It works well enough. There's nothing here to appeal to adults, or anyone who isn't a Ben 10 fan. But if you know one of those, this is a great present - and at under GBP 20 it's a reasonably priced one, too.

A very, very good videogame: another brilliant evolution of Koei's unique interpretation of the real-time strategy genre, and every bit as satisfying as previous efforts. What it lacks in terms of the speed and immediacy of, say, Gundam Musou, it makes up for with strategic range, design ingenuity, and conceptual novelty. [JPN Import]

Impressive heritage and a handful of neat ideas bubble beneath this co-op horror, though they're both ultimately squandered.

A charismatic and enjoyable gangster sim that gets a big bogged down in admin. [Eurogamer Recommended]

A tense, imaginative thriller that buckles under the weight of its own ambition.

If you're looking for a fully featured PES game, you'll obviously need to look to other formats, but if you're just after a decent facsimile that allows you to enjoy the magic of a flying football, you might find the series' best feature to be its saving grace on the DS.

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

But this game is also clunky, burdened with terrible songs and much too weird for most people. It's a quirky alternative to Dance Central, but not a competitor.

Insipid character and course design married with inherently repetitive gameplay, obsessive collecting and an array of horrible touchscreen features make this feel like a waste of time. It's got plenty of content, and is a perfectly serviceable, occasionally competitive kart racer, but there's not much distinguishing about it.

The best reason to buy Hydrophobia Prophecy - not for entertainment, but as a kind of digital tourism. You're paying for a look at everything the developers achieved over Hydrophobia's exceptionally long development, and to see what this game might have been.

It's a pity that the energy that Trailblazers displays - and its upbeat spirit can prove infectious - isn't met with a little more meticulous thought and care placed elsewhere. The unfortunate thing when invoking such classics as F-Zero and Splatoon is you invoke their brilliance, and while Trailblazers has happily taken the grand ideas it's skimped out on the detail - and so this colourful mash-up ends up feeling plain sloppy.

There's just too much about it that gets up our nose, and however much we jam our finger up there trying to straighten it out, favouring the outside line or not, it still slides back and forth just out of reach.

Even in the cramped indie survival game genre, there's nothing quite like Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

The biggest problem with The King of Fighters XII is that it feels unfinished. The combat is fun and robust but not particularly innovative.

This is an art toy to savour, and a time-waster of great power.

Angry Birds Trilogy certainly benefits from the more extravagant presentation options that a TV allows, and in bringing Rovio's juggernaut to consoles it has a basic "does what it says on the box" appeal - but there's clearly a lot more that could have been done beyond bluntly porting the levels across.

Given the option of a good bike simulation and a great arcade bike game, I'd actually prefer to see SBK head further down the latter path for future instalments. Heresy, perhaps, but on the evidence here I'd even be open to the idea of Black Bean being tasked with reviving Road Rash for the HD generation.

Many of the vast list of things we object to in Fracture equal the low standard set by the likes of "Turok" and "Haze," and that if you managed to survive those games without burning down the shop that sold them to you, this will suffice for a weekend's distraction.

This hardcore off-road driving sim is focused and compelling, but just a bit too austere for its own good.

Cheap, cheerful, timeless fun, and ultimately short-lived - but isn't that the whole point?

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.

It's the sort of bland shooter that if you tried it on MAME you'd barely give it a second look - so why does anyone think that gamers will part with 400 points for it? Sometimes the past is better off left alone.

Beneath Arcania's often outstanding art direction and technical achievement lies a dry spreadsheet of must-have RPG elements, none of which is sufficiently developed to compel and all of which fail to balance against one another.

Untainted by the passing of time, and still as mindlessly entertaining as it was back in the day. Sure, Hyper Sports improved on the formula a little, and Epyx went off and took the idea to dizzy heights not long after that, but in essence this is one of those few occasions when a game concept emerged fully formed from the beginning.

Beautiful but bug-riddled, Impact Winter isn't the game it could be yet.

Once again it comes down to this: superb pop songs and amazing choreography, wrapped up in a package which could be more polished and comprehensive but which does the job. Good times.

With its distinct Voxel 3D visual style and some engaging puzzles, there's a core of good game struggling to get out here, but one that is ultimately thwarted by the fiddly controls.

It's the Citroen Saxo of rally titles - small, well rounded and not horrible to look at, but it is pretty horrible to drive, it sounds like a chainsaw dragged over sand paper and the sales guy is going to have his work cut out selling it.