You'll hope developers like Amaze don't go within 100 miles of a movie license ever again, and pray that BVG has the good sense to try harder next time. Consider yourself warned.

Operation Raccoon City is an under-designed and under-produced nightmare, a game that delivers the bare minimum in every category and stops right there.

The systems that should have been its biggest draws are relegated to one-trick sideshows, while the majority of the game is just one dreary combat engagement after another.

What looked like a peaceful riff on one of Miyamoto's finest ideas winds up a far duller prospect than it ought to have been. Shame.

Another adequate yet uninspired entry for the Ford Racing brand.

Put next to the (unfairly derided) Lumines Live, Tetris Evolution is clunky, overpriced and devoid of compelling new features, and with the Xbox 360 controller's directional pad putting in its usual awkward performance, it's hard to think of a reason to recommend this to anybody.

Cross Edge feels like a gift aimed squarely at the hardcore JRPG crowd. Its best features are its rewardingly complex battle system and its clean and equally nostalgic 2D presentation. But these virtues will make it about as appealing as pulling teeth to anyone who doesn't know the difference between Makai Kingdom and Odin Sphere.

Rogue Corps is elevated at times by the fact that it's hard to truly screw up a twin-stick shooter.

I love and hate Dark Messiah: Elements. For everything that's good about the combat intensity, the flexibility of the skill system, the quality of the puzzles and the brooding, engaging atmosphere, it's undone by massive technical problems.

It's not all bad, though. Unlike Papaya Studio's murderously terrible Ben 10 efforts, Vilgax Attacks and Cosmic Destruction, The Rise Of Hex opts for thoughtful-but-repetitive Shadow Complex-lite 2D platform-puzzling.

Some committed souls might eke a few hours of mild entertainment out of Red Faction: Battlegrounds, but only if they try really hard. It might not be irredeemably terrible, but there are so many better games in the download scene. Don't waste your time on this forgettable spin-off.

There's nothing wrong with using a brand name to sell you game, unless that game happens to be among the most uninspired beat 'em ups released in several years. If you remember Activision's "Minority Report" game, then this is about as good as that.

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.

The multiplayer modes deserve some credit, as fans will no doubt get off on the prospect of playing Deathmatches and truncated Capture The Flag sessions while in the guise of 50 or Slim Shady, but the maps are unlikely to inspire anyone with real multiplayer experience.

It's too complex for a party game; you try explaining the importance of ball choice and oil patterns to small children or drunk people.

It looks cute, it has a couple of nice ideas, but it's just not fun.

It helps that The First Templar's endearingly off-kilter presentation keeps expectations low, and even at its best it's still only pretty good at what it does. But being surprised by a game that succeeds on modest terms is often more satisfying than grudgingly accepting a hyped blockbuster that fails to deliver, so while the final "not bad" score might be the same, the actual experience couldn't be more different.

NeverDead feels like gaming's equivalent of Buckaroo Banzai, or Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of those weird B-movies you used to find lurking in the midnight spaces of an old video store and which you often loved for their unlikely concepts or their wilful obscurity more than their actual quality. NeverDead hasn't been given room to get the most out of its strange ideas, but it's still plucky, warm-hearted and genuinely idiosyncratic.

If you're a fan of Conflict and/or shooters in general, you're likely to find Denied Ops shallow and dull. The two-man control system doesn't work properly. The visuals are ugly. The script is sub-Armageddon. Yes, it's easy to pick up and play. But if you're after an experience with real challenge and depth, you won't want to.

A game of limited worth, then, less enjoyable than 2012's World War 2-themed Sniper Elite V2, but which demonstrates a developer on an upward trajectory nonetheless.

Then there's the combat. It's messy. You'll fling ranged spells at enemies and they'll mysteriously miss, presumably due to line-of-sight issues, but it's difficult to tell. Even melee combat seems buggy at times, with monsters you can't hit even though they're stood right next to you.

Eckert's game is too exasperating for a recommendation, but it's an interesting failure nonetheless. One of the best-looking and most chic indie titles of the past 18 months, it's evidence of a keen artistic talent - albeit one that needs pairing with more scrupulous game design in order to fully blossom.

And yet for all that, I kind of adore Balan Wonderworld, to a degree that's surprised me. Maybe it's just come along at the right time, when I needed a colourful comfort blanket of a thing, a nostalgia strip as strange and insubstantial as watching a YouTube compilation of 90s TV adverts. Maybe it's because my expectations were low - Sonic Adventure has always been the game where the scales fell away from my eyes when it comes to Sega's mascot, and to Sonic Team, and I can't say I've ever enjoyed too much of the series since...Or maybe it's just because this is how games used to be, and sometimes it's comforting to slip into a 90s netherworld, and back into the old ways. When games were often clunky, unexplained, awkward and often downright frustrating. Balan Wonderworld is all those things, an almost too exacting facsimile of a type of second tier 90s platformer that never quite achieved greatness, even if it's fascinating all the same.

No-one cared when this was released on PSP in summer 2009, and they certainly won't give a flying fig about it now.

There are flashes of promise in this first-person shooter, but this is a mostly uninspired, unpolished waste of an opportunity.

Alien Syndrome had the potential to be a decent by-the-numbers action RPG, but it struggles to even reach those heights with insipid repetition and a total lack of challenge crippling your incentive to see it beyond the first few hours.

Unfortunately, while the movie's version of piracy is a picturesque mixture of high-adventuring, quick-witted, swashbuckling derring-do, The Legend of Jack Sparrow is a weak mixture of low-brow, quick cash-in, button-bashing doggy-do.

Eat Lead is far from a compelling parody, taking weak, ambiguous pot shots at other games. Even though these attacks are often hard to trace to their intended target, it's fair to say that Eat Lead isn't worthy to mock them, because whatever else it's trying to be this is a howling misfire of a cover shooter, neither funny or enjoyable, and guilty of worse crimes than the ones it's attempting to mock.