It's horribly awkward to play, causes genuine pain after a while and thanks to the limitations of the DS cartridge has horrible sound quality. If you can get past important issues like those then the game itself is nice enough, but that's a very big if.

Yet for all the hours I've enjoyed putting into the multiplayer, I still feel insulted by the thoughtlessness of the single-player.

The only relation to what Championship Manager used to be and what it is now is the name. All the talent left with Sports Interactive.

Beyond its shameful lack of a single-player component, which its gameplay attributes are absolutely screaming out for, Shadowrun feels somewhat unfinished, like a beta trial for better things to come - only it is a finished offering and it is never going to deliver.

An endlessly contrived core adventure filled with dislikeable characters, non-existent evolution, and a promising Wii Remote battle mechanic ruined by shoddy camera control combine to send Crystal Bearers to a decidedly deserved demise at the bottom of the bargain bin. Fish it out at your peril.

Despite the pedigree of the licence, very little of the movie's quality has made its way into the game. The characters are bland and the presentation of the narrative is decidedly uninspiring. It feels like a half-finished game and, whilst the idea has a lot of potential, is decidedly lacking in quality in its current form.

It is just SimCity Lite, and really provides no new challenge or choices. Of course, I did still enjoy raining a meteor shower on my metropolis - probably a little too much, thanks to the frustration I had built up while playing.

Family Game Night Volume 2 is an awkward one to recommend when bearing in mind the costs of the physical board games.

Drakengard is not shockingly bad, just unadventurous and frankly quite dated.

If I haven't already made it blisteringly clear, I'd advise avoiding Heroes over Europe.

By losing the open city nature of previous games and restricting you to organised events the series has lost a large part of what was fun about it in the first place. Add to that the fact that the driving itself seems to have become horribly broken since last year and suddenly you're left with a game that's relying solely on its image to shift copies.

In the end The Shoot provides the occasional bout of enjoyment for a single player but almost none for multi. It's not all bad but its design choices get in the way and forsaken the experience. It gets some use out of your Move controllers at least but don't expect anything of any substance.

It's too fiddly and obtuse to appeal to children, and too generic and tacky to cater towards the discerning taste of a gaming adult. The only possible reason you'd have for wanting this game is because it's cheap.

I'm sure no one deliberately went out to create such a boring experience with depressing backdrops and uninteresting characters, but that's exactly what has happened.

A surprisingly poor product considering all that the developers needed to do was effortlessly copy someone else's character design onto someone else's game design.

For committed (good one - Ed) fans of this rather niche genre, Time Crisis 4 might appeal, and it does offer flashes of high-quality entertainment, but frankly most of what Namco have delivered is largely uninspired, and the GunCon 3 controller is certainly no mould-breaker.

Time Crisis Razing storm provides a brief throwaway thrill before its true colours are laid bare. It's not utterly terrible but it's not far off.

Steel Diver fails to offer a lasting and enjoyable experience.

A strange game, its impenetrable combat will put off most D&D novices while the more experienced who are able to forgive (or simply understand) the lack of information will find its horrible interface minimises any enjoyment they may have.

While it's conceptually the game we were told it would be, every component is so underdeveloped, the game world so patently artificial. Only the customisation tools stand tall, but even they're of so little consequence that they're almost instantly forgotten.

It works, it's competently put together and it does indeed run like a dream on any old machine. Yet it is totally lacking in any spark and there really is an unbearable sense of ennui from the very outset of the tired looking and cliched intro sequence.

With more players I'm sure it will hold up against the big boys of the run-and-gun multiplayer world, certainly looking better than most. But without the players to fill the rooms, Warpath is pretty much meaningless.

Velvet Assassin is an excruciatingly painful, unappealing mess of a game, and its number of redeeming qualities can be counted on the stump of a leper's former arm: it ends.

While there is no denying NASCAR 2008 does a perfectly competent job at recreating the sport, it's not a good enough racer when compared to the genre as a whole to tempt anyone but the most devoted of NASCAR fans.

Bakushow is, in a way, a tough game to score. I mean, its rubbish, but it does do exactly what it claims to and does it perfectly well. The fact that what it does is quite clearly the most pointless game concept in all of history is obviously a bad thing but it doesn't try to hide its flawed plan so anyone who buys it is hardly in a position to complain.

It wastes opportunities, it wastes the talents of its creators and - above all - it wastes your time.

One feeling I do get from the game is that it is a finished title, and quite a lot of effort has been put into pleasing Gundam fans, the only unfortunate thing is that whilst trying to add in the lore and even upgrades that the player can try to achieve for their mech, the game suffers too much from the over-repetitive.

As depictions of large battles go its probably the least epic I've ever seen, hampered by an engine that seems unable to cope with more than ten or twelve characters on screen at once and some of the most soul destroyingly boring combat you'll find it manages to take a fantastic premise and some of the most visually striking source material around to produce a game that will be filling bargain bins around the country within weeks.

In the face of the political mess in Zimbabwe, the economic mess and knife-happy teenagers here in the UK, and the ongoing disaster in Iraq, the Incredible Hulk: The Official Videogame eclipses them all in making me unhappy.

It's a criminally malnourished set of events that never accomplishes anything more than a series of stale time trials that force the player into frustrating cycles of pause and restart. If that's your bag, it's been done far better elsewhere.

Heed our advice now, be yee a Pirates of the Caribbean fan or nay, and steer clear of this scurvy-infested wreck of a game.

The overwhelming feeling, the more you play D-A-C, is that what it really needs is more Star Trek in it.

I can't be bothered to go on. Anyone who buys this is an idiot. I wish artistic license would have allowed me to start and end the review in as many words.

The game is large and the dedicated gamer will be kept busy for quite a while but I personally cannot imagine why on earth anyone would chose to subject themselves to such an undertaking. With so many superior games on the market there is no obviously legitimate reason to recommend Cy Girls.

I could continue. I could tell you more about the dated combat, broken tutorial, utterly vacant multiplayer lobbies and risible voice acting. I could yet I decline. As you should if anyone offers you this title. Even at its bargain basement RRP.

Other than the music there is little good to be said about this game. It offers nothing in the way of fun, in fact it's boring and a tad irritating. The camera is surprisingly awkward for such basic gameplay and this is symbolic of the rest of the title.

Given another six months development time we may have been talking about a real treat, as it is we're instead talking about a game that fails on every level to do the licence justice.

A blatantly shallow excuse to create yet another exercise in brutality and abhorrent language. The game lacks any form of motivational justification, and setting it in realistic surroundings, force feeding an uninteresting cliche-riddled narrative across truly banal missions, and then relying on violence and blood-spattered cursing and imagery to pad the gaping holes, makes the '18' certificate assigned by the BBFC ('M' for Mature in the US) seem sadly insufficient.

The AI driving your other car is just as bad as the one driving your opponents so you spend most of the time flicking between cars just making up for how the AI seems to lose your hard won position as soon as you leave it in control which takes all the fun and tactics out of it, you still have to admire the idea though and it would be nice to see another game pick it up and develop it properly.

Coming to the PSP at a time when appetites are being well and truly wetted for "Killzone: Liberation," a game that shares a similar top down viewpoint but appears to use it to far better effect, there can really be no good reason to recommend 50 Cent: Bulletproof (G-Unit Edition).

The most depressing game I've played in a long time.

Compared to the great strides forward made by most of EA's other sports titles this year, NBA Live is an embarrassment.

X-Blades is, in summary, really just one long button-mash-fest, and doesn't require much subtlety as a result. Unfortunately the story and graphics do not do enough to make up for this simplicity - the game is of a decent length but sadly just gets very samey towards the end. Nothing special, overall; one for genre fanatics only.

Sadly, the ongoing diatribe of criticism cannot be allayed by Two Worlds' character evolution either, and although its undeniably involving weaponry, items, and magical alchemy features do provide moments of considered worth amid the gathering disappointments, they're not able to drag the experience clear of its own destructive inadequacies.

And so then, with forty long and irretrievable hours of my life behind me, I pressed the Wii eject button on Baroque for the final time. What relief! I promise you, pushing one little white button has never felt so good.

Celebrity Sports Showdown is not the worst game on the Wii, but its not a long way off. Only the SouthPeak Interactive crime against humanity Pool Party stands out as much worse than this, but by a lot narrower margin than any game should.

This game is quite clearly meant to be a celebration of how "kick-ass" the SWAT teams are, and will probably provide a smattering of enjoyment for the more jingoistic out there. But it really has nothing to offer anyone else - it's just a poor version of Killzone on the PSP. Purchase at your own risk.

Final Fantasy XIV offers the potential but for now, it's lacking in too many areas to recommend.

Whichever way you look at it, Just Dance is one of the most cynical bandwagon jumping game we've seen in a long while.

Overall the game smacks of rushed development. 49gamers obviously decided that they would speed the game out for the Olympic tie-in, regardless of whether they had the license or not. Unfortunately, the gameplay isn't anything particularly exciting and is in some places completely devoid of entertainment.

If you belong to that weird subset of racing game fans who feel their life won't be complete till there's a game that enables you to race around the sky using a control method inspired by a love of percussion instruments then you may possibly eek an evening's worth of entertainment out of this, if you're forgiving. For the rest of us there's nothing to see here, keep on walking, someone will be along soon to sweep up the mess.

A rotten excuse for a game.

It's awful. I'd rather play Rogue Warrior.

Ninety-Nine Nights 2 is dull, tedious, frustrating, and many other negative words.

A game like Hard Rock Casino can provide all the virtual casino action it likes but it's never going to provide the same thrills and spills that a simple pack of cards, bag full of coppers, crate of beer and a few good friends can do.

Personally I get a similar amount of pleasure from cleaning the oven or mowing the lawn, both of which I can do for free and both of which provide some tangible benefit when I'm done rather than just making my thumbs hurt.

A cheap shoddy cash in.

If you are a big fan of darts and watch it religiously then I can see this game being right up your street, especially during the months when it's not on the television. But for those of you out there that occasionally have a session with your pals down the pub then I suggest you stick with the traditional way of playing darts and avoid this title.

It seems Secret Level somehow managed to circumvent everything that can make games fun as they produced Iron Man. It's not awful, but its decidedly below average from beginning to end. The game is not necessarily the laziest attempt at a cash-in I've ever played, but it's certainly on the right track.

Showing a complete lack of faith in either their own control system or their intended audience's ability, Double Helix have seen fit to implement a far too effective automated targeting system which does its best to remove every last element of skill from proceedings.

Whether you'll ever get to see much of it is highly questionable, though, given that the time between starting and becoming completely despondent with ArchLord is likely to be minimal.

It's ugly, it's poorly executed, it's riddled with technical glitches, its A.I. is laughable, it's boring, unoriginal and thoroughly unrewarding.

With such soulless and unplayable mechanics slapped onto an idea that was mediocre at best and marketed to kids via a familiar(ish) licence this represents not only the worst game I've played in a long long time but the most gut wrenchingly cynical example of all that's wrong with the games industry today.

Ignoring, as is really only fair, the poor timing of its release there's still a multitude of reasons why you shouldn't spend your hard earned money on Winter Sports: The Next challenge 2009. Mow the lawn, look at the lambs or just enjoy the extra daylight, whatever you do with these warm spring days make sure it's more enjoyable than playing this.

To put it simply, if the idea of thirty very simple arcade games with no real objective other than good old fashioned high score setting appeals and you can put up with the strained atmosphere of craziness then you may get some fun out of this well presented but ultimately flawed collection.

When the only reason you're compelled to continue playing a game is to point and laugh at how badly the entire thing has been thrown together, you know that it has major problems.

Apart from the topical title, Flushed Away shares the same type of brain busting boredom we've all come to expect from these sort of lazy cash-ins, with the added disadvantage of leaving itself open for some puntastic criticism... absolute toilet.

Such a regressive, unexciting game deserves nothing but our collective scorn: it insults the medium and its audience. The greatest kick in the teeth, though? Every website and magazine will go to the effort of writing a review because it's guaranteed to provide a steady stream of traffic. Look - I'm doing one right now! Sex sells no matter how loathsome and uninspired the tacked-on game proves to be, and everyone at Tecmo obviously knows it.

It feels rushed and poorly thought through and a distinct lack of identity is coursing through the game from start to finish.

Damnation strikes you as an unconfident, unconvincing effort, and the only possible conclusion is that Blue Omega lack a basic grasp on the fundamentals.

Sadly, Rebellion's staid middle-of-the-road performance continues with Shellshock 2: Blood Trails, which, although not unequivocally broken, is so thoroughly unappealing and 'last generation' that it's all-but guaranteed a well-deserved place amid the lower echelons of gaming mediocrity.

It is a title with a dull, repetitive level structure, unforgivably long loading times, lazy cutscenes, a generic musical score and perhaps most damningly, another game blighted by the continuing curse of sub-standard Superman videogames.

An abomination of a racing game, not only is it lacking in everything a good racing game needs (a sense of speed, fun tracks, controls that feel right and competitive AI) but it has all been put together with such an obvious lack of care or basic gameplay testing that you wonder why they bothered at all.

Most truly awful videogames usually throw up some kind of content-related plus point to touch upon by way of light relief to the flow of dirge, but sadly the only content plus point evident in Crazy Frog Racer 2 is that there isn't much on offer and its all over so blessedly quickly.

I simply cannot understand the half-arsed approach that has been taken with Godzilla; I played more engaging games 15 years ago on the GameBoy. With every level taking exactly the same design but with a slightly different background it reaches new levels of repetition.