The level design is regrettably less inspired. Many stages are disappointingly contrived to funnel the player into acting out a fixed, linear solution, precluding creative tactics and diminishing the realism created so well by the visuals.

Gets a final score of 70 simply because the minor changes to the PS2 version have somewhat lowered the quality of the gameplay experience. A lot of the tension has been forceably removed by the anomalies with the lighting system and for a stealth game, if you don't have tension, you don't have much else left to be going on with.

Unfortunately, now the major problem of mundane backtracking has been remedied, the minor flaws have become overly pronounced. Despite this, Kingdom Hearts II is still a hugely pleasurable experience.

It really does little better than Tekken or DOA. Possibly time would have been better-spent working on a PS3 title rather than releasing this. It’s time for the genre as a whole to move forward.

It could have been a great game rather than a merely average one if it backed up it's shiny new exterior with some added substance. Expect to be pleased, but don't expect any surprises.

An undeniable classic tainted by an awful control mechanism that still doesn’t feel natural after some ten hours’ play, with a few fun extras more suited to the input method.

An incredibly sold game. The on-court action is on a par with NBA Live and for the price £19.99, you can’t really go wrong. The atmosphere of the arenas and the passion of the fans is there, the gameplay is there, and a huge chunk of addictiveness is certainly there.

If you have Xbox Live, then let the good times roll and be prepared to get pasted by the world's best players. A lot more could have been added.

Whatever the future may hold though, Fahrenheit is itself a compelling, truly adult adventure of rare literary and filmic qualities, and that’s more than enough to satisfy for now.

This game may be worth playing in about a year’s time when Obsidian has finished patching this clunky monstrosity, but right now, it’s a strictly average affair.

To call this game pointless would be trite, but it’s unrelentingly shallow and really nothing more than mental chewing gum. Nothing else tastes quite like it, though, and if you have any sense of fun about you, you’re bound to enjoy the goods.

If you like ice hockey, then NHL 2k6 delivers the goods – and how. The franchise mode will suck you in for the long haul, and the party games are easy enough to pick up for some multiplayer action.

But if you are tempted by it’s smooth retro, isometric 16-bit leanings and complex combat-mechanics, then it’s as good as a starting point as any in the Nippon Ichi catalogue.

The greens play far too slowly, even on the desert courses, and despite the greens being covered in a nicely implemented undulation marker when you come to putt, they are incredibly difficult to judge.

While it is playable – Onimusha enthusiasts will still probably enjoy it – there isn’t a huge amount here that you won’t find in previous instalments. And that’s it; ultimately there just isn’t anything here that hasn’t been done better by another game.

Savage karnivores may still enjoy this bloody-rare slab of fighting beef, but genre gourmets should look elsewhere.

Despite the superb presentation which, as usual, is currently unmatched by any other game, the players still feel like they are sliding about the pitch, rather than running. When kicking the ball, the contact between ball and boot is more realistic than in previous iterations of the game, but the trajectory of the ball is still very strange.

It’s well put together, a joy to behold and a marvel to look at, but it’s just a lot of never ending sameness.

You'll be simply crying out for more after you've waltzed through the missions on offer in just a few short hours. What you do get for your money however, is a solid multiplayer game and an unfortunately short but immensely fun single player game that is well worth investigating.

If you've played and enjoyed other fighting games on the Xbox or any other platform for that matter, but you've never played "Third Strike" then this is well worth a try. The fact that you also get "Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition" and the Street Fighter II animated movie thrown in as part of the deal is purely a bonus.

Lazy level design and the inability to die make the game too easy, leave you questioning why you want to carry on, and may even lead you to just not bother completing the game.

Had Evolution been released as a full price game the short single-player campaign would have been a huge disappointment, but considering that it retails for under £20 and there's an impressive set of online game modes included as well, it's a steal.

There’s no one title that makes the package an absolute must, but if you want an arcade-perfect (and multiplayer) Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, you’ve come to the right place.

I couldn't get past the bad spelling, lack of save ability and the general frustration. For some reason Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes just gave me very negative feelings.

I hate to say it, but even though Rockstar have released Liberty City Stories at an absolute steal of a price, this feels like a desperate cash-in. The PSP’s biggest selling game to date has been ported over quickly, and without a great deal of care. It shows.

The only issue I have with the package as a whole is the random shoddiness of the emulation. One minute you can play through a section with all guns blazing from every part of the screen and you’ll get bucketloads of slowdown occurring.

A great puzzle element, eye grabbing funky visuals and a nice array of bonus features gives a nice sprinkle of longevity for any puzzle fan. Well worth checking out, even if it can be the most unfairly frustrating game ever created at times.

Just taking the best points of a fine gaming series does not a good game make. As a huge Advance Wars fan, I’m appalled that another developer could take such liberties, but they do say that imitation is the best form of flattery.

A solid title for the greater part, but is not only flawed, but not massively difficult to beat. However, I'd rather play a game that made me smile for four hours and one that made me frown for twenty.

The fact that the storyline really fails to draw you in at all will doubtless be the main barrier that falls across the path of the casual player.

Some things are incredible. Some things are dull. It seems that the game’s good points outweigh the bad though – even if only by a bit.

Good, but not nearly as great as the entire world would have you believe.

Rugby 06 just doesn't begin to fix those flaws and the addition of a very few new features, coupled with possibly the worst commentary I've heard in a sports game for a long time, mean that the game just doesn't do enough.

The single player experience is good enough to practice on before you go into battle with your friends, but the battle itself is where the action is at.

A bit of a mixed bag. Astounding presentation, some very clever innovations (such as "Warp Speed" as standard on a 1940's aeroplane) and some very slick flight action is broken up by slowdown and a feeling that you've seen it all before.

On one hand, SingStar owners will love the new tracks but will hate the fact that there are absolutely no new features to be had – so we’re looking at a five or six out of ten. For gamers who haven’t played SingStar and don’t own the game, we’re looking at an eight or a nine. I fall into the former category, and I’m pretty sure that most people will too.

If you liked the "Codename: Panzers" or "Sudden Strike" series, you’ll love Rush for Berlin. It’s a challenging and fun game with some real highlights and nice surprises in most levels.

Feels like a very short game. The extras, as I mentioned, will serve as a tasty bonus once you've completed the main game, but get dull fairly quickly.

To enter the racing genre successfully, you need to have some boiling hot IP, promotion that would make EA jealous, or some gameplay twist so innovative that the next bored developer will rip you off instead of vice versa. Jak X has none of those.

The attention to detail in Yakuza is extraordinary but the overall effect is like getting everything you wanted for Christmas and not being allowed to play with it.

What surprises me about Top Spin 2 is exactly how accurately it resembles a real game of tennis.

Petroglyph have done a nice little job on expanding what was already a good game. Granted it isn’t the same as all the other RTS games out there, but isn’t that what you want – a little diversity? If the first game left you wanting more, which it certainly did for me, Forces of Corruption will most certainly fill a void in your Star Wars craving.

The occasionally dodgy AI, the god-awful music and the camera grumbles make Blitzkrieg 2 feel a little rough around the edges, and when you’re competing against strategy games like THQ’s seminal "Dawn of War," you can’t afford that.

Kill stuff, level up, and do it all over again. Whether the endless repetition is a good thing or not really depends on your threshold for endless button-mashing and levelling-up, since there’s really nothing else to the game.

When you’re on the fifth one in the series and it doesn’t play all that different to the first one, it’s probably time to stop. That’s not to say that Ace Combat Zero is a bad game, it’s just that you’ve seen it all before, done it all before, and got the t-shirt.

It's a game trapped in the past. Not the 80's as such, but in a time long before GTA showed the world what spatial freedom was all about. Freedom is a word that Radical has toyed with, not exploited. Ergo, in the case of Scarface, the world is never truly yours.

The combat system is as well done as anyone could ask for and is enough to make you play again and again. Unfortunately, the sections involving Octavianus’ are only punctuated with such pleasures, generally coming across as uninspired and fairly clumsy.

Some less "hardcore" players will find themselves frustrated to a fault, as Tails falls into a pit of spikes for the hundredth time, but if you can put up with the heartbreak, harking back to ten years ago can be great fun.

Overall, this is a none too shabby collection. The decision to buy will depend on your desire to have a true arcade version of the games and how sentimentally attached you are to each title.

Good, but ultimately a shallow experience.

The soft-focus haze of the original has inevitably suffered due the PS2’s lack of hardware anti-aliasing and indeed, the watery recreation here simply makes the low-res textures and dull palette look muddy and indistinct.

Any action/adventure fan is looking at a fairly solid proposition here, but don't be surprised if the beauty of the game isn't enough to push those feelings of deja vu and boredom to the back of your mind.

A terrible shame and no mistake. Just a little variation in the missions would have been enough to send the game into the upper echelons of greatness. As it stands, you’re looking at a massive amount of style over not a great deal of substance.

Indeed, Polarium isn’t so much about your stylus skills, rather your ability to create continuous paths on the screen to change as many blocks to the correct colour in one move as possible.

The development team have gone all out in the tension stakes and made the game into one of the most palm-moistening titles available for the Xbox today, but the lack of AI and some incredibly shoddy graphical work takes off a considerable amount of sheen.

You can overlook the sloppy graphics, the poor narrative and the occasional rudimentary puzzle, because the design of Penumbra sometimes reminds you how inspired it is, offering the player some genuinely interesting puzzles in a properly spooky setting.

The bottom line is if you can put up with some quirky controls and are a massive fan of the originals then this is probably worth a look. However, if you are a purist and perhaps have a favourite Metal Slug outing, then you should wait for it to appear on the Virtual Console.

The cracks show very clearly after the game drags you in by providing a trouble-free first mission, and they are enough to completely kill the game for anyone who only has a passing interest.

UGAG can very comfortably be compared to a Rubik’s Cube – it isn’t very pretty or enticing, it’s just an extremely straightforward, ball-bustingly hard challenge. It almost deserves two separate scores. If you like a challenge, then add [30] more points to my final score. If you prefer a bit more of an easier time, then detract [50].

For general fans of racing, there are many, many titles available that will satiate your need for speed better than this effort. Not a tragic attempt, but at the same time, IndyCar Series 2005 is as close to average as they come.

At times, things look great and play well, but this is all too rare. For the majority of your playing time, you'll be doing the same things over and over again, whilst wandering through what's fast becoming the stock set of urban environments.

Players that are new to the KOEI party will undoubtedly feel overwhelmed in the first mission, stunned in the second mission, and then ultimately bored by the time that missions five and six rear their blood-stained heads.

A testimony to computer gaming brilliance crippled by a premature release.

What can't be overlooked though, is the fact that the game started out as a technical demo to show off what the DS can do. Since then, little has been done to turn it into a fully fledged game.

The seemingly simple process of having a working camera and an enemy lock-on system has been neglected and as a result we’re left with a ‘nearly’ title – one of those ‘it could have been really good’ situations.

Scaler was never going to set the gaming world alight, but if you're looking for something to while away a few more of those cold winter hours, you could do much, much worse.

You can’t help but feel that this is the type of game perfectly suited to the DS; inventive, addictive and something quite refreshing – a genre injected with a new lease of life on a new platform. It won’t take you long to complete Another Code, but the nature of the game mechanic will ensure you will enjoy doing so.

As far as racing games go, Full Auto’s arcade handling provides a welcome change to the rigours of the superb "Project Gotham Racing 3," but the slowdown and – in some cases – downright bugginess means that it won’t ever take you to gaming nirvana.

A fair game that tries to do a little too much. The puzzle, platform and racing genres are all represented as advertised, but none of them are pulled off well enough to provide a particularly engaging experience.

You'll not appreciate the "on-rails" feeling that Killzone provides. You will appreciate the wonderful graphics and score that ' barring the enemy voices ' is one of the best I've heard in a long while.

If you aren’t a Dragon Ball Z fanatic, then you’re pretty much looking at a very average beat ‘em up with some pretty graphical effects and a few aerial manoeuvres. If you are a fan, then I have a feeling that this will fill a portable gap, but certainly not for long. Badly flawed in places, but not a terrible way to pass the time.

I really wanted it to work, and continued in the vain and unfounded hope that it'd all come good at some point. It doesn't.

Shoots for the stars but barely breaks orbit.

PQ is but a one-trick pony. It does what it says on the box and very little else. Your brain will get a workout, but 30% of the time it’ll be a practical one as per the title, with the other 70% being used to think of other games you could be playing on your PSP. Original yes, fun…not so much.

If you come into Enchanted Arms looking for something as epic as the Final Fantasy series then there’s a hefty chance you’ll leave disappointed. That’s not to say this is a bad game at all. Enchanted Arms plays like most would expect - an average RPG. Nothing more, nothing less.

Despite the intervention of the US Marines, there are some glaring flaws, which have somehow been overlooked.

It looks old, it plays old, the music is just annoying, the cut scenes are poor, the video sequences of amateur re-enactors, and the sound doesn’t utilize modern systems like EAX.

World Poker Tour isn’t a complete loss. If you want poker on the go, then this is a fine choice. Just don’t expect to use it as a training tool, or to hone your skills, since the gameplay more often than not suggests that the title should be World Bingo Tour. Fun and atmospheric at times, very, very frustrating at others.

There is improvement to be had here, and given that the jungle drums are sending a message that Madden 2006 is on the way to the DS, we’re hoping that the developers can see where they’ve faltered and that they get a chance to try again.

Nothing terrible, nothing amazing.

This game probably won’t win any awards for originality. But even as it is, comic fans will be especially pleased, and it’s more than capable of providing the desired bang you’d expect for your buck.

The single player experience is good enough to practice on before you go into battle with your friends, but the battle itself is where the action is at.

In some cases, I'd have preferred to see the home console versions being ported over. Off Road Thunder for example, was a much better game on the Dreamcast than it was in the arcade.

UFO Aftershock is, in short - strategy gaming brilliance, spoilt by lacklustre interfaces and controls, and one truly terrible camera.

The game fails simply due to a lack of polish and attention. You can play 9-ball and 8-ball in "World Championship Snooker 2004," so I would recommend picking that one up instead to satiate your need for cuestick action.

The ability to lock and unlock the camera to the main enemy is a bonus in boss battles and works well, but since this idea doesn't filter through to the rest of the game, there is much to be frustrated with.

Bringing your very own creation up from nothing and turning them into a successful member of the gaming society can prove to be curiously addictive.

What the game could have done with is more content and a darned sight more polish – both of which it severely lacks.

There are games out there that are five and six years old that do point and clicking better than this. That’s not to say that it’s distinctly flawed, because it runs along just nicely. It’s just not very good.

An average game that looks like the characters were developed first, with the gameplay being filled in as the coders went along.

A solid game idea realised with some weak online play and a mixed graphical performance means that there are many titles that are more deserving of your money for the 360 right now.

Graphical improvements are minor, the gameplay enhancements are built to match and the AI is still as awful as it ever was.

Unique in that it is the only war strategy game available for the Xbox. It isn't unique in joining the stacks and stacks of mediocre games that take a good idea and turn it into a hollow and somewhat tedious experience.

It’s probably the most depressingly average game I’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t even try to be good, because it can’t be bothered. It just plods along, at it’s own pace, chucking enemies at you every now and again.

Technically a poor game, but this is one time when the overall value is greater than the sum of the parts – just.

A missed opportunity. Dynasty Warriors was a poor attempt at a launch title, and whilst this second title in the Warriors series is a fair bit better, it still leaves a great deal to be desired.

Do you feel like hacking the living hell out of a thousand-plus enemy factions that you can easily defeat? Do you want to just repeatedly press the square button until you grow a blister? If so, then Devil Kings will be superb for you. If not, then you’re likely to be somewhat bored.

It is fair to say that I was completely amazed when I booted the PSP up for a quick go, and then realised that I was still playing the damned game four hours later. I can’t reiterate enough, that I never thought that a handheld FPS could work as well as this.