It doesn’t matter how hungry you are, Cooking Simulator won’t satisfy your appetite.

Zombie Derby: Pixel Survival focuses on mobile-style gaming and easy Gamerscore collection, but is all but devoid of the most basic requirement: fun.

3on3 FreeStyle brings a keen reminder to why we love street-style games so much, but the clear pay-to-win influence stops this particular game from shining, turning it into a battle of the wallets rather than a test of skill.

An uninspired wave-survival shooter with bland enemy and level design, significant balancing issues and a real lack of replayability - you’ll only need to play through it about four times and you’ll have seen just about everything Bitmaster really has to offer. It’s a shame because Bitmaster actually controls really well and the RNG gameplay could have been the foundation for something fun and replayable.

The Experiment: Escape Room does its damnedest to strip out all of those joys. You’re not going to enjoy an escape room if you can barely see it, and you’re not going to feel the satisfaction of completing a puzzle if you are forced to use a guide. The Experiment: Escape Room is that murky, and that obscure.

The whole Heavy Fire: Red Shadow experience feels like it should be on VR, and that may well be the best way to get anything out of this turret shooter. The price is too high as well – at least for anyone to take a punt on – and even though it does nothing wrong and all appears to work fine, it does become very repetitive quite quickly.

In food terms, Takorita Meets Fries is a single, cold chip. As you eat it, you’re aware that there should have been more of them - perhaps there was at one time. It tastes alright, but it needed a little more time in the oven to be satisfying. And a waiter keeps promising that more will come, but on the basis of that one, cold chip, you wonder whether it’s going to be worth the bother.

To use an apt metaphor for Knight Quest: Goblins Raid’s quality, a doubled edged blade would be most fitting; it’s a polished, fun medieval platformer, however a combination of perplexing gameplay and level design decisions, result in a self inflicted wound that damages the very platforming foundations so strongly needed for a title such as this to work.

BigChick has big ideas. The idea of a chick-herding game had us bobbing our heads in chicken-like appreciation. But, as it turns out, herding chickens is hard and not particularly fun.

You should go into PBA Pro Bowling 2021 on Xbox not expecting too much, but even then you will probably find yourself disappointed by what is on offer, alongside becoming pretty bored during events.

With Mushroom Quest on Xbox One, we have a game that is far too easy, far too limited and far too short. There’s no replayability. And you’ll end up only getting an hour of gameplay out of it, if that.

Outright Games should know better than releasing this Shetland pony-sized game

Its vibrant art style and relative wealth of content are overshadowed by the shoddy controls. They fall far short of what is expected of a modern platformer and really spoil what could have been a potentially enjoyable experience.

15in1 Solitaire bundles in some confusing, poorly tutorialised and - on occasion - broken variants of Solitaire, which is no use to anyone. Then someone ties weights to the controls, making them as leaden and inaccurate as you will ever find.

Unfortunately, despite an intriguing proposition, The Strange Story of Brian Fisher: Chapter 1 fails to meet its ambitions at almost every turn. What results is a lacklustre experience for which I cannot recommend saving your pennies for.

Emoji Kart Racer arrives in a clutch of karting releases with a rather daunting £24.99 stuck to its bonnet. It needed to race ahead of the pack, but mostly it bounces from wall to wall near the rear, doomed by poor controls and blockages on the track. Sad face. Angry face. Poop emoji.

‘Crazy’ Athletics, this isn’t. Lazy Athletics is far closer to the truth.

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.

You have to have cojones of steel to call your game ‘WeakWood’. You have to know that reviewers and comment threads will be jumping at the opportunity to rub that ‘Weak’ in your face. But in the end, we don’t have the energy. It’d be like trying to hit a duck in a barrel, and we’d just miss with every attempt.

DEEEER Simulator is wacky, off-the-wall and intriguing to begin with. However, it’s a jumbled cocktail of ideas which run short quickly. After an hour or two, you'll struggle to find reasons to jump back in.

It is easy to look back on your youth with rose-tinted glasses, but what makes it so fascinating is the fact we can’t relive the past. Commander ‘85 on Xbox One is so caught up on this that it fails to see the flaws in front of it. Whilst the idea is certainly worth exploring, Commander ‘85 itself is probably not.

Sadly, Monstrum on the Xbox One is a poor attempt at an interesting concept. The abandoned ship isn’t the most unique setting for a horror game but being pursued by a bloodthirsty monster should provide at least some tension. Instead it is a laborious plod through samey corridors where sometimes being caught by the monster is preferable than having to perform the same objectives over and over again just to escape.

Step back and consider what PAW Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls is offering, and there’s only one conclusion: it’s just not good enough. You will be consistently apologising to your kid that, yes, you will have to reset the whole level and start again, as it’s a festering bin of bugs.

Argonauts Agency 6: Missing Daughter - an impossible challenge for any level designer. Can you create something new with no new materials? Can you deliver something fresh when there have been five previous games that have used the same ingredients as you? The answer is, inevitably, no. The problem was in the question. There was no way this was going to be anything but a chore.

890B is a very short experience, with an average playtime of an hour, but that alone isn’t the issue. The problem is, you’ll spend a large chunk of it mindlessly visiting the same parts of the facility and engaging in boring conversation.

Delta Squad on Xbox One is okay for the price, but don’t expect more bang for your buck. You get a campaign, a survival mode and generally a time-waster that can be forgotten about in a day.

If you really want the real players and ballparks, just know that while there are some fun moments, R.B.I. Baseball 19 will likely leave you frustrated and wondering when a good licensed baseball game will finally arrive on the Xbox One.

Duck Run is weirdly addictive, slightly compelling, but far from decent. Come for the achievements if you must, but don’t say we didn’t warn you about the frustrations of the gameplay.

Masked Ninja Action is not a bad game, particularly for the price. But it’s a meagre one, and as each platforming level passed us by, we wondered whether we would have to switch our brain on and actually pay attention.

For a game as old as Cyber Citizen Shockman, it has some novel ideas such as a world map and specific rewards for completing certain levels. The levels themselves though are beyond difficult, some designed to kill you as quickly as possible; unapologetic about it.

Speedway Racing is a grim and joyless drive. It plops itself in the middle of arcade and simulation, but takes the worst from both worlds: it takes the punishing, exacting controls from a sim, and the shallowness of an arcade game.

The combat system and its associated mechanics are woefully under-developed, and the game’s tendency to use those very same mechanics in the platforming sections only emphasise the problems. Look for your high fantasy elsewhere. Mystic Fate is far too frustrating to be truly enjoyable.

Yes, Trident’s Tale looks fine when static, and yes the narrative is okay (if cliched), but from there, this one is a huge struggle.

A Winter’s Daydream on Xbox One is cheap, which helps in its extremely short length of just 3 hours, but I fear that this low price point won’t cover the expensive mistake that this ‘game’ makes. That is, forgetting to become a game at all.

If you love the professional American bull riding league then you might just manage to get something out of 8 to Glory, but if you aren’t a veteran follower of the sport, then it’s a bit pricey to take a gamble on. It’s different though, and that should be wholeheartedly applauded, however I’m afraid the gameplay just becomes too repetitive for any long term bull riding fun.

The single solution puzzles make it all too easy to get frustrated when spending a large amount of time trying to clear a level. Combined with the damsel that one would rather leave in distress and the horribly annoying bug that continued to remove all challenge from the game, Dungeons & Bombs on Xbox is an unoriginal idea that goes off with a “meh” rather than a “bang”.

We’re blessed with high quality platformers on the Xbox with a new one tending to arrive every few weeks. When that’s the case, there’s no chance that we’d give Crossbow Crusade anything but two thumbs down. Just wait a few more weeks and something more worthy of your time and patience will come along.

A platform speedrunner might find something in Dashing Orange. It’s an obstacle course for that player, in the same way a Spartan Run is for a jogger. But in our case, we wanted to give up repeatedly on Dashing Orange. This little orange was not for us.

Games have moved on massively since the early 2000s and while BloodRayne 2: ReVamped is almost like a time capsule, it feels like a rushed port, with no real attempt made to tailor the game to the console market or controller even.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance tries to do way too much. The gameplay is unfocused, inconsistent, and unpolished. And the refined storytelling that made the original show so beloved is completely absent.

Emulating Space Invaders was always going to be a challenge, mainly because some bells and whistles were needed to update that classic for a modern audience. But SHMUP Mania goes the other way. It takes things out, making a minimalist game even more minimalist, and the result is a snooze ’em up that you can safely ignore. ‘Mania’ indeed.

Awkward most definitely does as the name suggests. In fact, I’d go as far as to say this is one game that is highly unsuitable for a family birthday. But for a group of mates on the beers and looking for a laugh? It does a reasonably decent job, at least for 5 minutes.

You can give us all the choices in the world, and they won’t mean anything if none of them are satisfying. And that’s the problem in Twice Reborn: A Vampire Visual Novel. Every path we took was padded out with insufferable world-building and detail. We felt like we were in a conversation with an energy-vampire; all the interest, all the goodwill that we had for the game, was being sucked out of us.

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.

From Heaven to Earth wants to provide a relaxing zen time - maybe it could have, had the controls been tightened and the frustrating movement made smooth.

Arsonist Heaven has some good ideas, but it really could do with a bit more care being spent on the traversal mechanics. Rather than being a twisted firestarter, it is more of a damp squib.

Mini Madness may hit the right nostalgic notes, but the repetitive humdrum racing and somewhat lazy execution is a long way behind the curve.

Thunder Kid: Hunt for the Robot Emperor has little more than a gimmick to offer, and even this has a very limited appeal.

I’ve struggled with Cards We’re Dealt. Yes, it all runs fine, and the multiplayer works okay, but I’ve been left disappointed by pretty much everything else – the visuals, the sound, the gameplay and the controls. If ever a game has failed to click, this is it.

The real test in Ball laB II is not in how many levels you will actually manage to complete. It's more to do with how many deaths you'll be able to take before you switch off and uninstall.

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.

Tokyo Warfare Turbo on Xbox One feels like an unfinished and incomplete game, and while the core tank action can be quite enjoyable, it is unfortunately situated in a package that offers very little in the way of gameplay variety and modes.

The lack of variety, weird aesthetic choices and quickly monotonous gameplay is not enough to recommend STAB STAB STAB! to anyone.

Arrest of a Stone Buddha is a superficial and empty video game. Despite having some novelty in its setting and ideas, there is simply no semblance of coherent game structure or practical gameplay mechanics. It almost feels like a concept to what could have potentially been a very cool 2D action game, but as it stands Arrest of a Stone Buddha is a pretty meaningless one; one that has been poorly ported and presented on Xbox.

At its best, Obsurity is a hardcore hack-and-slash where you spend more time retreating than progressing, which is better than it sounds. But at its worst, and it is all too often in that area, it’s a buggy, unwieldy and incomprehensible brawler that needs tightening up on pretty much every joint.

Calico on Xbox is a cat café sim where you’ll actually spend more time away from the shop than inside it – rendering the place almost useless. Fortunately, the townsfolk are nice enough to have a chinwag with and have plenty of distracting quests to provide something to do. Sadly, there’s too much back-tracking through a world that isn’t overly pleasant to look at and it’s got a fair amount of bugs.

Whiskey Mafia: Leo’s Family is a Mafia adventure that is over within forty-five minutes, and you will have 1000G handed to you in a brown paper bag. That might be an offer you can’t refuse, but we’d argue that you should.

Outbreak: Contagious Memories is a love letter to a game that will be stamped “return to sender”. It takes the memory of great games from the past and drops on them from a great height.

I really wanted to like Hellboy Web of Wyrd, from the announcement trailer reveal, it looked amazing. Technically that is still true - it does looks amazing. Yet sadly it doesn’t have the substance to back up the fantastic style. Maybe hardcore fans will find more joy, but Web of Wyrd feels tricky to recommend to even the most dedicated fans.

The art style is generally pleasing to the eye, but the lack of enjoyable content means that it’s likely to be the only thing you’ll remember from the game. With an already diminished player base, there are plenty of other similar local multiplayer titles on the market that offer a lot more.

Fundamentally flawed, Filthy Animals: Heist Simulator will struggle to hold your attention - it is frustrating rather than entertaining, no matter how many of you are playing at once.

Yes there are the occasional good bits, and it’s reasonably decent fun to be able to take a solo career team on a journey to success, but at the end of the day you’ll have to be a huge fan and follower of all things volleyball in order to really find enjoyment. And even then, it’s not a patch on what we find down at the beach, even more so when you take into account the horrendous price being asked.

If you’re fond of the genre, and are prepared for a challenging (even frustrating) experience, Mars: Chaos Menace might be just what you’re looking for. However, the average player will almost certainly be alienated (pun!) by the staggering amount of retries it takes to make progress.

Windborn - Echoes of the Night has none of that trademark Aery calmness. Its entire focus is on relentlessly hitting checkpoints against a strict time limit. To be honest, the whole package feels a bit half-baked. It's a real shame.

Big on the clumsy, and low on the rush, Clumsy Rush on Xbox One is a plodding excuse for a party game. Its controls are frustrating, its gameplay is insanely repetitive, and all attempts at switching up the action fall completely flat. Despite its fun visuals and strong concept, there is not enough here to recommend the game to anyone. Give Hungry Hungry Hippos another try.

When all is said and done the only real reason I could find to suggest A Hero and A Garden is the easy 1000G.

We’re trying to imagine playing Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again one more time. Would it be so bad to jump into its roguelike loop and give it another go? We can’t muster the energy. There’s no sparkle in its miserable combat, no reward or unlock to tempt us back in. There are just so many better things to be doing with our lives. Nope.Not.Playing.It.Again.

Bumblebee – Little Bee Adventure fails in delivering a worthwhile and chilled out exploration experience. It’s very similar to EpiXR Games’ other titles, albeit with a plethora of issues which negate any possibility of relaxing.

It’s fun to explore this extended dungeon, but it offers nothing over the existing ones in the main game, where you have a Gladiolus tailored to your playstyle.

When it comes down to it, Enter Digiton: Heart of Corruption is just confusing. I routinely found myself asking why the game even exists. It doesn’t have an interesting story to tell, its combat is monotonous, its world design is incredibly poor, and moving through it isn’t fun at all.

The only real reason to pick up RogueCube on Xbox One in lieu of another roguelike is for the easy Gamerscore. It’s just hard to recommend a game when it has odd mechanics and might crash whenever a specific item gets added to your inventory.

The Otterman Empire on Xbox One does not offer a particularly good experience. It draws inspiration from Splatoon, a shooter that could do with an Xbox equivalent, and ruins most of the good faith you might afford it. The general gameplay is clunky, unresponsive, glitchy, and just downright infuriating.

Vegas Tales had potential. It had an enticing ‘choose my benefactor’ premise. It had Tuvok from Star Trek Voyager. But while the odds were strong on this being an FMV game that did something unique, none of the bets that it placed came off. We’re sad to say that Vegas Tales is more craps than high-stakes poker.

We’d hesitate to call Peepaw’s Farm a bad game, because - when seen as a prototype or demo - it’s Untitled Goose Game-lite, and we like a bit of honking. It’s got some fun jokes to share, and we genuinely laughed at a couple of them. But then we remembered that Peepaw took four quid out of our pocket as we were chuckling, and it felt a bit like a grift. Achievement hunters might like them apples, but we’d have liked them to be bigger and a hell of a lot more satisfying.

The Sisters 2: Road to Fame alternates between being awkward to navigate and fundamentally broken, which aren’t the best two outcomes in the world. We could make excuses for it and say the minigames are fine, but ‘fine’ isn’t going to make us cough up £33.49.

If you’re in the market for a super cheap, super quick runthrough in which you can gather up pretty much a full 1000 Gamerscore in less than 30 minutes, then this is the game for you. However, if you’re looking for something half decent, or a new adventure to get your teeth into, don’t even consider Chop is Dish.

I know it is an old game reworked, and many do have a hankering for the retro, but it’s hard to make a case for Blade of Darkness being the game to advance the case of the old getting remastered.

Aery - Winter Wonderland is horribly jarring. ‘Wonderland’ is not the term we would use.

Despite some good ideas, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? shows that as a full price title, there’s not enough here to justify to cost. Fans of the show will get some enjoyment here, but even they will feel short-changed by the price tag.

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.

Micetopia on Xbox is a cute platformer that doesn’t dare to try anything new, difficult or deep. It’s what happens when you cut all the flab from a Metroidvania and then keep on cutting. It feels bad to dunk on such a harmless little game, but your money really is best spent elsewhere.

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.

Crazy Cats vs Crazy Cyborgs is not worth your time, nor is it worth your money. Even at its budget friendly price, the game has next to nothing going for it bar visuals and speed of completion.

There are times when Deepest Trench succeeds at pulling players into its dark, watery world, especially when two divers are working together to survive impossible odds. Yet these successes are fleeting, and the game too often feels rough around the edges. What is an excellent concept is sunk by the game itself.

If you’re curious about retro-inspired horror and don’t mind rough edges, Acre Crisis might scratch a weird itch. But if you value polish, consistent mechanics, and coherent design then you’ll likely find more frustration than fright.

CrossfireX is a strange beast which doesn't quite fit together. Odd development decisions and a real lack of ambition result in a barely average experience which pales into insignificance when compared to its competitors and previous developer efforts.

Making a licensed game remotely must have been quite the challenge - locked into a release date, sellotaping a game together from the scrappy materials that you’ve been given. We would have loved to say that DreamWorks Spirit Lucky’s Big Adventure was a plucky underdog, overcoming those issues to create something that fans and young players would love. But no. It’s a soggy cardboard box of a game, empty of things to do and barely holding itself together. And as cardboard boxes go, £34.99 is quite the asking price.

Just Bricks takes minimalism too far. A game of this type needs more than some bricks and a paddle. We’d have happily chucked in a few quid for some extra power-ups, achievements and a less resounding feeling of boredom. But, then, it wouldn’t be ‘Just’ Bricks, would it?

Even though HardCube on Xbox One is a relatively cheap purchase, I can’t in all honesty recommend anyone purchase it, unless all they are bothered about is grabbing some super easy achievements and Gamerscore. It’s a poor addition to the puzzle platformer, and can’t hold any form of light to those ball rolling games from decades past.

Much of the enjoyment is spoilt by the camera sensitivity, enemy spawns and save points, and all that combined just means it is too frustrating to play for any length of time. I can well imagine this game working perfectly in VR, but for the humble Xbox console it still needs some work.

Music Racer: Ultimate is a decent effort at a rhythm game, but it simply lacks too much in the meaningful gameplay category to warrant a recommendation.

Strong Moon is an action platformer that is too broken, too clumsy to reward skill. Instead, you’re exploiting its issues to make progress, and that’s no way to enjoy a game.

The era of endless runners is over now, and Superola Champion Edition makes sure it goes out with a whimper.

Billy’s Game Show may be short but it is full of frustrations and lacking any real scares.

World Enduro Rally on Xbox One is a pretty bad game, but even a bad game can hold certain merits if it’s designed well. Alas, it isn’t. With bland visuals, awful sound design, poor camera work, often unresponsive controls and numerous bugs, this game doesn’t really offer anything of value.

As gaming habits have evolved, brick breaking games have largely been consigned to mobile gaming. This latest effort doesn’t do much to make a case that they should return to arcades or home consoles. Poor level designs are compounded by bad ball physics and some glaring omissions such as scoring and the ability to share creations online.

FuzzBall on Xbox One ends up a pale imitation of those who have done the “party game” so much better in the past. This, coupled with the unjustifiable price tag, makes it one I simply cannot recommend.

Blazing Trail is awful, not to put too fine a point on it. There is no fun to be found, it looks dull and I’d rather be playing anything else.