Fairly dull - a sensation that the "zany" presentation usually accentuates. The Vs. mode makes up for it slightly, as you try and outpace your friend, but even then it's hardly essential, despite a single-cart download-play option.

It's simple, accessible and briefly entertaining.

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

Bullet Witch's graphics can switch from breathtaking to tawdry in the bat of an eyelid, just as quickly as the action can veer between exhilarating sensory barrage and tedious, repetitive trawl.

Wise WW2 strategy gamers will stick with "Company of Heroes" and "Faces of War" for the moment.

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.

The worst kind of licensed game: utterly ignorant of the series' charms it's designed to complement, and bad enough at what it does attempt to make baby Hera cry.

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.

Ideas like collaborative mission editing offer tantalising possibilities for the creatively minded, but they can't mask the flaws of a game lacking a central hook.

By turns clumsy and clever, annoying and addictive, Fable Heroes isn't as different from the series that inspired it as it initially seems to be. It turns out one of the golden rules of being Albion's king also applies here: surround yourself with good people and you'll enjoy yourself all the more.

It doesn't help that you're saddled with an inelegant control set-up that demands constant use of all four shoulder buttons at once.

It's not NBA Live, it's not NBA Street and it's not NBA 2K. And playing Chosen One you'll be reminded of this every couple of minutes.

A visually stunning, dreadfully fussy and cruelly unsatisfying hardcore game - one that does very little indeed to reward the near-infinite levels of patience required to get anywhere close to the value of your time or money.

Warhammer Quest is a competent example of a digital board game but in trying to sand its sharp edges and ensure that it's accessible to all, Rodeo has oversimplified the already slight source material.

Ultimately, Cake Mania is too expensive, too slow and too limited to excel in this overcrowded field.

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.

Creating your own army, and then constantly improving it with the spoils of skirmishes against live foes, is what will keep players coming back for more. With a more streamlined control system, and some tidier graphics, Battle March could be one of the best console strategy games. As it stands, it's strictly for the hardcore.

Shameless money grubbing.

A total waste of a fantastic licence - incredibly anti-climactic, a mere six hours long, full of uninspired levels and identikit enemies, and achingly tedious to play. Once finished I had to quickly uninstall it lest I ever accidentally clicked on that hateful icon again.

While there is some enjoyment to be had here, it is hard-won and rarely fulfilling. The imprecision of the combat and its lightweight feel combined with the ropey visuals conspire to date the game considerably.

The absence of any tutorial mode makes it an uphill battle for newcomers, while committed rugby fans will probably be put off by its lack of depth. New Zealand games don't even begin with the Haka, and where's the fun in that?

Babel Rising has a killer hook, but ultimately fails to use it for much more than the basics. Its entertainment value is simple and occasionally cathartic, but is exhausted far too early.

It had the incredibly difficult job of creating a new character in the Lost world with an interesting enough side-story, able to exist without disrupting the timeline or feeling like an aberration, and able to expose fans to at least a handful of things with which they would be satisfied, even eager, to tinker. There's no question it achieves that.

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.

The poor technical quality of the game isn't quite enough to dim the innate amusement of thundering around New York as the Hulk, but it's certainly enough to drop this from "long awaited next gen remake of a great game" to "yet another movie tie-in that's only really good for a weekend rental".

There's an original story here, but it isn't very exciting, and it lacks the style and incessant comedy of its big screen brethren.

The sad truth is, if you already have a Wii, you've already got a better boxing title in the shape of Wii Sports - a game that not only allows you to pummel away at a cartoon representation of your sister, but also effortlessly possesses more charm, more wit, and - worryingly - a lot more precision than anything this can offer.

The problem really is that, even online, the only incentive to carry on braving Circle of Doom's tedious environments and simplistic action is to obtain a high-powered character, or a monstrous weapon. Except once you've done that, it renders the game even more tedious and simplistic as you one-hit-kill your way around the same stultifying environments that you've been grinding through.

Centipede and Millipede are the sort of simple, repetitive, no frills shooters you can get more than enough fun out of by playing the free trial version of, so we should be grateful to Microsoft for allowing people to find out why they probably shouldn't bother with this one.

Like the best burgers, the best arcade games are simple, allowing us to enjoy the important flavours. BurgerTime World Tour is like a child sticking everything they can find between two halves of a bun, and then gorging on the resulting mess until they puke. Bon appetit.

Its mediocre visuals will tax your PC like an Inland Revenue man hopped up on crack; we had to scale the settings right down in order to make it remotely playable, and even then it crashed us back to the desktop with depressing regularity. Perhaps it was trying to tell us something.

That almost all of these 11 games look like tired also-rans merely compounds the feeling that this is one of the most cynical cash-in releases ever conceived. Avoid.

Having Gary Oldman and Frodo do voiceovers doesn't make up for the fact this game looks and plays like something made five years ago.

It lacks the ambition and style of some of its four-wheeled contemporaries, and you could argue that this license would have been better served by a semi-simulation like Milestone's own SBK. But by focusing on what makes motocross fun to watch rather than ride, it replicates the excitement of jumping from lip to lip astride a two-stroke tearaway... just about.

I'm all in favour of games that transport us back to the good old days of vibrant originality, but Knack simply doesn't.

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.

A solid entry in a mostly wretched genre. It's cute, it's charming and makes you smile without ever really winning your heart. Still, if you've been fiending for a decent PS2 kart racer you can play without vomiting your bones out in horror, here's where your money should be going.

Possibly the worst videogame Nintendo has had the misfortune to publish. Avoid at all costs; this is disgracefully bad.

Make a game with controls that don't work, and lovable presentation and playful creativity can't save it. It always hurts to punish a game that tries something different, especially when such obvious care has gone into its presentation, but Fret Nice fails to execute its ideas with competence.

While the story mode is relatively short and generous in opening up new areas fairly quickly, fishing these days is far better suited to mini-game distractions in bigger titles than something like this.

The sooner Gameloft stops wasting its considerable resources making console-lite games and starts figuring out how to make the most out of mobile platforms, the better. Like 9mm, Silent Ops is gaming at its most clueless and uninspired.

In the end, the game's dated feel is a double-edged sword. It might be odd to feel nostalgic for a time that's less than a decade ago, but Flower, Sun and Rain will make you feel exactly that.

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.

For all my reservations about the format, there's definitely an audience for this sort of thing out there and while 800 Points puts this in the upper price bracket for Live Arcade, it still makes it the cheapest brain game option around. In that regard at least, it gets the job done.

Forget about tactics: it's about pitting your silly custom character against someone else's silly custom character in a giggling orgy of button-bashing. It's not big or clever or deep, but it is fun if you take it for what it is.

Despite the rugged, rough-hewn aesthetic of Skyrim, Hearthfire ultimately offers all the character and personality of an Ikea cupboard.

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.

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.

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.

Plot-wise, this is an unnecessarily confusing experience.

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.

There is a Ferrari experience here, as long as your idea of the Ferrari experience is a Toyota MR2 with an ill-fitting F355 replica bodykit.

Sonic's stuck in a rut, then: he can run as fast as he likes, but no matter the fancy new tricks he learns, he just can't seem to keep up any more.

The only sane reason to invest in Valkyria Revolution is to send a message to Sega that this series should live on, and to hope that somehow it leads to the revival the originals deserve. Given the state it's left in after this turgid affair, though, that time may have already been and gone. [Avoid]

If you want a game that does the franchise justice, you can probably pick up the fantastically entertaining Die Hard Trilogy on PSone for about one eighth of the cost of this.

Painfully thin.

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.

But the biggest problem that Battle For Naboo suffers from is that it is just too short. There are fifteen missions, but they only take five or ten minutes each to complete, and only a few offer any real challenge.

Quotation forthcoming. [Mar 2006]

After thirty-odd rounds of Duæl Invading, it becomes increasingly apparent that a Game Over screen isn't going to appear any time soon. With extra lives spewing out at a rate of knots, it seems like the difficulty level wasn't quite as finely tuned as it could have been.

Part of me has always thought that Nintendo doesn't really care about technology. The company's made games that look like they're made of paper and felt, and when it dabbled in VR it did it with cardboard. So it feels a bit weird to see Nintendo banging on about HDR and, in the later moments of the stamp rally, diving inside the Switch 2 console itself and letting you walk over its battery and its heat channels and all that jazz. It feels like Nintendo spends a lot of time pretending that this isn't technology at all. It's just imagination and playfulness.

The Devil's Cartel is functional and fuss-free, a game that delivers the expected genre tropes with as little imagination and as much bluster as possible. It's not a bad game, but nor does it have anything beyond basic mechanical competence to mark it out as "good" - and even that competence wobbles more than it should.

If you play through this avalanche of new content and you still don't find yourself warming to KOEI's Warriors series, then you can probably forget about ever doing so, because Gundam Musou 2 is absolutely the best in its class. Here's hoping it won't be quite so criminally overlooked as the first game. [JPN Import]

The biggest problem with the game is that it's simple but devoid of real depth. Without the challenge of precision-aiming, it becomes easy to blunder through levels without much planning and the experience is shallow and repetitive for it.

You can sort of see how the concept for Rocket Bowl must have seemed like a good idea, and for a few minutes it's certainly interesting to play around and enjoy the admittedly good physics.

If you have the sort of disposable income that allows you to spend thirty quid on a short-lived and rather bland diversion, or if you have an intensely adolescent fondness for flames, skulls and chains, then I dare say you'll find Ghost Rider to be 'not that bad'. And it's not.

Put MicroMachines in front of four people instead of one and it’s a revelation.

If there is a poignancy to A Valley Without Wind, it's that you really are playing through a post-apocalyptic world, just one that's failed creatively rather than ecologically. The designers were too ambitious, built to high, and you're free to explore what's left.

A massive improvement on the previous Taito-related DS efforts issued to date. As short-lived as it is, and despite some irritating control and level design issues it's a lot of fun.

Just like the mad scientist whose baffling plot drives the action, Rise of Nightmares is a failed experiment.

Fun at times but also scruffy and repetitive, Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood lacks a bit of bite.

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.

It's a genuine shame. The game is well-presented and polished, the control system works nicely, and the progression lays the groundwork for a really enjoyable experience - but the team decided to come over all Zen minimalism when it came to the games themselves.

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.

There's a hellish amount of "...", even by J-RPG standards, and many sentences don't quite make sense - it's either a poorly written game, a crap translation to English or, probably, both.

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.

It's certainly one for the fans and Neo Geo completionists, but curious retro-heads and fighting game fans might get the wrong impression of SNK if they buy this particular compilation.

The presentation is of a high quality, there's enough data to please fans of the TV show and they haven't mucked about with the classic Top Trumps gameplay. It's a shame none of the modes really make the most of the fact you're playing on a DS, and grown-ups are likely to memorise the cards and find it gets repetitive rather quickly. Still. Dr Who Top Trumps!

If you can divorce yourself from the fact you're playing an agony simulator, you would at least hope to extract some enjoyment out of the 'puzzle' nature of the game. But the humdrum truth is that there's not a great deal of challenge within Torture Bunny either - just a whole heap of trial and error and an element of luck.

There isn't the tiniest nugget of novelty here. If the big engagements had been engaging then that wouldn't necessarily have been a problem. Because the battles are bothersome, the unoriginality is as lethal as a cannonball to the cranium.

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.

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.

The marriage of XBLA and boxed game is a nice idea, but the Pub Games themselves are lightweight and boring, and the potential benefits for Fable 2 players are the sorts of things typically bundled on Collector's Edition bonus disks in the first place - and typically overlooked by the majority of players who can think of better ways to spend the extra money.

It's fun for as long as it lasts.

Poorly translated and badly acted, there's little here to distract from the terrible gameplay.

Big Willy Unleashed is toss. The controls make playing the game feel like trying to do the washing-up with a pair of chopsticks, using clogs instead of rubber gloves. It looks revolting. The script is appalling.

The activities are largely pointless, gratuitous exercises in showing off the girls in their bikinis, and any attempt to give the game some sort of justifiable kleptomaniacal purpose is beyond insulting - even to serial wankers.

On the plus side, there is single-card download play for wireless "fun" with up to four players. On the down side, if we really want to tell up to four friends that we despise them and never wish to suffer their company ever again, we can think of more direct ways to do so.

The fact this is the best SEGA can come up with after years of waiting for Dreamcast re-releases does not say much for the publisher's ability to evaluate the worth of its own back catalogue.

So the only niggle is not that this doesn't sufficiently differentiate itself from previous games in the series. No, the only niggle is that the combat camera angle is too low.

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.

The nagging question is why on earth should a second-rate FPS game that's so indebted to its peers - and one of which, in the case of BF2, does a persistent character thing for free - think it can get away with demanding a subscription fee for any of its content? Answer: It really can't.

A bad game? Not really: just an underwhelming one. Your pulse may quicken occasionally, but your world is unlikely to turn upside down.

Come not for the enticing Game of Thrones name, certainly not for the ugly graphics, clunky interface (as appears to be Cyanide's habit of late) and soulless writing, but instead, perhaps, for what genuinely is an ambitious new take on real-time strategising. With verve and wit and gloss, Genesis could have been the start of something fascinatingly, enthrallingly cruel: as it is, it's a song of needless branding and sad compromise.

Remember how it once was in its proud mid '90s heyday, not what it's become: a relentless, lazy cash-cow to lure in unwary souls drunk on memories.

If you really need to be reminded of Splinter Cell's glory days, go back and pick up a cheap copy of Double Agent. Just do yourself a favour and give this pointless reissue a wide berth.

Simply by staggering across the finish line first, Bound By Flame may seem to be an attractive proposition for PS4 RPG fans, but don't be fooled. With its shonky cut-scenes, its outdoor sound effects that play indoors and its linear maps, this is in no way a current-gen experience. It's a budget offering at a premium price - and a poor one at that.

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.