For a fun party game - even one aimed at kids, who let's face it are just witless dwarves who'd be impressed by a cardboard box if it had a picture of a monkey on a skateboard on it - Viva Piñata is horribly oversimplistic, repetitive and just plain lacking in oomph.

This is a below average, clunky game that I'm knocking an extra few bonus points off of for the sheer stupidity and laziness of the near-bordering-on-racial-profiling plot.

This game is so flawed, so monotonous and deathly, deathly dull that I'm struggling to think of any reason whatsoever to waste your time and money on it.

The premise for basing a game on one of the stupidest and, at times, funny tv shows of the last few years might seem very sound, but this has missed it's target utterly and I think this is an enormous shame and an opportunity lost.

Though it boasts a whole host of different modes in both the single and multiplayer game, as well as a variety of extras, including the ability to watch the two previously released music videos as many times as is necessary, in general it all feels far too much like it’s been thrown together in an attempt to squeeze the final drop of milk from the long dead and buried Crazy Frog cash cow.

At its worst, Scarface is a clumsy, angst ridden and self indulgent idea with a game tacked on as an afterthought. At it’s best, it is tired, clichéd and derivative.

Kazook is nothing but a host of buzzwords and heavily stereotyped characters mashed clumsily together with unoriginal games that quickly plummet into a repetitive tedium.

The graphics are shocking, the sound does little to add to the experience, the storyline is mediocre and the controls are unfriendly.

In summary, I just can't recommend this because it has virtually no purpose and is horribly tedious - it says a lot that Sam Fox Strip Poker on the ZX Spectrum from 1986 actually had more of a point to playing it, even if that point was just to see an awful, monochrome drawing of a pair of oversized norks.

The RTS genre is already full to the brim with WWII clones and Frontline is nothing spectacularly different from anything we haven’t already seen.

Aura 2 is terrible and I have no sympathy for it – Telltale Games have shown us with Sam & Max that you can still produce funny, clever, well designed and playable adventure games on a very low budget.

Most games are labours of love that many people have obviously spent a lot of time on. Patriots, however, feels like it was made in an afternoon by three bored computer science students. Please avoid this.

Despite the genuinely lovely mood created by the mid 1930s settings, haunting soundtrack and clever use of lighting, even the train full of believable – if not slightly stereotyped – personalities can’t make up for the lack of care gone into the unrewarding finish of Murder on the Orient Express.

This is an absolutely diabolical game, a bloated, leaden, enjoyment-free shambles which Sonic Team should be ashamed to have their name on and you should under no circumstances part with any money for. The only way it could have been any worse is if a representative from Sega had put an actual dead hedgehog in every box.

It has a fantastic score, an excellent cast and some genuinely good ideas, but its inability to find balance between narration and game, along with poor execution, means that this is one purple headed monster you won’t want to be playing with.

Nothing new for fans of the series and nothing that appeals to gamers, a game that had room for so much potential, sadly falls short in reality.

It’s a mystery how two such very different games manage to share so many things in common. In away it’s almost a relief that Maximum Impact 2 is so poor, as it allows XI to bask in its own glory, an example of how the 2D fighting genre isn’t dead and hopefully an opportunity for younger gamers to appreciate the concept of gameplay being greater than eye-candy.

We've got a complete duffer dressed up in some genuinely half-decent bling.

I could go on and on about the other dreadful aspects of this game - the fact that there is virtually zero replay value because once you've solved the puzzles they never change, or the stupid setup that has speech subtitles appearing OVER parts of the screen you need to see to perform actions at some points - but I really can't be bothered.

Kids thrive on new ideas, excitement and imagi-nation, and can easily handle complex situations and scenarios - none of which are on show here. Just because they’re young doesn’t mean they should make do with a bland, unimaginative, unchal-lenging and in parts quite shoddily finished effort.

Overall, it offers absolutely nothing new compared to the console version (save for a few extra issues making it slightly inferior), and it is highly unlikely it could serve as means to garner any new fans.

An utter disgrace. It’s tedious, blatantly made on a zero budget with zero effort, and consequently is about as much fun as spending a day transcribing random pages from the phone book.

Trials of Obi-Wan doesn’t lay out any new framework for player cooperation, competition or any kind of interaction apart from grouping to kill a tougher opponent, and it fails at bringing real immersion in the Star Wars universe to a game where this feeling is already very scarce.

While the stealth mechanic is implemented fairly well, and enemy AI at least stands up to initial tests, there’s just far too little excitement throughout the entire course of play.

The humour is immature and unfunny to anyone over the age of 13 (which negates the game's 15+ age rating). The tennis is frustrating and flawed, and simply not up to the standards of the best of the genre.

So to sum up – it looks like a homebrew net Yaroze demo, sounds worse than a knackered monophonic mobile phone with the Crazy Frog ring tone on it, moves with all the fluidity and beauty of a giraffe trying to control a pedalo and is so shatteringly tedious and yawn-inducing you could mistakenly think you’ve contracted narcolepsy while playing it.

The game is still plagued by most amateurish of design blunders, being less than adequate in every aspect save for its "depth" (and even that is put to shame by most of the stat-based Nippon Ichi titles released in the past few years).

Yet, for all its inventive environments and distracting gameplay attributes, the borderline nudity in Outlaw Volleyball Remixed, combined with an overabundance of ill-fitting arcade traits sullies the enjoyment well beyond reprieve.

Ultimately, ROTS is not out-and-out dreadful but it is offensively average.

Metal Heart: it’s like that funny looking pastry next to the apple Danish that looks delicious but I’m sure as hell not eating it!

Don’t bother buying this game, it's nothing you haven't seen before.

Here’s a one word review – crap.

And by God, when I find whoever told Vivendi about Fight Club and convinced them to make a game out of it, I’ll run their scrotum through a cheese grater.

Tries to roll driving and role-play into a neat little package, but through ham-fisted design and execution the game's faults continually blot out any true sense of immersion within the game's atmosphere.

I'll have to either return to watching paint dry or tuning in for Celebrity Big Brother…I think I'll opt for the paint, it's far more entertaining.

The bitter irony of this game is that, despite the purpose of videogames being to relieve one from boredom, this one will actually drive you further into the depths of tedium.

A dull and unimaginative affair and if you are unfortunate enough to receive this as a gift, you should start thinking about what you did to offend the person who gave it to you.

Mission objectives are the standard “find this” and “hit switch” variety and almost feel like an afterthought to break up the mindless slaughter.

Midnight Nowhere has the worst box art ever. Fact. That’s a stone cold, hard as nails fact. No getting around it, this box art is simply appalling. From the pathetic background picture to the cheap Photoshop job done on the text, it reeks.

My biggest problem with this game is the sheer fact that the “Thoroughly modern storyline” is anything but. In fact it is as about as exciting as a show about painting fences and watching them dry and is as easy to follow as tracking a goldfish in the pacific.