down with when you've got an afternoon stretching out in front of you. [Issue#338, p.118]

Octodad: Dadliest Catch asks you to overlook an awful lot more than plot holes.

Despite its reheated fantasy trappings and formulaic design principles, it also remains surprisingly easy to get hooked on the steady dopamine hit of each fresh loot acquisition and the rhythm of the game's combat pulse.

Clock Tower 3 is never scary: rather it's unwitting proof of the banality of evil. [June 2003, p.101]

With a much better camera and less of a fondness for gratuitously fussy challenges - and a tendency not to combine the two - this could have been a minor classic. [June 2017, p.96]

Annoyances aside, there's a sense of pluck to Titanic Scion which may well power you through its most threadbare moments and its nagging UI quirks. [Issue#416, p.118]

One of the most ungainly platformers of recent years. [Sept 2015, p.123]

Ends up feeling like it's been built by PC game developers obsessed with quick saves. There's absolutely no creative latitude; it's a case of remembering where enemies appear and getting them before they get you. [May 2005, p.86]

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

Next Encounter is one of the grandest and busiest console battlefields yet created. This is a spiritual update to Space Invaders, a one-trick pony that kicks harder than most FPS thoroughbreds, making the "Medal of Honour" series seem like a vain diva by comparison. [June 2004, p.109]

Ironically, this series is unlikely to blossom until its popularity wanes and Koei stops being afraid to change it. [July 2005, p.95]

Toybox deserves a wider audience. Chunky, colourful and challenging, this is a game that makes the most of its strange conceits. Occasionally those Nobel laureates are onto something, then.

Ultimately, though, the derivative puzzling and repetitive grid of traversing Sker House at an absolutely snail's pace makes Maid of Sker more like a crawling simulation than a game that truly makes our skin crawl. [Issue#349, p.104]

It's a smart idea in an enjoyably brisk score-attack game that sadly feels a little undernourished thanks to the brevity of its campaign and its repetitive play rhythms.

The game, though, is the same enjoyable knockabout romp that it ever was, and Gameloft has thankfully made no attempt to shoehorn touch-screen controls in unnecessarily. If you feel a burning urge to spend 500 points to relive some small part of your lost youth, you won't be disappointed.

Try and play Shelter as a perfectionist and you’ll fail, the victim of a cruel world and occasionally clunky, unclear rules. Better to simply do your best, allow Might and Delight’s fantastical art to enthrall, and let nature take its course.

Boom Boom Rocket is marking time rather than feeling the rhythm, and that’s not enough to set Live Arcade’s skies alight. [June 2007, p.88]