Shellshock 2 is a scandalous FPS made with no apparent knowledge of the genre, little but contempt for its audience, and few tools beyond a spluttering engine and a hammer. [Apr 2009, p.116]

Bad Day LA is the game people often say they want and then ignore when it arrives; it prizes ambition over execution and flair over finesse and both pays the price and reaps the rewards for daring to do so. [Sept 2006, p.82]

Worst of all for a game hoping to sell itself on scares, Amy is never frightening. Instead, its horrors are derived from the game's shoddy execution, weak puzzles and frustrating play rhythms, a nest of poor game design decisions through which disappointment, not fear, are hatched.

Fighter Within’s storyline is a misery of clichés, reaching for kung-fu movie kitsch but delivering nothing of the sort. But even the ugly presentation and forgettable cast of characters could have been forgiven if the developer had managed to make good on its ambitions for a nuanced fighting game controlled with arms and legs rather than fingers and thumbs.

Bugbear built the FlatOut brand, and bred a following on a balance of silly stunts, destructible environments and rewards. It crafted the game's zanier side with care, with the aim of keeping players invested in its often cheap kicks. Team6 has abandoned that manifesto in favour of haphazard thrills via haphazard design. As a result, FlatOut 3 crashes and burns.

Prose With Bros is irresistible: the interface is clean and simple, voting is snappy, and the algorithm producing each game's jumble of words delivers perfectly innocent but eminently corruptible English every time.

The laser-like focus on the personal side of management is to the exclusion of all else – the lack of a match engine is one thing, but there's no detail whatsoever to the football your team is playing.

Playing against AI can throw up a challenge, but requires patience. Higher difficulties give the AI more time to think, but DTOL's real problem is its interface. It's simple to the point of crudity, but functionally it can be opaque and cluttered, making a reasonably complex game seem even more so while you're figuring out the rules. Get past that, and there's an acute psychological game to be played in DTOL, but it'll require time – and an extra player – to find it.

Chaos reigns in the brackish bayous of this endearingly ramshackle racer from Hydro Thunder Hurricane developer Vector Unit. An erratic police presence might attempt to uphold the law, but between the fluctuating prices of its illegal trading posts and the trail of destruction your air boat leaves in its wake – not to mention a frame-rate choppier than the winding waterways themselves – this is a world without order.

Monkey Bump lacks the gooey intricacy of the team's best games, perhaps, but it's still an elegant time-waster with fine-tuned controls and an excellent handle on the things that keep score-chasing gamers happy. Slight and chirpy, this may be PomPom at its least idiosyncratic, but the expanding boundary has never looked more at home.

AWESOME Land's harder across the board, actually, but its slightly naff virtual controls work better than expected, and the checkpoint placement isn't unduly sadistic. It's difficult, at times, to tell whether FreakZone's pitched this as parody or homage, but take it as the latter, and you'll have a fairly good couple of hours with it.

With both real-time and turn-based flavours of haphazard carnage on offer, Glitch Tank is willing to mess with your brain at a variety of speeds. Michael Brough's certainly given iPad owners something to think about, then – even if few will have the patience and foresight to feel truly comfortable on this strange new playing field.

Pig & Bullet is certainly an amusing distraction, but Spiceworx's thin veneer of polish can't hide the simplistic Flash game lurking beneath.

Gauge, then, is throwaway, minimalist, score-chasing brilliance, a game that's pulled together from the smallest selection of pieces, but that also feels bold and new and intensely imaginative.

The game is divided into four tournaments, each containing four unique courses. It's when you get to the second stage of the first tournament that the game's major failing makes itself apparent: there's only one composition to race to. Presumably, the developers thought this would be enough, as differences in course layout and sound effects provide a little variety, but in practice it's just too repetitive.

Rowdy and knockabout? Perhaps. Fun? Not quite.

Ugly, punishing, and extremely satisfying, Gets To The Exit is a raw kind of fun. [Oct 2012, p.110]

It's a surprisingly effective template for an action game, offering all the explosions and feedback of a shooter, while leaving you with a warm feeling of smugness when things go according to plan.

Fussy collision detection and what can only be deliberate slowdown are perhaps nods too far to the 48k era, yet the developer's ageing tools have sculpted something that feels surprisingly new. Not bad for what looks like the oldest game on Vita.

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.

Goat Up 2 wears its influences on its sleeve – from Pac-Man to Portal – and its attempt to blend the immediacy and pace of the former with the brain strain of the latter is a unique, effective proposition.

The presence of IAP can’t prevent Fearless Wheels from ultimately delivering a robust and worthwhile ride for those looking for the colourful bursts of shallow play its minute-long tracks encourage.

It’s a solid concept, but Honeyslug struggles to develop it in any meaningful way.

Matches are brisk, varied and tense, but you might face a long wait to get one. An idle mode allows you to browse the internet or check emails until a challenge arrives, but alerts are sadly infrequent. Local play is a fine substitute if you have a willing partner, but Gun Monkeys is a two-player game too often lacking a player two.

It’s a game designed to intentionally test your stamina and patience, meaning that if you fail to prepare yourself for Hookball’s relentless pace and harsh difficulty, then prepare to fail.

Despite its flaws, however, Overdrive captures the essence of its progenitor, though it also serves as a reminder that the much-missed Bizarre Creations isn’t coming back.

Had Climax been able to condense the best parts of all three games - China's pared-down and accessible design, India's looks, Russia's two-character dynamic - into one, we might've had a valuable offshoot, but ultimately this is another Assassin's Creed that succumbs to inconsistency and bloat. [April 2016, p.110]

More consistent is the creeping sense of dread throughout, an atmosphere that's built on Robot Invader's preference for slow realisation over jump scares. [Tested with Oculus Rift; June 2016, p.118]