A rank combat system, quirky camera and a lack of inspiration at the game's exploration/puzzle core make playing the game hard work.

The game isn't particularly satisfying or even all that interesting.

The broader fault is simply that by the time you've spent an hour in Potter's company, you'll have sussed out the rest of the game, leaving you with even less to look forward to than usual - because of course you know what's going to happen to everyone anyway. If you don't, you're better off reading the book.

Yuriko's heroic experiments in mass carnage do not entirely save this from being a rather underwhelming offering: she's just three large levels. The rest of the game might be dressed up in FMV spangles, but it's simply not produced to the high standards of the original game.

At times it's just too frustrating to be described as "fun", and being turned away, a stone's throw from the end of a level, by the Game Over screen just because you didn't understand precisely how to complete a fairly arbitrary objective is enough to saturate you with disbelief like an anvil landing on your face in the middle of a field.

As it is, Lucid flows along happily over its 55 levels, but playing for high scores alone may not be enough to tempt you into the zone.

The dictionary definition of the average hackandslasher. It's a brand well and truly stuck in a rut of its own making and deserves no more than average marks.

Unfortunately, Let's Golf 3D isn't one to get overly excited about, and in a market drowning in rival offerings, you won't have far to look to find a better one.

Aside from being just a tad too repetitive and too long, the platform levels are well-presented and plenty of fun.

Pandora could well lend itself to a great film, and would lend itself fabulously well to a good third-person action game. Unfortunately, despite providing two third-person action games here for the price of one, both of them are dull and forgettable.

Yet another middle of the road film license that survives by dint of being as average as they come.

The worst of the game's technical sins is performance, with appallingly low frame rates in our patched PS3 retail version when you brake suddenly or drift through many a corner.

If Shank was an animated short, I'd happily roll a fat one and sit hurgh-hurghing on the sofa at the dumb grisliness of it all. But as a game, it just feels pointless and irritating, and about as engaging as repeatedly attacking the sofa with your own face.

Metal Slug 4 is intense, immediate and fun in all the right ways, but it's disposable entertainment in every sense of the phrase. [Review of Metal Slug 4 only]

Anyone with RTS sympathies will be able to wring some pleasure from it, but no-one's likely to enjoy it enough to recommend it to a mate, devote a fan-site to it, or have its logo tattooed in a private place.

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.

Humans Must Answer comes from a place of honest passion and enthusiasm for the shmup, but feels torn between recreating the feeling of hammering coins into a cabinet in 1987 and doing things differently just for the sake of being different. The two never find an equilibrium, leaving the game's best ideas underdeveloped and its mistakes awkwardly exposed.

The levels are based around the old fashioned ‘portal’ system, so the need to load in every level is blatantly apparent – and in no way comparable to the impressive ‘no load’ system that Naughty Dog so skilfully pioneered.

But the trouble is, as soon as you remove the novelty death sequences it's actually the dictionary definition of the average third-person shooter.

Love is perplexing, challenging, and confusing. Thus, the cold, calculating puzzles should complement the emotional relationship parable. Hazelden wants it to work. We want it to work. But the sad truth is that in this instance the two simply don't have enough in common. Sometimes love just isn't enough.

Playable within its faulty parameters, yet at the same time, something we've seen a million times before, and in many ways better. Roll on the next one, please.

It doesn't have the sheer polish or design coherence of something like this month's other Rise-TS, Rise of Legends, but there's lots to like. Until you remember the campaign mode again at which point you just find yourself wishing the developers to go bust, until you remember they have and you start feeling bad again.

A thoroughly generic game with overly simplified beat-'em-up mechanics, extremely repetitive gameplay, and a crushing lack of variety.

There's a solid, clever, comprehensive fitness game buried away in here that's fighting to get out. And I hope EA can at least issue a patch that resolves some of these problems.

The new elements fail to meet expectations, but the bash-and-grind basics haven't changed at all.

On a console that's hardly lacking in excellent on-rails shooters - Darkside Chronicles and the soon-to-be-released Sin and Punishment 2 among them - and interesting, lovely-looking downloadable games, 530 Eco Shooter has no place.

As it is now, LEGO Universe starts as a pleasant distraction but promptly ferries you straight into a fierce, ludicrous grind that leads nowhere. That's one brick wall I could do without.

For the price of Monopoly for Wii (RRP GBP 29.99), you could buy real Monopoly. Twice. Or you could just buy no Monopoly at all and spend the money on something more likely to inspire amity and harmony, like a book by Hitler.