Much like Sid Meier's recent reinvention of "Pirates!,' huge numbers of ideas have been included at the sacrifice of any of them being particularly impressive. Jack of far too many trades, apprentice at only a few.

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.

With this episode the Myst series goes out in respectable fashion. There's still nothing on offer for anyone that craves action, exhilaration or an easy ride but frankly that's no great surprise.

What Blood Bowl offers is a way for enthusiasts to enjoy their chosen tabletop sport without much of the hassle, remotely and conveniently - and for those with friends who'll also indulge, it's probably a no-brainer purchase.

Solid fundamentals, a good selection of modes and a huge cast will no doubt make this top of the must-have list for followers of the series but unless you're ga-ga for Goku, there are definitely better, flashier and more rewarding fighting games out there.

It's plodding and lacking in imagination, and it's mostly the great cut-scenes that will get you through. It's certainly not 'rip out your optics' bad - but Transformers: War For Cybertron hasn't got the touch either.

At its best, it's all very bite-sized and relaxing, like a bucket of M&S flapjack bites, a glass of red and some ill-gotten American-strength meds.

Overall, while it certainly captures a lot of its source material on spec, Wallace & Gromit's other strengths - Peter Sallis, Gromit shrugging or staring despondently into the camera, needless contraptions and simple directorial flourishes - are sorely missed in Fright of the Bumblebees.

Atlas Fallen echoes other mid-00s slashers with fun melee combat and cool ideas, trapped in a run-of-the-mill open world.

Special Forces is not without its moments of drama and excitement, but ultimately there is an overriding sense that you are simply going through the motions – Move or no Move.

With brainless autoaim combat, forgettable missions and little in the way of challenge, the flash stunts and crazy moves can't hide Just Cause's flaws, and ultimately, rather than being some sort of "GTA"-beater, it's more of a poor man's "Mercenaries," ludicrously padded out with hundreds of entirely worthless side missions that sprawl over uninteresting terrain.

Ultimately, despite the pleasing use of the stylus, there aren't enough original ideas to make it stand out from the crowd.

Detective Pikachu Returns is a straightforward mystery adventure whose strengths lie in its Pokémon setting and breakout star.

Its ideas for first-person puzzling mechanics are original, and when it starts combining them all into larger and more baffling setups it has great moments with a chilled-out pacing all their own. But that creativity is smothered under slavish imitation of the aesthetics and structure of the Portal series, and such a large influence is malign.

Despite throwing in a canine companion, button-tapping mini-games and retweaking difficulty levels and so on between NTSC and PAL, Dead to Rights is fundamentally underwhelming to look at, repetitive to play and riddled with more flaws than bullet holes, and this'll stick like rigour mortis after your fiftieth fistfight.

It's a fine showcase for some good ideas, doing for Arkanoid what Flipnic did for pinball. But its novelty value doesn't make it a game you'll come back to for long, though.

A solid core could provide some great competitive match-ups, but the dreary, generic campaign will fail to impress solo gamers.

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.

As a concept it sounds pretty liberating, but in reality, the fact that there are no preset challenges actually limits Jam Sessions in terms of actual playability.

If you weren't around for the old days Micro Machines, and you're desperate for something to race around on the DS, this is a solid, straightforward game that should keep you going, providing you can put up with its inherent foibles.

Van Helsing isn't a polished game, or even a particularly thoughtful one for most of its campaign, but it has scrappy charm and schlocky character, and it benefits from leaning on one of those design templates that is ultimately really, really difficult to screw up too badly.

A well-designed, well-conceived game.

It's just a shame that such a fundamental feature as combat takes the shine off what could have been the sequel to make Risen popular beyond its small audience of devotees.

Where Shellshock succeeds is when it resolutely refuses to pull punches in its general content, and when it hits the spot it's briefly thrilling. But for those occasional flourishes it's simply weighed down by being an average shooter, albeit one that's boosted by contentious context and some well-realised attempts at atmosphere building.

Although Field Commander has plenty of options, it's doubtful hardcore strategy heads will find enough to get lost in.

To some extent it suffers from selective authenticity. Ten two-minute rounds against a tough opponent can be tight, tense and technical, but the skills you're applying are arbitrary.

Nintendo serves up another bumper blink-and-you-lose blitz in WarioWare: Move It!, but the package is let down by the need to fumble with often-fussy motion controls.

The unremitting bleakness has a certain stylistic charm, but such is the relentlessness of it all, Vampire Smile is too intense to digest for more than a few levels at a time. It's an-all-you-can eat banquet at gunpoint.