Babel Rising has a killer hook, but ultimately fails to use it for much more than the basics. Its entertainment value is simple and occasionally cathartic, but is exhausted far too early.

Absolute masochists might be able to sift through the pointless junk crudely glued onto the Rainbow Islands concept, and manage to find enough of the original's appeal to justify the time and expense but in a world where Taito Legends is readily available, offering the rather wonderful untouched arcade classic along with many others worthy of your attention for a fraction of the price, why would you even want to bother with this garish mockery?

Compared to Mario Galaxy or Ratchet & Clank - heck, even compared to Crash Bandicoot, another platforming mascot mired in mediocrity - Sonic Unleashed is an obviously poor effort from a series that is still hopelessly lost in the modern gaming landscape.

A gaudy glimpse of the bad old days of mid-1990s 3D. And no-one wants that.

When Aeon Flux isn't busy being average, it's tied up in its own gibberish, or nudging you towards your next confrontation with awkward controls. It has almost none of the excitement we play video games for and as such, is time lost and tears in the eyes of anyone foolish enough to waste their money.

Smashing into crowds of rancid flesh-eating zombies ought to be a terrifying life-or-death battle, not like shooting fish in a barrel.

Poorly translated and badly acted, there's little here to distract from the terrible gameplay.

Spaceforce can't be recommended despite some interesting ideas.

Chromehounds is really, really, really boring to play...Not one that I can imagine Xbox 360 players sticking with for more than a handful of hours tops, no matter how starved they are for new releases at the moment.

Make a game with controls that don't work, and lovable presentation and playful creativity can't save it. It always hurts to punish a game that tries something different, especially when such obvious care has gone into its presentation, but Fret Nice fails to execute its ideas with competence.

Planet Coaster 2's flexible creation tools are as compulsive as ever, but the fun butts up against an exhausting UI, uninspired management gameplay, and conspicuous content gaps that feel like cynical spaces for DLC.

There's not much to like about SWAT: Target Liberty. The squad-based mechanic is imbalanced. The levelling-up and weapon selection systems don't have significant effects on how things play out. The plot is silly, the cut-scenes are rubbish and everything's so small it makes your eyes hurt.

A gentle cadence and quirky characters can't counter Mythwrecked's repetitiveness, making this more Greek tragedy than odyssey.

Bulletproof reads revelations from the Bible of production but knows almost no game. It's superficially slick, with its bling'd up 50 Cent avatar and glitzy rap, but really it's a third-person shooter that stumbles well under the benchmarks set for the PS2.

It might look a little like Yoshi's Island, then, but it's a worse game in every regard. 19 years on from the original, its design has been denuded of almost everything that made it great: a series once fecund with ideas is now coasting on past glories.

But by far the most irritating aspect of the handling is the inability to simply make your board go where you want it to.

It's just a waste of time. Too clumsy to satisfy any action gaming urge, and too wrapped up in its own turgid mythology to realise it's getting things so badly wrong, releasing it right before the onslaught of massive winter releases is a decision more audacious than any design choices in the game itself.

Four heads might not necessarily be better than three, but it's yet another of a great many reasons why Blue Dragon: Awakened Shadow compares poorly to the peers it so desperately tries to ape.

To be presented with this utterly misguided and ill-conceived attempt to reinvent one of the best strategy-RPG series of the last two decades seems criminal and unfair. It’s a mammoth level grind, bringing together some of the action-RPG genre’s very worst conventions while leaving out some of the best.

Stood next to any of the better games of the year, Gungrave feels like a depressingly hollow experience designed to showcase some nifty graphics.

Beautiful music, cute visuals, and a peculiarly charming attitude make you want to like it. Recognising that it's aimed at younger players makes you want to forgive it. But it cannot be denied that this is a big ol' mess of nice ideas executed badly, with the most important ingredient completely missing.

A competent entry with some poorly executed ideas and a striking lack of personality.

Great ideas and a storied history are mired in mediocre combat and a disappointingly unpolished delivery.

The combat's weak, the storyline's excruciating, it's technically deficient - Haze really is this year's most significant gaming disappointment.

Xevious has been bettered hundreds of times over down the years, and only the most diehard retro fiend will want to part with their cash for this now.

It would be easy to score this game as plain mediocre. After all, it essentially works, displays a misguided and seemingly half-hearted attempt at innovation, looks pleasant enough, passes the time and will likely meet the low expectations of its surprisingly large fanbase. But should such calculating mediocrity be continually excused?

It doesn't really work, as the game never finds the right way to balance the two modes of play, but this brief flicker of ambition offers just enough ballast to prevent this otherwise tiresomely unremarkable game from sinking completely.

An exceptionally generic platformer shaped around quick trial and error design and limp enemies, and built around a tired looking cel-shaded engine that does little justice to the visuals of the arcade original.