Leaping from vehicle to vehicle like some sort of crazy offspring of Evil Kinevil and The Six Million Dollar Man is a lot of fun for a while. But then a combination of a horrible driving experience and some tedious difficulty spikes drain all the fun out of it, and you're left scowling about missed opportunities.

While FIFA Manager 10 is by no means a poor game, there's an underlying suspicion that the energy that's been pumped into the hit-and-miss multiplayer features would have been better spent on genuinely innovating the single-player game, which sadly feels a little too similar to last year and a little tactically thin compared to FM and CM.

Nintendo serves up another bumper blink-and-you-lose blitz in WarioWare: Move It!, but the package is let down by the need to fumble with often-fussy motion controls.

It's competent and capable of entertaining, and perhaps Camelot has proven that you don't need to exercise as much restraint as Wii Sports did to make a good golf game - but it still suffers from a lack of challenge for single players and being disappointingly unbonkers.

The drab lunar landscape which makes up much of the game is a poor substitute for the rich snowfields and forests of Earth 2150, and poorly balanced campaigns make the single player experience less satisfying than it perhaps should have been.

The all-new split-screen multiplayer modes are a bit hit and miss, but still welcome nevertheless.

One of those games which stands inches away from greatness.

If you do like games that challenge you to work out the rules for yourself, to find the edges of the world by falling over them, then Fract is a unique and often remarkable experience, best savoured in the dark at full volume. Go on, get lost.

Slick puzzle design finds itself at odds with the creativity of organising that A Little to the Left wants to evoke.

Mediocre combat and tiresome activities hold back Ghostwire: Tokyo's otherwise spectacular, otherwordly atmosphere.

Fortunately, the game does at least make it possible for the non-hardcore to eventually grind some extra powers (in the Rising mode) to make things slightly easier - but, you guessed it, you have to work pretty damned hard to get them.

It's a bland taste to a cultured palette. But it's fun, too, and self-aware.

Worth a look, then, but probably only if you're in a very exclusive set: FPS-obsessed gamers who only own a Nintendo DS.

It's so obviously a lot of good games. And we're feeling a degree of magic. But in the end Feel the Magic isn't quite enough to sate us.

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.

While the narrow theme inevitably limits replayability, longevity, and appeal, I've found the challenge of pulling off a peace deal at the toughest difficulty level keeps drawing me back for an hour or two's play every so often. Call me soft, but I want to taste those hopeful tears again.

There's simply nothing here that leaps out as being interesting, innovative, original or inspired. It's solid, entertaining, and for anyone with an interest in arcade flight combat, will while away quite a few hours some damp weekend - after which time it will be consigned to the corner of your games shelf and forgotten within a matter of weeks.

If you're the sort who, when presented with a river, like to crouch and examine the eddies, this may be for you. If you just want to know what's downstream... well, less so.

Even though it's lazy journalism of the worst kind, it's also a pretty accurate summation of Unlimited's appeal - a game where the journey is just as enjoyable as the destination.

Sand Land proves once again that Akira Toriyama and video games are a perfect match.

The Maw is the sort of game you'll play for an afternoon, giggling like a fool the whole time. There's not much more to it beyond that brief but satisfying flurry of amusement, unless you want to go back into each level to harvest all the Achievements, but not every game needs endless replay value. The Maw is charming, cheap and memorable enough that its short lifespan shouldn't put you off.

Raskulls' crazed, crafted combination of platforming, racing and puzzling always promised to be something worth paying attention to, and so it has proved.

Quotation forthcoming.

A naturally divisive game, a few will succumb to its slightly wonky charms. Most, however, will find that the gimmicks have only limited appeal.

There's nothing special here. Elebits is a fairly competent FPS tidy-'em-up with a great edit mode, but that's all.

If you've somehow held off getting this so far, now is definitely the time to enjoy one of the most creative and engaging indie platformers around.

Folklore turns out to be one part boring adventure game, one part underdeveloped collect-em up, and one part standard dungeon crawl. The only aspect of the game that rises above the mundane is its technical polish and the vibrant creativity with which its imaginary worlds have been created - the vivid luminescence of the Fairy World, or the scratchy, Ian Miller-esque authenticity of the War World for example. [JPN Import]

Despite the single-player mode's inability to engage on a narrative level and the fact that you're supremely powerful for most of that side of it, Frontlines is a pleasant addition to the legion of shooters crowding the 360's line-up, largely thanks to its multiplayer.