NetEase's spin on the hero battler is complex and moreish, but rarely much actual fun. Its biggest impact is a renewed appreciation for the rivals that do it better.

I can handle the graphical bugs - those overlapping buildings, the misshaped roads, the fire fighters who have chosen to stand on the station roof and spend their time endlessly vibrating. What I can't handle is the knowledge that things aren't working properly, that whatever success I've made is a sham, the result of misshapen game mechanics producing outcomes that are frequently contradictory or even nonsense.

If you haven't played the PC, PS2 or Xbox 360 versions, do. They're brilliant. This isn't.

As the Story Mode can be cleared in a couple of hours you're left to find fun in one of the game's simple multiplayer modes (download play or Wi-Fi) but these do little to enliven the repetitive and staccato move, stop, point, shoot, flow of play leaving a meagre and shallow title that's difficult to recommend.

A severely flawed game. Yet somewhere - hidden underneath a terrible combat system, weird AI and an untrustworthy camera - there lies the frail skeleton of a good stealth game.

A soulless attempt at straddling the fence between the over-the-top action found in the Blitz series and trying to accurately simulate the sport of football like the competition.

With camera issues, a cowardly gaming mechanic and the frankly awful stealth sub levels, what you're left with is perhaps the best example of graphics over gameplay we've ever seen. Unless you get off on repetitive bash 'em ups, leave well alone.

A soulless cash-in that has little to do with its license, and nor is it much fun in its own right. If you're lucky enough to not encounter any game-breaking bugs and if you have a friend or two to play with, then it can be pretty entertaining for a few hours. But that's a lot of "ifs" for so little payoff, since overlong levels and axe-sponge enemies inevitably whittle this dungeon crawl down into a slog.

There's nothing devastatingly awful about this, it's just thoroughly outclassed by most of everything else on the market.

That's what's most disappointing; there's absolutely the spark of a really cool whatever-this-genre-is game in Among the Sleep, and for a while it looks like it's going to get there. Too bad it ends barely a quarter of the way in, passing the baton to something both much less interesting and perpetually trapped in its shadow.

Put it this way: if your kid gets stuck on a game like Open Season, you know something's amiss. Consider it a good test of whether videogames really are for them.

So easy on the eye visually that if you saw a demo of it running you might actually think it was going to impress you. But keep watching and, like a drunken rejection from a girl in a nightclub, it will quickly dawn on you that it's not going to happen. Like the gameplay, a solid base was never built upon and the end result is just boring.

you get less than two hours of gameplay consisting of a few repetitive fights, and all you get to show for it is a new hat. Hardly worth getting out of bed for, let alone rising from the grave.

Solid, but uninspiring.

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

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.

The implementation is rushed and slipshod, however, ignoring fundamental problems and expending limited energy on the wrong things. What you're getting for your money feels a little like somebody else's office in-joke: you can sense the well-intentioned laughter, but you can't really join in.

With the mood alternating between boredom and exasperation, Sanctum Of Slime is a spirit-crushing exercise that only a committed masochist could appreciate.

Even the main characters - the ones voiced over in cut-scenes - have an annoying American accent that just shatters the whole illusion, and they sound like they're talking to you through a king hangover mixed with a few pints of disinterest.

With the mood alternating between boredom and exasperation, Sanctum Of Slime is a spirit-crushing exercise that only a committed masochist could appreciate.

Naughty Bear sold itself to a lot of customers by pretending to be adult, gritty and brutal. In fact, it's childish, facile and more pointless than manning the phone-lines for the Rob Green retirement fund. Avoid at all costs, or at least wait until it's inevitably slashed in price if you're really desperate for some sledgehammer humour and cheap Gamerscore.

But no amount of colourful 3D graphics and soothing jazz can make up for tiresome puzzles, empty levels, unoriginal weapons and endless backtracking.

With the dreadful lack of effort in the PS1-like visuals, and ghastly AI, even those with especially designed tattoos should consider their old friend exactly that: old.

Average execution, terribly repetitive combat, lots of reasonable ideas that don't quite work, a general lack of cohesion: it's not diabolical, but it's far from great.

El Matador is an unsophisticated action shooter which might have been a decently average blast - there are elements of simple fun to be had in its running and gunning - but it's all messed up by the transparently scripted and static enemies, patchy AI and poor clipping detection.

At the end of the day this isn't a matter of graphics whorishness, it's just that the GBA can't do the game justice. Underneath it all you can feel the spirit of the game struggling to get out.

Tedious repetition needs to be a little better disguised.