Despite its good looks and offbeat content, the process of winning rapidly becomes too fiddly to be much fun.

The latest and ugliest Puzzle Quest spin-off is still addictive, but its gimmicks are getting very old.

A cheap and nasty film tie-in that reaches a new low for Lego games and stands in stark contrast to the creativity of the movie and the toys.

Skater XL has a mid-budget price point and comes from a small indie outfit from which you wouldn’t expect triple-A polish and heft. It also has a substantial community busy designing mods and items for it, too. But unless you’re a truly fanatical skateboarder in real-life, your most likely reaction to buying it and booting it up is likely to be: ‘Is that it?’. It’s an exemplary control system in search of a game.

An extremely insubstantial Star Wars pod racing themed VR and mixed reality experience, that is technically competent but whose greatest value is in demonstrating the limitations of AR as a concept.

Despite its desperation to please, Foamstars is hard to dislike – but it’s difficult to say whether it has any staying power. There’s the expected battle pass progression trees, unlockable perks, and skin microtransactions to make your eyes roll, but it’s not as egregious as other live service titles in the same mould. In a similar vein to other B-tier online games with fun ideas (Knockout City, Rumbleverse, etc.), Foamstars feels like it’s caught against the tide, no matter whether it manages to stir up a dedicated player base or not.

A distinctly unambitious expansion that adds nothing meaningful to the parent game except a very short, and mostly dull, new story campaign.

It should be impossible to make a mix of zombies and scantily-clad samurai bimbos this boring but that’s the one and only accomplishment of this brain-dead button-masher.

A bad idea poorly realised and while the original coin-op retains its campy charm this remake is rendered pointless by the unsatisfying controls and glitchy performance.

A poorly thought out attempt to take on Call Of Duty and Battlefield, whose main gimmick is as a flawed as its other elements are overfamiliar.

An extra hour of combat and so much less, with a download that manages to undermine much of the impressive storytelling of the main game.

It's nice to see someone is making a new Pikmin game, but this half-hearted clone has neither the variety nor the imagination of its considerably cuter inspiration.

It’s clearly been made in a hurry and with no more care than the deeply flawed original, which means only the truly zombie-obsessed should apply.

Unravel the mysterious history of a dead planet in a brief, overly simplistic first person walking simulator.

After a solid few years the Dragon Ball games are regressing, particularly in this flawed fighter.

Disappointing follow-up to the already lightweight Shattered Dimensions, which seems to go out of its way to waste all the potential of the character(s).

A tragically awful attempt to revive the Dark Alliance name, with horribly repetitive combat, empty storytelling, and a dragon horde’s worth of bugs.

A lo-fi 8-bit style twin-stick bullet hell shooter whose exhilaratingly weird music and catalogue of surreal weaponry is undermined by technical problems and a reliance on luck.

The worst Guitar Hero spin-off yet with a half-hearted tribute to a band who barely deserved one anyway.

While it lasts an entertaining and fairly imaginative tech demo, but none of the mini-games will have you coming back for more.

It's not quite the return to glory Mashed and Micro Machines fans would've hoped for, but despite its flaws this is still a great party game.

Yet another downloadable Robotron clone, but one with some interesting, if peculiar, ideas.

A relatively promising next gen debut, but it’s still missing lots of older features. And even with a few new ones it’s hard to think of this as anything but a work in progress.

Like the recent and mostly terrible, Tomb Raider Reloaded, Mighty Doom uses the well-worn Archero template, this time to somewhat more interesting effect.

It's a great idea, and filled with some top grade Suda51 weirdness, but Kinect is nowhere near accurate enough to make even such a simple game work properly.

A crossover between the world’s most famous manga characters results in a peculiarly underdeveloped fighter, with an especially disappointing story mode.

Maybe Russian games are meant as punishment not entertainment. This limp strategy RPG is surely the former.

A game about fighting office block-sized monsters, where you spend most of your time battling far less interesting human-scale enemies, with clumsy and repetitive melee combat that pales next to the all-too-few behemoth fights.