Humour doesn't work. [June 2010, p.86]

Matters are made worse by the pre-2003 3D models, the atrocious voice acting, and the shocking writing. [Sept 2008, p.77]

The whole thing is an abomination. [Aug 2009, p.73]

Paying money for something like this shameless and undercooked feels like shaking the hand of the guy who's shagging your wife. [May 2007, p.76]

While it lacks the charm and cleverness of the "Broken Sword" games, it retains the compelling one-more-chapter allure of the novel. [Aug 2006, p.83]

That the developers have endeavoured - and succeeded - in modelling the social turmoil of the period makes this a unique, rewarding, and dense experience that demands dedication and will reward players with weeks, if not months, of unique historical wargaming. [Sept 2006, p.80]

The plot is incoherent, with the panache of a 12-year-old's erotic Harry Potter fiction and the finish of a turd laced with pipe cleaners and glass. [Feb 2008, p.89]

It's the least fun I've had since I had a catheter fitted during a spell in the hospital. [May 2008, p.82]

Avoid. [Nov 2008, p.75]

A very lacklustre package. [Sept 2006, p.72]

Unless my brain is being fried by professor Xavier's Cerebro machine, I quite enjoyed X-Men: The Official Game. [Aug 2006, p.81]

It's choked by its own clumsy presentation and inability to develop its own ideas. [July 2007, p.83]

Clutch isn't worth the money. [Nov 2009, p.77]

Aaaaaaagh! [Oct 2009, p.72]

It's got too many issues to recommend it. [Oct 2010, p.]

It has nothing to offer that we haven't already seen in a thousand other hack-and-slash adventures. [Feb 2007, p.82]

Warriors Orochi never rises above simple hack-and-slash, but is fun, visceral and silly, with daft voice acting and Asian techno-jazz. [June 2008, p.83]

Sadly, ten years on, Hospital Tycoon has added nothing new to "Theme Hospital's" stellar gameplay and ends up feeling, a bit like its subject, cold and clinical. [Aug 2007, p.75]

It's mostly bland, somewhat interactive and slightly confusing. An improvement, then. [Oct 2007, p.75]

Mad Doc needs to do the full makeover in the expansion. [Jan 2008, p.72]

Entirely average. [Feb 2009, p.83]

Just because this game isn't as cynical as "The Godfather's" art-slashing antics, doesn't mean it's any good - it's with great regret I have to say it's not. [Nov 2006, p.74]

The script and the acting is great, but the imagination going into the levels is hugely lacking. [Oct 2006, p.78]

The game is tedious from start to end. [Sept 2009, p.74]

The handling is fairly woolly and there's no real sense of speed, but there's probably 20 quid's worth of fun.

This content pack really is unmitigated bum. [Sept 2007, p.82]

It hangs together. [Oct 2008, p.63]

Bad everything. [Feb 2010, p.78]

At its most unimaginative and ill-executed. The controls are faintly cumbersome, the camera a wild, mindless beast, the visuals dour, the combat tedious. [Dec 2006, p.91]

MKA's unresponsiveness and emptiness gives it the air of an MMO that was canned and crammed into a single-player format, or was designed for the soloing MMO player. [Jan 2007, p.82]

Tedious missions. [June 2010, p.88]

Any sense of believability is quickly shattered the moment you shoot an enemy. The gargling that emerges from your TV sounds as though it was obtained by someone with gastroenteritis taping a mic to the inside of their toilet.

Unexciting...Unrewarding...Uninteresting... Ungood. [Aug 2007, p.82]

There's simply no reason to play Dreamlords. The RTS is a shallow, boring experience, and the Web interface is a jerky, abysmal joke of an attempt at an MMO. Don't touch this even with your longest of sticks. [May 2007, p.83]

I honestly feel like I should donate some money to charity after having paid for such a nasty little swindle of a game. [Mar 2008, p.76]

Rarely have I come across a set of RTS missions as mercilessly unforgiving as these. [Sept 2008, p.72]

Horrifically dated graphics, a sparse online population, tedious gameplay, and unfathomable online interface and a lack of progressive challenge. [Sept 2007, p.75]

An insult to both fans, and the creators of the show, and serves as a lesson for developers on how not to treat licensed material. [Feb 2008, p.78]

It's just a dull succession of (il)logic puzzles, stuck on an ugly, incomprehensible hub. [Dec 2007, p.80]

Championing pre-rendered backgrounds in this day and age immediately makes Neverend feel dated, and the gameplay does little to lift that 'samey' feeling. Despite its decent character models and combat system, there are plenty of other RPGs far more worthy of your time.

It's so lazily developed, so utterly devoid of creativity and verve, that it's not even worth giving half a chance. [Jan 2008, p.84]

Lumbering and zombified. [Aug 2010, p.89]

SunAge is a terrible RTS, lacking definition, originality, or fun, wrapped in a half-arsed story. Don't even think about it. [Mar 2008, p.82]

The maps are boring, units weedy, AI absent, trooper non-responsive, graphics dire, sound effects pathetic, music repetitive, resource gathering system incomprehensible, and the storyline, as mentioned, is woeful. [Aug 2009, p.75]

A farily well done RTS that suffers from a few problems that put you off, like banging your teeth on a sausage gristle. [Aug 2006, p.77]

The only things you'll get out of Stormrise are a headache and a stress-related heart attack from trying to select a unit. [June 2009, p.66]

It ends up being a fun MMO romp for casual players and a rich PvP hamster wheel if you're sitting out there with an axe to grind. [Christmas 2006, p.84]

Stranger looks remarkably terrible and plays worse. The game is just hideously optimised...Stranger takes the fantasy RTS genre backwards before breaking it. [Apr 2006, p.81]

A massive pile of crap. [Feb 2007, p.80]

Damnation is so deeply generic and boring, so it gets the sort of mark that it deserves. [Aug 2009, p.71]

A general lack of polish that makes me wonder if NovaLogic even care about the games they make any more. [Dec 2009, p.74]

The problem's with the lack of inspiration or effort. [Christmas 2006, p.81]

If you want something to put on the box, Mr. Marketing Man, try this: "This is so bad, it is like beating old ladies to death with hammers." [May 2009, p.77]

Criminal lack of story. [June 2008, p.76]

It's still ploddingly adequate in an unsurprising way, but the faults are just too many. [Sept 2006, p.72]

The level of professionalism in this game can be summed up by the fact that they haven't even bothered to translate all the text. [Oct 2008, p.73]

Painful in so many ways. [Jan 2010, p.74]

The bottom line is that these events, while fairly dreary in reality, simply have no place in a game. For all its production values and official licence, ultimately you'd have a more interactive experience playing with a yoyo while watching the Winter Olympics on the telly.

Unadulterated shite of almost the lowest possible order. And yet Ubisoft have the gall to charge 20 f***ing quid for it! [July 2009, p.76]

Even at its bargain price, MOB is frankly appalling. [July 2009, p.73]

The glass isn't 'half empty,' it isn't even 'not full.' It's a soundless, hateful asphyxiating void. [Oct 2007, p.74]

A great hulking sh.t. [Oct 2008, p.74]

Combat though, is miserable. [Aug 2008, p.73]

Still, it's better than any of Ugh Boll's films. [Sept 2009, p.72]

Ridiculously short. [Mar 2010, p.76]

An unpolished, bland mess of a game that doesn't deserve a single megabyte of your hard disk space...It ends up looking like shit as well as playing like it. [Mar 2007, p.68]

Make no mistake, this game is two oversized coal sacks of crap - but The Mark has a redeeming hilarity. [Apr 2007, p.68]

A distinctly shoddy game - iffy controls, rubbish bear fights, dull levels and gameplay obsessed with balancing, jumping and the most inane rhythm action ever devised. [Mar 2008, p.84]

For 30 minutes of so, you'll be having a strange amount of fun. [Aug 2009, p.76]

The in-game text, when comprehensible, looks like a toddler wrote it, the sounds don't match up to the visible actions and the voiceovers are awful, disjointed and mediocre. [Aug 2006, p.84]

Let's face it: this is a Tycoon game where you control three numbers. It is, in short, a turd of a game. [Sept 2008, p.69]

Plays a bit like "Psychonauts," but lacks any and all of that game's wonderful charms. [July 2009, p.76]

Lengthy load times, dated visuals, and obtuse interface and an unnecessarily decentralized recruitment system. [Dec 2009, p.73]

Overwhelmingly unremarkable. [Nov 2006, p.84]

This is a marketing bullet, heading straight for the impressionable brains of your child/wife/mother/effeminate brother (delete as applicable) - and possibly even your own pocket. Avoid it. [Aug 2006, p.77]

The interface is so abysmal you'll want to tap out within minutes. [June 2007, p.89]

From now on, every "Stuff" pack you release will be scored one per cent lower than the previous "Stuff" pack, until you stop making them. This isn't even funny any more. [Jan 2007, p.73]

Once the armies swell in size, the laborious job of shuffling them around the battlefield is like shovelling coal. [Oct 2006, p.65]

Roma Victor is one of the most staggeringly lacklustre and awkward-to-play MMORPGs ever made. [Oct 2006, p.80]

Send him (and the game) to the dogmeat factory. It's the most humane thing you could do. [Oct 2007, p.87]

Deal or No Deal is a monstrosity - an unforgivable mess of arse-lint with less value than your average free flash game, as it has no real "game" to speak of beyond the arbitrary picking of boxes. Giving this piece of heinous excrement anything but a snide, cruel lambasting would be too generous. [Mar 2008, p.79]

It's too hard to be any fun. Not hard in a challenging way - more in a stupid, dull way that has EASY opponents refusing to shoot, and HARD opponents taking perfect cover and sniping you from the moon. [July 2007, p.84]

All good, except for one very stupid omission - no online multiplayer. [June 2007, p.72]

For most, wrestling with Battlefront's sprawling intricacies will be an approximation of hell, but for some it will be a strategy-bong heaven. [June 2007, p.74]

Sure, the emphasis on tactics and cover etc make it slower than today's bells-and-whistles RTSs, but the time you get to think makes it one of the cleverest. Some games just don't seem to get tired with age. Chess and Close Combat are among them. [June 2007, p.79]

Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm makes everyone behind it look like absolute bastards. [Oct 2008, p.69]

It's very tactical, it's highly polished and I can pretty much guarantee you've never played anything quite like it. [Oct 2007, p.86]

These animals are not that easy to deal with. [Jan 2008, p.87]

Smells like teen sh.t. [Feb 2008, p.88]

Controlling the horse is a rather troublesome thing on the keyboard, and there's no option to use a gamepad. [Mar 2008, p.82]

An inferior, dated FPS mess, a poor man's "Quake III" that borrows heavily from the illustrious classic and copies it with shocking ineptitude. [Apr 2006, p.80]

It's strangely hypnotic. [Dec 2008, p.74]

The mere thought of booting up Hour of Victory ever again is making my balls hurt. [May 2008, p.84]

Its nauseating, greased-pig feel makes it devoid of fun and vlaue. [Sept 2008, p.68]

A slightly alienating, yet eventually rewarding, game that lets you create your own levels. [Sept 2008, p.70]

I have considered the benefits and cost of this pack, and settled on a representative numberical value. [Sept 2008, p.73]

While Pipe Mania is a pretty good remake, shelling out 20 quid when you can play perfectly good Java-based versions for nothing online is simply money down the drain. [Dec 2008, p.77]

So why have I played it all morning? [Dec 2008, p.70]