Not only does Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 cure insomnia, but it improves your social skills as you will need to go out and find friends to replace the ones that don’t want to speak to you again after you force this one them.

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.

What we don’t understand is why someone allowed this to soil the reputation of one of the best FPS series of the last generation.

Despite its problems, Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle is still playable on the DS, and fans of the genre looking for some portable point-and-clicking will find themselves with a game to really get stuck into. You’re going to have to forgive a lot of minor annoyances, though.

The most important point, though, is that that unique blend of playground-style level design and narrative-driven play that was so very nearly exemplary the first time round has been greatly refined, and no longer suffers any flaws quite as game-spoiling as before.

It’s visually wonderful, technologically marvellous and honestly a great deal of fun to play, but as with many other people, we have to seriously question its staying power.

Kane & Lynch is very much a case of what could have been. With a little more time for polish and tweaking Eidos could have had a game worthy of the hype and its British Academy Video Games Award nomination (which was somehow secured before the game’s release).

It’s visually wonderful, technologically marvellous and honestly a great deal of fun to play, but as with many other people, we have to seriously question its staying power.

Please, THQ, we know you can do decent wrestling games, so stop insulting us with these annual updates to a flawed and bug-riddled game engine.

Kane & Lynch is very much a case of what could have been. With a little more time for polish and tweaking Eidos could have had a game worthy of the hype and its British Academy Video Games Award nomination (which was somehow secured before the game’s release).

It’s just too simplistic to hold the attention of any serious management fan.

King of Fighters XI is more of the same, giving fans exactly what they want and completely ignoring the possibility of opening up the series to new players. It’s perfectly balanced and intricately developed, improving upon its predecessors yet still offering nothing so ‘new’ that could improve its score.

You can play through the game in a matter of hours, including the additional skirmishes, and shouldn’t have much difficulty doing so. It’s kind of cool being a predator, hunting down aliens, but AvP: Requiem feels like a budget game using tired clichés and with dull, inoffensive gameplay.

What we don’t understand is why someone allowed this to soil the reputation of one of the best FPS series of the last generation.

Everquest 2: Rise of Kunark has a lot of welcome content for new players and veterans alike, and while the game may not rival WoW in terms of player numbers, what it does do is really bring the new and old worlds of Everquest 2 and Everquest together into a new seamless package that is going to have a lot of appeal to a lot of people.

It’s the game that shows just how powerful and capable the machine is of producing incredible games. It’s the game that at long last tops "Super Mario 64" as the finest platformer of them all. But, most importantly, it’s the game in which we can finally make Mario look like a bee.

The gameplay had the potential to be really quite good, but its limitations – i.e. the interface – seem to be borne of the PSP’s shortcomings, which rather defeats the purpose of this being a handheld game. The best feature of Squad Command we have found is the multiplayer.

The good implementation of the strategy makes up for what would otherwise be a pretty unimaginative and uninspiring game that would at best be described as a homage to a much loved aging genre.

Playing through Ice Station Santa not only reminded us, as most of the Sam & Max instalments tend to, that there really aren’t enough good point and clickers around, but also that there aren’t enough games with a Christmas theme to them.

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.

As something new, Bladestorm: The Hundred Years’ War is familiar but refreshingly new, even if doesn’t exactly work out quite as nicely as Koei probably would have liked.

As something new, Bladestorm: The Hundred Years’ War is familiar but refreshingly new, even if doesn’t exactly work out quite as nicely as Koei probably would have liked.

Removing micromanagement is one thing, but when the gameplay goes out of the door with it, it becomes a serious case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Developers Slant Six have done a good job fitting a new genre into both the PSP itself and an existing series: it was about time the third person tactical action sim made its way onto a handheld.

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

Despite being a new, full-priced release, F.E.A.R. Files already has a bit of a Bargain Bin feel about it. We’re not saying don’t add it to your wish list, but unless you’re a huge fan of FPS games and Japanese-style horror, we’d suggest it go somewhere close to the bottom.

Even the positive multiplayer aspect can’t be recommended because it is just nothing new. At around six hours to play through, and with only a moderately intriguing storyline to follow, this is about as thin as F.E.A.R.’s welcome will wear without breaking.

Lovecraft’s work intrigues people, it immerses them and, given the right circumstances, can scare the crap out of them as well. Unfortunately most attempts to turn these ideas into gameplay fail miserably and Darkness Within is just another example of how not to do it. The game mechanics fail to create any kind of immersive experience that the graphics could easily have supported.