No amount of lavish technical polish and drama-filled cut scenes can disguise how it feels to play, and the fact that at its core, the combat doesn't quite cut it. Put simply, it feels like it's trying too hard to be different for the sake of it, and throws all manner of good, well-established ideas out to its detriment. Instead of being a spectacular refinement of what's gone before, Heavenly Sword is a reinvention that doesn't quite pay-off.

Time in the cooler has allowed our favorite frozen sport (sorry, curling) some time to roll out genuine improvements. The enhanced AI isn't quite a cure-all for 07's passive defences, but it does bring a satisfying, sim-like feel to the franchise for the first time in years.

An all-time great.

Sure, some of Codies tactics in 'going mainstream' are a tad irksome, but in the main the game succeeds by not only being exceptionally good fun to play, but being unquestionably one of the finest looking racing games on the market too.

If you're a fan of the genre, though, and think you're willing to put up with weak framerate and some ill-conceived technical features in return for trying out genuinely interesting tracks and innovative weaponry - then by all means, put Fatal Inertia through its paces. For the rest of us, though, the search for racing carnage should probably lead back to superior franchises like FlatOut and Burnout.

As a concept it sounds pretty liberating, but in reality, the fact that there are no preset challenges actually limits Jam Sessions in terms of actual playability.

As it is, it's a game that veers between excellence and anguish a little bit too often.

Unfortunately, the worthwhile drawing concept is let down by some rather ropey platforming action. Levels are somewhat uninspired, reminding us of the doldrums of the Amiga era. Jumping feels too floaty, and shooting imprecise. More irritating, you can't save mid-way through the longish levels.

Simply put, it's exceptionally good at what it sets out to achieve, which is to distil the best bits of John Woo's cinematic vision and turn it into a crazed video game approximation that anyone can play - in that sense, you can't really fault it.

American Football fans looking for a cheap retro fix will probably squeeze 400 points worth of fun out of Cyberball before déjà vu sets in, but the absence of any real multiplayer challenge means any amusement comes with a built-in expiry date, one that arrives sooner than you'd like. It's no Speedball, that's for sure.

Fatal Fury Special thoroughly deserves the sort of audience that Live Arcade can deliver, it's just a shame that this particular version feels rather unloved, hampered as it is by frustrating control issues and lacking the game mode that many players will want most.

What's important, though, is to not get bogged down in the detail too much. It's a game that, when played under pressure, can be a real pain, but taken at your leisure is one to savour.

From the fully-featured multiplayer to a host of carefully crafted single player modes, Worms hasn't been this fresh in years.

Lair, sadly, is a classic example of the apocryphal polished turd. Strip away the HD bluster and the game beneath is little more than a basic PS2 shooter with a makeover.

On top of all this timeless goodness, the icing on the cake is the remodelled, sharpened-up graphics (with character art from Udon Comics), new special effects, online play in every mode, some evil achievements to go for, and, of course, online leaderboards.

Top notch side-scrolling brawler from 1993, and, in many respects almost as much fun now as it was then.

Nobody cared about yet another shovelware DS game like this cluttering up the shelves. "Why don't you all just buy the books instead if you're so interested?" he thought.

Weighing in at a hefty 20-25 hours in length, Dead Head Fred outstays its welcome and never really elevates above being a fun yet ultimately frustrating platform-cum-action adventure game.

Incognito has taken the DNA of Battlefield and crafted a sublime online console game - a virtual battlezone that serves up more than its fair share of wonderful audio-visuals, but more than that, plays beautifully, with every game you play supplying a key gameplay moment that only online gaming provides.

A very poor introduction to the genre for Xbox owners. It's by no means terrible; but without borrowing Sakaguchi's rose-tinted glasses, it's not much fun either.

Sadly, just as your monster hunting hero is prone to do, it comes within striking distance of greatness, but then swings hopelessly wide and just misses the mark.

Some of you might also grumble about how little innovation there is in this sequel. In most senses, yes, this is a straightforward re-run of the last one. In its favour, though, it boasts vastly superior visuals, instant restarts, an achievement system, and, of course, an online components like a leaderboard, uploadable replays and multiplayer modes.

Offering new items, skills and other general stuff for level 20 Guild Wars players certainly justifies the lessened price tag, but I'm not sure that the overall quality of the adventures here can really be said to make this one of the more interesting outings into the Guild Wars universe. They're just not interesting enough.

The problem with all these things which have been coded to create historical semi-realism is that it creates a limit of the tech-tree they can climb.

Never boring and always thrilling. It's a brilliant combination of two massively popular brands and a clever blend of subtle strategy and bombastic button-bashing.

This is the kind of game you'll only get out when you've got people round who want to play the Wii cos they've seen it on the telly, and you'd rather eat soap than play one more round of Wii Sports baseball.

The trouble is, it's a little too easy, even for a game aimed at children.

Almost every area of the game can be customised in line with your tastes to the extent that, if you ask nicely, Tiger will probably even dress up as Sailor Moon and call you Susan.

Immersive, engaging and with the kind of gameplay depth that so many shooters lack, Metroid Prime 3 might not represent a huge progression as far as the series goes, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the best games I've played all year - and certainly one of best yet on the Wii.

This entry, the last from original developer Climax, could have been the one to finally make that breakthrough. A triumphant, genre-defining swansong. Instead it's a safe and solid continuation of what's worked in the past. Existing fans can therefore rejoice, but all those fabled mainstream gamers may still find it a snarling pitbull of a game and back slowly away. Their loss.

Unless you're astonishingly tolerant of technical and interface problems, and totally addicted to dull hack-and-slash RPG combat, don't buy this game. Forsooth.

There is a place for more substantial 3D games like this on the platform but Street Trace: NYC provides nothing to recommend itself over the slew of more tightly focussed and expressed rivals on the platform.

Some of the most touted improvements are distinctly underwhelming. The "detailed, story-driven, semi-dynamic campaign" turns out to be a poorly presented, poorly paced string of twenty-odd scenarios offering sod-all in the way of continuity or sense of progress.

Its uniquely British humour and gentle progression system (the ability to restart levels with saved high-score is a hugely welcome feature) provide light relief to what is, essentially, one of the most unorthodox and alien gaming experiences you'll ever have.

The hours spent playing this masterpiece were the perfect encapsulation of why videogaming is such a favourite waste of time for so many of us. Thrilling, terrifying, moving, confusing, amusing, compelling, and very very dark. BioShock isn't simply the sign of gaming realising its true cinematic potential, but one where a game straddles so many entertainment art forms so expertly that it's the best demonstration yet how flexible this medium can be. It's no longer just another shooter wrapped up in a pretty game engine, but a story that exists and unfolds inside the most convincing and elaborate and artistic game world ever conceived.

BioShock is the ultimate rarity: not only does it live up to its lofty promise, but exceeds it through simple, old fashioned talent and imagination - not to mention verve, style,class, wit, and sheer bloody-minded ambition. It takes the tired, worn-out FPS genre by the scruff of the neck, reinvents and bend it out of shape in such a breathtaking fashion that it's going to take something very special to top this in the months and years ahead.

The storyline, while clearly bonkers, makes a refreshing change to the standard RPG fare, if only because it draws at least superficially, on historical characters and events.

Settlers II is a great game. A classic. This version isn't. It's a travesty, and one that should never have been released. Without the fatal bugs it'd be a disappointing put passable conversion but you can't play a game not knowing when or if the game will actually work the way it's supposed to, or if saving your progress will cause it to crash.

It's too complex for a party game; you try explaining the importance of ball choice and oil patterns to small children or drunk people.

Maps are too long and slow-paced when they should be frenetic and bite-sized.

If you liked the original, and poured endless hours into it, then you should definitely get this one: there are just about enough tweaks and changes to make it feel different enough to justify a purchase - especially the chance to play a mate online.

Although you can excuse Sega for trying it on with a true classic like Sonic, foisting dated crap like Ecco on us yet again feels like a monumental waste of everyone's time. Download the free trial if you must, but don't even think about parting with your hard-earned cash for this. It might still look pretty, but Ecco plays like a dog.

If you don't have a Dungeons and Dragons background, the game will seem impenetrable and dull - and even players of the tabletop game will appreciate the detail, but hate the incredibly clumsy interface and lack of information and feedback.

Granted, there will always be those for whom story-led gaming and turn-based battles are a complete turn-off, and for those people, Persona 3 is unlikely to be a Road to Damascus experience. For the rest of us, though, this is one of the finest RPGs on the PS2 - and that, in itself, is a huge accolade.

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.

Despite all of the positives, the game underneath, for all its features and ideas, remains a broken one, thus continuing the Mana series legacy of being a series that tries its hand at new things to get noticed but fails to match up to the brilliance of its forefather.

Ultimately you'll have to win a difficult argument with yourself to justify the purchase. Good luck.

Madden 08 stands by itself as a respectable, rewarding sim, but judged in the context of last season, it's merely a mild, expensive improvement.

Thankfully, when you die, which will be quite frequently, the loading times are kept mercifully short and don't add to the frustration like so many other PSP games.

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

Untainted by the passing of time, and still as mindlessly entertaining as it was back in the day. Sure, Hyper Sports improved on the formula a little, and Epyx went off and took the idea to dizzy heights not long after that, but in essence this is one of those few occasions when a game concept emerged fully formed from the beginning.

Even huge fans of the originals are likely to be disappointed by Fare Wars.

If you're very young and easily entertained, Boogie might keep you occupied for a bit. But if you're looking for a game you can enjoy playing with kids or with friends after the pub, this isn't it. Not even after a bucket of Cheeky Vimto.

If you fancy a spot of no-frills arcade dogfighting this will keep you entertained for a while, and there's also a LAN/Internet multiplayer (offering free-for-all and teamplay modes).

Played on a big screen with the ability to take a much wider view of the battlefield, it would be much less stifled and tough to grasp, and the individually awkward or squirmy action bits would be more acceptable. But it isn't and they aren't, and getting past the game's flaws is ultimately more trouble than it's worth on a system already packed with action and strategy games that are consistently better than what lies beyond the frustration herein.

Despite being ahead of "Doom 2" in many respects, it's simply nowhere near as fun to play. Saddled with clunky combat, it's impossible to come to this with fresh eyes and appreciate what the fuss was about.

If you're used to the sensibilities of modern gaming, I can imagine this being a massive let-down thanks to its unforgiving nature and lacklustre audio-visuals. See past the limitations and embrace the challenge and you may well enjoy what's on offer here.

It is, simply, just about the best version of just about the best logic puzzle out there. [JPN Import]

As the most original, admittedly surreal, take on the sport for years, Mario Strikers is a gem of a game and manages to flawlessly meet Nintendo's brief of appealing to absolutely everybody.

Wing Commander Arena is a rudimentary shooter, the sort of thing that might have passed muster as a homebrew PC title ten years ago, but an unimpressive trudge for console gamers today.

Super Contra might appeal to the extreme hardcore retro apologists out there with oceanic reserves of patience and superhuman skills. It's certainly a challenge, and if that sounds like you, go for it. But if you're a mere mortal and squeal when the going gets tough, then the chances are you'll agree that the sequel is just too damn bloody minded by design to warrant much attention 19 years on.

Alien Syndrome had the potential to be a decent by-the-numbers action RPG, but it struggles to even reach those heights with insipid repetition and a total lack of challenge crippling your incentive to see it beyond the first few hours.

Final Fantasy II was a poor videogame in 1988 and no amount of spit and polish will perform the necessary shifts to its foundations to produce a good one in 2007.

One for 80's obsessives (you know who you are...) and die-hard GH fanatics only.

This generation is drowning in impossibly good racing games. If you want something technical, you've got DiRT, if you want something easygoing, you've got SEGA Rally, if you want something cool, you've got PGR4, if you want Nascar 08, you've got problems.

The best Civ expansion ever? Yeah, why not?

A cheap, polished online-enabled offering that fans and newcomers should embrace heartily to their bosoms. It's exactly the sort of quality offering that Microsoft should be extracting from developers of Live Arcade titles and one that should bring a smile to the faces of any right thinking gamers.

With literally hundreds of better classic games out there to choose from, it's absolutely mystifying that something that's aged as badly as Yie Ar Kung-Fu can be held aloft as some sort of period piece worth re-investigating.

So, an improvement on the (initially) buggy port that the first GRAW on PC was, but even with the pleasingly significant interface and visual tweaks over the console version, this is still very much a an adequate but not spectacular sequel to an adequate but not spectacular tactical shooter. It's GRAW, but a bit better, and that's it.

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.

Another well-conceived and well-executed update, with enough new gameplay features that Rugby 06 owners should warrant investing in an upgrade (we'll conveniently forget the lack of career mode) and enough gameplay concessions that fair-weather rugby fans caught up in World Cup fever can confidently purchase without fear of overly complex control set-ups or endless technical rules vagaries.

It's certainly decent enough, but it's not good enough to unseat Virtua Tennis from its position as the best game of tennis on the PSP.

This is thoroughly disappointing in some respects - not least because Sword of the New World is one of the most beautiful MMORPGs we've ever clapped eyes upon.

Overall, it's a solid and unique JRPG which, thanks to some brave and interesting design decisions is worthy of attention, even if it will do nothing to convince genre detractors of that fact.

Golden Axe, then. Big, brutish, three-button sprite-based fantasy brawler with bags of nostalgic moments and inexplicable co-op charm: Yours to buy for the 39th time for just 400 points.

For your 400 points you get an absolute nailed-down classic that is, in many respects, just as much fun today as it was back when it was released.

The core game is, given a little time and concentration, excellent, if repetitive. Since Sony seems to have long left the Colony Wars series for dead and Nintendo likewise with Rogue Squadron, this game ably fills a gaping whole in one of gaming's most pure and heady genres.

That [50] down there is starting to look a bit mean isn't it? It would be if EE2 wasn't buggier than a shrew's breakfast and outgunned by a better, cheaper, alternative.

Cheap, cheerful, timeless fun, and ultimately short-lived - but isn't that the whole point?

By no means the best the genre has to offer any more.

As the back of the box says: Identify (that the game's a bit rubbish). Eliminate (it off your shopping list). Survive (with your dignity intact).

It may not last long, but it's entertaining while it does.

It's nice to be reminded of where games started going wrong back in the '90s. It wasn't 3D, it wasn't FMV; it wasn't anything like that. It was when we did away with big stupid smiling still photos of sportsmen gnawing on trophy handles as background graphics, with preposterous guitar music playing over the top, like a sort of hungover Sunday morning TransWorld Sport nostalgia vomit fantasy.

In every other respect, Super Stardust HD is an absolute star, the jewel in the crown of the PlayStation Store and quite possibly the best purists' shooter to appear on console since the legendary Geometry Wars.

In general, Carcassone is a quicker game to grasp but lacks Catan's depth and tactical nuances with the outcome of a game often feeling more like luck than skill. If you've only got a Silver Live account Carcassonne is a marginally better purchase thanks to its offline multiplayer and its short game length and puzzle-like aspects gives it a strangely addictive quality, yet the honest fact is that despite being a better adaptation, Carcassonne just isn't based on a board game quite as good as the one Catan is.

Thanks to the game's fundamental competitive structure, in two-player mode it shines and the charming art style, which ably mimics Japanese fighting game aesthetics, lends the package character sorely missing from its DS Sudoku rivals.

To produce a technically sloppy title is one thing, but the game is horribly flawed from conception to execution in a way we haven't seen since, ulp, Driv3r. Marred by a remarkably vacuous combat system, the pathetic driving and undercooked flying elements merely underline what a thoroughly wasted opportunity this was.

To produce a technically sloppy title is one thing, but the game is horribly flawed from conception to execution in a way we haven't seen since, ulp, Driv3r. Marred by a remarkably vacuous combat system, the pathetic driving and undercooked flying elements merely underline what a thoroughly wasted opportunity this was.

More than the script (generally witty and sharp, if occasionally undercut by an iffy voice-actor) or the graphic design (a brother to Fable's faux-fantasy charm), the constant capering of your charges is what gives the game its personality. That is, they have a lot of personality and so does the game.

More than the script (generally witty and sharp, if occasionally undercut by an iffy voice-actor) or the graphic design (a brother to Fable's faux-fantasy charm), the constant capering of your charges is what gives the game its personality. That is, they have a lot of personality and so does the game.

A once-reasonable game for the 360 is now a distinctly mediocre game for the PC.

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.

Difficulty is introduced by sheer numbers and, for players who aren't grabbed by the core mechanics, the game will soon become tiresome. But the combination of sumptuous 2D art style, interesting structure, enjoyable storyline and ever more unmanageable fights to tackle, for those who are, GrimGrimoire will be one of the most interesting games to come out of Japan in some time.

It's a fine showcase for some good ideas, doing for Arkanoid what Flipnic did for pinball. But its novelty value doesn't make it a game you'll come back to for long, though.

Competent in its own right, playable even, but deep down as nutritionally void as the popcorn you'll scoff while watching the movie.

The truth is that there's more than a whiff of exploitation about this wholly unnecessary release - especially as it's a game which few people rated highly in the first place. Although it does benefit from better controls, that doesn't disguise how boring the storyline is, or how mediocre the missions are.

The thing that really marks The Darkness out, we'll repeat, is its "minute-to-minute gameplay". You can't argue with that. It's a game which offers thrills arguably as intense as anything the genre has to offer. It is, for the most part, an extraordinarily entertaining game with precious little fat around the edges,and often technically stunning.

If you've got a DS, plus Pearl or Diamond, and you've got a sizable collection of Pokémon that you'd like to see rendered in 3D on the TV, then Battle Revolution might be worth the asking price. Even then, you'd have to be a pretty hardcore Pokémon fan.