It may not be quite the same as owning a real table, but it’s certainly cheaper and the game feels a lot less cynical than some of the under-polished retro arcade packages that are currently available.

As a game for all the family and friends it works really well.

An extremely robust and well-featured RTS with hours of play stretched out waiting to be dived into. The fact that the usual selling point of such titles – the campaign mode – is rather disappointing interferes with how the game will ultimately be received.

Certainly improves on the original PSP game and in many ways ends up being a better game on the PS2. While it comes much closer to fully capitalising on the ingenuity of the core concept, there’s still a feeling that the series is not quite there yet, with the PSP version lacking refined controls and the PS2 version requiring a little more depth for a home console game.

What Storm of Zehir does best is in bringing a little bit of Forgotten Realms to life without going too over the top on the story.

A flung together collection of sub “Now That’s What I Call Music!” tracks doesn’t really make for an enticing prospect.

It shows that there is huge potential for games that let users create more than just a standard character – if only other companies would grow a set and let their developers use their imaginations more.

The fact that the game can be enjoyed by adults (provided you don’t mind playing through an extremely easy game) as well as kids epitomises just how strong Madagascar is, particularly as it’s a movie licence.

A game that you’re going to like a lot or you’re not going to like at all, depending on your tolerance for genuinely challenging gun battles, genuinely unsettling creepiness and genuine-looking bland industrial environments.

All of the mechanics for a great game are there, yet the more intangible aspects of great game making seem to have been overlooked entirely.

A competent and enjoyable blaster and a great way to while away some time with friends. It's far from sophisticated, but does strive – and largely succeeds – to keep things fun.

If you're just after an unmemorable shooter you can fight through that doesn't put you in the shoes of a bullet guzzling maniac, European Assault has its advantages, but to anyone who wants a decent first person shooter: abandon the Medal of Honor franchise now.

We may not call Bunjigai a classic, largely thanks to its less-than-refined story and level design, but as an action-packed hack and slash experience this game has it where it counts.

Even with the sheer volume of stuff to do in the game, there have no real improvements over the last game in the series, aside from the inclusion of the ad-hoc multiplay – they’ve even taken a step backwards by forcing players to team up in order to take on half the quests.

The package is, as a whole, rather rough around the edges. You know you’re in for trouble when even the publisher admits that the tutorial is “a pain and a little time consuming”.

Sadly what we get is some very cluttered gameplay, a nonsensical story even by Japanese standards, and not much in the way of challenge beyond that which arises from the fiddly method of controlling the tokobots during combat.

If you really want to have a crack at more cerebral online strategy, you should have a look at the splendid DefCon first. It may not have anywhere near the scope or variety offered in MAN2’s maps and random-ally allocation, but it’s a fair bit cheaper and, dare we say it, requires less work to enjoy.

Mercenaries 2 is arguably a bigger and more ambitious game than the original, but it feels less polished and less satisfying.

If you ever played Ecco The Dolphin on the Mega Drive, or its conversion on the DreamCast, and you spent some time just happily swimming around on that first level doing flips and jumps while enjoying the simple delights of the whole virtual-swimming experience, there’s a good chance that Endless Ocean is going to be right up your watery boulevard.

In the end Sudeki is not without its disappointments, but it also has its moments. Unless you take particular objection to the stylistic setting, it's still worth a throw of the dice.

The game has style, variety, originality, plenty of content and bags of fun – but let’s face it, when you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve pretty much seen them all. The same goes for a good deal of the other unlockable content.

This is not a bad diversion for a few hours, but Boing! Docomodake feels like a very short game that could actually have done with exploiting its unique features further. In conclusion, there is still mush-room for improvement.

With the amount of in game advertising that is all over the place, EA probably don’t need to sell many copies to make enough money to guarantee the next instalment in the franchise. We just hope they make more of that opportunity to evolve the series than they did with this somewhat lacklustre effort.

If you can live with the fact that there are no expansions aside from a minor collection of downloadable extras, and that, unless you’re somehow immune to the boredom which strikes after playing any instalment of The Sims for more than a week, it probably won’t last you very long, then Life Stories might make for a decent introduction to one of the most over-exposed series of all time.

The AI falls prey to cheap tricks consistently; almost all of the characters have to be unlocked through the single player and to unlock all of the drama scenes you need encyclopaedic knowledge of the series itself.

The story and puzzle solving elements work really well, but Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is badly let down by this insistence on making some clues as obscure as possible.

With a bit more clout in the technology and art departments, the lack of compelling gameplay could have been forgiven, but as it is Wild Earth remains more of a curiosity.

Overall Juarez is not a bad FPS, with its unusual setting and unique approach; it’s just not as good as it could have been, suffering as it does from some real wasted potential.