It stops being fun alarmingly quickly.

While the game certainly has aspirations to action-RPG greatness, it falls far, far short of the mark by instead boiling down to a trudging mess of relentless combat, character statistics and more quests and side-quests than you could shake some kind of magic stick at.

An artefact. It's completely anachronistic in today's world.

The Collective appears to have over-egged the pudding a little, putting far too much needless emphasis on repetitive and increasingly tedious action elements to the detriment of the already unpolished adventuring.

The Devil's Cartel is functional and fuss-free, a game that delivers the expected genre tropes with as little imagination and as much bluster as possible. It's not a bad game, but nor does it have anything beyond basic mechanical competence to mark it out as "good" - and even that competence wobbles more than it should.

Although Harvest Moon DS possesses the same base addictiveness as its forebears, it has no charm, no originality and no ambition.

If you're in the market for a proper jet-fighter game, I'd recommend hunting down a proper PC simulation. I remember EF-2000 from about 1998 being about 1998 times better than this. And if you want an arcadey dogfighter, try "Crimson Skies" for Xbox 1 instead.

With about triple the number of mini-games, or a budget price launch, we'd probably recommend it as a quirky curiosity/novelty purchase, but if we have to hear another squeaky kid utter the word 'like', we'll probably self-combust.

There is nothing to set this apart from every other mediocre first-person shooter you've ever played, and nothing to make it worth recommending.

The trouble is, it's a little too easy, even for a game aimed at children.

With a slow burn opening that lays the groundwork for a potentially brilliant sci-fi thriller, Fort Solis initially shows plenty of promise - but its story loses momentum in its later chapters, and fails to stick the landing.

But there are flashes of inspiration here, clues to the competence and ingenuity of the developer. Sadly these are drowned out by unnecessary bulk and repetition, resulting in an experience that's flabby and uninspiring regardless of your appreciation of its aims.

When you've got a quiz where players don't even need to understand the question to win, you've got a quiz that doesn't really work all that well.

You're going to get stuck, regularly, without remorse. And the main reason you'll get stuck is the terribly unresponsive controls' unholy alliance with the drunken camera that render the proliferation of tediously precise jump puzzles much more of a challenge than they should be.

If you're very young and easily entertained, Boogie might keep you occupied for a bit. But if you're looking for a game you can enjoy playing with kids or with friends after the pub, this isn't it. Not even after a bucket of Cheeky Vimto.

In fact, if, like me, you find yourself the victim of a game-breaking glitch, which requires you to hold down the SELECT button the whole time you're in the air, you'll definitely be disappointed.

It is blighted on so many levels by the blundering stupidity of its malformed stillborn design that recommending it is beyond us. The blue pill never looked so tasty.

Fascinating and frustrating by turn, there's just enough to make you cling to the hope that one day the development team will actually find him. For now, I'd love the big, glossy, elephant folio art book of the Epic Mickey series, but I can probably do without the games themselves.

Lacking both a challenge and soul, and failing to even engage on a narrative level, what you're left with is an overly forgiving shooter with weak strategy elements, which only serve to make it even easier for you. Having played right to the end, I wish there was something I could point to in its defence, but all I'm left with is the empty realisation that they've managed to somehow make this even less entertaining than the flawed original.

The multiplayer mode is more a case of surviving the longest than exhibiting any competitive skill (in which case, why not just play Survival mode?), and while those who get stuck in will find plenty of stages and difficulty levels to work through, it's all still quite basic even after a few tortured hours, and the occasional lazy design decision (like refusing to accept chains bigger than those asked for in "get 4 chains of 4" style scenarios) conspire with the general lack of urgency to turn you off completely.

Mario Party 8 is a "would have, should have, could have" kind of game. With such an depressingly long list of wasted possibilities, and so many other mini-game collections available for Nintendo Wii (The excellent Rayman Raving Rabbids, for one) It would be wrong of me to say you should pick this up.

Where "Gregory" and "Joe" were as often inventive and ingenious as they were incomparable to anything else on the shelves, Under The Skin's clever thinking dried up before it even made it off the blackboard.

There are clearly some talented people at Playlogic - notably whoever did the endearing cut-scenes, which play out like Hanna-Barbera doing The Matrix. How something so colourful and quirky became so bland is a mystery of the creative process.

Placed on a handheld, the gravitas of the shock scares is gone, and with unrealistic graphics and a cheese factor turned up to eleven, any feeling of genuine creepiness is lost. While it does keep all the flaws described here, the GameCube remake does at least offer beautiful graphics and some decent shocks.

And if the shield was gone and the enemies were fewer, and more varied, it could have been a lot like an actual videogame, with a difficulty curve, rather than a bewildering ascent up a six-foot cliff onto an endless plateau of tedium.

It's not thunderously bad, but it is offensively plain, and there are some really daft design decisions lurking among the ridges of this DVD.

Mafia II gets the last word by destroying the myth that the mafia is interesting at all. It contends that the mob world is a hell of boredom populated by aggressively stupid automatons. These drones wake up each morning, carry out a series of repetitious tasks, and return home.

Mafia II gets the last word by destroying the myth that the mafia is interesting at all. It contends that the mob world is a hell of boredom populated by aggressively stupid automatons. These drones wake up each morning, carry out a series of repetitious tasks, and return home.