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.