With a rather abrupt final sequence it does seem to rush to its climax, but despite its brevity, this is an unforgettable trip through the realm of Kong.

A fun football simulation for newcomers and the best FIFA of recent years. Even so, competitor "Pro Evolution" still has the virtual World Cup firmly in its grasp.

Raw and emotional, though let down by some annoying or wonky design issues, Sea of Solitude is a worthwhile and beautiful journey through loneliness and regret.

Convincing physics have been brought into play to improve the feel of passing, crossing and shooting - a feature that brings FIFA more in line with the current simulation champ, "Pro Evolution Soccer."

Some locations are dreary trudges through dull space-station corridors, but others show more imagination, such as giant pinball tables and underwater in Atlantis.

The slow pace may not be to everyone's taste but this game is a must for horror buffs.

That rock is the rocking arcade rally game "Rallisport Challenge 2," which offers better visuals, a more tangible driving sensation and arguably the best online support ever seen in a racing game. That hard place is "Richard Burns Rally," which has established itself as easily the most realistic (not to mention difficult) rally game. In the wake of these two triple-A titles, Colin McRae 2005 comes off feeling a little too tired to remain the pinnacle of rally gaming.

There are sufficient missions but little choice of objectives, ensuring the action starts to feel prematurely repetitive.

Adapting one of Hollywood's masterpieces was brave, but it's a pity the game designers lacked the courage of their convictions, choosing to shoehorn Grand Theft Auto into the mafia setting.

But the game demands that players spend too much effort in the drawn-out process of base construction, which gets repetitive.

The arcade-style fist fights can get a little repetitive but DC Comic fans should get a thrill out of teaming up their favourite characters.

The levels are so big and detailed that it's a wonder they don't bring your console to a crashing halt.

Discerning gamers will find that this third excursion to the frontline is enjoyable but a little unpolished. It is, however, the best-looking 360 game to date.

Unlike other games of this ilk, there's no movie presentation - you're never fooled into thinking you are taking part in anything other than a videogame.

Fast-paced, epic and accessible, Microsoft's hack'n'slash sequel will entertain role-playing novices but disappoint veterans looking for more depth and innovation.

There is less humour and mission variety than in recent GTA titles, plus twitchy car handling and a stuttering pace. But few handheld games offer as much depth.

With a rather abrupt final sequence it does seem to rush to its climax, but despite its brevity, this is an unforgettable trip through the realm of Kong.

Like the film, Scarface is brutal and often ridiculously over-the-top. It uses the GTA template effectively but may feel too familiar for Vice City veterans.

Presentation is stark and uninviting but few games are this mentally taxing.

The levels are so big and detailed that it's a wonder they don't bring your console to a crashing halt.

There are many improvements, yet fans of the game's ambitious predecessor will miss its free-form nature.

Battlestations: Midway has the potential to blossom as a multiplayer game, primarily online. With everyone free to jump between units, it can become chaotic, but that's half the fun.

Patient players looking for a unique experience ultimately will be rewarded by this atmospheric and ambitious shooter.

Exploring as Sonic or new character Blaze the cat is rewarding, even if enemy placement can be stupidly punitive, demanding rote memorisation or lightning use of the dash attack to avoid calamity.

Building farms, mines and warehouses, converting resources into goods, blazing trading routes and watching your settlements grow into prosperous cities is very satisfying.

Like the film, Scarface is brutal and often ridiculously over-the-top. It uses the GTA template effectively but may feel too familiar for Vice City veterans.

Far from perfect but Dark Messiah has entertaining fantasy action. Dispatching foes in imaginative ways is the highlight.

The strategy play can sometimes feel mechanical, but budding tacticians will undoubtedly love it.

Just when you become well-entrenched in the world of Eberron, the single-player campaign comes to an abrupt end. The only way to continue the fun is to get online and master the multiplayer side to the game, which is something that might not appeal to every adventurer out there.

The game is immediately likeable. The presentation is cheerful and anyone can pick up the joypad and have fun.

Sony has accomplished its mission. This is the best shooter yet for the PSP.

The biggest grumble is that, once you have constructed a basic park, there is often nothing to do except sit back and wait for more money to roll in. Your zookeepers and maintenance staff take care of the park, and there is rarely a calamity that needs your attention.

This is the most family-friendly 360 launch title, offering an entertaining fantasy adventure with plenty of secrets and varied powers.

A refreshingly innovative and unique multiplayer game requiring poise, cunning and paranoia.

No long-term thrills unless you have lots of friends with the same consoles.

Mission objectives are not always clear and some youngsters might get lost or frustrated at the lengthy travelling between missions, but there is always something fun to see or do.

It would have been good to see the game's accessibility for beginners complemented by combination moves for more skilled players.

The 3D view tends to slow the pace of the game as you struggle to find your targets, resulting in play that's not as frantic as it should be. But aside from this frustration, Worms still has a magic touch.

The strategy play can sometimes feel mechanical, but budding tacticians will undoubtedly love it.

This is another fun, fleeting, exceptionally good-looking Call of Duty game, but its World War II theme doesn't add much besides bringing some of its mechanics back down to Earth.

There are a couple of perplexing flaws in the design, such as the inability to go prone or jump over low walls and fences, but suspend your disbelief and you'll be gripped.

Adapting one of Hollywood's masterpieces was brave, but it's a pity the game designers lacked the courage of their convictions, choosing to shoehorn Grand Theft Auto into the mafia setting.

While it does have its fair share of bugs, we're confident that with a little patching (something the developers haven't been afraid of in the past) Pacific Fighters will surpass "IL2" to become the top World War II flight sim.

Attempting to provide both satisfying big-budget narrative adventures and an online squad-based loot-grinding platform, Marvel's Avengers is an extremely impressive effort that falls short on long-term incentives (at least so far), but nails the campaign.

Just about everything in Ultra Street Fighter II that isn't 25 years old is divisive at best, and at worst seems outright lazy. None of these features take anything away from the excellence of the core game though. The portability of the Switch and its instant two-player chops means not only can you defeat M. Bison on the train, but you can bring out the machine to settle a grudge match with a friend absolutely anywhere, at any time.

The strategy play can sometimes feel mechanical, but budding tacticians will undoubtedly love it.

Though it's not without its faults, this is still an ace tennis simulation.

Convincing physics have been brought into play to improve the feel of passing, crossing and shooting - a feature that brings FIFA more in line with the current simulation champ, "Pro Evolution Soccer."

The best addition is multiplayer action. Up to 10 nearby mates can battle wirelessly and faraway foes can be challenged online. But purists might consider changes such as a hold box for troublesome pieces, previews of the next six blocks and infinite spins to be far less welcome.

Terrific fun for youngsters, while amusing pop-culture satire will also have older players giggling like chimps.

An enjoyable city-building simulation that lacks SimCity's depth but emphasises social cohesion.

Unfortunately, the game is plagued by a cumbersome camera system that takes an age to rotate around your character. But the gorgeous look of the game and the intriguing storyline should be enough for most gamers to overlook these problems.

Using the Nintendo wi-fi connection service, users can then send their designs to friends to solve, bolstering the game's long-term appeal.

Like the film, Scarface is brutal and often ridiculously over-the-top. It uses the GTA template effectively but may feel too familiar for Vice City veterans.

Nina's solo outing fails to rise to the calibre of the Tekken series, though her fans will have fun.

The quality is uneven and there are no multiplayer tournament modes, but youngsters and Sega devotees will have great fun, particularly with the music games.

It may lack the depth of console heavyweights such as Tekken and Virtua Fighter, but the playing options are terrific, with alternate stories and multiple forms of each pugilist to unlock.

While not PSP's best driving game, Rivals is an entertaining street racer that offers quick thrills.

It's glitzy, ditzy and full of glam, but it will also leave you battered and bruised.

If you wore out your copy of the bewitching original you may need to question whether new songs are enough to get you playing the same game again.

There are a couple of perplexing flaws in the design, such as the inability to go prone or jump over low walls and fences, but suspend your disbelief and you'll be gripped.

Some locations are dreary trudges through dull space-station corridors, but others show more imagination, such as giant pinball tables and underwater in Atlantis.

We all know that war is hell, but this game often forgets that games need to be entertaining. At times the missions are just too frustratingly difficult, with your soldiers facing near-impossible odds.

Long-term appeal is doubtful with only 11 missions available and a lack of online support for multiplayer action.

A minor improvement over the original, with just as many silly sci-fi shenanigans.

But if you know the difference between a Mame emulator and a Lame encoder, this could be right up your eight-colour alley.

A tabletop-style survival sandbox that you can take on alone or with friends, State of Decay 2 packs in enough scavenging fun to make the occasional malfunctioning weapon or levitating enemy easy enough to endure.

The action can be hard to follow, but fans will appreciate the realism.

Detroit wants so badly to be an interactive Hollywood blockbuster, but its amazing visuals and cinematic presentation can't make up for some really lame writing, weird performances and an overall lack of grace. But in spite of that, it can be a fun interactive B-movie.

Aiming squarely at gamers' nostalgia for mid-90s roleplaying games and hitting nothing but a vast white void, Lost Sphear is a fun game bogged down by a muddle of throwbacks and a cacophony of unoriginal, competing ideas.

For all ESO's recent improvements in general and the smart, nostalgic design of Morrowind in particular, I can't overcome the sense that the world is just less fun and impressive removed from the single-player focus of the main Elder Scrolls games. This is an MMO caught between two very different RPG styles, with the world and its quests begging for solo exploration and heroism but without the depth or focus to back it up.

Warriors fans know what they're in for. It's an entertaining power fantasy with lots of bad guys and explosions, heaps of different characters to learn and all sorts of diversions on the side to power up your teams and weapons. But for all Age of Calamity's painstaking adaptation, it lacks almost everything I loved about Breath of the Wild. It's a skin deep approximation with the aesthetic and characters the only thing intact, mostly concerned with turning the existing areas into linear bombastic shooting galleries and sword fights. All that would be fine if the story or themes were meaningfully expanded here, but they aren't.

Unique touches like the IR games and two-player competitions give this Brain Training a fresh edge, despite how similar it is to the 2006 original. But in 2020 there's nothing here — aside from those two aspects — that couldn't be done on smartphones, and that's probably where Nintendo should have put it.

Mission objectives lack imagination, and after constructing several cities the game can feel repetitive and formulaic.

The puzzles are clever and the variety is terrific, but it can be too tough and frustrating, particularly for the young audience the game would otherwise appeal to.

The innovative controls for the sniper rifle don't allow the player to pull off precise headshots when they're needed most, which leads to rising frustration.

A decent start to what will inevitably be a games series.

There's no escaping the awful loot boxes and ham-fisted progression system here. The much-anticipated single-player mode has its moments but it's not as strong as expected, leaving the online play to serve as the core of the experience. Though there are some smart tweaks and changes that could have potentially improved the game over Battlefront 2015, funnelling all your upgrades and levelling through random boxes massively misses the mark. The production values are sky high and in the moment it can be amazing, but Battlefront II's economy keeps me from wanting to jump back in.

Dark, violent and derivative, but nowhere near as flawed as the movie.

A deep and enjoyable racing game but offers little to stand out from the pack.

Players really have the feeling of being in the midst of a huge conflict. But the lack of multiplayer options is baffling and the difficulty can quickly lurch between effortless and frustratingly tough.

Aussie expertise has produced the best Spyro game in many years, but the action gets repetitive and some old fans might be dismayed by the emphasis on combat.

It's pitched at a younger audience than the usual Tony Hawk games, so the frantic, no-frills racing may only be fun for casual gamers.

The new hands-on capture system is not enough to make this an essential Pokemon adventure.

At its core Shadow of War is a tremendous amount of fun, but its good mechanical parts are under constant threat of suffocation from its gormless framework. The player's own story of an endless struggle against (and alongside) powerful orcs is enthralling, but the game's actual narrative is a boring trudge. The loop of killing powerful enemies for new loot is a great motivator, and building your army piece by piece to take strongholds seems like a perfect fit for this game, until you hit a wall and are faced with its app-style payed-for incentives.

Lacking any innovation, the best this game offers has already been done.

Pity the game lacks GTA's mischievous sense of humour and fun distractions.

While this is an arcade racer, skill still plays a big role. Shifting the rider's weight, proper use of the clutch and preloading the suspension are necessary for clearing jumps and effective cornering.

Spectacular sequences include bombing foes as an eagle and battling in the midst of a buffalo stampede. Some tasks feel like players are being asked to jump through arbitrary hoops, but it is the occasionally wayward camera that will cause the most grumbles.

Great games never really die, they just get reanimated.

Amusing multiplayer mini-games such as basketball, soccer and ice hockey are enjoyable diversions.

The action can get intense, highlighting one of the game's main issues: the unwieldy camera angle that requires constant attention.

Deliberately lacking ambition, this is an encore that will please patient fans, but also reminds us why the point-and-click adventure is now an endangered species.

Though it looks stunning and is an impressive achievement in open world multiplayer gaming, a lack of variety and completely frustrating single-player mode keeps Sea of Thieves from staying afloat.

It's not exactly taxing on the brain, but it is strangely compelling.

Empire at War hits all the right notes if you're a Star Wars fan, but be prepared to grind out your victories.

A psychedelic puzzle-shooter with serious old-school appeal. It'll be lapped up by the cool crowd but it's a little too basic for its own good.

Having to wait until the game lets you solve a riddle even though you have grasped the solution long ago is particularly galling. Players too often feel like passengers on a scripted ride, rather than individual auteurs directing their own unique experience.