As a game that endures precisely because of its easygoing, laughable nature, Talisman is far from ideal.

Rich PvE combat and an unusually friendly community make Arc Raiders a more approachable extraction shooter than most, but Embark Studios' continued use of AI voice generation is a black mark against its reputation.

If this were the only console RPG available the numerous flaws might be worth suffering, but when compared to the ambition and polish that other games have brought to the genre in recent years Risen demands far too much and offers too little in return.

Ultimately this is soulless and boring with almost no redeeming features, and the worst tennis game of this generation by some margin.

People shouldn't make RTS games for consoles for the same reasons that people shouldn't put square pegs in round holes: they don't fit. And people definitely shouldn't make substandard RTS games for consoles.

Something Microsoft should have put out at a budget price from the beginning, because the single-player story mode is without question one of the worst platform games we've had the misfortune of playing in <I>years</I>, while the multiplayer is merely adequate next to the best in online console gaming.

Maybe with a price cut and some rebalancing work this could be worth getting, but right now it's a bit of a shambles.

Dream Trigger is a novel experiment that starts off refreshing, surreal and unique, but it's too content to regurgitate the same tricks and never evolves past its base mechanics. New coats of paint can only mask so much before it grows tiresome.

Spyro would score a 5 were it to work properly - smack bang in the middle of middlyness, doing nothing well, and utterly without imagination (for goodness sakes, travelling back and forth between two versions of reality - where did they get that idea from?!).

With a frustrating yet easy single-player mode that can be exhausted in less than an hour, it falls to multiplayer to improve the score - and it's true that playing with other people does liven things up a tad.

An atrocious MMO wedded to a fleetingly enjoyable multiplayer shooter. Had Vogster just focused on the latter component, it might have had something worthwhile.

The clichéd storyline is accompanied by plenty of hammily acted cut-scenes, and the whole package is ultimately pretty forgettable. There's some nautical mileage in the sea battles, but that's not nearly enough.

What looked like a peaceful riff on one of Miyamoto's finest ideas winds up a far duller prospect than it ought to have been. Shame.

Whatever your thoughts are on the finer points of the game, it all boils down to one thing, really, and that's the fact that you're essentially mashing the same two or three buttons repeatedly, and largely winging it most of the time.

Despite making an excellent first impression, Park Beyond ends in a downward spiral that's exciting in a coaster, but lethal in an economy.

Mixing repetitive, imprecise combat with annoying characters and a landslide of nonsensical, proper noun-stuffed lore, Immortals of Aveum is almost so bad it's good. If only.

The gripes are really mainly relating to the individual games, which for anyone remotely experienced will quickly become far too familiar and untaxing to warrant extended interest.

The presentation is so poor, with the board and tiles constricted to an area around half the size of one of the DS' screens, that it's almost impossible to see the detail on each tile.

With Robocalypse content to be barely average in every department, this is one for only the most undemanding Tower Defence addicts.

With just a smidgen more subtlety it might have worked, but the cod 1950s B-movie horror shtick is rammed home in CAPITAL LETTERS and SHOUTY VOICES at EVERY OPPORTUNITY to the point where you just want to tell Digital Reality to just PLEASE SHUT UP.

While the simple structure makes it compulsive, it also leaves it unsophisticated.

It's a stupid idea, and one that pretty much breaks Midnight Bowling. It's too silly to work as a bowling sim, but it's also too open to unfair play to work as a fun multiplayer game.

The fort-versus-fort gameplay definitely doesn't gel with the Worms dynamic. Instead it robs a once-proud series of almost everything that made it so memorable, and the result is a game that tires as much as it feels tired.

Even the best endeavour seems futile in the face of a clunky control system and a lack of strong visual feedback. To call it a relaxing piece of leisure software doesn't excuse it, either.

It has neither the charm, nor the innovation, nor the wicked guns, and therefore ultimately feels like a bit of a chore.

Thanks to a quite absurd damage system, you can find yourself downed in three or four hits, usually meted out with all the precision of a Friday night drunk in Basildon.

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.

Harmony of Despair isn't a failure of concept but a failure of ambition, one that leaves Koji Igarashi still waiting for his next great discovery.

At best, it delivers one of those non-threatening interactive playgrounds that parents can feel safe letting their young 'uns explore, and on that level it's job done. For the rest of us looking/hoping/praying for a decent driving game based on the latest Pixar movie, you're best advised to ignore its No.1 status and steer clear of this road accident.

It looks cute, it has a couple of nice ideas, but it's just not fun.

Monster Jam is a terrible racing game, and a laughable attempt at recreating the hefty impact of monster trucks to boot. With zero challenge and aggravating control, I don't think "MotorStorm 2" has much to worry about.

The game becomes a painfully slow and suffocating linear trudge through every single cabin on the train - for the fifth time - in an effort to find everyone and get hold of their passports for investigation purposes, while asking all nineteen passengers and crew practically the exact same set of twenty odd questions.

This kind of release does the publisher no favours at all. If content is king, then Super Monkey Ball 3D is very much the Prince Andrew of the 3DS launch.

What's most frustrating is that with more enemies, more graceful control and a more compelling structure, there's no reason why a retro-styled Adventure Time roguelike couldn't have been an absolute treat and a game worthy of the show.

Missing the elegance of FromSoftware, Lords of the Fallen is let down by Soulslike clichés and performance woes.

If a game is going to force you to play like an a**hole, it should have a stronger reason for doing so than 'You're a ninja, duh.' Ninja Gaiden 3 has none.

Absolutely horrible execution.

If you really, really want to play tennis with your Move controller, Racket Sports works well enough to fulfill that function. But think carefully about whether that experience is worth £25 (it isn't).

If it featured a character aimed at kids a few years older it would probably score higher, but a game that so woefully misunderstands its audience should only be purchased by those with precocious offspring or vast reserves of patience.

After driving around the three cities, picking up fare after fare and learning your best routes and so on, there's really very little the game can offer you that "Grand Theft Auto 3" and "Vice City" doesn't do far better with its throwaway Taxi missions.

A formulaic, by the numbers FPS with zero innovation, demented AI and a crushing lack of inspiration.

Eventually, the mire of frustrations, constant reloading, harsh difficulty level, bugs and generally poor design wears you down. Rabid strategists will appreciate the game's saving grace, the combat system, and may find themselves more tolerant. Good luck to them. They'll need it.

Empire Earth 3 simply tries too hard to be popular. In doing so, it strips out everything that made it good in the first place and forgets to replace it with something equally worthwhile.

As far as Nintendo seems to be concerned, at least until the first DS outing, Pokémon begins and ends with the Game Boy. Pokémon XD is tedious and restrictive. The message is clear: if you want Pokémon, crack open a GBA.

A great idea lost under the weight of tiresome game mechanics.

We've also come to take EA's high presentation values and their sports titles' accessibility for granted, and Rugby 2004 has neither. In essence, it feels like a cynical attempt to steal cash from dazzled armchair Wilkinsons, and we're yanking a point off for that alone.

What balance there is in Tactical Intervention is precarious at best. Mechanics have been piled on mechanics - ideas the game's creator always envisaged adding to his first game before Counter-Strike was firmly thrust into the hands of its community.

There's remarkably little puzzle-solving, and on the occasions when you do need to find a power-up to get through an area, you'll generally find it right next to it. The plodding pace of the game also makes combat incredibly dull, as you might expect.

But with a miserly six songs present in the set list (versus 28 songs in the marginally more expensive Rock Band), and a pathetic selection of songs in the store, it hardly hits the ground running.

The original Super Monkey Ball wasn't designed with a balance board in mind, any more than monkeys are meant to wear waistcoats, and the end result is just as odd and incongruous. It might well be time to stop grinding that organ.

Operation Raccoon City is an under-designed and under-produced nightmare, a game that delivers the bare minimum in every category and stops right there.

Of RPGs with overblown production values, galaxy-wide spider-web narratives, protagonists of indistinct sex and abundantly irritating characterisation, Final Fantasy is still King and this chartered framework does absolutely nothing to impinge its power.

Way of the Samurai 3 wastes too much energy juggling the numerous ways it can end your story and not nearly enough on making the journey to get there worthwhile.

In the face of such opposition, Nightshade, a pretty damn poor game when stacked against PS2 contemporaries like "Devil May Cry" or "Castlevania," simply doesn't have a candle to hold.

Ironically for a series based around the idea of a carefully staged experience that collapses into unpredictable chaos, you're always more passenger than participant on this visit to Jurassic Park.

Suffice to say, feeble half-baked offerings like this are a step in the wrong direction. Hopefully Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening will do a much better job next month.

It may be fun and it may make you sweat, but as an interactive fitness companion it's a feeble, infuriating effort that lacks the stamina to compete.

If you forget about the campaigns - and God knows, you're going to try and forget about the campaigns - the skirmish is an entirely competent example of its genre, and its inclusion enough to make this not actually an actively worthless game per se.

Those in search of a tough brawl might find nourishment in Golems of Amgarrak's slim pickings, but it's ultimately another quest-by-numbers effort that makes it very clear that the Dragon Age team's attention has now fully shifted to the sequel.

The intricate layering of tasks and guard puzzles merely proves frustrating, and with the lack of anything beyond the game's eight lengthy single-player levels, which you probably won't feel much like completing, it's a game that looks good in theory but falls flat in execution.

A frustrating gaming experience.

At no point was it an unpleasant game to play, it's merely completely retrograde in several key areas and lacking any sense of presentation or style. It's an ugly game, but one which, crucially, works as a game at its most basic level - which, to my mind, weighs heavily against the problems it has in most other areas.

A game that could have been much better, had it not focused on trying to cram as much Gangsterite gibberish up its Los Santos as possible, and instead focused on creating a game which was enjoyable, distracting nonsense.

The most heartbreaking thing about all this is that Sonic Team is clearly trying; the developer throws everything it can at the game in the hope that something will stick. Yet the result is a disastrous lack of focus.

A plodding, tiresome game that is only able to frustrate.

Simply too generic in pretty much every way, a collection of ideas done hundreds of times before in other games, offering nothing new to excite or surprise the player. A wholly unremarkable and totally avoidable game.

New Rally-X is fun for about ten minutes, but that's all, and for the price that's just not enough.

TV Show King is a quiz game, and it features questions. That basic level of expectance is all it manages to meet, and it's horribly clear that this is simply a "make do" release, put out there to mop up an existing market with the minimum of effort.

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.

Instead, try teaching them to spell 'soulless merchandising opportunity' because this isn't a worthy companion piece at all.

Put next to the (unfairly derided) Lumines Live, Tetris Evolution is clunky, overpriced and devoid of compelling new features, and with the Xbox 360 controller's directional pad putting in its usual awkward performance, it's hard to think of a reason to recommend this to anybody.

For all it brings to the table - space combat, Halo's shield, varied levels - not one single aspect is truly worthy of praise.

Far too similar to games that are wonderful. So while it's not hideous or unplayable, it constantly reminds you of a far better game you could be playing instead.

Chibi-Robo simply isn't much fun.

Because for all it brings to the table - space combat, Halo's shield, varied levels - not one single aspect is truly worthy of praise.

A final point to raise is why Taito felt the need to demand that multi-player link mode would only work with 12 levels of the old version? It's hard enough to justify buying this ancient classic as it is, without removing the last temptation from the already hard pressed gamer.

Massive bravely peels away the many layers of Ubisoft open world-isms in Star Wars Outlaws. It's a fatal error.

Taken as a whole, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days will probably amuse unfussy fans of nihilistic violence for a few evenings. But in a genre stuffed with far more interesting efforts, that still leaves it woefully below average.

The only reason to buy Sonic Free Riders would be if it was actually free. And even then, only if you just really liked the box.

More will follow, but despite what its name might suggest, Infinity is extremely limited, both in terms of what little content it offers and your ability to access it.

NetEase's spin on the hero battler is complex and moreish, but rarely much actual fun. Its biggest impact is a renewed appreciation for the rivals that do it better.

I can handle the graphical bugs - those overlapping buildings, the misshaped roads, the fire fighters who have chosen to stand on the station roof and spend their time endlessly vibrating. What I can't handle is the knowledge that things aren't working properly, that whatever success I've made is a sham, the result of misshapen game mechanics producing outcomes that are frequently contradictory or even nonsense.

If you haven't played the PC, PS2 or Xbox 360 versions, do. They're brilliant. This isn't.

As the Story Mode can be cleared in a couple of hours you're left to find fun in one of the game's simple multiplayer modes (download play or Wi-Fi) but these do little to enliven the repetitive and staccato move, stop, point, shoot, flow of play leaving a meagre and shallow title that's difficult to recommend.

A severely flawed game. Yet somewhere - hidden underneath a terrible combat system, weird AI and an untrustworthy camera - there lies the frail skeleton of a good stealth game.

A soulless attempt at straddling the fence between the over-the-top action found in the Blitz series and trying to accurately simulate the sport of football like the competition.

With camera issues, a cowardly gaming mechanic and the frankly awful stealth sub levels, what you're left with is perhaps the best example of graphics over gameplay we've ever seen. Unless you get off on repetitive bash 'em ups, leave well alone.

A soulless cash-in that has little to do with its license, and nor is it much fun in its own right. If you're lucky enough to not encounter any game-breaking bugs and if you have a friend or two to play with, then it can be pretty entertaining for a few hours. But that's a lot of "ifs" for so little payoff, since overlong levels and axe-sponge enemies inevitably whittle this dungeon crawl down into a slog.

There's nothing devastatingly awful about this, it's just thoroughly outclassed by most of everything else on the market.

That's what's most disappointing; there's absolutely the spark of a really cool whatever-this-genre-is game in Among the Sleep, and for a while it looks like it's going to get there. Too bad it ends barely a quarter of the way in, passing the baton to something both much less interesting and perpetually trapped in its shadow.

Put it this way: if your kid gets stuck on a game like Open Season, you know something's amiss. Consider it a good test of whether videogames really are for them.

So easy on the eye visually that if you saw a demo of it running you might actually think it was going to impress you. But keep watching and, like a drunken rejection from a girl in a nightclub, it will quickly dawn on you that it's not going to happen. Like the gameplay, a solid base was never built upon and the end result is just boring.

you get less than two hours of gameplay consisting of a few repetitive fights, and all you get to show for it is a new hat. Hardly worth getting out of bed for, let alone rising from the grave.

Solid, but uninspiring.

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

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.

The implementation is rushed and slipshod, however, ignoring fundamental problems and expending limited energy on the wrong things. What you're getting for your money feels a little like somebody else's office in-joke: you can sense the well-intentioned laughter, but you can't really join in.