It’s doesn’t have the adrenaline fuelled action of the original, nor any neat new ideas to make it feel like a progression.

It might be cheap, and it might have more content than Liberty City Stories, and it has gaming audio to die for, but, on balance, Rockstar has milked the flaccid teat of its cash cow to the limit.

While the gameplay is incredibly repetitive, the Strategy Phase introduces some depth and direction to the battles, breaking things into manageable chunks suited to gaming on the move.

A very precise, slick, and technically impressive game. It just lacks a crucial spark.

What we've ended up with is a game loaded with promise that sells itself short in the execution. There's no doubt it'll entertain the kids, but it won't challenge them.

The art style is very appealing, with lots of crisp cartoon sprites, but the core gameplay feels truncated and shallow.

It's just a shame that compared to the innovative excellence of Koei's other battlefield titles like Bladestorm or Gundam Musou, or even just Samurai Warriors 2, Warriors Orochi falls a little short.

24: The Game isn't a bad game, but it isn't a new, interesting or exciting one either. It's one of those depressing tie-in games where the proposal came before the creativity - as, I suspect from the banality of all the interactive sequences, did the script.

A solid fighter for dabblers.

It lacks the imagination that the design documents must have been crying out for, and ultimately feels too much like psychedelic paintball in a foam-padded adventure playground.

If you can stomach the story, and the isometric viewpoint giving you occasional trouble when trying to select your desired unit with the stylus, it stands as a decent bite-size alternative. Anyone else, though, would be better off waiting for the DS's next turn to see if it spits out something more meaty.

The Con is about as far from revolutionary as you can get and in no way suited to extended play, but to give Sony its due, it's easily one of the stronger and more accurately pitched portable fighters out there.

While Shattered Space is quite possibly one of Starfield's most enjoyable storylines to date, it once again struggles to offer any real consequences. And its new setting feels woefully underutilised.

Even though this is undeniably a good representation, the feel of it is really not all that different from the SNES and Mega Drive titles of yesteryear.

While the hacks and cheats may be gone, they have simply been replaced by new chaos and a design disorder that does everything in its power to dissuade anyone but the keenest of sentimental subscribers.

I'm no fan of the gross sense of entitlement displayed by some gamers, but when the core game is still blighted by outrageous glitches and glaring bugs it's hard to see how State of Decay justifies charging almost 50% of its original asking price over again for a game mode that arguably should have been implemented at launch.

It may not shock you, but it can at least build a thick, oppressive atmosphere as the relatively clever plot keeps twisting and the grot and grime pile up and threaten to choke you. It can't handle fear - but it does a neat line in mild intrigue. Silent Hill: Downpour won't freeze you to your seat, but it will probably keep you playing to the end.

An expressive, characterful entry point for metroidvanias.

A delightfully macabre homage, this asymmetrical horror could finally threaten Dead by Daylight's crown, if you didn't spend more time fighting the servers than Leatherface himself.

If only its sedate beginning and dreary atmosphere didn't make it a throwaway extra, we'd probably recommend it. But we won't.

In many respects, then, Thieves in Time is a fitting successor to the PS2 titles: Sly Cooper games were always solid genre pieces first and foremost, where likable characters and decent mechanics masked a journeyman feel to some of the content, and the same is true here. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has moved on considerably in the intervening years, and so what starts off as a welcome regression quickly loses its verve.

Kinect Rush certainly lives up to its title, but only for the first hour or so. After that, the rush wears off and the grind sets in. That wide-open field turns out to be not so wide and not so open after all.

It's still a disappointment to see that, after so long, Age of Mythology doesn't quite hold up to modern RTS standards, but there's enough here - and likely enough coming - to warrant a look regardless.

This is a game that makes our GBA a Super Nintendo: and one with a decent d-pad, battery life and scratch-free screen that doesn't need us to fiddle with firmware and dally with grey-hued legality to enjoy.

Has all the right atmosphere and, for once, really comes across as how a game of a film should look and feel, and it's just the game to successfully bridge the gap between role-playing and strategy.

The core process of gathering up pellets and delivering them to the goal simply isn't as fun as it should be. For a game built upon this crucial cornerstone, no matter how many ideas are added on top of it, the whole construction remains unstable and, soon enough, un-enjoyable.

It's all reasonably diverting, but the mix of genres never really gels and when things get frustrating the game lacks that basic addictive lure to keep you playing.

As much as n-Space tries to do things a little differently, and as fun as it is to walk around in bodies that don't belong to you, too much of the game plays it by the same old rules.