Treyarch have done a commendable job with the single-player in such a tough development cycle, that just managing to make a multiplayer mode that improves upon Finest Hour's is a fantastic achievement.

The tweaks to the existing feature set and gameplay have certainly raised its game and will make you feel like you are close to experiencing a real football match.

Republic Commando does so much right – the squad-based elements do enough to add another dimension to the game without bogging down the action; the Star Wars presentation is executed brilliantly; the action and set-pieces have been designed and paced superbly.

Little touches like the ambient music and subtle film grain only add to the unsettling atmosphere, which is utilised via various plot devices almost as a weapon against your senses. Definitely worth a look if you like those kind of bleak horror movies that make you sleep with the light on.

In the grand scheme of things, we’d probably rate GTA: Liberty City stories as being somewhere between GTA III and GTA: Vice City. That should give you some level of guidance when considering whether or not the £20 asking price is worth it.

2K Sports insistence on cramming new features in every instalment of this long-running series is admirable, but hopefully next time they will focus on tweaking what they currently have and making the offensive side of the game more fun.

Although RotWK certainly doesn’t justify rushing out and purchasing the original if you don’t already have it, BfME2 fans who can put up with the micromanagement and fancy some new challenges will find plenty to love here.

While it’s not worth upgrading from the Xbox version for the graphics improvements alone, the fact that you essentially get the expansion for free does help make up for the feeling that the game isn’t as next-gen as it really ought to be.

The PSP port in itself is not perfect, but with 6 and a bit full games, all of which are pretty damned well polished side-scrolling shooter experiences, it comes pretty easy to recommend to anyone looking for a bit of classic coin-op action.

To its credit, Escalation has certainly improved the Joint Ops experience – just not tremendously.

Perhaps more of a focus on cerebral maze-like levels and less on the ‘gotcha’ high-wire acts might have helped this unique game series reach its full potential.

It really (for us, at least) holds very little appeal when by yourself. With a group of friends though, it’s easily the most fun you can have with a PS2.

Medal Of Honour: Airborne may well be as gung-ho as a cigar-chomping drill instructor and as shallow as the pool of blood left by one of your expendable buddies, but it doesn’t profess to be anything more than an exciting and enjoyable week’s worth of FPS action.

What the series needs is not useless gimmicks and badly rehashed game mechanics, but good, old-fashioned racing fun. We don’t need customisable bells and whistles; what gamers really want is a Need for Speed that uses its strengths, and doesn’t try to shoe-horn in its weaknesses for the sake of bullet points on a press release.

It may not be the most technically accomplished game to have graced our screens, but the plain and simple fact is that it’s so much fun to play, it’s almost indescribable.

It’s Madden, which is no bad thing, but it’s a case of same stuff, different year.

With so many fast-paced action games clogging up Xbox Live Arcade, a slower-paced puzzler like Switchball really stands out. As to whether or not that’s a good thing, well it’s really up to you.

While not a bad game, our overriding feeling while playing Lego Indiana Jones was that we really wanted to play through Lego Star Wars again. The game works, for all its glitches, and will undoubtedly provide a good few hours of co-op fun with a like-minded second player. Nevertheless, the painful fact is that Lego fatigue has set in far sooner than we had expected it to.

As addictive as the gameplay can become, the comprehensive (albeit complicated) modding software is sure to trigger compulsion in the more creative players.

Treyarch have done a commendable job with the single-player in such a tough development cycle, that just managing to make a multiplayer mode that improves upon Finest Hour’s is a fantastic achievement.

Five years ago Yakuza 2 would have been a system seller. Today it’s just enough reason to wipe the layers of dust off of a shelved console and give it a final send-off.

An interesting and entertaining way to spend 30 minutes a day, lavished with as much charm and consideration as Nintendo has ever been able to afford.

The sound of Jack's shallow breathing as he becomes increasingly frightened is very effective, and there is nothing quite as unnerving as hearing the growls and mutters of your pursuers as you hole up in some dark corner.

There are dozens of ready-made missions and most of them can be tackled in radically different ways, which adds even more longevity on top of the mission editor and slew of multiplayer modes.

Surely everybody knows the score by now: EA ever so slightly update FIFA. It gets new stats, new players, new kits and slightly better graphics whilst remaining pretty much the same game it always has been.

A huge, lazy and sometimes glitchy disappointment of a game. The character progression really doesn't provide a strong enough excuse to keep playing after the initial joy of the combat has dissipated, and the number of times you find yourself going through the same old motions during missions smacks of padding of a magnitude normally associated with the corpulent Don.

Surely everybody knows the score by now: EA ever so slightly update FIFA. It gets new stats, new players, new kits and slightly better graphics whilst remaining pretty much the same game it always has been.

For every ten or so big releases which disappoint, there’s a relatively small-scale title that comes along and surprises everybody by being pretty good. Arena Wars fits nicely into this category.