With the mood alternating between boredom and exasperation, Sanctum Of Slime is a spirit-crushing exercise that only a committed masochist could appreciate.

Naughty Bear sold itself to a lot of customers by pretending to be adult, gritty and brutal. In fact, it's childish, facile and more pointless than manning the phone-lines for the Rob Green retirement fund. Avoid at all costs, or at least wait until it's inevitably slashed in price if you're really desperate for some sledgehammer humour and cheap Gamerscore.

But no amount of colourful 3D graphics and soothing jazz can make up for tiresome puzzles, empty levels, unoriginal weapons and endless backtracking.

With the dreadful lack of effort in the PS1-like visuals, and ghastly AI, even those with especially designed tattoos should consider their old friend exactly that: old.

Average execution, terribly repetitive combat, lots of reasonable ideas that don't quite work, a general lack of cohesion: it's not diabolical, but it's far from great.

El Matador is an unsophisticated action shooter which might have been a decently average blast - there are elements of simple fun to be had in its running and gunning - but it's all messed up by the transparently scripted and static enemies, patchy AI and poor clipping detection.

At the end of the day this isn't a matter of graphics whorishness, it's just that the GBA can't do the game justice. Underneath it all you can feel the spirit of the game struggling to get out.

Tedious repetition needs to be a little better disguised.

Perfectly competent in execution, yet lacking that spark that makes us visibly excited to cough up yet more money for almost exactly the same Pokémon game as the last forty-four when Diamond and Pearl land over here.

If this came free with the PS2 Network Adapter - as it does in the US - we might be more inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

An exercise in extracting value from its players rather than providing it, the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is what happens when this industry is at its worst.

Unless you already have an emotional attachment to the Star Trek universe, and feel a cheeky little frisson down there at the prospect of pretending to be Kirk, there's no reason at all to put up with the unresponsive controls, shallow gameplay and absolutely infuriating inability to save during an hour-long mission.

After a jovial couple of hours in its company the scales will fall, and what had just seemed an unpretentious, unassumingly enjoyable videogame becomes a kind of existential nightmare of averageness that it's impossible to play for a minute longer. Monster 4x4: World Circuit is the definition of the lowest common denominator.

As it is, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy is best sampled as a rental for Wii owners looking for a multiplayer party game that'll last a night or two.

Despite its initially promising duality concept, tactical shooter Spectre Divide is held back by a hesitance to take further creative risks. The results are underwhelming.

Many of the vast list of things we object to in Fracture equal the low standard set by the likes of "Turok" and "Haze," and that if you managed to survive those games without burning down the shop that sold them to you, this will suffice for a weekend's distraction.

An exceptionally generic platformer shaped around quick trial and error design and limp enemies, and built around a tired looking cel-shaded engine that does little justice to the visuals of the arcade original.

The quintessential movie tie-in, a self-fulfilling prophecy of functional banality. On the surface it's brash, busy and superficially attractive, but underneath it's hollow, blatantly padded and more than a little monotonous. It's never much fun, but nor is it wonky enough to be terrible. It's simply there, a forgettable distraction.

The Chinese Room has managed to make something from a box of inherited parts, but this action RPG feels hollow and functional, and is only redeemed by some stellar performances from the characters and cast.

A serviceable, sometimes-engaging official Star Trek version of Stellaris that makes sense for generic space war fans, but flounders when it comes to narrative logic and Trekkie authenticity.

It's a short and rather insipid slog that simply doesn't have the charm or ambition to compensate for its wonkier aspects.

Beneath Arcania's often outstanding art direction and technical achievement lies a dry spreadsheet of must-have RPG elements, none of which is sufficiently developed to compel and all of which fail to balance against one another.

There's no passion or care in Urban Trial Freestyle's construction, no sense of playfulness of fun. It's a game that does the bare minimum required to look like another game, and once the resemblance is close enough, it leaves it at that, with all the rough edges still on display.

After plugging away at The Drowning for a few days and pumping money into its ravenous maw, it becomes clear that this is a transaction machine first, a headline-grabbing control scheme second and an actual game a distant third.

Ubisoft's long-in-the-works pirate adventure boasts a beautiful world and bombastic ship-to-ship combat, but it sinks amid boring busywork and tedious traversal.

Another safe, derivative, formulaic movie tie-in that's lacking in the graphical department and is way too easy for all but the youngest gamers out there.

But when you find yourself constantly messing up routine jump manoeuvres because of vindictive collision detection, the whole thing becomes aggravating - a war of attrition against poorly designed controls.

Wrecked offers a tissue-thin single-player mode, poor frame-rate and camera, bland track design and clumsy online multiplayer, all for a premium price with expensive community-splitting day-one DLC.

There is so little replay potential here, so little urge to top high scores or perfect shoddy make-do attempts, that completing each task feels more of a relief than an achievement.

It's fun for half an hour, but that's an awfully expensive 30 minutes. Don't buy RIDE unless you want to be taken for one.

It's not a badly made game. With the exception of the camera, everything works. It looks all right. It's not the worst videogame we've ever played, and it's certainly not the worst movie tie-in. But it's entirely lacking in imagination and innovation. There's nothing that hasn't been done before and no incentive to keep playing.

Hammers of Fate adds a lot of material for HoMM5. But to warrant a better mark, it would have to actually deal with the basic weaknesses of the game. As it is, despite the Caravan's efforts to streamline one aspect, it just doesn't.

So, while Hydrophobia breaks new water, it treads old ground. The systems beneath the ebb and flow of its technical accomplishment are archaic and, without exception, lack finesse.

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.

If Mercenaries Vs was a basic online extra on a full-fledged mobile Resident Evil, you might forgive it, but as a standalone release it has no redeeming qualities. Come on Capcom, you can do better than this.

Shameless money grubbing.

This is a superhero game that actually makes you hate the superhero you're playing as for their rubbish attacking skills, poor movement and general refusal to do what they're told.

A dreary, badly made game which offers no real closure to the series and bears no relevance to either Blair Witch film. A waste of your pennies, despite the reasonable price tag.

Unless you're some kind of creepy time-rich retro masochist who actually enjoys having to start over from scratch every single time, Xevious is likely to provoke nothing but buyer's remorse.

Imagine how stupid you'd feel if you actually ended up paying for more of it?

From this point it's clear that in terms of being a shooter, 007 Legends is dismal - but in terms of being an actual James Bond game, it's a genuine insult.

Turtles is about as shallow as gaming gets, with even less to offer than Renegade, a game already three years old by the time this hit the arcade...Even at 400 points, that's pretty shoddy value.

Usually, spin-off games can fall back on their inherited audience of existing fans, but with a pointless story that adds nothing to a tale already completed, it's hard to see how even the most devoted follower could get more than an evening of mild amusement from such a scrawny experience.

As a relic to amuse your friends with it serves a purpose, but you could probably achieve the same result by visiting YouTube.

The repetition of the exploration, the game world, and the unsatisfying combat leaves Galerians: Ash failing to engage at any point.

And so rather than allowing you to feel like an armoured avenger, Iron Man's videogame outing merely offers the chance to lurch awkwardly around the sky like a drunken wasp while holding down a button to blow stuff up.

The combat's inexcusably awful. The duelling is absolutely mind-numbingly uninspired. The platforming and exploration feel tacked-on, overly basic and adds little variety, and the fetch quests plumb new depths in their tedious pointlessness...One of the most dreadfully vacuous and uninspired movie tie-ins in recent memory.

If you're even slightly tempted, just remember that at the maelstrom's core is a very basic and ugly game made by a company that is both dishonest and incompetent. Combining disgraceful ethics with endemic failures of design, The War Z is a real disaster.

The game's central conceit, which has you infiltrating giant towers with the aim of bringing them down from the inside, encourages uninspiring, repetitive internal environments, a problem the game's art team fails to overcome.

X manages to fail on almost every level.

Then there's the combat. It's messy. You'll fling ranged spells at enemies and they'll mysteriously miss, presumably due to line-of-sight issues, but it's difficult to tell. Even melee combat seems buggy at times, with monsters you can't hit even though they're stood right next to you.

It's one of those games that seems to be actively trying to bore or frustrate you at every turn, and it's so charmless and poorly designed that it makes you wonder whether it was just that nobody had the heart to say anything.

As well-intentioned as this remake probably was, the harsh truth is that the gameplay hasn't aged well. If you can stomach even a quarter of the game's 16 levels, you'll deserve a Medal of Honour for special feats of tolerance.

Movement is on the analogue nub, camera controls on the face buttons. It's a system that has worked okay for other PSP shooters, but there's a stiffness here that makes it feel more like Super Treacle Squad than a simulation of impeccably-trained Special Ops.

We're hugely disappointed in this utterly botched effort by Sega. What should have been the revival of a classic franchise has been turned into a poor rip-off of a Capcom title that wasn't even the dog's bollocks in the first place.

Another boarding game! And yes, it's just like Sonic Free Riders! Except Sonic and the stupid albatross have been replaced by a weird green wolf thing and an annoying surfer dude monkey. And the tracks aren't as good. And the power-ups are duller. And it looks horrible.

There are no injuries, field goals, audibles, safeties, penalties; it's just pick a play and then pick up and play, with as few things to think about as possible. We expected that, but it turns out it's also the main reason that NFL Tour is rubbish: American football needs these things. It needs a bit of complexity and nuance. Without it, it's only ever slightly entertaining.

Even if it were polished to an acceptable, 2013-standard AAA shine, Colonial Marines would still only be a generic effort coasting on borrowed iconography. Weighed down by so many grindingly obvious mechanical issues, it never even gets off the ground. For a game all about exterminating bugs, it's a fatal irony.

Inevitably, it's the mini-games that really muff things up though.

You wouldn't think it possible, but cartoon games have an even worse track record than film adaptations. South Park, Futurama, The Simpsons - all have debased themselves thoroughly when making the leap from telly to joypad. And yet even by those low standards, Family Guy is a pretty desperate experience.

A short game painfully elongated by mindless repetition, there maybe a half-decent melee game somewhere in the midst of all this movie propaganda, but you'll need super-patience to find it.

It's the shortest game ever, and that's not acceptable for a full price release. And no matter how 'pumped' we feel after playing it, it's a minigame. It should be a tenner - not forty quid. [Rating at £10 = 80]

The problem lies in the way you coast through the levels without any real sense of progress or achievement until you realise you’re finished.

Poor controls, lacklustre source material and almost non-existent extras all combine to make this one to avoid unless you have a particularly nostalgic longing for this particular slice of gaming antiquity.

Half-arsed dross.

Regardless of how great it was considered back then, Spelunker HD is the kind of shoddy remake best ignored. The download scene is hardly short of platforming fun, now is it?

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.

The graphics are horrible, and made even worse by that hellish "smoothing" filter. Your powered-up hero has a bulky weightlifter's body with a tiny comedy head on top, while enemy designs are lumpy and ugly.

It's a crude and unappealing game, marred by at least three design decisions (the scrolling, the time-limited weapons, the long-winded upgrade system) that immediately make the gameplay a grind rather than a blast.

Is it unfair to demand £19.99 for something that's as unfinished, badly designed and devoid of deliberate entertainment value as Aurora Watching? Definitely.

A punch, kick and throw marathon that bears more resemblance to early 90s side scrolling beat ‘em ups from Capcom than a 21st Century action adventure on a next generation console.

This is one of the biggest disappointments of the system, and the year.

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.

The only redeeming quality is the echo of ambition that can be faintly heard in the ruins of execution.

It deserved to be left dying in the gutter, begging for loose change, and is in no way a glorious representation of a fondly remembered era of classic arcade gaming. It's a clunky, somewhat charming period piece that's interesting for five minutes if you have childhood associations with it, but, for everyone else, it isn't even worth going beyond the free trial version.

On the real-life TV programme, it's the usual kind of knockabout fun where not getting knocked into the water provides the goofy incentive. On the 360, though, most of the time is spent mangling yourself into forms that the Kinect sensor has rather too much trouble interpreting.

Even Harry, Ron and Hermione's limp-wristed spell-casting animation looks half-hearted. It's an insult to the fiction, an insult to the increasingly good films, and an insult to bad videogames.

It's a mess of conflicting design elements, glitches and outdated film trivia, casually entertaining for about five minutes and tear-inducingly frustrating from there on out. It tries, clearly, but it fails on almost every count.

Ultimately, all Funky Punch has going for it is the price. It's certainly cheaper than Tekken, but it's also a pale shadow of virtually all its genre peers. If you value frugality over actual value for money, then by all means give this a spin.

King of Clubs doesn't play a very good game of golf, and the unlockable elements do little to counteract this rather glaring flaw.

Between the obvious chinks in the artificial intelligence and glaring clipping anomalies (with characters walking through walls and floating down staircases), only a truly hardy adventurer will persevere. Did I say hardy? I meant foolhardy.

At best, it's a functional third-person platformer that sometimes acts like a shooter. At worst, it's an astonishing collection of poor design decisions, half-hearted implementation and mindless narrative clutter that will only lead to buyer's remorse in all who decide to give it a try.

Perhaps the most damning thing of all about Next Dimension though is that throughout our time with the game, we never once felt the impact of a blow or watched a character reel in pain – there’s virtually no weight to any attack and hit contact is unconvincing.

It doesn't help that the game goes from mildly challenging to ridiculously easy within the space of a few hours, and once you hit level 50 nothing in the game will pose any kind of threat.

As interesting an idea as Sky Diving is, sadly the concept fails to deliver thanks to clunky motion sensing.

505 Game Street has been commercially smart to jump aboard the Brain Training bandwagon quickly, but it has made a huge mistake in throwing a faceless copycat effort out there. Hopefully people will not be remotely fooled - we're certainly not.

Even the staunchest of Myst fans can't deny that this is a pretty poor port. Despite being faithful to the original in sound effects and atmosphere, its glitches and lack of new, DS-specific functions ultimately inhibit its worth.

Instead, the game concludes disagreeably, as virtually everyone Jason is supposed to protect is left tortured and dead by his original departure, and he simply has a party because he got what he wanted. For an action RPG elevated beyond its serviceable components by the allure of rich mythology to end in such a desperate contradiction is comprehensively self-destructive.

Should you want to, you can almost play Monopoly, Boggle, Yahtzee and Battleships on it. Just in a really tacky, and depressingly lonely way. And you might want to take advantage of the wireless multiplayer, but really that just makes you weird. Play proper board games if you're in the same room, for goodness sakes. It's a lazy mess, and you deserve better.

The original Ape Escape was charming and innovative, but this entry is as basic as motion gaming gets. What really hurts is that there's no reason why Ape Escape couldn't have been the game to take the waggle genre to the next level, if only it had a bit more passion behind it.

There's nothing terribly wrong with all this in theory, but the game's shocking lack of polish makes even this rudimentary gameplay a real chore to get through.

A very short, and very dull, brawler. Double Dragon does include some nice "extras" - configurable controls, and some arcade flyers, which should be worth an extra point, but throws the point away with quite possibly the worst (unstoppable) menu music I have ever heard in my entire life.

What could have been a mildly enjoyable platform excursion swiftly degenerates into one of the worst adverts for motion control I've ever seen. Suffice to say, we won't be rushing out to check Mission 2.

As Tenchu Z is already outclassed in every area by last generation stealth games like "Metal Gear Solid 2," it fails almost completely when stacked up against "Hitman: Blood Money," "Splinter Cell: Double Agent" or upcoming treats like "Assassin's Creed."

Eat Lead is far from a compelling parody, taking weak, ambiguous pot shots at other games. Even though these attacks are often hard to trace to their intended target, it's fair to say that Eat Lead isn't worthy to mock them, because whatever else it's trying to be this is a howling misfire of a cover shooter, neither funny or enjoyable, and guilty of worse crimes than the ones it's attempting to mock.

If you're so deep into professional cycling that you'd want to play a game where you navigate sterile menus and tell other people how to ride bikes, then there may be some small morsels of enjoyment to be found here, provided you accept that your own enthusiasm will be picking up the slack for a drab and technically sloppy game.

The systems that should have been its biggest draws are relegated to one-trick sideshows, while the majority of the game is just one dreary combat engagement after another.

Tetris Splash gets one point for being Tetris, one point for at least having an online mode and one point for being relatively cheap (assuming you don't bother with the DLC). But it loses points for ugly background graphics, the obligatory ghost block, the bad pacing, the expensive add-ons, the limited multiplayer options and having no sharks.