A disappointingly short-lived experience. That's partly because the game is so captivating for as long as it lasts that you may be compelled to blast your way through in just one or two sittings.

It's not for everyone--but, in the end, Crystal Chronicles can be a tremendously entertaining multiplayer game for those willing to work together to overcome some obstacles both in the game itself and in its design.

Though we wanted to like Joan of Arc, we found it burdened by a number of rookie mistakes, including a bad camera, poor pathfinding, and lackluster artificial intelligence.

Sadly, like the war it's based on, WWI: The Great War is an exercise in madness, frustration, helplessness, and human folly. This is a mess of a real-time strategy game.

Despite featuring an arcade-style mode, Dangerous Hunts is more of a slow-paced sim. Whether you find it intense or terribly tedious will probably depend on your hunting knowledge and patience.

An unplayable mess of a game; it feels like a really bad amateur mod that was released before it was finished.

It's a real shame Apache Longbow Assault doesn't offer a deeper campaign and more game modes. It otherwise has some good things to offer: sharp graphics, solid audio, and lots of fast airborne action. This is a game that doesn't do too much, but what it does, it does well.

On paper, this game features some neat ideas, but control problems, micromanagement, and other flaws often make Riot Police a lot less fun than it could have been.

Much like its predecessor, "Battlecruiser Millennium," this wildly ambitious simulation is torpedoed by an almost incomprehensible interface, the absence of a tutorial both in-game and in the poorly organized manual, numerous bugs, and many fit and finish issues, including dated production values.

Offers more of the intense and suspenseful single-player and multiplayer action that made Vietcong the respectable game that it is.

But if R-Type must end, at least it's going out on a high note--rest assured that Final lives up to the classic R-Type name in every way.

The AirForce Delta series has always been of middling quality and has never really been able to live up to its contemporaries, such as "Ace Combat" and "Lethal Skies," and Strike does little to buck that trend.

The developers spent a lot of time creating a really engaging story, but they hardly put any substantial gameplay into the game.

Because the PS2 version of Mafia unavoidably compromises the PC version's graphical presentation--while also introducing longer loading times and injecting more interruptions into the gameplay--it comes off like a mere shadow of the original.

Sonic Team almost seems to be daring you to try and have fun with the PlayStation 2 version by making it significantly uglier, slower, and generally just rougher around the edges than the other two versions.

Regardless of which online game type you decide to compete in, any game that you play will be stricken by a pretty severe amount of lag.

Though it still exhibits many of the camera and control issues that vexed Sonic's previous forays into 3D, it's truer to its 2D roots than any other 3D Sonic game before it.

The lack of any strategy to the gameplay, a generally poor design, and an endless number of stability problems turn Monster Garage into a real monster, all right.

Though the ending is a little unsatisfying, and the actual adventure is a little short, the game offers plenty of replay value with five appreciably different character classes and a really satisfying cooperative mode.

If you can grit your teeth and get past the daunting frustration factor, you'll find in Army of Zin a surprisingly deep and involved hack-and-slash platformer with a quirky, endearing style and a lot of heart.

Team Sabre may not be realistic, but it's packed with explosions, wild gunfights, and quite a bit of fun--though it's also extremely frustrating at times, due to a limited save system coupled with some excruciatingly difficult gameplay.

Features a surprisingly impressive presentation, complete with realistic physics and some of the most destructible environments ever seen in a game, which lead to some very exciting unscripted moments.

Though the ending is a little unsatisfying, and the actual adventure is a little short, the game offers plenty of replay value with five appreciably different character classes and a really satisfying cooperative mode.

It has a lot of things going for it, including beautiful graphics, oodles of detail, and lots of depth. Sadly, it's a game that doesn't quite hit the million-dollar jackpot due to some cumbersome gameplay, an unusually and often frustratingly high level of difficulty, and interface issues.

It's basically a simple, mildly entertaining, and somewhat uneven pseudofuturistic dungeon crawl for one or two players.

Bandai's decision to pad one good game's worth of content with about 60 to 80 hours' worth of filler, and to split that game into four full-priced products spread out over a year, remains disappointing.

The action is repetitive and straightforward, but the game features a lot of cool weapons and tons of stuff to hack or shoot at, plus it's got some of the charm that helped make Fallout a genuine classic.

This concept itself obviously isn't a terribly original one, and Shattered Universe's gameplay mechanics are equally pedestrian in design, hopelessly trying to mirror bigger, better space combat games.