The familiarity of Vice City Stories also breeds a clawing sense of stagnancy, and the lack of a second analogue stick - while patched - does leave a rent in the application of the gameplay control.

A good, but not brilliant game. It's a vast improvement over last year's FIFA 06 and plays slightly better than 2006 FIFA World Cup. While gameplay wise it's still not quite up there with Pro Evo 6 it comes closer than ever before this time around.

While streamlining the Dungeon Siege experience for the handheld market undoubtedly made sense when it was discussed at design time, the sense of depth and involvement that's been lost in the process leaves a frustratingly shallow game.

Secret Files: Tunguska signifies a new era for point and click adventures, both in terms of playability and stylistically - don't miss it!

For veterans of the series, you will gladly find your love for it refreshed and charged, once again to play through this new glorious setting and deeper plotline, incorporating two new character classes and hero customisation to keep you online and campaigning for hours on end.

It succeeds in tracing classic-but now dated-gameplay structure while offering an instantly accessible social online aspect that may well offer an avenue into MMO not usually accepted by those with more of a penchant for more immediate titles. However, it fails monumentally to accept the next-gen baton handed up hopefully by its Dreamcast predecessor.

It sets the foundation and future for the franchise on the next-generation. However, if Ultimate Alliance had better playable characters, improved customization and a little more of a challenge in places it would indeed be perfect.

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.

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.

It's the branching gameplay that catapults Double Agent above its predecessors and marks the series as striding forward into a wealth of possibilities.

Ignoring the annoying so-called 'geographically appropriate' ads , Battlefield 2142 is a title bound to please fans of the series.

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.

Space Empires V is a strange game, bursting with a massive expansiveness in terms of play, but let down by an unsupportive structure that newcomers to the series are likely to find off putting.

Gun is simply fun, allowing you to live out all your cowboy fantasies (no, not those ones) and feel like you really are an old west gunslinger.

A game that fails to truly engage on any level, producing an underwhelming mix of the RPG, action and adventure genres all wrapped up in adequate if slightly retro visuals.

It does not do anything wrong but then it does not really do anything right, or to a noticeable degree. What could have been a killer IP for the DS, one that could have possibly rivalled Nintendo's own for some big sales, is not really flying or even "falling with style". It simply falls.

God Hand will be shunned by a lot of people who'll cite the poor graphics, alarmingly retro game design and what appears on the surface simplistic combat. But for the select few who 'get it' and have a soft spot for such things or are willing to take a chance God Hand will be loved unashamedly and held up as an example of what can be made of an aging genre when refined to its purest form by skilled developers.

Scarface delivers on nearly every front, from its varied and excellent soundtrack overseen by Jay-Z, to its strong characterization, stylized violence, outrageous swearing, and engaging progress.

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.

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 gameplay has its strengths, but as a whole it's hard not to be irritated by the ineptitude on display at times.

The frenetic immediacy of the uprisings and the power of their resulting fire fights is thoroughly entertaining as well as graphically hard hitting - despite the obvious "Far Cry" similarities. The sense of absolute speed when behind the wheel (or controls) of some of the game’s more ‘beefy’ land and sea vehicles is always thrilling.

Paraworld is more than worthy of getting hold of, certainly if you fancy a taste of dino action but don't quite know where to start the search for time-travelling warp gates.

The PS2 is still clearly still capable of impressing in the graphics department as games like Okami and God of War 2 have proved, TFatF by comparison looks like it's from a different generation entirely, one where blurry low detail was the norm.

Okami is nothing short of an artistically inspired gaming masterpiece.

It would have been forgivable to exaggerate the gameplay in places in order to make it more entertaining. But The Godfather is a game for the purists and in order to please it has to feel genuine, The Godfather certainly is.

It should appeal to both the veteran King of Fighters fan and the newcomer alike, although for a purer King of Fighters experience the fanatics among us may be better served by King of Fighters XI which is being released at the same time.

The models and textures are very low rate, the enemy AI knows only to attack or run and the gameplay - despite having added a couple of additions - is very stale.