It's nothing at all like Command & Conquer, but - eventually - it's a thoughtful and bombastic multiplayer RTS that's welcoming to everyone.

After playing the three levels of this, all the beans in Tesco wouldn't make me play it again. There's not room in this sandbox for two. Or one for that matter. Goodbye gods, hello atheism.

The poor AI and lack of an in-game save option makes the single player campaigns frustrating and unrewarding, and the role-playing elements don't quite work as well as they perhaps should.

There's a mess of nerves that throb confusedly beneath its borrowed face. It looks about right, certainly, but you'll need more than immunosuppressants to stop your face exploding in outrage half the time.

At times a wonderful effort and a tremendous tech demo that kept us entertained for all of a couple of hours, but that's all it eventually feels like - a tech demo. As a game, it's woefully shallow and it left us wanting something more.

An expensive indulgence, Legends and Killers undoubtedly improves the multiplayer in terms of variety, but that's just not enough to make it essential.

Bullet Witch's graphics can switch from breathtaking to tawdry in the bat of an eyelid, just as quickly as the action can veer between exhilarating sensory barrage and tedious, repetitive trawl.

It's a thin and troubled tribute to the original Panzer Dragoons, slim on the ambition, vision and art that made its predecessors what they were - and some way short of the invention and execution in the games they inspired.

But more importantly, you do get to 'be' the Fantastic 4 and experiment with some really rather excellent superpowers, and the game isn't so bad that a serious fan couldn't overlook its flaws.

Runes of Magic is by and large a robust, enjoyable game. As a free-to-play title, it's impressive. Although Western gamers will still have their reservations about amorphous RMT versus those nice straightforward subs, Runes of Magic is something of a landmark: it won't dislodge the subscription-based model in the West by any stretch of the imagination, but it does demonstrate that free-to-play doesn't necessarily mean rudimentary, shallow, cheap or totally brutal in the integration of RMT.

While the storyline blooms from the initial boredom into something more intriguing, it fizzles disappointingly as the game comes to its rather abrupt end.

For its target audience - those late 20s, early 30s gamers who remember blowing on the NES cart's connectors when it wouldn't load - the impact of WayForward's high-purity dose of old-fashioned platforming has been diluted by the new wrapping. Even those new backgrounds, as lovely as they are, pull the eye away from the parts of the level that have actually been recreated. For the Pixar generation, meanwhile, there's just a quaint, old-school platformer here, starring a character of whom they've never heard.

A serviceable shooter, but it lacks the spectacle of Call of Duty, the tactical options of Deus Ex or Crysis, and the urgency of FEAR. In their place it has, well, not much.

Ys simply falters in the face of the better games now on the market, and in that context, it's hard to recommend it as much more than a curio for the hardcore RPG fan.

It's a content-packed, well-produced handheld game - they can put that on the box if they want - but the racing's a bit boring, the load-delays are too regular and too long, it's very punishing when you start getting somewhere, and the lack of online options hurts it.

It lacks so much of what made its forebears great, and at times you look at it and wonder if they thought any of it through.

Perhaps Neverwinter has more potential, perhaps it will grow beyond this, but games can only be reviewed on what they are, not what they might become, and for now the many user-forged forays into fantasy are, just like the rest of Neverwinter, mostly about going to a place, bashing heads in and grabbing swag.

Fans of the comic strip can feel free to add as many points to the score below as will make them happy, since they're the ones most likely to make the effort needed to get past the flaws, but for everyone else there's little here to justify the hefty price.

Turok is at its best when you slow down and make use of your surroundings and arsenal. The reason it loses so many points is that it can be at its absolute worst ten seconds later, and that while its lows are paralysingly dreadful, its peaks are never much more than competent, or fleeting novelties spoilt by cliché, repetition or sloppiness.

Fans of the character will be pleased with how well his off-the-wall mannerisms have been realised in game form, and there's enough inspired wackiness to make your first play-through worthwhile, but the same lack of nuance and depth that makes Deadpool such enjoyable company also means that his game is a joke not worth hearing twice.

While crafted from familiar pieces, Capcom's latest shooter is an enjoyable combination of mechs, dinosaurs and general silliness.

It's just a pity that a developer with the unmistakable talent of Housemarque hasn't seized the opportunity to tweak, twist or otherwise refresh an overused formula.

Disappointing, but not necessarily boring.

Disney has clearly tried to make a vastly more flexible and more varied game to Pokémon but, in doing so, has broken that game's more elegant flow and focus of ideas.

Mega Man 10 doesn't quite perhaps have the sparkling feel of reinvention that its predecessor enjoyed, but if you were one of the many who considered MM9 a welcome return to form, then this is another must-buy. Everyone else is perfectly entitled to look confused.

There's a bit more up and down, certainly, but all that really distinguishes it is the sharp, cartoony look, smooth framerate (even if we couldn't find a 60Hz option) and web-like interface for loading each level.

Feels like a hastily put together stop gap before the series goes PS3.

If you loved the original games then that might carry you through to completion but for those who are new, prepare for a long slog.

It's clear that the team is trying to provide an accessible, fast-paced scrap-'em-up that can be enjoyed by all the family, not just autistic puppeteers. In that sense, the game's a modest success, offering a shallow but sometimes riotous playpen for up to four players to scrap away in visually interesting ways. But the slightness of the package means that this polished after-pub game will provide some short-term laughs but only minimal long-term nourishment.

If you're prepared to ignore its shortcomings and get to know it, there's an approachable beat-'em-up in here, even if it yields to your whim far too easily.

Here's hoping they'll do better with the sequel, if there is one, and produce a game with real charm, inventive level designs and plenty of fast-paced action - the game Tokobot should have been, in other words.

The problem is, it's hard to ever truly engage with it when so many of the The 3rd Birthday's key encounters are fundamentally spiteful. If you're really determined to eke some enjoyment from the rubble of frustration, there are a few moments that might make you feel like it's worth it. Sadly those occasions don't come along nearly enough to justify all the joyless attrition en route.

B-Boy has limited itself, partly by playing on Sony hardware and partly by gameplay that's not inclusive enough; it's so stylish it's for poseurs not players. Not into hip hop culture? No reason to pick this up, no matter how pretty and slick the dancing is.

So - here's a rating for the casual gamer. Add one point for every air show you've ever attended.

Completists will certainly enjoy the three Templars' Lairs bundled alongside The Bonfire of the Vanities, but being forced to buy the accompanying memory sequence to access them leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

UsTwo's slightly airless prettiness benefits from a few new ideas.

It is, at best, a sidestep, one that neither advances its series nor the genre into which it has lunged.

Mechanically, Life Eater uses a diary-based puzzle system in some really interesting ways, but it struggles to say anything meaningful about the shock-factor setting it's gone for.

It's hard to ignore the fact that the 3DS has smarter and more inventive puzzlers - a handful of them are also on the eShop, in fact - but if you want a good old idea dressed up in garish new duds, Tokyo Crash Mobs should just about do the trick.

A visually arresting, warm-hearted tale of a gofer searching for his purpose, Harold Halibut flounders amongst endless fetch-quests and waffle.

Is it that surprising that Joy Ride Turbo seems a little confused? Not really, I guess.

Lies of P has strong enough foundations in its edgy tone and tweaked weapons to provide an enjoyable experience for those in need of a FromSoft fix.

Dull warfare mars a fascinating battle for supremacy during the late Bronze Age collapse.

The squeaky eccentricity of proceedings leaves you charmed, if a little frustrated with the lack of a truly solid baseball game.

If a few joints can be tightened, a few rough edges filed down, Ironclad Tactics could hum along nicely. For now, however, I wouldn't recommend you climb aboard this one. It's a rickety ride.

But more importantly, you do get to 'be' the Fantastic 4 and experiment with some really rather excellent superpowers, and the game isn't so bad that a serious fan couldn't overlook its flaws.

It's built on an impressive world but it doesn't do enough with it, and as a result it's curious, but hardly compelling.

Much of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is more of the same gruelling beauty - but a shift to explict storytelling and signposting means its essence as a living, evolving shared text is lost.

Scrappy where it needed to be polished, clumsy where it needed to be nimble, the game wears its iconic characters as a shield, happy to serve up scripted shocks but offering nothing that might actually surprise.

Once successful, surrounded tiles flip to the colour they're surrounded by, while any surrounding tiles disappear entirely. Got it? Good. That's the entire game.

The portability, extra modes and various refinements of the DS version make for a much more satisfying game than the Flash effort we're continually referencing, but the DS is already home to a good few equally satisfying puzzlers (including "Mr. Driller" and "Polarium") and we'd seriously suggest looking to them before haggling for a copy of Zoo Keeper.

Perhaps more importantly is the inexplicable disappearance of dead bodies. Literally five seconds after they've flopped heavily to the ground, apparently not man enough to withstand a nail-filled 2-by-4 in the cranium, they - *ping* - vanish.

While this remains a great multiplayer, social game for some people, and it's certainly a good way to work up a sweat, at heart it's still an eight year old game with remarkably little alteration from the original.

With ever-present control frustration taking the shine off an otherwise commendable effort, you'll be hard-pressed to see the game through all five levels, never mind slog through the upcoming chapters. Unless they fix the controls, that is...

The game's peppered through with the sort of idiosyncratic humour that marks so many of Nippon Ichi's games, but here the jokes often come at the expense of clarity, with Badman more eager to poke fun at some crusty JRPG convention than to properly explain his game's own subversions.

For most of us, though, Opoona is a curiosity - it's charming, strange and often fun, but too shallow and stretched out to make for a genuinely engrossing RPG experience. [JPN Import]

While the game is otherwise an Advance Wars clone, somehow it's much less than its inspiration. Perhaps it's the fact the units' rock-paper-scissors relationships aren't so immediately obvious, or the weaker level design or the schizophrenic yet middle-of-the-roach aesthetics, but Commanders: Attack of the Genos lacks character, identity and personality.

PC gamers accustomed to feasts of content and polish will likely feel short-changed from their subscription fee once the initial 30 day rush is over.

The combat's fluid, relatively deep and involving once it gets going, but it's also a wholly repetitive game that's been surpassed in so many meaningful ways that you can't simply be content with 'more of the same' anymore.

Play Liberation Maiden because you're after an acceptable arcade shooter, in other words; approach it expecting another wonky blast of Suda51 charm and, President Mech aside, you're going to be a little disappointed.

While it may be the best implementation of a console MMO to date, PS3 owners should still ask for more.

Me & My Katamari doesn't move the series on at all - in fact, it sort of rolls it backwards a bit, what with the smaller levels, slightly shonky control system and limited multiplayer modes. Not to mention the fact that you're constantly having to play through environments you've already explored, which is just tiresome.

As a side story to the main event, Honest Hearts is forgettable and predictable. Where it justifies its asking price is in the takeaway benefits it supplies to the long-term wasteland wanderer. More levels, more perks, new weapons and new enemies - this is what really benefits the game, and Honest Hearts delivers more than enough to make it a worthwhile diversion for players of all levels.

If you posses superhuman racing skills, FAST - Racing League is the game for you. The rest of us can mull over what might have been.

Conceptually beautiful, it takes the basic mechanics of a twin stick, top-down shooter and then essentially procedurally generates enemies - and therefore entire levels - based on the ebb and flow of any given music track.

Stronger emotional stakes and faster-paced drama promise an explosive climax that ultimately pulls its biggest punch.

Furiously frustrating. The game pitch works wonderfully in the realm of theory but in practice its problems undermine most of the flashes of brilliance.

The camera is crap, the scale is awkward, the story and characters are basic and cringe-worthy, the combat is tedious, the platforming and puzzling is too basic, and I was well bored of it by the time I conquered the final level with the first of the four Teams, which wasn't even that long after I first grabbed it out of the shrink-wrap.

Sonic is a bit like the band you used to love when you were a nipper but just refuse to change their sound: they keep a loyal crowd and play all the hits on demand for nostalgia's sake, but the new tunes sound like the old ones. Only the real obsessives need worry about this one.

If you were a massive fan of the Lego Star Wars games then by all means check out Bionicle Heroes - to a very large degree it looks like the same game, and as such you'll get the same kind of grinding enjoyment out of mining all the levels for booty.

It lacks a single-player offering worthy of the name (and simply is not worth buying if you don't have Live), is mystifyingly missing most of the PC maps and has been ported to such a disappointingly low grade standard technically that we can't help but feel like it's a huge missed opportunity and a disservice to hardcore followers of the machine - the very people this game is intended to excite.

There's really something fundamentally wrong in a game where I start keeping a book beside the table to read while my armies trudge into battle.

GRIN clearly has the capacity to go beyond what it does in Wanted, and it's a shame that the game only aspires to be a competent, mildly inventive extension of the film.

4am is too obfuscated for serious music producers who will grow frustrated at the limited number of samples and the lack of visual feedback over which tracks and effects are active at any one time. And the experience is also too inscrutable for beginners, who will find themselves lost in the matrix of noise, unsure of how it may be truly directed or tamed. A fascinating toy, then, but a toy nonetheless.

For a few quid you'll get a fair bit of enjoyment, but the fact remains that there's a putrid whiff of exploitation about this one. Let your wallet be your guide.

30 years after the arcade original debatably debuted the bullet hell concept, Toaplan's best shooter is back in an imperfect port of a port.

With the gameplay mechanics reduced to a largely predictable run of conversations and (in)appropriate use of objects, The City That Dare Not Sleep feels stuck in a rut much of the time.

Tiny incremental tweaks to the function are all very well if your base material is simply amazing or the form changes significantly but, all told, this is an old, whiffy average GBA kids RPG, dull and tired through inbreeding.

Here I sit on a cold December night in 21st century Britain. I am a 31 year-old woman. I have a degree. I am playing virtual Yahtzee with a computer-generated version of Mr Potato Head. I feel sick.

It lacks the ambition and style of some of its four-wheeled contemporaries, and you could argue that this license would have been better served by a semi-simulation like Milestone's own SBK. But by focusing on what makes motocross fun to watch rather than ride, it replicates the excitement of jumping from lip to lip astride a two-stroke tearaway... just about.

The evolving nature of the gameplay, and its intriguing story structure keeps you going. Not only that, the actual location design and some individual set-pieces are very atmospheric, and it somehow appeals to the old school adventurer in us that used to routinely find ourselves trapped somewhere with one single, set solution.

The all-new split-screen multiplayer modes are a bit hit and miss, but still welcome nevertheless.

With the gameplay mechanics reduced to a largely predictable run of conversations and (in)appropriate use of objects, The City That Dare Not Sleep feels stuck in a rut much of the time.

It needed to kick your arse more, and give you something mechanical to lure you back, not just canned explosions. You'll enjoy playing it, but you're not actually being entertained.

With the RPG situation on PSP as overwhelmingly dire as it currently is, Anniversary stands out as one of the more enjoyable, its simplicity and charm forever keeping it gently compelling, in spite of the irritating throwbacks inherent to its age.

If you happened to be sitting at home one evening, bored off your tits, and feel like lying on your tummy with a stupid grin splattered across your face, you could probably do worse than to rent it out - even if it is basically that "Kill all the Haitians" line from Vice City done up as an entire game. Totally.

The fact that Surfacer + is also out for iPhone for pennies makes the DSiWare price even more laughable.

Band Hero does not add anything to what we already saw in Guitar Hero 5, so in the end buying it just depends on your opinion about its track list.

Despite a number of difficult to spot and ultimately underwhelming "improvements", the Cube and PS2 versions of Dead to Rights remain generally engaging, with an uneven sprinkling of genius.

Its redeeming features are those it shares with Odyssey to the West – a sweet and nicely told story, an essential humanity. However, their redemptive powers are outdone by anachronistic trial-and-error gameplay, which grinds its gears and snaps your patience once too often.

An easy game to admire, the concept is appealingly daft and the implementation rich in wit and charm. It's just too laidback for its own good; an approach that pays dividends in those first joyful days but proves less successful in the long term as the rising difficulty curve chafes uncomfortably against the whimsical lack of direction.

Controller novelty value can't disguise its one-trick limitations or the vanilla production values, and there's no doubt that it should have been released at a budget price. One to rent, then.

Mask of the Rose is an incredibly ambitious dating sim - for better and worse, as its complexity is its greatest constraint.

There's no doubting Juiced is a quality game, but it veers off the racing line with a flawed progression system that starts off promisingly but penalises players too harshly and makes it a frustrating experience to claw your way back.

If you're looking for an ATV game that offers solid arcade-style gameplay, a wide range of events and decent offline multiplayer options, Offroad Fury 3 does the job.

Amped 3 certainly isn't awful, and will keep you entertained for a long time if you can get past the hideous presentation and get used to its stop-starty nature, but the most recent SSX was enormous too, and treated the sorts of tasks that Amped considers its core as a second string to its traditional racing and tricking.

The setting lends itself perfectly to the premise, yet ultimately the overly forgiving combat system makes the game too damned easy.

Come on, SNK, stop churning out ports of stuff we've seen a million times, and give European fighter fans the game they really deserve.