Penumbra is very likeable and accomplished. Clunky presentation holds it back, and wonky writing keeps you at a distance, but it shows potential. [May 2007, p.74]

Still fun, but disappointing. Here's hoping for a great finale. [June 2007, p.83]

For the single player, though, Master League is where it's at and, personally speaking, it remains the greatest game mode of all time in any game ever. [Dec 2006, p.84]

It's deeply hilarious - as aracde-feeling as strategy games can get...It does everything it can, bar a song and dance routine, to entertain you. And it succeeds. [Apr 2007, p.62]

This odd land is worth exploring, and its meaty questline worth bashing through. Whether it's worth £18 for the privilege comes down to your appetite for Oblivion's combat.

Which brings me to fielding, by far the worst aspect of Brian Lara and the sole reason that its score is down in the 70s rather than in the mid-80s. Fielding is totally inconsistent and spoils what is otherwise a fine sports sim - one that almost nails one of the hardest sports to simulate.

Quotation forthcoming. [June 2007]

The bravest, most futuristic survival horror game since "System Shock 2"...A singularity in the landscape of PC games, it deserves careful exploration. [Apr 2007, p.90]

TDU's MMO elements are slight compared to quest-and-kill fare, but it's still the greatest advancement of the driving-a-pretend-car concept in years... A car fancier's wish-dream. [Feb 2007, p.74]

So many good ideas, but there're the cheese in a mousetrap of punishing difficulty. Proceed, but with great caution. [June 2007, p.82]

Silent Hunter 4's awesome intro movie demands immediate wordage. [May 2007, p.84]

Frequent levelling and plentiful and varied loot give Silverfall a definite momentum; the blend of worlds and the inventiveness of some of the creatures give it a modicum of novelty. This is an easy game to get swept along by, but, largely because of those serried foes, it's also an easy game to walk away from. [Apr 2007, p.82]

It straddles the abyss between simulation and arcade, and it does it seemingly effortlessly. [May 2007, p.78]

Bluntly, depth doesn't automatically mean satisfaction, and even within this very small strategy niche, "Europa Universalis II" is a much better choice if this is the kind of warmongering that floats your trireme. [May 2006, p.93]

This is a big, tight game that's just lacking in greatness or spark. [Feb 2007, p.78]

Runaway gets halfway there, but just doesn't have any soul. [June 2007, p.91]

This is the biggest and best combat flight sim money can buy, but it's by no means flawless. [Jan 2007, p.70]

If only it had set its sights on capturing the same sense of fun. [May 2007, p.80]

A cheap and filling snack of carnage. [Apr 2007, p.80]

I feel only sorrow and embarrassment from having spent a bank holiday Monday wrestling with such garbage. [Aug 2007, p.92]

Even more annoyingly, it requires Windows Vista, although there's no real justification for this: it's Direct X 9 and could happily run on XP. [May 2007, p.72]

Chaotic but magnificent bouncy fun. [June 2007, p.76]

The new areas are the standout feature and shine in a way the original Titan Quest's levels never did.

Disjointed and muddled, wth embarrassingly bad acting. [May 2007, p.83]

Shoddy graphics and repetition means that this is more of a warm-up act than a stadium filler. [Aug 2007, p.92]

All of which leaves this expansion pack as probably the least essential yet. It won't disappoint any fans, sure, but there's little to make lapsed devotees come in from the cold. [May 2007, p.89]

Elegant and refreshing. [Apr 2007, p.76]

The Mark approaches dreadfulness like a collector, cataloguing every scuttling horror in the digital world. The sound is terrible, echoing cheaply into dead environments. The voice acting is terrible, with lost children's presenters in place of military tough guys. The cutscenes are terrible, except for when they're rubbish slideshows.

The pattern of play - building a base, waging war - has ended up as middle-of-the-road as a Tiger on a country lane. [June 2007, p.88]

Another uninteresting slog around the World of Wehrmacht. [Jan 2007, p.104]

Largely the same as ever. Good if that works for you, bad if not. [May 2007, p.83]

You've played it before. [Apr 2007, p.96]

A remarkable piece of work, and a worthy successor to "Total Annihilation." Strategy games don't come this big, and this ambitious, and they never demand <I>this</I> much from you. Take command - if you think you can handle it. [Feb 2007, p.62]

It's just the kind of intelligent silliness that's always made GalCiv a joy to play, and worthy of even the most discriminating Space Miner's downtime. [June 2007, p.86]

It's still intelligent and sometimes witty. But this time it's ringing with emptiness. [Nov 2006, p.94]

A decent enough online shooter. If you really need another one. [Apr 2007, p.89]

Soapily melodramatic, inconspicuous consumption. [Apr 2007, p.100]

The worst is dressage, which plays like a Simon-says rhythm-action game designed by people without rhythm. [Sept 2007, p.89]

Ambitious, but too flaky and cold. [Apr 2007, p.70]

Battlestations: Midway lacks this depth. There's masses of stuff to do, there's just not enough places to actually do it in, which is something of a shame.

Far too little new content for your very few bucks. Ho hum. [Apr 2007, p.89]

Given the incredible scope and the devs' track record for turning out hard-to-get games, EU3's riches are surprisingly accessible. [Mar 2007, p.92]

Nothing else is this slick, this viscerally impressive, this overwhelmingly addictive.

The most enjoyable independent game I've played since "Defcon." Funny, challenging and cute, in the old school it's absolutely top of its class. [Mar 2007, p.76]

Lovingly drawn New York backdrops go some way towards rescuing the painful puzzles. [July 2007, p.90]

Enough Car Goes Bang, but not enough basic bang for your buck. [Apr 2006, p.78]

S&M mistakes 'wackiness' for comedy, alliteration for timing, and cliche for characterisation...Telltale just need to realise that writing funny is hard work, and they're not yet doing nearly enough. [Feb 2007, p.70]

Sweet as a kitten, and improving your personal lexicon. [Feb 2007, p.81]

The loose control means the precise movement required to traverse even some of the most basic levels just isn't there. [Apr 2007, p.50]

Superb artistic design, broken game. [Oct 2007, p.76]

It might well be more twitch than tactics, but Vegas is the fun, modernised version of its own predecessors and FPS cousin "Brothers in Arms." I reckon that right now you're itching for a shooter with a brain at the top of that jittery reptilian nervous system, and this is it - if you have God's own PC. [Feb 2007, p.84]

Childish, repetitive and ill-considered. [Feb 2007, p.80]

This is one of the biggest expansions that EVE has seen, with some far-reaching changes. However, I can't help feeling that it was delivered now for the sake of bringing in some new content, when really it could have waited a few months for something more comprehensive. [Feb 2007, p.82]

A tiresome, half-arsed effort. [Feb 2007, p.88]

Ultimately, Rise is meant for the BFME hardcore. [Christmas 2006, p.74]

There are times when - beaten by twitchy analogue controls, insufficient feedback and maybe just a sheer lack of hardcore skills - it can feel like a dispassionate sim rather than an affecting, involving game. [Jan 2007, p.90]

Poirot is the strongest and best performed character, which makes his background role a great mistake. Competently built, OE is too often directionless, but most of all, dull. Dull, dull, dull. In conclusion: dull.

An engrossing but overly geeky sortie. [Jan 2007, p.84]

The speed of TrackMania is truly ridiculous: you might think the idea of subtlety is lost when you're hitting about a gagillion miles an hour, but the faster the car, the better the handling. [Apr 2007, p.74]

HoAE is sweet, and absorbs time reasonably pleasingly, but at no point does it ever manage to be anything accomplished. [Dec 2006, p.96]

Unless you're already wrung every last drop of fun out of the outstanding "Combat Mission" trilogy (unlikely), I wouldn't bother braving this Winter Storm. [Oct 2006, p.87]

It's not a bad game, just a terribly uninspiring and disappointing one. [Christmas 2006, p.66]

Fails to match "Lego Star Wars" for charm. [Jan 2007, p.98]

It's tedious beyond belief, has a plot that must have been ripped from the Eragon junior colouring book and action scenes that makes me cry. And they've gimped the dragons. [Jan 2007, p.80]

For now, unless you're desperate for a new RPG today, hold fire and see if the inevitable post-release patches will fix up the leaky bits. If so, add 15% or so to the score. [Dec 2006, p.112]

It's great that it's varied, and the penguins are madly cute, but there's no sense of pacing. [Jan 2007, p.104]

Remains a pretty and obscure artifact of narrow gaming tastes. [Jan 2007, p.92]

Mesmerisingly challenging... If there's another wargame that blends geopolitics with tactics this brilliantly, or portrays war so memorably, then I'm unaware of it... The new king of wargames. [Dec 2006, p.56]

An expansion to delight EverQuest die-hards. [Jan 2007, p.86]

A smooth operator. [Christmas 2006, p.86]

RoboBlitz is an R2-D2 of a game: resourceful, charming, with plenty of personality, somewhat quirky, and short. Luckily, it's priced correctly, too. [Jan 2007, p.76]

Smug, poorly made, and incredibly frustrating to play, they managed the fearfully but not the wonderfully made. [Apr 2007, p.86]

If you can relax into the game, get past the learning curve and ignore being hit on by an ugly Scottish man, there's a mass of strategy here. [Dec 2006, p.110]

It's warm, deep, intricate beyond belief, so very funny (just wait until you meet the gnome bard), and opulently involving... A marvellous RPG with stunning tools. [Dec 2006, p.68]

Carbon manages to look uniformly bland. [Christmas 2006, p.82]

A game so monotonous, it's inspired a new word - 'tediocre'. [Christmas 2006, p.90]

Something of a triumph...Simply the best Guild wars yet. [Christmas 2006, p.76]

Spoiled by repetition and muddle. [Jan 2007, p.100]

There's really nothing that can match Dark Messiah's combat. The mixture of weaponry and convincingly cause-and-effect physics really does take first-person fighting to new places. [Nov 2006, p.62]

This promising material is all remorselessly forced through the sausage-grinder of inept execution... About as much fun as having your ear cut off. [Nov 2006, p.77]

Cynical and unimaginative - but fun. [Jan 2007, p.102]

A lazy, uninspired update. [Christmas 2006, p.84]

It lacks the stylistic nuances and gratifying climax scenes that really made FEAR work, and much of the level design is perfunctory at best. [Dec 2006, p.66]

Sadly, regular combat again proves Stronghold's downfall. Units require extreme babysitting. [Dec 2006, p.100]

The good part of all this is, the game is very rarely boring. What's happening onscreen is always dumb, sometimes infuriating and often crap, but there's always something happening. [Feb 2007, p.72]

Sam and Max's twisted world is captured near-perfectly in the art, which makes the disappointments in the dialogue and puzzles all the more acute. [Dec 2006, p.92]

The change of theme makes it all feel fresh again, the new mode adds special moments of its own, and the technological streamlining makes it approximately 15 minutes easier to jump into a game. [Dec 2006, p.106]

The interface is mostly excellent, but it doesn't properly tell you why a train can't reach a station. That can drive any player to distraction. [Dec 2006, p.88]

Age of Empires III just hasn't aged all that well. [Feb 2007, p.91]

It does everything you'd want from a pet-focused expansion pack. Nothing more, nothing less. [Dec 2006, p.115]

All in all, it's the finest selection of planes ever to ship with a commercial non-combat flight sim. [Dec 2006, p.86]

The most hardcore space-based 4X in years. [Jan 2007, p.88]

It's hardly the prettiest game ever, and the story is laden with nonsense, but it's a game with a racing pulse - energising, like the best action games are supposed to be. [Oct 2006, p.90]

Alchemy, brigands, gold management, and lots of trading [Christmas 2006, p.85]

While Tiger 07 is as good as ever, it's also the same as ever, making it hard to recommend, despite its manifold pleasures. [Nov 2006, p.90]

Repetitive, but well worth repeating. [Dec 2006, p.78]

Scarface's attitude is enjoyable and infectious. [Dec 2006, p.94]

I slept with the mailman then insulted his performance. It had no affect on the game. I spent the first day in bra and panties, even while having lunch in someone else's home. No one noticed. I can only suggest you tune into something else instead.