There's nothing to dislike about it. It's well-rounded and harmless in every respect, but there's no real challenge to anyone remotely used to playing games or over the age of 10.

It's one of the few truly original games on Live Arcade, and deserves your attention for that, but it can't quite shake off the sour tang of unfulfilled potential.

Lurking behind a dated exterior is a limited but sophisticated RPG with a unique setting and some memorable new ideas.

The result is a game that doesn't really offer motorbike enthusiasts the same attention to detail that petrolheaded car nuts get out of GT, and takes hours and hours for the rest of us to warm to.

But those of you with Zelda on the mind best ferret off elsewhere - this is a very different sort of Link To The Past.

Entertaining though Lost Kingdoms can be when it's raising two fingers to RPG convention, it's still blighted by conventional RPG problems.

What perhaps saves Kiryu's latest adventure is an absolutely fantastic combat system, bolstered with wild gadgets, and minigame offerings that just about work with an approach to breadth instead of depth. This is another entertaining, idiosyncratic, action-packed romp for the Yakuza series, but it feels as though Like a Dragon Gaiden needs to do more to justify its undermining of Kiryu's perfect sendoff in Yakuza 6.

It's polished and accomplished, and certain aspects of it, such as the meta-game structure and the player customisation, are fantastic. Even so, there's no escaping the fact that the game is hugely disappointing. The flashes of brilliance only serve to throw the mediocrity of the game into even sharper relief.

Hutch is to be congratulated for coming up with a control system for touch screen driving games that really works in a simple yet gratifying way. It's just a shame that it debuts in a game so determined to penalise you for enjoying its knockabout potential.

As far as block or blob-based puzzlers go, Puyo Pop Fever is perfectly adequate, but the PSP happens to have a few better alternatives: "Lumines" offers a more classy experience, while "Koloomn" is a more original title, and one that will take every brain cell to master.

With a bit more humour behind it and some slightly more adventurous mission design, Payback could have been a must-have. As it is, it's a perfectly enjoyable way to spend a few hours and it certainly does a decent enough job of emulating "Grand Theft Auto's" media-baiting exterior.

Not half as bad as the limp first few hours suggest. It's perhaps not the greatest company epitaph in the world but, as Devlin might say, while throwing himself out of a speeding car, knocking back a slug o' the good stuff and mashing a Nazi's head in with one punch: "It coulda been a lot worse."

The assured art direction results in one of the most striking and distinguished-looking games of the year, but this keenness of creativity isn't matched by a breadth or ambition of ideas elsewhere.

The lack of grouping levels does it a real disservice, and once again that it's a remix of an old PC game with a new title isn't enamouring. But the same hypnotic power is present here, and even now, having played the stupid thing to death, I've a horrible suspicion that if I loaded it again I'd end up playing all over again.

With nothing to aim for other than a slightly higher score, Food Processing feels like one of those apps which burns brightly and briefly before you move on to something more involved. That's a guaranteed few million sales, then.

The dull gameplay, horrible interface flaws and cringe-worthy political message of the game mark it out as a wasted opportunity, and a very black mark on the copybook of the C&C franchise.

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.

Fantasy Life fails to capture either the lazy, pleasing routine of village life seen in Animal Crossing or the sense of urgency from the strongest Japanese RPGs. In its eagerness to offer variety, Fantasy Life somewhere lost its focus.

But for a few missing weapons, then (sorry - a few dozen missing weapons), this is as close to the series' peak as we've been since the days when the novelty hadn't worn off on the PC, and given the right company you'll find it quite approachable, with simple controls and the usual potential for comedy failure.

The biggest question mark is whether a big enough online community will spring up around it to allow it to fulfill its potential. Sadly, with a fair amount of optimisation issues rearing their heads early on, Quake Wars looks destined to line-up with the also-rans in the online shooter stakes.

When it's good it's fantastic, but when it's not it's a spirit sapping experience. That's Mafia in a nutshell - a flawed classic that'll certainly provide good rental value if nothing else.

However, at its marked-down price it does offer a low-risk introduction to the series for anyone who's not yet experienced the undeniably satisfying feeling of cleaving a path through an entire army of foot soldiers.

It does its job reasonably well, but blandness abounds, and the whole thing just looks like it's been rushed out to fulfil a contractual obligation, rather than a labour of love.

A fun arcade karting experience is often too chaotic for its own good, but a tight handling model with a high skill ceiling offers surprising depth.

The story is compelling and well told, and there's certainly enough flow to put it in the category of "just ten more minutes" games - but you'll need a lot of patience to get the most out of Ego Draconis.

Contrast is a game of light and dark: a puzzle platformer with two well-realised female leads that occasionally buckles under the weight of its own mechanics. It's beautiful in parts, but also a little broken; I admire it for the first and can almost forgive it the second.

Astropop is a fun, but ultimately short-lived experience that's missing the X factor of the best puzzlers to drag you back for long.

In the end, it's a golf game fundamentally redesigned to its detriment, shorn of many of the little things that made up the rest of its appeal, and now merely flawed but enjoyable.