Yes, things look prettier. But scratch the surface to plumb the depths as the saying goes, and Sins of the Fathers Anniversary Edition’s flaws become that bit more glaring. The polished aesthetics may well be enough to sway those avid nostalgia hunters, but I can’t be sure that new players will be at all interested.

Sonic 4 is an utter mess of a game, cobbled together in a manner that puts the entire franchise to shame. It feels sluggish, broken and lazy, but at least it only lasts a couple of hours!

Given the pedigree of Ron Gilbert and Double Fine Productions' past works, a lot of people will be understandably excited by the prospect of The Cave. On paper, it sounds appealing, with its variety of characters and plethora of reasons to replay. It looks charming and, at first, the humour hits the spot. Problems lie with its inability to give you any great reason to replay it. It's just all too disappointingly shallow.

So many times during this review I quit the game just because I couldn't be bothered to solve a puzzle, only to realise I had to keep playing to give it a fair shot. My opinion would start to sway a bit more positive, then I quit again for the lack of care. Which says everything about Magrunner: Dark Pulse really.

Battleborn ended up stretching itself too thin by trying to include too many modes.

As a tower defence shooter hybrid, Excubitor has the potential to be an adrenaline-charged, strategic masterpiece. However, a number of aspects have let the game down and this left me feeling disappointed.

The Callisto Protocol is one of the year’s biggest letdowns. It is joyless, contrived and feels unfinished, as if the studio rushed it out prior to Dead Space Remake’s launch on January 27, 2023. Like Black Iron itself, I can’t help but feel the project was abandoned at some point. It feels so wrong for a game that looks and sounds this great to be so devoid of spark and quality control. It’s fitting that after traversing every tight nook and cranny, the only feeling left once the credits have rolled is that of having life squeezed from you.

The Long Journey Home had so much promise but Daedalic forgot to make it playable. They focused on the big picture, on the huge epic universe, without realizing that it’s the small stuff that’s important.

Level design is cramped and unfair, the controls are imprecise, the interface is from a completely different genre of game and is extremely cluttered and unhelpful, and the whole thing is just painful. 2Dark is extremely frustrating, extremely badly designed, and extremely not fun. I’m glad it wiped my saves. Avoid.

NaissanceE could’ve been a neat game but Limasse Five should’ve just stuck with making a cool artistic world and left the actual gameplay at home. I may have then complained that there wasn’t enough game in it, but at least I would have actually enjoyed it.

There may well be a half-decent game lurking beneath the facade of tired jokes and nods to RPG tropes and stereotypes, which Citizens of Earth then insists of portraying anyway, however it’s far too caught up in its own bravado to realise it.

I had hopes for Yesterday, but they were beaten out of me during its absurdly short playing time. I got actively angry at the game at several occasions just because of the leaps of non-logic I was supposed to take.

It’s been awhile since a game repulsed me. Not in a gruesome or transgressive way, just in a way that’s unenjoyable thanks to frustrating controls and its unfunny execution. Don’t get me wrong, it’s clear in its intent and you’ll know how you feel about it early on. However, it’s very unappealing and is a reminder as to why these sorts of games are better as experiments rather than full releases. If you like overcoming frustration, maybe you’ll find something worthwhile. I don’t.

Journey of a Roach attempts some nice ideas and is pretty cute, but altogether isn’t a particular good or enjoyable adventure.

Right now the small player population is seriously harming what makes Ravaged stand out, but even when you do end up in a big battle on a fresh map, its best attributes are lost underneath layers of niggling issues that just prevent it from being an enjoyable experience.

Fire is a sweet, innocent adventure with a very kid-friendly style, and it hurts me to kick it in the teeth. But I will. Behind those innocent looks lies a very basic adventure, with no story, no dialogue, no characters, no personality, and no satisfaction.

Depicting the horrors of an asylum with animated pictures was a tender touch to sensitive imagery. Even the 3D animations conveyed moments with care. But the story is confusing and painfully disappointing and the translation errors make matters worse. So I can commend LKA’s efforts, but I can’t recommend The Town of Light.

King’s Bounty II is a game where it takes forever to do anything. I averaged maybe 2-3 short battles for every hour of gameplay – perhaps 20 minutes of fun for 40 of drudgery. All this is doubly frustrating because somewhere under all this crap is a pretty solid strategy game. I just wish that King’s Bounty II would stop jerking me around and just let me play it!

If you were to summarise it in a puzzle, Puzzle Agent 2 would be a paint-by-numbers picture: formulaic, messy, and unable to hold the attention of all but the most easily perplexed.

Fat Shark have managed to shoot themselves in the foot by simplifying a formula that worked rather well. Rearmed 2 does enough to remind players as to why the series is often remembered fondly, but quickly blurs the image by stuttering over its best features.

It’s a shame that Infamy devolves into such juvenile practices as there are some nice flourishes on display – for instance, the hand-drawn aesthetic lends a quaint, homely feel to adventuring that feels refreshing in light of the grandeur that western RPGs typically strive for – yet it’s impossible to root for a game that makes such a critical misstep.

Overpass is for a certain type of sadist, and it’s been awhile since a game made me want to stop playing it as quickly as possible. It might have its polish and intent, but the mechanics they serve are frustrating. Perhaps everything I mention makes the game all the more interesting, a game that isn’t for noobs like me and something that would sit comfortably between Surgeon Simulator or Getting Over It. But this makes for a niche game that will bug anyone else. I get the appeal, but it’s simply not fun.

Fat Shark have managed to shoot themselves in the foot by simplifying a formula that worked rather well. Rearmed 2 does enough to remind players as to why the series is often remembered fondly, but quickly blurs the image by stuttering over its best features.

There was one mission that brought out the intensity that I expected, but it was over too soon and right back to the problems that preceded it.

The only way to experience the whole game with relative ease is by dipping your toes in the online pool. Unfortunately, most of the title is plagued by repetition, lifeless design, and enough Japanese obscurity to deter most enthusiasts, meaning Moon Diver's appeal is broken quicker than Ryan Giggs' super injunction.

Overall an immense disappointment.

The only way to experience the whole game with relative ease is by dipping your toes in the online pool. Unfortunately, most of the title is plagued by repetition, lifeless design, and enough Japanese obscurity to deter most enthusiasts, meaning Moon Diver's appeal is broken quicker than Ryan Giggs' super injunction.

Long term Magic fans will want to avoid Magic 2015 to avoid utter frustration, whereas newcomers should look further into the Duels of the Planeswalkers’ back catalogue for a more appropriate and fulfilling platform for inauguration.

It's unfinished, it doesn't communicate vital information to the player very well, and – let's be honest here – it's all more than a little repetitive. Every level just feels like you're doing the same things over and over again. There's fun to be had certainly in the building and exploration departments, but it could've been handled with a lot more care. This isn't a game, it's a tomb.

It's certainly a question of quantity over quality.

If you have the sheer will power to push on through the vast mire of early drudgeries, there are jewels to be found buried deep within Ancient Wars: Sparta, but whether you’ll still be motivated enough to really enjoy them is another matter.

It's a wasted concept and it's let down by lazy execution.

Face Noir tries its best to be a compelling Raymond Chandler-esque film noir detective adventure and falls flat on its noirish face. The story is boring, characters are either bland or straight-up racist, acting is mediocre, writing is worse, cutscenes are mostly static photos, and the puzzles are a string of “find the important thing the designers have hidden” moments rather than any genuine brain-teasers.

If you are unfazed by the inevitable, constant death, the steep learning curve, the idiot AI, the poorly-designed (but neat looking) maps, the certain index finger cramps, or the underdeveloped character creation system, you will find Dawnspire to be a unique (and economic) gaming experience.

The problem is that as much as it wasn’t a bad game it wasn’t a great game either, falling somewhere in the realm of mediocre. Then again...so is most reality TV.

The combat is dull, the graphics are boring, even the heroes – the games' big selling point – are totally underwhelming. Not to mention ridiculously expensive for any extras. It's free to try, but it's not really worth the bandwidth either.

Mechanically, The Inquisitor borrows from several genres but rudimentary implementation fails to make a case for engaging in clue collecting or swordfighting. Worse yet, some of its mechanics are only there waste your time. On paper, and with more work put into it, The Inquisitor could have been a decent low-budget romp through an interesting setting. Sadly, in its current form, it only succeeds as a contender for the title of worst game of the year.

Those who've played the first game will either not want to touch another AZMD or be supremely disappointed at the sheer amount of regurgitated content here. Newcomers will likely get frustrated with the emphasis on grinding and repetitive game play.

While Peaky Blinders: Mastermind has some style and a novel approach to puzzling, it's not enough to properly engage. It definitely clicks at times, and there are moments where solving a problem makes you feel like a meticulous planner. However, there aren’t the eureka moments you’d expect from better puzzles nor mechanics worth mastering in replays. It’s hard to recommend and it’s only for a niche of Peaky Blinders fans who want an average puzzler with a lot of dull micromanaging (if they even exist).

Scaling itself back for a more "pure" co-op experience just doesn't work for this franchise that benefited so greatly from borderline parody. For that reason alone, The Devil's Cartel is an awkward one to recommend.

It's certainly a question of quantity over quality.

Dynasty Warriors 9 suffers from a lot of issues, most stemming from the terribly implemented open-world. Assets are reused, it’s buggy, repetitive, bloated, empty and bland. These shortcomings are made all the more painful by the obvious potential this game had, and how fun the base combat can be once players waded through all the other nonsense.

Even without comparing it to previous games, it's still mediocre at best. If I had one word to describe Wrecked, it would be unnecessary. There are enough arcade racers out there, and some of them are actually pretty decent. This one; is not.

There are no difficulty levels, no online support, no party modes, no DLC, and no reason to switch it back on. To say that I wasn't entertained would be a lie, as there's enough charm in a few of the games to pass a couple of hours on a dreary Sunday afternoon - but that's nowhere near enough to justify a full-price or even a budget purchase.

The Technomancer is not grossly bad, but it feels cheap and is deeply mediocre. It’s a cheap game, and worse: it’s no longer a cheap price. As I said in the first paragraph, I can’t think of a reason anyone would want to buy it over any other game in existence.

For all Croixleur Sigma can be quite challenging - particularly towards its Story Mode’s end or within Challenge Mode - no real skill is needed to succeed, and it’s lack of variety and intrigue make this feel like a wasted journey west.

As a Playstation Move launch title, it does a great job of showing off what could potentially be done with the hardware in the future, but as an actual game, it stinks.

What little positive elements it has going for it are marred by its problems.

There is fun to be had in five minute bursts as a distraction from doing work, but then that’s what I bought the phone version for. Don’t buy it. And there’s no multiplayer either, in case you were wondering.

In a year that has seen plenty of top-notch sports games, this is arguably the worst of the lot.

It's dreadful.

Ultimately though I found myself sat in front of my computer, scratching my unkempt beard and trying to answer the question: who is the game for?

It is a simple role-playing game for slower systems. You would get far more enjoyment from playing something such as "SpellForce: Order of Dawn" for the same cost.

Even relatively minor things like the inability to jump will grate, let alone more major concerns such as the control system. What could have been something rather special is simply a scattering of nice ideas, awkwardly actioned.

Bland, boring, and turgid to the last - look to Tropico 4 for a fine example of micromanagement, or instead XCOM Enemy Unknown for turn-based kicks: Omerta: City of Gangsters deserves to be thrown in a trunk and taken "someplace up state."

Bedlam is a neat concept that has managed to result in a game that’s utterly bankrupt of creativity, polish, or fun. It’s a game that went so wrong at every turn that it makes you just feel bad for its developers. There’s nothing here but a bunch of half-hearted references and wistful nostalgia for old video games, both of which you can get plenty of for free on the internet.

It's never satisfying to condemn any game but it's hard not to with Inversion. There are glimmers of nice ideas within, but the water is too muddied to see them clearly. All that's left is a bunch of mechanics that we've all seen before, and better implemented elsewhere.

If you've just come from a literary binge of A Song of Ice and Fire, or just had a marathon of HBO's high production TV show you might be tempted by the lure of Cyanide's A Game of Thrones - Genesis. However if you're that invested in George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy universe you're likely to be left pretty angry, whereas newcomers like me leave feeling just dazed and confused.

Bodycount has been pinned as the spiritual successor to Black, but this couldn't be any further from the truth. The latter was full of quality at the end of the last generation's lifespan, while this title whimpers to a halt in a key point of 2011's gaming calendar.

Good intentions and sporadic success can only carry a campaign so far, and Sniper unfortunately falls well short of the quality benchmark in almost all respects.

Blades of Time never matches up to the well-executed time mechanic it so readily deploys.

The intelligent use of horror, intensity, and most importantly, subtleness has gone. While this game is only a diversion until Resident Evil 6 arrives, Capcom have done an amazingly awful job. Resident Evil used to be the trendsetter, the series everyone looked up to, now its identity has been de-constructed in a major way.

As a curiosity project for fans of the genre, I can only say that I’m glad Lords of Football exists; but as a full-price release it’s not something that can be readily recommended.

Bannermen’s appreciation of genre greats can be easily seen through the cracks in its shoddy construction. However, in between a single faction with a small, uninspired roster, bland story and writing, and very few options in terms of tactics and strategy, it’s tough to recommend. As rooted as it is in the genre’s past, it’s nowhere close to mastering what made RTS titles of yore great, ultimately being just a flimsy, soulless imitator.

The game feels more like a web browser game than a console feature.

There are some half-decent ideas here - particularly the evolution of the hospital - and some fairly decent jump scares, however Daylight is too often too keen to rely on tropes that have been far better served elsewhere.

A lack of ideas and poor design just won't cut it in a year that sees Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare go head-to-head.

As it stands, there's hardly ever a reason to go beyond the obviously marked out route to the objective, as there'll not ever really be anything that interesting to find if you do.

Kung-Fu Live isn't worth the 10 quid it costs on the PlayStation Store, especially when most PlayStation move titles charge just under double this price for a superior experience. Don't waste your PlayStation Eye on Kung-Fu Live.

In a year that has seen plenty of top-notch sports games, this is arguably the worst of the lot.

Even if you spend the time to unlock your skills and build that warrior-archer-tank-damager behemoth you had in mind, what's the point if the activities you're engaging in are so threadbare and unappealing for the most part?

With the amount of great action games on the market there is simply no reason that you should give Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z a try. It is a shoddily made, awful mess.

If you’re into in-depth management of a park then Adventure Park may be for you, but for everyone else the design problems, unattractive menus, misplaced priorities, and numerous other flaws adds up to a tedious experience. Worst of all though, Adventure Park is bland, lifeless and lacking in both character and imagination.

It promised a light-hearted take on one of the world's most serious sports and it never gets anywhere close to showing that. Poor character designs, terrible mini-narratives, and a broken fight system make this a waste of time and effort. Fans of MMA might satisfy some blood lust, but for everyone else, it shouldn't even register on your gaming radar.

As usual, all objectives revolve around causing mass genocide and protecting painfully annoying innocents. If you were looking to buy this game for the online multiplayer experience, don't bother. At the time of writing, it seems nobody across the world wants to punch with friends.

On a good day, it's even approaching mediocre or average. Then you fall into the swamp because the killing animation took you over the edge of your small raft and you die instantly.

A pretty unsavoury experience. Without enough depth and presentational focus on the Huey to make it a decent simulation, and without any form of tutorial or guiding hand for the novice players, the developer has managed to straddle both camps, pleasing nobody in the process.

It’s a broken game, unfinished, derivative and sloppily produced, filled with uninteresting environments and levels. A pirate’s life is supposedly full of action and adventure, but you’ll find none of it here.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is a slap in the face to anyone who put the game on their Most Wanted list at any point since 2007. It’ll be remembered for a long time, but for all the wrong reasons. What a shame. I just feel sorry for those who bought the Season Pass… since there probably won’t be a Season now.

This can't be the same developer that made the last two games. That team must be off doing Dead Island or something. There were germs of good ideas in here, and it is possible to play it through to the end, but the criticisms and frustrations will overwhelm any fun you have doing so.

Just too lifeless to bother with.

I was particularly looking forward to Stronghold 3, so much so I requested the review months ago, and I still find it difficult to believe that Firefly have so spectacularly fouled things up.

It promised a light-hearted take on one of the world's most serious sports and it never gets anywhere close to showing that. Poor character designs, terrible mini-narratives, and a broken fight system make this a waste of time and effort. Fans of MMA might satisfy some blood lust, but for everyone else, it shouldn't even register on your gaming radar.

This can't be the same developer that made the last two games. That team must be off doing Dead Island or something. There were germs of good ideas in here, and it is possible to play it through to the end, but the criticisms and frustrations will overwhelm any fun you have doing so.

When a licenced game fails to excite fans of the franchise on which its content is based, it had better have something in reserve for the swathes of other consumers to latch onto. Unfortunately for The Punisher, it ends up unrecommended in both regards.

It’s not a particularly good advert for the brand, or the MMO. It’s way too pricey for what it is, and it’s got very little replayability. Coupled with the fact that there are plenty of games on tablet that do what it’s trying to do so so much better (The tablet port of XCOM, for example) that, really, this looks incredibly amateurish by comparison.

Inmates had ambitious intentions and a few good ideas, but these were not executed well at all. Fear and thrills were extinguished by the questionable shaking head effect and the game’s puzzles remained overly simplistic and did not feel challenging or rewarding to complete. In addition, I encountered a number of bugs that stopped me from progressing, at points. While this game may be attractively short for some, I cannot recommend the experience.

Story can’t be the thing that carries a video game and story is all Eisenhorn: XENOS has. A character as powerful as Gregor Eisenhor, with a great voice actor in Mark Strong, and an epic story deserves more than a glorified version of a mobile game. But brainless combat and mechanics, crummy audio, and unacceptable bugs keep this game to no more than a book promotion.

The most telling problem though, is that even when playing with the very best squad of footballers that Pure can muster, it just isn't engaging and fluid enough to be of interest for more than a couple of matches.

Just too lifeless to bother with.

I hate to use the term "cash-in" but there really isn't any other description for Sanctum of Slime.

All in all, Agarest Generations of War is pretty bland, generic, and average. Factoring in pure gameplay, there are plenty of better JRPG to sample, and, hopefully, a brighter future for the genre above and beyond what this PC port would illuminate.

007 Legends is rushed, short, frustrating, and wastes several interesting scenarios. It's at best slightly above average (several bits in Moonraker), but largely painfully average or excruciatingly below average.

I was under whelmed by this game. It seemed a game with all of the right elements, but they never really came together in a way that ‘smelled as sweet’ as a game by any other name.

There's precious little to recommend here outside of the occasionally cutesy over-sexed anime visuals and comedy wobbling breasts.

For fans of gaming, stay well clear. Even as far as movie-tie-ins go, this title is the biggest crime to the Harry Potter franchise since Emma Watson decided looking like a public schoolboy is sexy.

This new Tony Hawk title fails in every way that Activision wanted it to succeed: it’s more difficult, it’s less fun, and it still doesn’t beat Skate. Sure, the skateboard is neat, but it, like everything else in the game, clearly is incomplete. Tony Hawk: Ride is just that: unfinished, incomplete, and broken.

Bombshell isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played, but it’s among the most dull and uninteresting. From its cheesy, late-90s alien blasting plot to its absolutely repetitive action, it’s tough to pull out any redeeming qualities. Even assuming its bevy of technical issues get ironed out, this one still isn’t worth your time.