Whereas the DS game could be defended for ignoring significant depth for the sake of accessibility, Cook Off's controls are simply too ropey for it to earn any flavour of respect, and leave its repetitive, flash-in-the-pan mini-games open to assault.

I can't help but admit I'm having a smashing time - quite literally - with Saints Row. Yes, the story is trite at times and yes, much of where that story takes you can feel a touch ridiculous, but it's to the team's credit that this deftly side-steps the issues of its predecessors and rarely feels gratuitous or malicious. The Saints Row reboot is self-aware and self-deprecating and if you're able to move past its prior reputation, there's a fast and furious shooter here that's worthy of your time.

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.

An artefact. It's completely anachronistic in today's world.

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.

The fact that I've had a good time with it even on half-melted servers demonstrates the strength of its emergent horror. Like the towering killer himself, Friday the 13th has come out of nowhere, and while it isn't invulnerable, it's more than capable of stealing your heart.

There's much to be said for games which simply polish an existing formula to a shine - but Loki, sadly, doesn't even quite accomplish that. It's solid, and it's competent, but unless you're absolutely crazy for point and click action RPGs, we find it hard to recommend a game on the basis of competence alone.

Medieval Moves' downfall is how repetitive it becomes. This is a game clearly designed for kids, yet the sheer exhausting monotony of bashing your way through each level is never rewarded with any meaningful pay-off, just more of the same against a different backdrop.

What you'll get out of N3 is the relentless pounding excitement that transcends the initial gripes.

The story may not be the most earth shattering we've heard, the voice acting (though delightfully it's British!) can be a touch jarring on occasion, and it's initially frustrating and rather basic and rough around the edges in some other respects, but nevertheless it grows into something that you can happily sit down and chip away at all evening without getting too worked up.

Slick but rather empty.

VB2's no featherweight then, whatever Ippo's boxing class, but it's certainly an acquired taste that proves satisfying if you give it time to beef up.

There's a strange kind of charm in the very concept of Babel Rising. The infidels may be building a tower, but Bulkypix has built a folly - and while I'm glad I don't have to play it any more, I'm at least a little bit happy that it exists.

As you alternate furiously between confusion and excitement, the explosive gaggle never lets up even for a moment. You'll launch a curtain of certain death, dash, homing missile strike, dash. Dash dash. Laser in the face. Die! WHY WON'T YOU DIE?

Getting to levels four and five, reaching 30,000 points in a co-op game and managing to deliver 15 frogs to the other side of the river on one life are tricky tasks that'll keep you going for a bit, but otherwise Frogger will probably take you less than an evening to exhaust.

The creativity and daring invention of the designers should be applauded in no uncertain terms. But by the end of the game, it's clear that the studio was unable to bring its patchwork quilt of mechanics together into a coherent whole.

Speed Kings is vaguely entertaining, and certainly there are worse racers, but with "Burnout 2" and "Midnight Club II" to compete with, it's as if Climax couldn't see the point.

Godfall offers obnoxiously stylish next-gen spectacle, but its appeal only runs skin deep.

Myst's spiritual successor offers a lot of the same delights as its 1993 forbear, but is hampered by litany of technical issues.

A pretty game set in a compulsive universe which is sneakily derivative and, at its heart, stale, repetitive, average and lacking in any meaningful creativity.

Nothing special - you won't find many original ideas or much variation between levels here, and it's all over a bit too quickly. But if you're looking to buy a game that will entertain a Scooby fan who just wants to play the cartoon, or a younger gamer who just wants some simple running, jumping and collecting to get on with, this will do the trick.

Dead to Rights is a lot like its belligerent hero, getting the job done in the crudest manner possible, leaving behind nothing more memorable than a sticky adolescent mess of blood, bullets and profanity.

With its unwisely generic title, Hamsterball doesn't inspire confidence that it's going to do anything more than roll over old ground, and so it proves.

Relentless FPS overlords might find their pulses raised briefly by the thought of endless, generic shooting and violence, but the rest of you would be well advised to direct your time and money elsewhere.

What we're left with really is a Saturday morning cartoon retelling of the tale, with none of the memorable dialogue, very little actual exposition, too much brainless padding and key events reshaped to fit the brief.

It stops being fun alarmingly quickly.

With its shaggy construction and wild ambition, E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy is as difficult to dislike as it is to recommend.

With a rewarding upgrade structure and lightweight strategic elements allowing Game Distillery to distance itself from its obvious influences, Aqua develops a personality of its own which, while not exactly breaking much new ground, shapes the shooter landscape in an appealing manner.

Broken Roads neglects its best ideas, padding out its runtime with fetch quests that leave you asking "why am I here?" for all the wrong reasons.

While it is fun, although not magnificently so, in its own right, it fails to offer a convincing reason to buy it over the many other fine EyeToy outings that have gone before.

Seen through adult eyes, it's a sweet but slender surfing game that's consistently amusing.

Determined types fond of incessant repetition might eke some mild enjoyment from The Lost Town, but the rest of us can move swiftly along and leave the town to its inevitable fate.

Cities of Tomorrow makes SimCity a better game but, unfortunately, it still doesn't make SimCity a particularly good game. While its presentation is excellent and the act of laying out a city is alarmingly addictive, nurturing and developing that city is less compelling.

Whatever the cause, the result is nothing if not a totally fascinating game, one with vast potential and reams of signature Rocksteady detail and panache and all the structure necessary to make a live service shooter that's genuinely enjoyable for months to come. There's just no central, underlying game to actually hang it on. A glittering, custom-made suit, without the hero to wear it.

Another frustrating 'nearly' package from Pterodon that's suffering from a dated look and feel. The single-player offering misses the mark, arguably, even more than it did last time.

Don't expect an RPG of depth – it's heavy on the action, light on customisation, and rewarding loot is rare. It's also in desperate need of more time in the womb, and the results of that are felt all over. But by and large, the sense of location and the constant weft of combat meant that I spent much of the fifteen hours it took to complete in a state of gentle enjoyment – and that definitely counts for something.

The only shame is that, when you finally manage to master the game with a single credit (and we're getting close), the only person around to show off in front of is probably a bewildered friend who's just popped round for a friendly game of Pro Evo.

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.

As a standalone experience, it's shambling but lovable: two parts quirkiness to one part tedium. Compare it to the original, however, and it's hard to escape the fact that a once-brilliant game has been put through a mangler. Somewhere along the way, Capcom's zombie apocalypse has been bludgeoned into a zombie compromise, and, unless you really like poodles, the Wii offering can't really be said to add anything that the 360 version was lacking.

A game that feels like it was created out of obligation rather than inspiration.

The designers didn't love this game, they just threw together poorly understood ideas from other games like "Halo" and "Half-Life" so that the management chimps responsible for the project could be satisfied that it was ripping off popular products.

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.

Junior F1 fans will love it - and maybe older enthusiasts will find it lifts their spirits just a bit in the off-season, too.

A shallow shooter that doesn't offer anywhere near enough bang for your ill-gotten buck.

Put it like this: This is probably one of the most enjoyable piece of early-Beta code that I've ever played. You want to damn Atari for releasing it like this. However, you also want to hail them for spending money on something of Boiling Point's ambition rather than the safe option.

An entertaining one-stop-shop for competitive multiplayer action, but the recently released Black Hawk Down campaign is an unpleasant war simulation in all the wrong ways.

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.

F1 2014's a strange game, then, and one I can't even accuse of being just a casual reskin. It's a quantifiable step back for the series, saved only by the fact that what's there remains a satisfactory companion piece to this year's season if you're fortunate enough to have a decent steering wheel.

While bugs may have been the bane of Dead Island, the underlying shabbiness of everything else still overwhelms Riptide. For as long as you don't notice the fundamental flaws in game systems and for as long as you can put up with the instantly forgettable story and mission objectives, this is a game where you can have a lot of fun improvising your way through hordes of the undead. Unfortunately, the game lasts twice as long as my patience for the duff bits held out.

A decent enough result after 20 years in the wilderness.

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.

Although its augmentations are selective and skin deep, Outcast remains a generous and uniquely captivating game. [Recommended]

Our advice: load Adventures as soon as you unpack your Kinect and enjoy it, preferably with small children to hand. Within a couple of weeks it will be gathering dust: another brave bundled game, first up out of the trenches, first to fall.

Pandora could well lend itself to a great film, and would lend itself fabulously well to a good third-person action game. Unfortunately, despite providing two third-person action games here for the price of one, both of them are dull and forgettable.

It doesn't scale well on gigantic tellies, and you must endure nasty 4:3 borders, but for the committed, that's all part of the authentic retro fun.

Need for Speed returns in this, a grossly unremarkable open world racer that marks another step back for the series.

In its better moments it's a guilty pleasure, in its worst it's embarrassingly retrograde. By being consistently fairly slick with it, it easily avoids skimming the lowest depths, but really it's the kind of game we've all long since grown out of. Or so I like to tell myself, anyway.

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.

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.

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

I really, really hope the developer gets a second crack at Move Fitness, as the core concept clearly works and there are some screamingly obvious things that, if added, would make the game a much better, potentially excellent, fitness game. But as it stands, what should be Mr. Motivator is very much Mr. Average.

Despite being two-thirds the price of most DS games, it's still not worth it. You'd be far better off having a wash and going to a friend's house for an unfriendly, loud, fight-inducing game of poker, where at least everything can descend into betting on Mousetrap.

Honeycomb Beat just isn't as addictive or substantial as it needs to be to make it a classic.

Adding to what has been an encouraging year so far for Live Arcade offerings, Voodoo Dice is another unexpectedly high quality puzzler.

And thanks to poor ball physics, the ball can quickly get stuck in a "loop" of identical bounces against indestructible blocks if you're unlucky.

Since the saber-play is occasionally exciting, and that those of you who desperately want something that reminds you of the film might be prepared to put up with this in spite of its flaws. Me? I thought this was crap.

It's unique, unlikely and uneven, but also the kind of unsafe game that is rarely created in mainstream circles these days. For that reason, despite the simplicity, the linearity, the dearth of meaningful systems, it is also curiously fascinating.

Zeno Clash 2 is not an unambitious game, and nor for that matter is it a bad one. The melee mechanic at its core is well-tuned, lots of fun once you've got the hang of it, and could carry a different game. But the new structure makes you wonder why it's there at all. Why the fetch quests and moth-collecting? Why the silly wrist-mounted puzzles?

Drakengard 3 isn't a very good game, then, but it's an interesting kind of failure, and as such is impossible to completely dismiss.

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.

This Impossible Mission remake won't set the scene alight as it did during the '80s but it's a solid, faithful rendition of a cherished old classic.

It's a guess-the-drawing parlour game for all intents and purposes, though, and there's always a nagging feeling in the back of your mind that there's far better things to do on a DS than this. As long as the likes of Professor Layton or Picross exist, it's easily overlooked.

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

There's fun to be had, but this isn't the reliable source of brilliant design that it should be. If you expected breezy old Wario to make sense of the Wii U in some fundamental manner, you're going to be disappointed by a game that occasionally seems quietly defeated by its host platform.

The camera is also a little problematic. With no right analogue stick, you'll have to periodically squeeze the left shoulder button to see what's directly in front of your hero.

BioWare has had a year to get Omega right. It didn't.

Kinect Sports Rivals is a well-constructed game with an enjoyable structure and smartly integrated multiplayer. But it's already looking dated as it continues to struggle against the limitations of its chosen interface.

There are some decent games here, in other words, but not enough to make this something you simply have to try. As for the Wii, it's on towards Zelda - and beyond that lies sunset.

There's even a bit of scope for creativity, since you can design your own T-shirts and posters, and - the one part of the game which might appeal to small boys - draw rude pictures all over the Bratz' faces in your favourite shade of lipstick, should you so desire.

But those who can overlook Hunted's design shortfalls and occasionally tepid fantasy backdrop will extract a good few hours of fun slashing and exploring before something better comes along.

Moon Diver is one of those divisive little numbers that you'll either love because of its repetitive, twitchy bombast, or want to drown in its own spittle. It's here. It's queer. Get used to it.

With such a tediously unengaging storyline, vanilla locations, rubbish camera system and an all-round feel of technical impoverishment, what you're left with is a game that's certainly fun, original and hugely engaging for a while, but one that fails to live up to its early promise.

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.

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.

Obscure II also deserves credit for the slick way it handles co-op play - a feature that's still completely unique and exclusive to this series...But if you're only after the cream of the crop, then be aware that this isn't likely to be one for your Most Wanted list.

As a single-player game, Sonic Rivals 2 is brilliant fun. It's fast and exciting and pretty and happy, just like the old games. And like the old games, it's a bit hard. It could have done without the silly battles but the races are so good they're worth putting up with.

If you've missed out on a decade of new ideas and developments, or you really need to blow away the greying cobwebs of a dozen gritty shooters, then Crash is four or five hours of enjoyable, low intensity fun - the colourful, ill-fitting Hear'Say pullover of the platform stable. But with so many better alternatives on offer, it's not an experience we'd recommend.

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.

True Crime is a game looking to score the ultimate dope hit of Grand Theft Auto genius, and it has the contacts to make such a score, but fails to use them.

But at least this game does have potential, unlike Iron Man and Thor, and if you can make your peace with its clunkier aspects then it's a passably enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.

Much like its robot host, it's a bare bones facsimile of something with a lot more soul. Samba de Amigo may cost four times as much but even in its slightly disappointing Wii incarnation, it's still four times as much fun as well.

There's certainly a worthwhile game in here, teasingly close to the surface. Maybe in 12 months' time the TV show will be a big hit and the game will have been patched and updated into the experience it was clearly meant to be. If that's the case, it'll be a hard-earned and well-deserved victory. For now, proceed with caution.

It's perhaps unsurprising, given the matinee idol lineage of the series, that Lara Croft's set-piece adventures work so well carved into chunks, yet - even if it's not as long as you fancied, and there's a bit too much shooting - it's still a pleasure to spend a few more hours with one of gaming's most graceful legends.

There's no brains, no muscle, no fibre beneath Ryse's extravagantly engineered good looks - this game rings loud but hollow.

The ports themselves are weak, perhaps the victim of an unrealistic development deadline, and the games aren't actually all that classic.

With only split screen to service your multiplayer needs, all you're left with is a solid, unspectacular single-player campaign that frustrates more than it entertains.

Generously stocked with puzzles and options, and with something to offer for players of all skill levels, Buku Sudoku is actually one of the strongest puzzle packages on Live Arcade and - somewhat to my surprise - comes highly recommended.