Hell, it's fun. But for a really short time.

The expansion is aimed squarely at the high-level ground-based combat players, and is a solid addition of content for them. That only this one group of players is catered to fully though only serves to alienate those left behind and devalues the offering overall.

By comparison, Donkey Konga 2's a bit too... (ah hell, why not?) humdrum.

There are moments as you roar around the tracks when NASCAR 09 is vastly more entertaining than you'd expect. Sadly these brief thrills are almost always muted by the typically sensible EA Sports corporate sheen, which ultimately reduces the game to another technically minded racer of limited scope rather than the over-the-top metal-shredding redneck rumble of the real thing.

A mild downhill racer with too many glitches, and beyond the grinding, nothing to do with its licence. The Wiimote controls don't ruin it, despite the madness of the button use, but they don't add anything a regular analogue stick couldn't have made easier.

It's a more clued-up committee that's in charge for Razor's Edge, for sure, but for a series that once felt like a singular, twisted and brilliant vision it's still a depressing turn. This is a better game than Ninja Gaiden 3, and one that does commendable things in atoning for Team Ninja's past sins - but sadly it's far from a brilliant one.

If BloodRayne: Betrayal gives Uwe Boll an excuse to make another movie, its appearance might not be such a good thing, But if you can get over such matters, this is a satisfying and brutal return to the old school.

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.

There are flaws, then, as there are with all these PS2 releases, but it's a promising enough start, and if this is a path SNK continues to walk we'll be there to meet it at the other end with cracked knuckles next time around.

To call this a bad game would be grossly unfair, but it's a truly unexceptional one. For a series like Shinobi, that is dishonour enough.

A short run-time and some middling levels used to pad out each of Nightopia's dream environments probably did the most to wear down my goodwill toward it, but there was nothing fatally dispiriting about the experience and ultimately it has more to fuel the player's affection than not, like skyscrapers bursting into balloons.

As a less in-depth alternative, to Madden, you can't really fault Blitz. It stands somewhere between the feature bloat of that immensely popular series and EA's own faux-urban NFL Street games. However, whichever way you put it, Madden still comes out on top.

Don't get me wrong; I loved my time in Las Cinco Muertes, and there's immense satisfaction to be found in just sitting back and watching your creations roam. But with a brutal learning curve, weak tutorials, and a lack of meaningful gameplay once your parks are mature, even the most ardent paleontologist may struggle to keep coming back for more.

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.

As things stand, not only does Ghost Squad feel completely archaic on a number of levels, it offers very poor value for money.

A better than average platformer with cleverly interspersed mini games to present the illusion of expansiveness and freedom.

Cryostasis is a brave, fascinating, often very beautiful game, but I find it impossible to recommend it - and not least because it runs like an exploded dog on most PCs. It's not quite creative enough - its environments fall into a monotony of samey rooms and bulkheads - and its combat is too clunky to be delicious.

For those few short hours the title doesn't really involve much more than collecting, leaping and basic problem solving. The plot doesn't interfere much, and as such the time travel element that could have been used to good effect is cast aside as just another excuse for all Banjo's hard work.

Unfortunately, it also features some of the things that remind us why adventure games fell out of the mainstream, with tedious fetch quests, aggravating scenarios and a spirit-crushing trash-sorting mini-game conspiring to gradually strip the joy out of it all.

There's simply not a single thing that Risen 2 does well, not its stilted combat, not its transparent towns, and definitely not its plot, which feels like something you'd come up with after passing out with the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD menu music in the background. Then again, there's nothing it does badly either, so it's no thief.

It's hard not to see the ways in which this could have been more ambitious, more innovative in the way it dusts off the past, but equally it's hard to blame Codemasters for simply giving Micro Machines fans exactly what they wanted, just how they remembered it.

A wasteland you'll love to wander, but not a game you'll necessarily relish, The Signal from Tölva is a dark, frustrating work.

At its best, Red River surpasses Ubisoft's original Ghost Recons for squad-based tactical play. But it's the presentation of the story – not the broad-canvas story, but the story of four marines and their staff sergeant – that marks it out as something new.

More often than not though, Eden succeeds, and once you get to grips with creating Molotov cocktails, shooting bottles in mid-air, and using aerosol cans as makeshift flamethrowers, it hardly seems to matter that shooting itself is so ineffective.

Someone somewhere is punching the air and whooping at their enjoyment of machine-gunning pseudo-Nazis while dressed like Elton John, but me, well, I'm hoping I'll soon move on to other, rather more evolved experiences.

A visually arresting, warm-hearted tale of a gofer searching for his purpose, Harold Halibut flounders amongst endless fetch-quests and waffle.

This is a game about Going Fast and Jumping, and, at last, its designers have realised that that's exactly what we want to do with Sonic. The Going Fast is brilliant, the Jumping is fantastic, and we have big smiles on our faces. Sonic is back.

R-Type Tactics lies among that enjoyable second tier of turn-based games currently occupied by the likes of Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command.