Disposable entertainment designed to be enjoyed unashamedly and uncritically. It's a game to pull out at parties, not obsess over: trashy, garish, stupid and - if all that appeals to your inner 13-year-old girl - terrific fun.

Beautiful, strange and sometimes a bit fiddly, Tokyo 42 offers a dazzling toybox to explore. [Recommended]

Darksiders' schlocky action makes a welcome return, though it's not enough to shake the feeling you've played this before - and better.

Overall, when you strip away our automatic affection for the universe, you're left with a simple story full of thin characters and predictable twists, where the combat quickly descends into a repetitive war of attrition, and a small suite of online modes that can't compete with the bigger boys in the genre.

It lacks cohesion, and ultimately frustrates too intensely and too often to keep your satisfaction at the right levels.

The game isn't terrible; it's visually slick, there's a decent variety of events and they're entertaining to play through the first few times. But there's nothing special about it and no long-term value.

It's a game fundamentally incapable of not running you down now and then, but the clarity of control and aspiration give wry subtext to its rightful claim to "high definition".

A puzzler that's subtly rather than brashly innovative, and which has a wicked-looking chicken on the front.

It's simple, but has noodles of charm.

It uses outdated visuals with no changes, cobbles together levels which the GBA can handle in order to avoid problems, uses a lazy password system which is totally unwieldy, and continues to rely on a ten-year-old gameplay dynamic.

Tenchu isn't a particularly complex beast, and it doesn't take long to get the most out of it, so it's a nice alternative if you're bored of creeping around gloriously detailed locations pretending to fight terrorism. On the other hand, only a few shiny surfaces and high-poly models stand between this and the visual mediocrity of most PS2 titles.

If you need you thirst for adventuring quenched, Another Code is an essential purchase, but novices need to bear in mind that this style of game is very much an acquired taste, and experts should be mindful that compared to the adventuring greats it's not exactly in the same league.

It simply doesn't really do anywhere near enough to unseat Polyphony's great monolith of a game. In some ways it's a whole lot more accessible (if you can be bothered to wade through the somewhat daunting layers of formulae that get you up the pecking order), but in others it lets itself down with appalling presentation, rank front end, awful music, and visuals which while perfectly serviceable won't have you gawping in awe if you saw it on a nearby demo pod.

So for 20 quid, you're getting a hundred copyright-free books that are a pain to read and some fairly rubbish electronical features. It's not a brilliant deal, especially when you consider there's a similar application for iPhone which is free to download. It's much better, too, with more text on the screen at a time, sharper fonts and the option to choose white text on a black background.

If anything, it's the Move controller rather than that clumsy apprentice or his mysterious cat that emerges as Sorcery's true star. If you're an eight-year-old kid, this short burst of adventure is going to offer you an afternoon or two of vivid fantasy with a wand in your hand and an arsenal of spells in your head, and your only major complaint will be that it doesn't last a few hours longer.

Of Let's Tap's five offerings, one is essential, two more are excellent, and all are inspired examples of minimalist and creative game design. [JPN Import]

It's not complex, it's not challenging, but it's not trying to be. It's an enjoyable family game which also has appeal for retro gaming fans and drunk people. If that sounds like you, put Off the Rails on your list.

This is a special game. I am horrible at it, and it, in turn, is horrible to me, and yet I keep pushing on, returning to Gods Will Fall again and again. [Eurogamer Recommended]

For those expecting massive advancements or a radical departure from the original, this will come as a disappointment. A more honest, realistic assessment would be to treat this as a mission pack, and for those who do just want more of the same, you'll come away a satisfied customer.

For anyone who has either of the last two EA F1 games, don't bother, unless the idea of building an F1 career specifically appeals to you. For us, it just smacks of more of the same.

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 open world adventure that does away with combat, Yonder's beauty is ultimately undone by its mundanity.

An earnest eco-platformer that is at once under and overcooked.

All told, it's just a solid, by-the-numbers "Virtua Tennis" clone with a generic cast of Clap Hanz creations. If you really must have a tennis game on your PS2, the bargain basement will serve you far better than this rather apologetic 'will this do?' offering.

Aspyr's renovation project tackles the three lesser Crofts, with intriguing results.

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.

Jet Set Radio's still capable of making people say, "What the hell is that?"

There's no getting away from the fact that Haunt is a slight experience, but it's also very charming and a game that is carefully crafted to work with both the Kinect controller and its intended young audience. Not a game you'll keep coming back to, but for parents it's still worth the 800 Microsoft Point asking price for the short but sweet entertainment it offers.

The important thing is that it's all rather good fun, right down to the level design, colour palette and even the sound effects.

For the faithful, it comes highly recommended. It's newcomers who should really consider giving this a try, though. Carve your way through the crude visuals, archaic menus and seemingly inexplicable features and you may just find your new favourite game.

Vanguard's created a decent blaster which offers a couple of moments of genuine bullet-dodging glory: Halo's touch-screen debut is good-looking, colourful, and fun.

Handsome visuals can't quite make up for bugs and a lack of urgency.

As an extension of "The Sims" as a franchise it categorically fails to engage, and even just squeaks through on a technical level. No amount of glitz is going to cover that up. It's not bad, per se, but there's no way anyone with a heavy, eclectic interest in videogames should be spending £40 on this.

It just doesn't seem confident enough to let itself be the thing it is, and this manifests itself in a reward structure that stops short of demanding the most of you, and in lots of tangential fodder that dilutes its purposefulness.

This is no Trials HD, but it's still great to play as a chummy pass-the-controller game, and nice to have stuck on an SD card for a rainy Sunday afternoon when there are no Columbo re-runs to watch on television. Nostalgic, colourful and modest, this is retro-gaming at its least self-conscious.

It doesn't play out quite like anything else, veering between brutal and whimsical all the time, and at its best it hits that shooter sweet spot: when your brain is absorbed, fingers moving in advance, the music's pumping, and your eyes observe genius skills emerging from some subterranean consciousness. So please don't quote this out of context, but I'm a big fan of DRM.

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.

It's an acquired taste, though, despite its popular ingredients.

This roguelite shooter is a beautiful piece of work. [Recommended]

Moncage offers a gorgeous blend of narrative threads and teasing puzzles, that makes for a game of real elegance. [Eurogamer Recommended]

An eerie journey back to the days when all games were a bit eerie anyway. [Eurogamer Recommended]

[Eurogamer Recommended]

Micro-developer Lunar Division melds scientific rigour and faithful devotion into one, creating an entirely singular game about the depths of space, the limits of your own mind, and the divine beauty of mathematics.

There will surely be a great skateboarding game for the Wii, perhaps with the next iteration of the balance board, but this isn't it.

NEVES isn't going to win any awards for originality, or even for presentation - great controls aside, it's all incredibly minimalistic.

In Scorn, a game of wonderfully horrible atmosphere and smart, hands-off puzzling is undermined by some dodgy checkpoints and wonky combat.

Though the Spore catalog is stuffed with useful creations, we still found it quite slow to load and not very easy to browse. Searching by tags is fine, but the mass of content (which includes a high proportion of mediocrity) means it can be hard and mind-numbing to find the best model for your job.

Still, for all the brilliantly original ideas on show here, there comes a point when you feel like developer Paon just decided to throw up certain levels simply as a bar to your progress. You can almost hear their cackling over your shoulder.

It's surprising how much fun the simple joys of bat and ball remain, and it's surprising how nothing more than a varied selection of power-ups, some cunning level design and uncluttered gameplay can still produce something so enjoyable. I downloaded it out of duty, but have kept returning to it for fun.

Wildlands is an environment worth lingering over, but the mechanics and themes it propagates are wearing extremely thin.

That Killzone doesn't live up to expectations shouldn't come as a major surprise to anyone; that Sony has chosen to release such a damp squib at this outrageously competitive time of year most definitely is.

If you can stomach the story, and the isometric viewpoint giving you occasional trouble when trying to select your desired unit with the stylus, it stands as a decent bite-size alternative. Anyone else, though, would be better off waiting for the DS's next turn to see if it spits out something more meaty.

Lumino City is an interesting design sketch, then, but the real building work is yet to be done.

A scrappy tribute to the long-lost Road Rash series whose raw spirit just about overcomes its shortcomings.

The heroic thing about it all is that Laughing Jackal manages to reinvent Qix in a way that has evidently been completely beyond Taito for the past 30 years.

What comes as a result is a sense of distraction, above all. Almost a sense that Maquette suffered from too much budget, from misplaced attention to themes or scale. The first half - three hours or so - is a brilliant success, a gorgeous, ingenious, delicately poised construction of spaghetti-brain recursion and latent atmosphere. The time you spend there, submerged deep in focus, is wonderful. The rest is interference.

We'd also like to point out that Sega has a whole stack of arcade games in its archives, and could have been a mite more generous than including just four in the package. One for obsessives only.

But right from the word go it takes a backward step by trying too hard to (ulp) be authentic and realistic, introducing some shonky control elements that never quite work and almost completely overlooking the fun aspect that was there in spades last time around.

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.

EA Sports UFC is a game capable of brilliance. It's let down by some curious design decisions, signs of a team perhaps too interested in capturing non-essential moves seen on YouTube rather than nailing the essence of the sport. But when it flows against human competition, it offers beautiful destruction and glorious drama. Landing a picture-perfect head kick in the final minute of the fifth round of a title fight? Well, it doesn't get much better.

Knights in Tight Spaces expands on every part of the Fights in Tight Spaces template, but an abundance of new ideas swamps the clarity the original game had.

The haircuts alone make SingStar Abba worth the asking price.

A game that a small number of people will rightly love and cherish, but overall it's an uneven experience - one that feels like it knows what it wants to be, but has resigned itself to existing in a world where it can't quite get away with it.

Part One of Burial at Sea is predicated on so many constants and variables that it will undoubtedly prove divisive. It feels all too brief, even as half of a two-part whole, but it delivers a rich storyline that builds to a suitably stunning climax.

Heavy Rain worked because it was a police procedural, a genre that's all about narrow horizons and methodical reassurance. The tight confines of Quantic's style suited it well. The same delivery just can't contain Beyond's epic scope, preposterous premise and high-octane action. You're left feeling detached from it, and its component parts have nothing more than a frail spine of story holding them together.

Both a brilliant modern riff on classic arcade games and a frustrating chore.

It's not a perfect adaptation of the German game it's based on, since the map can sometimes get cluttered while the nuances of the game aren't always terribly well explained, but compared to the rather flaccid likes of Lost Cities this is one of those games that hides a devilishly addictive experience under a rather bland exterior.

Even with a spit and polish to the visuals and the usual effortless presentation it can't help but feel tiring after a while.

With a bit more substance to the missions and a few control refinements it would have been a must-buy. Let's hope Legendo gets it right in time for the next two parts.

Second-hand content with a spoon of sugar, no more. It's a second-rate package.

Citizens of Earth succeeds in rediscovering something of the ingenuity of 1990s JRPGs in its playful twists on genre clichés. And as a kooky and inventive contemporary re-imagining of the Super Nintendo-era role-player, this, like its protagonist's campaign, is but a near miss.

Worst of all is that exploring Wonderland is, in practice, about as full of wonder as watching paint dry. Paint the colour of blood and dreams, but paint nonetheless.

With sharp writing paired with a charming if amateurish cast, Puzzle Agent's appeal is rough-hewn, but improbably cohesive. Were it not so instantly likeable, you might not care so much about the fairly standard logic puzzles.

It's hard to know how many people are really going to care about the return of Rocket Knight. Climax has done a decent job of giving it a modern sheen, but while it's mildly entertaining and completely inoffensive, it's also forgettable.

The shrink from arcade to DS screen in no way cramps the experience, offering the same amount of exacting control as it ever did.

A must-have purchase for any action gaming fan, and is a testament to what can still be done with the genre with the proper amount of thought.

Running between shots can be chaotic fun, but Mario Golf truly lives in its ever-soothing standard mode. [Eurogamer Recommended]

As the journey shifts and becomes a bit darker, there's a real flash of steel at the core of it all. If you've played the SteamWorld games, you'd probably expect this, but it's still a delight to see a game like this built with such craft and obvious humanity. I started The Gunk worrying about how one of the great 2D design teams would cope with three dimensions. The truth is they cope so effortlessly that I just spent the next four or five hours gloriously lost in what they had built. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Dontnod takes a thrillingly Gothic perspective on early 19th century London, but squanders it in a dreary and indecisive adventure.

For all its sheen, H.A.W.X. remains a curious sideshow in Tom Clancy's murky world rather than a star player.

The real problem, however, is that Lips: Number One Hits doesn't just fail to move this series forward - it fails to resolve the serious issues with the first game.

A pretty broken game but one that is loaded with entertainment value regardless.

It's a fun distraction on your mobile, giving you a few hours of entertainment to rack up a high score, finish all the stages, and gawp at the tremendous graphics. Like I said, worth a bob or two.

Absolutely enormous, endlessly gorgeous, but maddening (especially in its final moment), The Whispered World is a muddled shame.

Homefront floats in the limbo between "not bad" and "pretty good", and is hamstrung by a single-player element that feels like a half-hearted obligation. What's most disappointing is that Homefront wanted so much to join COD and Battlefield at the top of the genre, but has ended up as merely a weekend timewaster for players waiting for the next shooter fix.

It's hard not to feel a little underwhelmed by what Virtua Tennis 2009 has to offer. While the online multiplayer facet has undoubtedly been improved, the disappointment over what's been done to World Tour mode and the general lack of ambition in certain areas leaves me wanting.

It's a huge game, in other words, and it's tough enough to ensure that you'll move through it fairly carefully. Throw in a scrappy kind of handicraft charm, ignore a selection of little annoyances, and Rainbow Moon becomes a bit of a blast.

As a smarter-than-it-looks nostalgia trip, then, Shadow Warrior delivers, and as long as you keep that in mind - and consume it in moderation - it's an easy recommendation.

At its best, Tengami is something you want to freeze-frame and hang on the wall. For a video game, that shouldn't be taken as a compliment.

It's easy to be wooed by Echelon's glorious graphics and its sometimes epic atmosphere, but the game is marred by a few problems which could sadly bring it down with a disappointing thud for many.

A cutesy bridge-building game with a surprisingly moreish appeal.

Beneath the hysterical presentation, the frantic battle segments and the skittish storyline, then, Project X Zone is a thin game. The emphasis on fighting game reactions in the battle segments should appeal to genre fans, but these are too simplistic for genuine expression or mastery. Likewise, the tactical elements of positioning and unit movement on the battlefield lack urgency and true significance. The result is a humorous curio, perhaps, but one without the underlying game to adequately serve its stars.

The Sims 4 is both fresh and yet also predictable, pleasant, comfortable and rarely overstimulating. It's wobbly, and you can still see some of its joins, or hear the creaks as new parts settle into place. It's not likely to win over any new players, but it will satisfy a lot of its old ones.

Mild improvements in traversal and combat are quickly overwhelmed by the creaking systems onto which they have been grafted. Revolutionary Paris is one of the most beautifully realised environments in a series that has had its fair share of them, but the game you play doesn't really do it justice.

Our feeling is that in this era of downloadable Rock Band albums for 13 quid - a price that's often criticised anyway - single-band games will have to offer gameplay innovations, spectacular fan service, or a lot more material than this to justify their existence and, more pertinently, an asking price of 40 quid without the guitar peripheral.

The spoken dialog is at times so badly acted, and the story so complex, that in the end you simply stop caring about the uninteresting characters under your control.

There's a great Kinect workout waiting to be made - this isn't it. But though it is flawed, UFC Personal Trainer should still get the committed fitter faster than its current rivals - just not without frustration along the way.

While the Wii version is a good game and takes to its new control scheme well enough to justify the port, it's just not sufficiently different to recommend a purchase, especially if you can source it elsewhere.