Into the Slimy Mines is a game full of strong ideas that, like the player, don’t have enough room to breathe. The card-based systems are fun, the aesthetic is charming, the effects are satisfying, and there is a decent amount of dwarven personality buried away in those slimy tunnels. But the digging system holds it back.

A football quiz game released during the World Cup is an open goal, but Do You Really Know About Soccer? has only gone and missed it.

There are dozens of merge-puzzle games on the Xbox, and Zoo Orbs Safari is comfortably in the bottom three. What makes that damning is that the original Zoo Orbs placed so much higher.

Mel the Pyramid Cat is definitely a step up from the series’ debut, yet where Mel the Space Cat’s minor improvements upon its predecessor could justify the swift release, a lack of meaningful stage design stops this third entry from surpassing its previous incarnation.

I appreciated Saccharine Echo for its high concept and its determination to go to serious, morose places. But it doesn’t have the deftness to pull it off, delivering a clumsy will-they, won’t-they romance when its themes demanded something more complex and interrogative.

Whether looking at the barebones gameplay, level design that repeats itself, or the lack of polish present, Magic Sheep contains all the qualities you'd associate with disappointment.

The result is a derivative, barely functional copycat that doesn’t deign to tutorialise itself. When every tenth game is inspired by Balatro, JokerJack needed to be so, so much more than whatever this is.

I have a theory. Anyone with eyes and opposable thumbs would have told EpiXR Games that Wolf Pack – Howling Spirits wasn’t ready for release. It’s a miracle that it even passed certification.

Unless Monster Ramp Racing drops its strange determination to only use two buttons - an accelerate and brake - it’s going to remain virtually unplayable.

I can imagine people looking at the price and number of wordsearches and hovering over the ‘Buy’ button. But Word Quest Pirates isn’t worth it. It’s a Groundhog Day of the same puzzles, the same words, and the same layouts. If you manage to reach the end of all 210 puzzles then you’re a better pirate than I.

Even cozy games need variety, pay-offs or moments of interest. Legends Aligned: Land of Order has none of those things. As a cozy game, it’s too one-note to instill feelings of comfort.

Alex the Rabbit wasn’t a big hit in our house. While we appreciated the Mario-like presentation, it was sorely lacking some important elements. It didn’t offer any challenge for three out of its four worlds, and it didn’t offer any innovation to replace it.

Alpacapaca Double Dash is not what the average person would call good. It’s a little shy of bad, in all honesty, as I’d have stronger words. It’s a clumsy, buggy, garish mess of a platformer, and I wanted to put it down after the first level.

I’m at a loss. There’s no good way of playing Sora - Winds of the Jungle, and I’m not convinced EpiXR Games know how they want you to play it, either. It’s a flying conundrum, and we reached the game’s end wondering why anyone bothered.

In tycoon terms, Baking Time is a bit of a dud. By some margin it’s the worst of the genre that we’ve played; a monotonous trudge through bakery after bakery. It’s even got the temerity to make you do it for dozens of hours.

Ultimately, it’s the controls that doomed Lara Returns to the Castle: when the basic hopping about turned out to be less than enjoyable, there was only one way that things were going to go.

Garten of Banban 8 misses the target by some way. A puzzle horror game this is not, with activities stretching the definition of puzzle, and an adventure devoid of scares entirely. It’s a big step backwards for a series; one that was improving incrementally with each release.

Any game that lets you pull on your Velociraptor suit should, at the very least, be thrilling. Somehow, Raptor Revenge can’t even manage that. It takes one of the coolest animals to have ever lived, files off their claws and makes them a bin collector. That’s where Evolution takes you, I suppose.

Apartment No 129 is a tricky game to review because, essentially, there are a lot of broken elements, and the control system is mayhem at times. But if you can somehow get around that, there is a reasonably decent, creepy game underneath.

There’s only one group of people who would get anything from RoboHero, and that’s achievement hounds. For everyone else, RoboHero is the most challenge-less puzzle game that we can recall. It’s a sudoku with only one number still to be filled out; a wordsearch with all the irrelevant letters redacted. It’s a puzzle in search of a point.

Hidden object fans, run away. There is no story to speak of, the art is a washout, and it never seems to end. Enchantment 2 Sun’s Tear is what happens when hidden object games go wrong.

I can see the appeal in making One Button Games 5-in-1 vol 2. There’s a challenge in creating these games. You can see how the designers have done back-flips to make them function, incorporating hold-presses of the A button just as much as taps. But as fun as they must have been to make, we are the ones who have to play them. And I rarely found that process to be fun.

Gridz Keeper is 25-minutes of random lever pulling and the odd jolt of satisfaction when a puzzle is solved. If we’re honest, we’d rather spend that time head-shotting undead hordes in a more conventional zombie game.

It feels like there is potential for a good game in there somewhere, but there is not enough content in El Coco to fulfill it. The game plays like a prototype or a tech demo rather than a fully fledged product in its own right.

S. Prysm Destroyer only has a sheepish answer to the question of ‘why should run-and-gunner fans play this game?’. It’s got some quirky PS1 graphics and wasp-woman butts. That wasn’t enough for us, and it’s probably not for you, either. We like a little more substance to our shooters, even at a budget price.

Ah, Love! Season 3 somehow holds the crown for the best of the series so far. No, it isn’t for interesting gameplay, stellar puzzles with thoughtful level design, or any other innate value associated with gameplay. It’s simply because it made the correct choice of halving the number of stages included.

Ah, Love! Season 2 takes everything it has from its previous entry, and that leaves it scrambling for any reason to exist.

As a side-scrolling beat ‘em up, Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is very generic, with nothing to really shout about. And as a Terrifier tie-in, it feels like the license hasn’t been utilised well at all. It is a game with little substance, and a missed opportunity.