The portability, extra modes and various refinements of the DS version make for a much more satisfying game than the Flash effort we're continually referencing, but the DS is already home to a good few equally satisfying puzzlers (including "Mr. Driller" and "Polarium") and we'd seriously suggest looking to them before haggling for a copy of Zoo Keeper.

Perhaps more importantly is the inexplicable disappearance of dead bodies. Literally five seconds after they've flopped heavily to the ground, apparently not man enough to withstand a nail-filled 2-by-4 in the cranium, they - *ping* - vanish.

While this remains a great multiplayer, social game for some people, and it's certainly a good way to work up a sweat, at heart it's still an eight year old game with remarkably little alteration from the original.

With ever-present control frustration taking the shine off an otherwise commendable effort, you'll be hard-pressed to see the game through all five levels, never mind slog through the upcoming chapters. Unless they fix the controls, that is...

The game's peppered through with the sort of idiosyncratic humour that marks so many of Nippon Ichi's games, but here the jokes often come at the expense of clarity, with Badman more eager to poke fun at some crusty JRPG convention than to properly explain his game's own subversions.

For most of us, though, Opoona is a curiosity - it's charming, strange and often fun, but too shallow and stretched out to make for a genuinely engrossing RPG experience. [JPN Import]

While the game is otherwise an Advance Wars clone, somehow it's much less than its inspiration. Perhaps it's the fact the units' rock-paper-scissors relationships aren't so immediately obvious, or the weaker level design or the schizophrenic yet middle-of-the-roach aesthetics, but Commanders: Attack of the Genos lacks character, identity and personality.

PC gamers accustomed to feasts of content and polish will likely feel short-changed from their subscription fee once the initial 30 day rush is over.

The combat's fluid, relatively deep and involving once it gets going, but it's also a wholly repetitive game that's been surpassed in so many meaningful ways that you can't simply be content with 'more of the same' anymore.

Play Liberation Maiden because you're after an acceptable arcade shooter, in other words; approach it expecting another wonky blast of Suda51 charm and, President Mech aside, you're going to be a little disappointed.

While it may be the best implementation of a console MMO to date, PS3 owners should still ask for more.

Me & My Katamari doesn't move the series on at all - in fact, it sort of rolls it backwards a bit, what with the smaller levels, slightly shonky control system and limited multiplayer modes. Not to mention the fact that you're constantly having to play through environments you've already explored, which is just tiresome.

As a side story to the main event, Honest Hearts is forgettable and predictable. Where it justifies its asking price is in the takeaway benefits it supplies to the long-term wasteland wanderer. More levels, more perks, new weapons and new enemies - this is what really benefits the game, and Honest Hearts delivers more than enough to make it a worthwhile diversion for players of all levels.

If you posses superhuman racing skills, FAST - Racing League is the game for you. The rest of us can mull over what might have been.

Conceptually beautiful, it takes the basic mechanics of a twin stick, top-down shooter and then essentially procedurally generates enemies - and therefore entire levels - based on the ebb and flow of any given music track.

Stronger emotional stakes and faster-paced drama promise an explosive climax that ultimately pulls its biggest punch.

Furiously frustrating. The game pitch works wonderfully in the realm of theory but in practice its problems undermine most of the flashes of brilliance.

The camera is crap, the scale is awkward, the story and characters are basic and cringe-worthy, the combat is tedious, the platforming and puzzling is too basic, and I was well bored of it by the time I conquered the final level with the first of the four Teams, which wasn't even that long after I first grabbed it out of the shrink-wrap.

Sonic is a bit like the band you used to love when you were a nipper but just refuse to change their sound: they keep a loyal crowd and play all the hits on demand for nostalgia's sake, but the new tunes sound like the old ones. Only the real obsessives need worry about this one.

If you were a massive fan of the Lego Star Wars games then by all means check out Bionicle Heroes - to a very large degree it looks like the same game, and as such you'll get the same kind of grinding enjoyment out of mining all the levels for booty.

It lacks a single-player offering worthy of the name (and simply is not worth buying if you don't have Live), is mystifyingly missing most of the PC maps and has been ported to such a disappointingly low grade standard technically that we can't help but feel like it's a huge missed opportunity and a disservice to hardcore followers of the machine - the very people this game is intended to excite.

There's really something fundamentally wrong in a game where I start keeping a book beside the table to read while my armies trudge into battle.

GRIN clearly has the capacity to go beyond what it does in Wanted, and it's a shame that the game only aspires to be a competent, mildly inventive extension of the film.

4am is too obfuscated for serious music producers who will grow frustrated at the limited number of samples and the lack of visual feedback over which tracks and effects are active at any one time. And the experience is also too inscrutable for beginners, who will find themselves lost in the matrix of noise, unsure of how it may be truly directed or tamed. A fascinating toy, then, but a toy nonetheless.

For a few quid you'll get a fair bit of enjoyment, but the fact remains that there's a putrid whiff of exploitation about this one. Let your wallet be your guide.

30 years after the arcade original debatably debuted the bullet hell concept, Toaplan's best shooter is back in an imperfect port of a port.

With the gameplay mechanics reduced to a largely predictable run of conversations and (in)appropriate use of objects, The City That Dare Not Sleep feels stuck in a rut much of the time.

Tiny incremental tweaks to the function are all very well if your base material is simply amazing or the form changes significantly but, all told, this is an old, whiffy average GBA kids RPG, dull and tired through inbreeding.