The gamers who are all about gameplay and who could care less about fantasy drafts and eleven players a side aren’t going to be too impressed.

Spawn: Armageddon isn’t going to turn the action/adventure category upside down, but it will get the attention of its based-on-a-comic-book competition.

Just completing a single string of pots (the cages the crabs crawl into on the ocean floor, trapping them) in Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm is a long and drawn out experience, with a difficult to master control scheme and layers of strategy and management to contend with. On top of that, it will literally make you seasick. In other words, a total PC game.

Straightforward and simple even for a title of this nature, Ice Age 2 purchased a copy of Platforming for Dummies, and stuck to it perfectly.

The issue becomes whether you’ll try to fight through the hurdles (natural and unnatural) to milk some fun out of it. It’s in there, but it doesn’t seem as if it’ll sustain you for very long.

It can be fun but flawed, and fans of Worms gameplay will likely find Worms or Worms 2: Armageddon to be more satisfying.

As a complete experience, Dark Void has moments of intense action, broken up by abject foolishness.

The cover system is actually pretty good. The rest of the game, completely rote.

There’s a lot to keep you going in Rocket Bowl, but it’s sort of a one-trick pony. There are a lot of courses, but not much overall variety from one to the next.

Fans of the movies will dig JAWS Unleashed for the most part I'm sure, but be ready to fight the controls as much as you fight the angry Amity Island residents.

Crystal Quest tries its hardest to bring a slower variation of the style and substance that Geometry Wars so expertly crafted but it falls short of delivering the overall fun factor that other XBLA games have.

To a jaded, seen-it-all gamer like yours truly, it seems like a good idea that didn’t get executed to enough of an extent. A completely redesigned Vigilante 8 game with next-gen graphics and physics would be super awesome, if you ask me. But probably not appropriate for Xbox Live. This one is definitely meant for those who truly can’t let go of their childhood.

Without doubt, Fret Nice has some good ideas, some cool presentation and is a unique concept, though it tries to force too many things that make the player less (rather than more) comfortable.

Sadly we've got a game that's fun towards the end but with a beginning that will have you throwing back sugar pills just to keep your blood pressure up.

It’s both interesting and sad to see how the Karaoke Revolution franchise has paved the way for these other games to thrive, but now the Karaoke Revolution titles are being heavily overmatched by what its successors are doing.

The battles between the creatures feel slow, and border on boring. The intensity that should be felt from fighting as a giant lizard wasn't felt, and that is a shame.

The cut scenes are gorgeous, the mech design is cool, the overall art style is kind of awesome… but the game itself isn’t really worth it.

The gameplay is essentially the same as it has ever been, but instead of having only one game mode, there are a bunch of variants for you to meddle with. It’s good if you LOVE Tetris and can’t get enough, but newcomers shouldn’t expect to find a mode that straps certain powers onto different colored blocks.

Simply doesn’t deliver what Xbox’ers are used to in terms of a quality first-person shooter.

A failure to tread any new ground thematically or even current ground mechanically dooms Aliens vs. Predator to a place in the collections of only the most die-hard fans of the universe, who will play through the game once and relegate it to the same shelf of shame occupied by their AVP Requiem DVDs.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam doesn’t stray too much from the classic DW formula, but for hack-and-slash fans, that may not be such a bad thing.

It has impressive visuals and a likeable cast, but the combat and platforming felt like they were designed to appeal to 5 year olds, not exactly the perfect demographic for a game based on PG-13 movies.

It gets stale fairly quickly, but Pocketbike Racer does very well for what it is.

The fact that there’s no online multiplayer support is a big downer too, with leaderboards representing its only online presence.

A rental is definitely in order for Tecmo Classic Arcade, if nothing else but to experience many games that you probably passed up back in the day, or to beat a few of the classics.

The gameplay system is confusing, the graphics are mediocre, and the sound is average.

The whole experience of Universe at War ends up being one big chore. If the single player is dull, and the multiplayer is broken, all you’ve got left is playing skirmish mode by yourself. And that will get old after a while anyway.

Phantasy Star Universe seems far too content to wallow in its mediocrity. The story kind of lumbers along until its conclusion, and while there’s fun to be had with character progression, the plotline never really grabs hold of you and demands your attention.