It’s an enormously likeable package, and one which sets perhaps a much more valuable next-gen agenda: one of games which place a higher emphasis on player enjoyment than they do their own ambitions. [Jan 2005, p.84]

There are nice touches – cockroaches that scatter under your flashlight, the occasional puzzle, effective cutscenes – but there is little that you won’t have found implemented in a vastly more satisfactory form elsewhere. [May 2008, p.99]

Prinny sabotages the player's platforming with unsympathetic controls. [Aug 2009, p.106]

The Saboteur is an awesome display of clichés, stereotypes, shortcuts and failures in logic. [Jan 2010, p.86]

Area 51 is entirely without inspiration, an exercise in slick, crowd-pleasing cookie-cutter cliché from the Jerry Bruckheimer school of entertainment manufacture. It is absolutely not bad, almost never broken, and usually a good deal of fun. [July 2005, p.92]

Approached free of any expectations higher than endless, mindless single-button mashing, the kenpu collecting and scenery spotting can provide some limited enjoyment in smaller doses, but approached as an epic quest, Key Of Heaven is one better left untaken. [Mar 2006, p.94]

A tasteful translation of an enduring classic, but it remains too cautious to satisfy those looking for innovation. [May 2007, p.95]

Schneider's presentational style may be a little sterile for some tastes, but while his games may not have the same force of personality as Minter's, he demonstrates an equally astute mind for augmenting existing genres.

The result is like the game's own inventory puzzles: disparate notions combining to create ingenious and often surprising new forms. [Issue#369, p.119]

Salt and Sacrifice shrewdly builds upon its forerunner's groundwork - offering enough depth to enthral the most ardent admirers of the Soulslike genre, while its robust 2D platformer fundamentals make it much more approachable than many of its peers. [Issue#372, p.108]

Without seeking to damn a fine game with faint praise, another succinct design philosophy comes to mind: it just works. [Issue#372, p.100]

There are some gently taxing puzzles here, and just enough variety to keep the game ticking along, but the real surprise is just how winsome Docomodake’s fungi are, each section ending with a guilelessly warm celebration of family values. [Mar 2009, p.95]

At a time when science fiction has never been handled with more vim and vigour, Star Ocean threatens to miss out on all the fun of the genre resurgence through its total lack of ambition. [June 2009, p.92]

This is far, far more than a nostalgic return to form - instead, it's a game so adept at exploiting its own heritage that it can integrate thorough modernity into its design without denting its retro appeal in the slightest. [Sept 2006, p.78]

Underneath the mundane masculinity and grimy gun-toting clichés lies a heavily structured and well-considered score-attack game – one that’s worth excavating for all the short-lived interest it holds. [Feb 2008, p.88]

The meetings themselves are well realised, with the developer putting considerable effort into evoking the right kind of atmosphere. [Christmas 2007, p.99]

As gorgeous as it is, though, even a pair of 3D glasses wouldn't make the action any more entertaining to sit through. [Issue#393, p.106]

Isn't a game that does anything obviously or overtly clever or innovative. But any game that takes such a simple premise and polishes it, hones it and refines it until it's this engrossing, this absorbing, and this much fun, is quite obviously doing something very clever indeed. [Christmas 2003, p.114]

The net result is a product that can't be faulted on its accessibility, but has less subtlety than ever with which to hide the inherently, and sometimes unrelentingly, mechanical process that caring for your sims represents. [Mar 2007, p.85]

Rarely does dying feel like the player's fault and, in typical "Sonic Adventure" fashion, the best bits are when you find that the majority of control has been taken away from you, and you're flung around the world at escape velocity. [Mar 2004, p.105]

Under GungHo's auspice it has made its deepest game in years, and one of its most fascinating, too. [Feb 2017, p.118]

This is a game that’s as riotously entertaining as it is viciously random... It’s gleeful automobile slapstick, but not for anyone who values skill and achievement more than taking a wrecking ball to their opponents’ racing lines. [Dec 2005, p.114]

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]

While the overall blandness means Galactrix is unlikely to truly thrill many people, it also means that it won’t exclude anyone either, and the ever-reliable pattern-spotting blends with the steady trickle of meaningless rewards to exert a pull on its audience that is truly Pavlovian. [Apr 2009, p.125]

For all the spectacle of Resonance's gunfights, the game feels restrictive. It's a strategy game in which your tactical options are limited to one or two reliable strategies, and an RPG in which character development is chained to similar lines. [May 2010, p.96]

Rain’s core ideas remain frustratingly underdeveloped throughout, and it comes off more like a watercolour sketch than the oil painting that was promised.

Call Of Juarez has mined its source material well, collecting a wealth of imagery that it then squanders on lacklustre and dysfunctional gameplay. [Aug 2007, p.93]

The constant flow of new sights and well-thought-out puzzles that make up the bulk of the game provide more than enough motivation to see this rescue attempt through to the end.