Shadow the Hedgehog doesn't really do anything new, and doesn't really give the impression anyone's trying particularly hard.

With its varied mission objectives, well designed co-operative gameplay and highly impressive graphics, it's a joy to play - most of the time.

The beauty of Mario Kart DS is that it's really, genuinely practical to play with other people, wirelessly or online.

If the SmackDown! series doesn’t start making proper innovations instead of these minor cosmetic tweaks year after year, there’s every chance we’ll get a little bored of it. For now, though, SmackDown! is still as good as wrestling games can get.

Bolder souls, as interested in commerce as they are in combat, can buy with much greater confidence.

There's a lot of game in Crash Tag Team Racing, but there isn't a lot of good game. And since there isn't really a lot of kart-racing game either, on a system that seems to have more pure racing games than any other in recent memory, it's hard to think of a good reason to tag it any other way.

A remarkably solid and substantial game. Certainly no one should be ashamed of owning it or giving it as a gift this yuletide.

SOCOM PSP is a simple, varied, and well put together game that works very well on Sony's handheld.

Battles are fun and fairly compulsive but this is a game we've played many times over, usually presented better, executed more beautifully and intertwined with a far superior story.

Standing back from the relatively minor niggles and the impatient desire for Tecmo to push on with the series in a slightly more forward-looking direction, it's still a labour of love playing a title that leaves you lying awake at night pondering on every palpitating detail.

While in terms of accuracy to the world it's the least accurate LoTR licence yet, in other areas it's terribly close to the books. It's slow-paced. It's a little unwieldy. It's hardly glamorous. However, it's also something which wraps you up in its own world for hours at a time.

It may test your levels of forgiveness, and stretch the boundaries of your patience, but if you want a game that delivers something close to the unforgiving challenge, tension and confusion of real warfare, then give it a try.

You'll enjoy the gunplay, you'll probably be numbed by the slo-mo gunplay repetition, and then see it through anyway because it's all quite undemanding fun with a decent story. On horseback. Just don't expect Gun to change the world. It really is just "True Crime in the Wild West."

There's a mess of nerves that throb confusedly beneath its borrowed face. It looks about right, certainly, but you'll need more than immunosuppressants to stop your face exploding in outrage half the time.

The combat may lack depth in skill terms - certainly you wouldn't compare it to something like Ninja Gaiden in terms of technique - but in the end Neo's the perfect embodiment of stuff you want to and now can do in a game. It's just the Path that's the problem.

Rare said that the game was basically completed on past systems anyway, then touched up, and that's incredibly obvious.

It's a king among peripheral games, using most people's underlying fascination with the hidden art of axe-wielding as a foil for delivering one of the best beatmatching games I've seen.

The stylised visuals looks great after all these years (and better than most things on GBA, it has to be said), and the exacting, refined gameplay formula still had us as hooked now as it did back then.

It's such a shame that Nintendo - the creator of Mario Kart, which is arguably the most fun you can have with platonic friends - just can't seem to sort Mario Party's problems out, even for the seventh instalment in the series. Roll on number eight, eh.

The game offers variety, excitement, thought and pace all in tiny bundle you can wolf down in a sandwich break. In fact, that's what this actually reminds me of - the gaming equivalent of a snackette.

What annoys me here is that Castlevania was always doing several smart things at once and this one, conversely, is founded on a presupposition that pandering to the klepto sword-swinger niche is all Konami needs to do.

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

Tiny incremental tweaks to the function are all very well if your base material is simply amazing or the form changes significantly but, all told, this is an old, whiffy average GBA kids RPG, dull and tired through inbreeding.

With such a tediously unengaging storyline, vanilla locations, rubbish camera system and an all-round feel of technical impoverishment, what you're left with is a game that's certainly fun, original and hugely engaging for a while, but one that fails to live up to its early promise.

The expansion is aimed squarely at the high-level ground-based combat players, and is a solid addition of content for them. That only this one group of players is catered to fully though only serves to alienate those left behind and devalues the offering overall.

Rise of the Underminer lacks the imagination, variation and challenge of a game like "R&C," and for that it doesn't deserve any more than the score we're about to give it.

Here's the difference between "Everything or Nothing" and From Russia With Love: whatever you thought of its approach, "Everything or Nothing" had to be invented; From Russia With Love just had to be filled. And it has been - with stuff from "Everything or Nothing."

The acute sense of excitement and precision in combat of the "Halo" games is absent, likewise the intensity of being in a firefight delivered by "Battlefield 2." All the explosions and laser-fire feel a lot like window-dressing, even if the game does have some attractive scenery.