There’s nothing inherently wrong with Twisted Lands: Shadow Town, but it just doesn’t feel at home on the PS3.

There's a fair amount of side-quest stuff to do such as playing mini-games in the maid café or helping out locals with their problems, although none of it is particularly innovative or memorable. There are also loads of different quirky weapons and hundreds of different clothing options to collect. Roaming around Akihabara while wielding a keyboard and wearing a Gundam cosplay made out of cardboard boxes is kinda fun, despite how average the game is overall.

Let's School is a moderately okay management sim, which will definitely help you wile away a few hours. A lack of humanity lets it down and makes what could have been a very personable experience into another cog in the machine, taking away any individuality and losing the benefit of having the setting in a school environment by treating school life as purely transactional.

Astria Ascending is a beautifully hand-drawn game with an old school JRPG feel. It tries to keep the experience modern with some much needed quality of life improvements, but annoying bugs hold it back. It’s a bit of a shame that the story is fairly forgettable but the fun combat system does help alleviate this to an extent. With a very detailed job system and plenty of optional side content to get involved with, there is entertainment to be found here if don’t mind the grind — but as an overall role-playing adventure, Astria Ascending has clear flaws.

If you've played other titles in the series, then this entry will feel like it adds very little to the experiences that you've already had, while leaving a much blander taste.

Once you overcome Skater XL’s learning curve there’s some fun board-based entertainment to be had here. But this is a lightweight package with subpar presentation, and unless you’re so deep into skater culture that you absolutely need a simulation for your PS4, we’d recommend either waiting for this to be updated – or pre-ordering Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 instead.

Dark Souls III: Ashes of Ariandel misses the mark. It fails to fill a large, fresh environment with tangible reasons to stay there any longer than a few hours, and although the new weapons and gear are some of the best in the game, you'll want to play about with them somewhere other than The Painted World.

This isn’t the Worms game that the Vita deserves, but as we wait for one to be built from the ground up for the handheld, it'll have to do.

With the online being a bit of a bust and the single player modes failing to really showcase the game's strengths, it's difficult to recommend Slice, Dice & Rice. Against a human opponent, the title's interesting and entertaining on a fundamental level, but as an overall fighting game package, it's found lacking.

Salary Man Escape is a competent puzzler that has a decent amount of fun to offer when things are going your way, but when that enjoyment partly relies on physics outside of your control, it’s easy for frustration to creep in when the going gets tough. Add that to the fact that the game lacks a definitive control method thanks to flaws in both motion and the traditional controller, and you can’t be blamed for looking for an alternative experience.

With a fairer difficulty curve this could have been a decent timewaster; instead, we'd recommend it to masochists only.

Knowledge Is Power: Decades is still the solid quiz game that its predecessor was, but other than that it's hard to argue a case for its existence. The visual style is fun and appealing, but the format is still too light on questions and there's not much in this year's edition that wasn't already in the original. It certainly does its job, but not much else.

Parcel Corps has a quirky and fun aesthetic with cel-shaded visuals that complement the trendy, edgy teen vibe it’s got going with BMXing and dark comedic characters. However, the repetitive gameplay and sheer number of visual bugs overshadow the enjoyable elements. With misaligned animations, parts of the environment popping in and out, glitchy objects floating around, music looping, and characters blocking cutscenes, it’s a real struggle to recommend a title with this many issues.

Zombie Driver HD has many of the components of a decent downloadable game, but repetitive missions and clunky controls make this more of a messy car crash than an exhilarating death ride. You may harvest some entertainment out of the dodgy dialogue and straightforward Slaughter mode, but just don’t expect the novelty to last anywhere near as long as your average Hallowe’en slasher flick.

It's not a totally brain dead release, but it's hard to recommend when it's launching on a console that already boasts several better action games.

Panic! isn't a bad game, but its imprecise touch controls hold it back. There's definitely a decent premise here – but, much like its subject material, the puzzler's best ideas are obscured beneath several layers of sticky, murky matter.

While the gameplay ties into various personality traits in some interesting ways, the puzzles are nowhere near challenging enough, allowing you to power through most of what this title has to offer in just a few hours. As a result, unless you have a penchant for unique indie titles, you won't need to take a test to work out that this probably isn't the game for you.

Scars Above is a more appealing prospect than it is a final product — an interesting premise that's ultimately lost amidst repetitive gameplay and mundane design. Some aspects of it are genuinely intriguing, if underexplored, but simply reaching for the stars alone is no guarantee of ever actually leaving orbit, let alone getting off the ground — and recommending this experience over any other is a bit rich, even for the lower asking price.

Chimparty is fun in places, but the repetition and occasional frustrations of its minigames means it's not likely to stay that way for long. As a family game it's too fiddly to be enjoyable for a sustained period of time, though its visual style is appealing enough to soften the blows of the substandard gameplay. Mario Party it certainly isn't – hopefully there'll be some better family games coming to PlayLink sooner or later.

The tactical aspect of the game is also finicky. You can give your four squadmates orders, but only within a short radius of yourself, limiting their potential. Your choice is a map that doesn’t pause the action and is therefore useless in a fight, or a quick menu that takes up most of the screen and isn’t very quick, also making it a burden in fights. The first-person view is neat, and the ability to take control of your squadmate's mechs is novel, but these features aren't enough to shake the feeling your time would be better spent playing XCOM.

Like the drive back home from an away day loss, you’re left wondering: what was the point? Despelote laudably captures the emotion surrounding Ecuador’s qualification for the 2002 FIFA World Cup, but it struggles to craft a satisfying video game about it.

While it is hard to be too critical of this game, considering the entire project was developed by one person and a small staff, it is also hard to even call this a full game. It's a shame because its graphics rival tentpole AAA productions and there's clear passion to deliver a satisfying gameplay loop. But a lacklustre story and repetitive pacing coupled with unnecessary additions such as the skills makes Bright Memory: Infinite an uneven and jarring experience. Perhaps in the near future, given a bigger budget, developer FYQD Studio could make a more fully realised vision.

So is this an improvement over the original version of the remake? Absolutely. Tower Five seems to have done its best to re-work the experience without completely starting over, but it could only take it so far. This is one remake we really don't need.

Repetitive gameplay and a lack of original ideas drain this enthusiastic athlete of energy, however, and you'll be tired of the free-to-play experience long before you reach the finish line.

While very short and suffering from some control issues, Small Radios Big Televisions mostly succeeds in delivering a fun, bizarre adventure game. Its presentation is its greatest strength, offering moments of tranquility and also of total obscurity. It's a shame that the puzzles never grow beyond their initial design, as the premise practically begs to be expanded upon.

Rad Rodgers struggles to find its difficulty sweet spot. Spending far too much time being either too easy or frustratingly hard, the inconsistent pacing means that neither those looking for a fun romp nor a hard as nails platformer will leave satisfied. While the gameplay at its core is decent and the design of each stage provides an enjoyable variety of challenges, the crass outdated humour and the radically varying difficulty mean that Rad Rodgers falls way short of being an excellent adventure.

Either way, despite this being a much bigger, deeper game than its predecessor, it’s just not as fun.

When it's obsessing over the broken politics of Gotham, this alternate take on DC's most famous franchise promises plenty – but lacklustre heroics and writing inconsistencies really drag it down.