Put the time into it and get used to its unconventional controls and it’ll eventually wriggle its way into your heart. [July 2017, p72]

Though Sports Bar conveys a convincing sense of space, any sense of immersion is nuked from orbit by wonky physics and jittery motion tracking. [January 2016, p76]

Umbrella Corps is basically its subject matter: an experiment that became a hideous-looking horror that does more harm to the company name than good. [September 2016, p77]

Do the right thing and get spiritual sequel Dying Light, plus all its DLC, instead. [September 2016, p75]

Whether you invested in the Kickstarter campaign, it’s hard to imagine this aggressively inadequate Mega Man “follow-up” leaving anyone satisfied. [September 2016, p73]

Any good racer offers either a sense of speed or a sense of control, but Carmageddon fails to provide either. [October 2016, p78]

It’s so relentlessly odd that you’ll crack the occasional grin, but otherwise this is – by some distance – a series low. [October 2016, p76]

As it is, you’re merely left with a badly scraped old junker. Combat may offer passing pleasures, but in every other respect, this is more devolution than revolution. [August 2016, p66]

This Hawk has had its wings clipped to the point where it resembles an ugly-looking, flightless dodo that deserves its own extinction. [Christmas 2015, p74]

Rugby 15 is messier than a Jackson Pollock painting and even buggier than Mimic. Pass. [Feb 2015, p75]

Yawn of the dead, people. Buggier than a petrol station sausage roll and it’ll give you the shits for much longer. [January 2015, p73]

Lots of genuine scares to be had, but this is way too slender an experience for the price you're paying. [Christmas 2014, p79]

If you're desperate for the roster updates, buy it. Everybody else, don't touch. [Christmas 2014, p77]

Good grief, this game. Does anybody know if PSN purchases are refundable? [October 2014, p79]

Made with Ho Chi Minimal budget and effort. A 'crapocalypse now' that left us with PTSD. [September 2014, p79]

Painfully dull, both in looks and entertainment factor. Only the die-hard purists can forgive this ugly, buggy mess. [September 2014, p80]

Not broken, just painfully, awfully average and repetitive. Offensive, too. [September 2014, p75]

Everything we loath about Eastern European developed games, and nothing we like. [September 2014, p70]

With licensed movie tie-ins comes no responsibility. [July 2014, p79]

Basement Crawl is aptly named – for that's where it belongs, packed away in a dusty box. [May 2014, p76]

Getting your arm chopped off might actually be a better option. Just avoid this. [May 2014, p74]

War may be hell, but it’s not as bad as this ugly, unbalanced, short excuse for a rail-shooter. [April 2014, p72]

A decent PS3 game swung low enough to limbo under our already low expectations. [February 2014, p82]

There is no way this antiquated nobody is worth this much of your money and attention. [February 2014, p82]

Bland, lacklustre and devoid of excitement. Expect it to hit nothing but net as it lands in your local bargain bin. [January 2014, p77]

A painfully generic puzzler that tries nothing new, outstays its welcome. [March 2014, p81]

An excellent concept that's half broken. Add [40] points if they ever get around to fixing the crashes. [March 2014, p81]

On the topic of being rushed, this game was, to shelves. The combat isn’t fluid, collision detection is spotty, and we frequently got trapped in floors. [Christmas 2013, p83]

Given how unfriendly the steering is in Hot Wheels: World’s Best Driver, you should take its subtitle very seriously. Nobody, short of a vehicular virtuoso without global equal can keep these cars in a straight line. [Christmas 2013, p81]

Generic shooter whose epic bugs are not limited to its alien antagonists.[Christmas 2013, p81]

Ignore the lure of this worm and certainly don't wriggle over to buy it. This is a trap. [December 2013, p83]

If you’re yet to buy yourself a FIFA game on the Vita, then you probably don’t see the problem in all this. But even still, we’d recommend you just go out and buy yourself last year’s game and save 20 bucks. [December 2013, p80]

Nowhere near ripe enough to consume. Just a big ol' bale of boredom. [December 2013, p78]

You’re looking at an insanely simplistic sidescrolling platformer with a handful of power-ups and ‘special skilled’ Smurfs to swap through. Doing our due diligence, we road-tested this with a six and a nine-year-old. After 30 minutes, they wanted to go play outside. Says it all, really. [October 2013, p83]

God knows why you’d want to invest in this crap, however. A match consists of mashing triangle to overcome an uninspired selection of bland nobodies. Thumbs down, we say. [October 2013, p83]

In 20 palette-swapped stages you’ll need to awkwardly flap your way through rings, whilst managing a stamina bar. Horrific collision detection abounds and you’ll spend more time in the wings watching load screens than getting airborne. [September 2013, p80]

R.I.P.D.: The Game is basically Atlus’ previous released game, God Mode, stripped of its more interesting features and re-skinned by an intern. It’s an aggressively boring, disastrously ugly, barely-functional mess that will make the majority of those who play it feel dead inside. [September 2013, p79]

In the end, Pacific Rim: The Videogame feels like a trap. It’s designed to lure in the casuals, offer them the barebones framework of a fighting game, and drown them with a tsunami’s worth of paid DLC options. [September 2013, p79]

If The Last of Us is gaming’s Citizen Kane moment, this is its Plan 9 From Outer Space. [September 2013, p73]

Tries to be charmingly hard, but the design simply does not match the vision. [August 2013, p76]

If you take only three sentences away from this review, let them be the next ones. Fast & Furious: Showdown is a cash-in that somebody didn’t use half their arse to create – they used one quarter of a buttcheek. The box may look pretty, but the disc inside is like a HD update of Burnout’s beta code. Like, the PS2 [August 2013, p80]

It almost feels as though developer Terminal Reality ran out of money, right on the home stretch. If only the game was shot in the head long before it ever got to that point. [June 2013, p79]

Poorly presented and boring. Little difference between each mode.[April 2013, p78]

Declassified feels like a disappointing DLC bundle rather than a full release. In its best moments it proves that Call of Duty could work on the console, and it has some good ideas – earning XP across single-player for multiplayer unlocks is particularly neat – but it's exceptionally hard to justify how this ended up with a $70 price tag. The very best PS Vita games have proven that, in the portable market, size can still matter. This lesson has, ironically, been ignored by gaming's biggest franchise. [January 2013, p76]

In the movie Skyfall, James Bond is accidentally shot off the top of a train as he pursues a bad guy and falls into a river below. All the stages in 007 Legends are the spy's sort-of memories of previous missions as he plummets into the river, all based on previous films. Honestly, he'd be better off being totally knocked out. 007 Legends is awful. [Christmas 2012, p.82]

If you're desperate for some dungeon dwelling, get a PS2 and play Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. We know the process of eBaying that equipment is going to be a pain, but we guarantee you it'll be less of a pain than playing this. [Christmas 2012, p.75]

What the avid propeller-head wants is realism, depth and tactics – all of which Damage Inc. does not deliver. There's no dynamic damage, your cockpit gauges may as well be crayoned on, and while the controls are responsive, this game cares not for your Earth-air physics. [December 2012, p74]

This four-player top-down shooter is a one-note type of game, an ear-shattering drone of gunfire punctuated with occasional soundbites. You're on the ground, shooting guys. Then you're in a chopper, shooting guys. The repetition and lack of character kills any hope the XP system had for making this brown square of a game engaging. Play alone and suffer the AI. Play with mates and... actually, don't. [October 2012, p79]

Welcome to brown town, ladies and gents. Escape is impossible. [August 2012]

Features; criminally stupid AI, rehashed enemies, ear-defiling voice acting and paint-by-numbers levels. This is 'so bad it's bad' gaming. [May 2012, p81]

The vehicle handling is awful, the graphics are rudimentary and the soundtrack is a three-riff wonder. Keep your cash and avoid. [May 2012, p80]

It has a lengthy runtime for the asking price, but it's basically a trap laced with nostalgia, and is only fun in very, very short bursts. To paraphrase Maverick's commander, we think many of you would rather fly a cargo plane full of rubber dogshit out of Hong Kong than finish this. [May 2012, p74]

The only way this Vita version differentiates itself from the umpteenth Ridge Racers out there is the way it feels like a demo. You only get three cars and five tracks and no solo career. Want more content? Start paying, sucker. [April 2012, p79]

Trite, boring and not at all compelling. Don't even bother waiting for it to hit the bargain bin, just leave it to rot. [April 2012, p77]

[W]e put the controller down (during a 'gameplay' sequence) and watched in stunned frustration as the game continued on happily playing itself for six minutes. It's inconceivable that there are gameplay levels that cannot be failed or be changed by your actions. Even Dragon's Lair, the game that birthed the concept 29 years ago, had consequences. [April 2012, p66]

All told, Jurassic Park: The Game may be marketed to you as a new-age Dino Crisis and a wild ride, but in reality it plays more like John Hammond's dinosaur tour as it was originally intended. You're locked on a linear track and inelegantly chauffeured through dino dioramas that you'll have close to zero interaction with. The tour grinds to a halt for the occasional toilet break (read: light puzzle moments), but once that business is dispensed with, you're escorted back to your proverbial jeep on a scalextric track and the tour limps on. [January 2012, p.77]

It's fitting that the developers are called Mastiff, because this game looks like a dog's breakfast. Each mission is a waterlogged shamble through the land that time and PS2 forgot, where you'll have to re-kill the same six simpletons over and over. [February 2012, p.75]

Sure, there are some minor kicks in three player co-op, but they're very short-lived and fraught with frustration. Call of Juarez should have stuck to its guns and remained an Old Wild Western. Avoid this like you would the real po-lice. [October 2011 p80]

Bodycount is a thoroughly boring ride that won't challenge your reflexes or intelligence. Ironically, the fact that this takes under four hours to get through is the best thing going for it. [October 2011 p75]

Captain America: Super Soldier is rudimentary gaming at its worst, a tired old melange of linear corridor crawling and basic brawling. It's utterly unsatisfying. That the whole thing weighs in at a squidge over four hours only further sabotages any shred of quality that managed to smuggle itself into the final game. Don't play this. [September 2011 p76]

After the last two Iron Man games we're honestly not even sure why anybody bothered. [July 2011 p.83]

Feelplus has been so single-minded in their efforts to create a unique drop-in/out multiplayer concept, they forgot the importance of welding it onto a singleplayer game that's worth replaying and buddying-up for in the first place. And without other humans running through your game, helping, hindering – or just making things interesting at all – you're stuck playing a mind-numbing shell of a game. Or, as the case will be, not playing it. [Mar 2011, p.79]

There's a difference between a game that is wacky and a game that is wack. Kung Fu Rider desperately tries to be the former but winds up being the latter. [November 2010 p67]

Enemies are flat-out dumb. On more than a dozen occasions we left Perseus (not voiced by Sam Worthington) standing in front of a foe, completely inert. He stood there for so long, not being attacked, that he sheathed his sword and stared back at the dullard in front of him. It took 18 seconds before anything happened. [August 2010 p78]

This was an ambitious production, but it boils down to sluggish platforming and repetitive fetch quests. [June 2010 p78]

Rogue Warrior isn't a complete fiasco. We tried to like it, but it just wasn't worth releasing. [Feb 2010, p.73]

The career mode is insultingly linear, short-lived and your progress through it is interspersed with cheesy live-action videos of people giving you mad props for kooking your way through. In addition, when you take into account its sub-par visuals, a physics system from four years ago, and the ludicrous price of admission; RIDE is pure frustration made plastic. [Apr 2010, p.71]

Grey, old, and well beyond retirement, KOF XII is irredeemable. [Oct 2009, p.74]

A mess in need of a thorough overhaul. [July 2009, p.81]

We desperately wanted to give Damnation the benefit of the doubt, but everything about it just feels wrong. You need to do far better than this to cut the mustard. [July 2009, p.82]

A misguided farce. Offensive. [Oct 2009, p.75]

An abysmal failure. No sense of excitement, fear or anything. [July 2009, p.76]

At some point during the development any wit and/or charm the series had left was quietly escorted out of the building and shot. [Sept 2009, p.67]

Cack-handed. [May 2009, p.67]

Absolutely terrible. It's simply broken. [Christmas 2008, p.92]

A game destined for the chopping block. [Summer 2009, p.78]