Not only can you learn how to play it in ten minutes, you can pretty much master the strategy of it in the same amount of time as well.

Hardcore gamers will be put off by the lack of depth in the arcade sequences, and casual gamers will be put off by the degree of challenge in the strategy sequence.

Anyone who has experience with other RPGs will probably become bored with this game after an hour or two. Although the quest is relatively long, the gameplay offers little in the way of innovation, insuring that the only people who will see it through are the most diehard of Naruto fans.

Whether you see it as a fantasy-slanted Gears homage or a punched-up and streamlined dungeon-crawler, the end result is roughly the same: Hunted is an adequate diversion for co-op aficionados, but little more.

At worst, though, it embodies one of the more unfortunate trends our industry is prone to follow: putting style and presentation over substantive interactive experience.

It's good to have a better Rayman Raving Rabbids installment on DS than the one released last year, but we have a feeling that Ubisoft could have done much more on a handheld system that offers many great examples of mini-game collections.

Unfortunately, where World Tour improved on its predecessor in every way, Total Destruction fails to recapture any of the fun of its arcade ancestors.

Maybe in Dark Void 2, in which a brash, headstrong pilot gets a hold of a jetpack created by an aging engineer and uses it to fight zombies, we'll see the full-fledged realization of this game's genuinely interesting designs. Until then, however, jetpack fans will have to settle for half-baked.

Indeed, the problem of "generic civilizations" is particularly acute in The Art of Supremacy.

Graphically, it's the best that NASCAR has ever looked, but once you get past the pretty picture, you're left with a racer with plenty of holes.

The gameplay is uglier than Paul Bearer in the nude.

It could've been called "EndCrisis" or "TimeGame," but there's still enough of a difference to warrant interest from light-gun gamers.

With shallow gameplay and minimal longevity, King of Route 66 is a coin-op in PS2 clothing.

While you can drive almost every Corvette made, the game doesn't feel realistic enough to give the impression that you're behind the wheel of one.

The biggest problem is the lack of difficulty and subsequent lack of replayability, but while it lasts Boogie offers a pleasant distraction from the usual crop of rhythm and action games on the market.

It has a simplistic hand-to-hand fighting system, a jerky, broken camera, crappy, jarring level designs, and horrifically frustrating platforming elements. It pretty much just fails at emulating the combat-heavy action games that have inspired it, and you'll constantly remind yourself of this as you play.

While the improved handling and graphics are a treat, Spy Hunter 2 feels like it's moving away from the original's inspiration, instead of towards it.

Fans of the series will no doubt like the ability to test the relative strengths and weaknesses of, say, the GAT-X103 versus the GAT-X207, but gamers unfamiliar with mobile suit mythology won't get that same buzz.

It's encouraging, though, that in just the week since SOL's been out the developers at Seamless have done a great job patching issues, with three released so far. It's a damn shame there are so many issues that are likely beyond the power of mere patches, because the space shooter genre badly needs a new classic to really get it going again.

We were hoping for more from The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, and we're disappointed that the game didn't do more with such a powerful license. Star Wars: Battlefront hasn't aged very well, and to get essentially the same game with a different theme left us wanting more.

It will captivate you temporarily with its novel look and gameplay, but when the story starts to get interesting, the clunky controls and molasses-like pace of the thing will leave you frustrated. The game runs far too slow to be enjoyable.

Drome Racers' controls are frustratingly floaty, just as they were in Rollcage, and the cars themselves are even floatier, hovering several inches off the ground instead of maintaining contact with "terra droma."

While the improved handling and graphics are a treat, Spy Hunter 2 feels like it's moving away from the original's inspiration, instead of towards it.

There's an embarrassment of riches in the genre on Xbox, so why embarrass yourself with this?

As nightmares go, this one ranks right up there with the one about entering the schoolyard pantsless, and perhaps even on fire. The turtles deserve better, and its unfortunate this game extends their bad luck streak.

Genesis Rising is by no means a total loss and there's certainly some fun to be had, but its lofty potential is squandered due to some poor decisions and a rigid design that will only appeal to a select number of players.

Merchant Prince II literally is "Merchant Prince" circa 1993 with a few new game options, slightly updated visuals, and programmed with Windows rather than DOS in mind.

It's unplayable out of the box and incomplete even when patched. But if it can survive, there're signs that WWII Online could be a winner.