With a bit more substance to the missions and a few control refinements it would have been a must-buy. Let's hope Legendo gets it right in time for the next two parts.

Second-hand content with a spoon of sugar, no more. It's a second-rate package.

Citizens of Earth succeeds in rediscovering something of the ingenuity of 1990s JRPGs in its playful twists on genre clichés. And as a kooky and inventive contemporary re-imagining of the Super Nintendo-era role-player, this, like its protagonist's campaign, is but a near miss.

Worst of all is that exploring Wonderland is, in practice, about as full of wonder as watching paint dry. Paint the colour of blood and dreams, but paint nonetheless.

With sharp writing paired with a charming if amateurish cast, Puzzle Agent's appeal is rough-hewn, but improbably cohesive. Were it not so instantly likeable, you might not care so much about the fairly standard logic puzzles.

It's hard to know how many people are really going to care about the return of Rocket Knight. Climax has done a decent job of giving it a modern sheen, but while it's mildly entertaining and completely inoffensive, it's also forgettable.

The shrink from arcade to DS screen in no way cramps the experience, offering the same amount of exacting control as it ever did.

A must-have purchase for any action gaming fan, and is a testament to what can still be done with the genre with the proper amount of thought.

Running between shots can be chaotic fun, but Mario Golf truly lives in its ever-soothing standard mode. [Eurogamer Recommended]

As the journey shifts and becomes a bit darker, there's a real flash of steel at the core of it all. If you've played the SteamWorld games, you'd probably expect this, but it's still a delight to see a game like this built with such craft and obvious humanity. I started The Gunk worrying about how one of the great 2D design teams would cope with three dimensions. The truth is they cope so effortlessly that I just spent the next four or five hours gloriously lost in what they had built. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Dontnod takes a thrillingly Gothic perspective on early 19th century London, but squanders it in a dreary and indecisive adventure.

For all its sheen, H.A.W.X. remains a curious sideshow in Tom Clancy's murky world rather than a star player.

The real problem, however, is that Lips: Number One Hits doesn't just fail to move this series forward - it fails to resolve the serious issues with the first game.

A pretty broken game but one that is loaded with entertainment value regardless.

It's a fun distraction on your mobile, giving you a few hours of entertainment to rack up a high score, finish all the stages, and gawp at the tremendous graphics. Like I said, worth a bob or two.

Absolutely enormous, endlessly gorgeous, but maddening (especially in its final moment), The Whispered World is a muddled shame.

Homefront floats in the limbo between "not bad" and "pretty good", and is hamstrung by a single-player element that feels like a half-hearted obligation. What's most disappointing is that Homefront wanted so much to join COD and Battlefield at the top of the genre, but has ended up as merely a weekend timewaster for players waiting for the next shooter fix.

It's hard not to feel a little underwhelmed by what Virtua Tennis 2009 has to offer. While the online multiplayer facet has undoubtedly been improved, the disappointment over what's been done to World Tour mode and the general lack of ambition in certain areas leaves me wanting.

It's a huge game, in other words, and it's tough enough to ensure that you'll move through it fairly carefully. Throw in a scrappy kind of handicraft charm, ignore a selection of little annoyances, and Rainbow Moon becomes a bit of a blast.

As a smarter-than-it-looks nostalgia trip, then, Shadow Warrior delivers, and as long as you keep that in mind - and consume it in moderation - it's an easy recommendation.

At its best, Tengami is something you want to freeze-frame and hang on the wall. For a video game, that shouldn't be taken as a compliment.

It's easy to be wooed by Echelon's glorious graphics and its sometimes epic atmosphere, but the game is marred by a few problems which could sadly bring it down with a disappointing thud for many.

A cutesy bridge-building game with a surprisingly moreish appeal.

Beneath the hysterical presentation, the frantic battle segments and the skittish storyline, then, Project X Zone is a thin game. The emphasis on fighting game reactions in the battle segments should appeal to genre fans, but these are too simplistic for genuine expression or mastery. Likewise, the tactical elements of positioning and unit movement on the battlefield lack urgency and true significance. The result is a humorous curio, perhaps, but one without the underlying game to adequately serve its stars.

The Sims 4 is both fresh and yet also predictable, pleasant, comfortable and rarely overstimulating. It's wobbly, and you can still see some of its joins, or hear the creaks as new parts settle into place. It's not likely to win over any new players, but it will satisfy a lot of its old ones.

Mild improvements in traversal and combat are quickly overwhelmed by the creaking systems onto which they have been grafted. Revolutionary Paris is one of the most beautifully realised environments in a series that has had its fair share of them, but the game you play doesn't really do it justice.

Our feeling is that in this era of downloadable Rock Band albums for 13 quid - a price that's often criticised anyway - single-band games will have to offer gameplay innovations, spectacular fan service, or a lot more material than this to justify their existence and, more pertinently, an asking price of 40 quid without the guitar peripheral.

The spoken dialog is at times so badly acted, and the story so complex, that in the end you simply stop caring about the uninteresting characters under your control.