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.

Ships Simulator is a voyage into the tedious, but the inexcusable visuals drag this one down to the depths.

Even as a free-to-play game, Magic Nations would have stunk. It has a Scrooge-like approach to rewarding you: it’s a thin trail of breadcrumbs to some slightly larger breadcrumbs. But Magic Nations is £12.49, which gets you a mediocre card game strapped to a microtransaction system that EA would have dismissed.

Do you score a game identically to the game it copies? Mushroom Run 2D is last year’s Fantasy Dash, but with a mushroom. Scoring it lower would be petty, but having been spat out by the same sharp-edged and awkward levels, we’re feeling extremely petty. Please, for the love of endless runners everywhere, please let this be the last Fantasy Dash clone that we have to experience. We’ll give you 79p not to.

This is a video game experiment: what would happen if you stripped absolutely everything from an endless runner? Some questions weren’t meant to be answered, but Ninja Dash 3D answers it anyway, then charges the price of a Starbucks espresso to observe its findings. Step back, put the wallet back in the pocket, and drop a smoke bomb to make a speedy exit.

The best way to describe Darkland II is that it’s the platforming equivalent of writing lines in detention.

I understand that delays, post-launch patches and day one updates are now par for the gaming course, but that doesn’t mean that a game shouldn’t be held back if it’s not up to scratch. Case in point: Tennis World Tour.

I'm not a fan of Nicole, either the game or the heroine. The gameplay is dull, the hook of trying to get these boys to like you is boring at best and annoying at worst, the characters don't ever come alive, and it’s generally not as much fun as other visual novels I've played, even others from the Ratalaika stable.

Kiki - A Vibrant 3D Platformer is a game low on ideas, which even then are poorly implemented. As platformers go, it’s a stinker.

Glittering Sword on Xbox is disappointing. It shouldn’t be expected to offer anything revolutionary to the genre, given its status as a homage to The Legend of Zelda. It should be expected to nail the fundamentals though. It doesn’t. The game never advances beyond the same simplistic puzzles and stale combat, and the only answer to scaling difficulty is throwing more projectiles and enemies at you in an attempt to slow you down.

Galaxy Kingdoms does the unthinkable and turns a twin stick shooter, one of the very finest of genres, into a dull gaming experience. The main problem is found in the speed of the gunplay; it is so slow, and it seemingly takes longer to reload a magazine than it does to empty it, that it totally kills any flow or urgency.

What we’re left with is half a game. Gnomes Garden 8: Return of the Queen stops abruptly halfway, thanks to a critical save bug, and it’s a flip of a coin whether you will emerge with your save game in one piece afterwards. At the moment it’s a no-brainer - don’t dare play this. Wait and see if 8floor address the issue.

Working an old-school pixelated visual look, a sound scheme that would have been thought of as poor back in 1982, and a career which is over in minutes, there isn’t a thing about Ultimate Ski Jumping 2020 on Xbox One that will have you appreciating the purchase you have taken in. It may well be the best ski jumping game available on Xbox One, but in a group of one, it’s also the worst.

Guazu: The Rescue is certainly cute. It might be enough for an undiscerning youngster, and it’s barely thirty minutes for some of the easiest Gamerscore around. But we are stretching ourselves here: make no mistake, this glorified student project is more guano than Guazu.

Tony and Clyde is a frustrating, repetitive and, frankly, offensive game. I can't in all good faith recommend it.

It’s almost criminal that Highway Police Simulator is available to buy when it’s such a mess, so please put your wallet down and step away peacefully.

In many ways, Agony delivers an authentic experience of the archaic interpretation of ‘Hell’. Playing this game feels like torture, an exercise in utter tedium as you perform the same tasks and witness the same, ‘gruesome’ scenes. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that meta, it simply tries too hard. Squandering any potential it might’ve had, the result is a shallow, monotonous experience that’s not worth your time.

When all is said and done, the biggest wreck in Perfect Traffic Simulator is the game itself.

Zombies Overloaded, rather fittingly, is a soulless, mindless grind - a lifeless, repetitive shooter that buries any semblance of fun under six feet of poor design.

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is an empty series of valleys where it’s easier to get lost than killed. We wanted the kind of bad that is stupid, ridiculous and embarrassing - we might have had fun with that. Dull-bad, though? That’s the worst.

Drunken Fist 2: Zombie Hangover’s core issues remain since the first outing, but some small improvements have been made. Despite this, on balance it will take a lot more to make this a game to recommend.

Crazy Trucks is crazy alright, but not in a good way. If you have a regular group of buddies, there is a smidge of fun to be had, but that's mainly down to playing with friends rather than playing the game, to be brutally honest. If you are coming to this as a solo player, I’d give it a miss - the fun on offer here doesn’t really get going, ever.

Oh, Minigolf Adventure, what an unfathomable mess you are. We’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall, watching to see how these decisions got made. We can only assume that they were rushed into the game as a last-minute fix for an even bigger problem.

Smoots Golf wiggles their hips, takes aim, and promptly trips over their golfing shoes and into the water. It feels like Smoots Golf was made by people who don’t like or understand golf, as it lacks the basic features that a golfer needs to play eighteen holes.

After taking in a whole host of KEMCO titles over the last few months, it has to be said that I am very disappointed in Frane: Dragons’ Odyssey - it has no redeeming features that allow me to recommend it to anyone.

Unfortunately it’s clunky, everything seems to lack polish, and you’ll be sick of each game mode in no time at all. I think it speaks volumes when the rare moments of joy arise from seeing the different environments or hearing a banging tune on the soundtrack. I wasn’t joking when suggesting FIFA Street – a last-gen game – is a better option.

A scrolling shoot ‘em up is a great idea for a roguelite, and when’s the next time you’ll be playing as an undead, flame fish? The execution just isn’t enough, though, and Akinofa ends up feeling as pitiful as a fish out of water.

The best I can say about Cyber Mission is that it runs okay, and that the two player side of things is better than the solo play. Other than that, it’s one to avoid.

Aborigenus on Xbox One feels like an idea that was good inside the developer’s head, but a sloppy mess when put to paper. It’s a world that lacks focus, identity and, most importantly, any sense of fun.

In conclusion, I can’t recommend The Lost Legends Of Redwall: The Scout – Act One to anyone other than absolutely rabid fans of the Redwall stories, and even then, try before you buy.

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.

Babol the Walking Box feels like the original Crash Bandicoot, but worse in every conceivable way. The Crash Bandicoot PS2 jewel case has been stomped on, smashed and then presented as a budget platformer for you to play on your Xbox.

Axis Football 2018 tries to be a complete sports simulation title but aside from the multitude of animation, sound and graphical issues, there are also too many bugs and glitches that contradict the fundamental rules of the sport itself. John Madden can sleep soundly for another night knowing his royalty cheques are safe for the time being.

Bounty Battle on Xbox One is a great idea. With such lovable and memorable characters from a host of indie games, it seemed like a knockout idea. Yet, horrible visuals, unfinished gameplay, and terrible optimization mar the loving treatment that was given to these indie icons.

Krampus Kills is an atmospheric Christmas horror game that is badly hamstrung by the actual game part of that description. It plays badly, it controls poorly and even the puzzle elements are an exercise in frustration, mostly as controller optimisation is very poor.

There’s a chance that you’ll have had enough of 41 Hours after just 41 minutes, never mind the 20+ hours that are claimed for full completion. There’s a good idea here, but it is one that has been ruined by poor execution.

It’s an incredibly short game, seeing how I beat it twice in the space of two hours. And, like the automobiles that Henry and Florence blew to smithereens, those are two hours that I’ll never get back.

For the good - the visuals, audio, navigation of paths and occasional combat moments - there are tens of things in XEL that will hold you back. Bugs and glitches are absolutely rife in this world, and there’s seemingly nothing to stop them popping up on an extremely frequent basis; mostly out of nowhere, springing a surprise just as you think XEL is going to give you a pass.

Whether or not you should purchase The Last Scape on Xbox One boils down to what you want from your games. If you’re happy to take a punt on an experimental title that is massively short on gameplay and ideas, then the low price kind of allows it. But on the other hand, many will consider this another one of those throwaway experiences that don’t really belong on Xbox One.

All in all, and if you can find it in yourself to take the fight to Blood Waves, then you’ll find a game that lacks sheen and finish in so many ways. Despite very briefly being a bit of fun, it is ultimately missing depth and individuality, which in turn will see it sink into obscurity after a short amount of time.

Wizodd is a cardboard-fort version of The Binding of Isaac and Legend of Zelda. It looks like them at a distance, but when you actually start playing, you can feel the cheapness and compromises. It gives you cardboard cuts in the form of weirdo design decisions and a slow ramp to being powerful. And as time goes on, the adhesive wears off and the walls fall over, as the game-breaking bugs tear it all down.

Master Maker 3D Ultimate is the ultimate example of how not to make a game. It is boring, controls poorly and has almost no redeeming features. This is one to avoid.

The overall difficulty of Spartan is a real shame, because it doesn’t need to be as challenging as it is to give you the reward and elation of finishing a level.

Granted, the co-op mode offers a bit of fun, although the language in the game is somewhat fruity to say the least, so you’ll need to pick and choose who you run through this with. All in all though, Breakneck City is a poor game that, frankly, performs badly.

I was hoping to be blown away by Dead Alliance, but a dwindling player base, poor gameplay, terrible bugs and a lack of content make this just another disappointment within a once great genre.

Mask of Mists on Xbox One is pretty disappointing. Its puzzles are uninspired, the sound design is rough, the monsters are boring, and the entire game just feels hollow. It is not a game that feels like it has an interesting story or experience to share with the player. The greatest quality I can think of is that it has some well-designed environments that are easy to navigate. Yet, when the game is not fun to play, why bother sticking around?

I’ve played dozens of KEMCO games over the years, and most of those have very much been in the retro camp, but Dragon Ruins is the perfect blend of too retro, in terms of the visuals, and not enough gameplay.

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.

Lacking the novel concepts of the first game, Cyber Citizen Shockman 2: A New Menace feels very run-of-the-mill as a result. And only by utilising the cheats on offer will you be able to drag yourself through this relatively short game.

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.

At first glance, XIII looks like a video game. It has graphics, sounds come out of the speakers, and a character moves when you touch the pad. But sit down to play it, and you’ll realise that it’s held together with sticky tape and paper clips, collapsing into scraps when you play for more than five minutes.

There's hardly any action to get stuck into in Cilla, the story is poorly presented, running a twist that can be seen a mile away and it doesn’t look great.

In a world where eFootball has crashed and burned, Football Cup 2022 could have taken its opportunity. But it’s crocked, about as likely to give you a game of football as Jack Wilshere. It’s unforgivably slow and clumsy, full of cheap goals and easy opponents with no difficulty settings. And to top it all off, it has no multiplayer.

If Strategic Mind: The Pacific could have been streamlined a little, optimised for the console market, it could have been a contender, but as it is the obstacles to just getting on with the game are too damn high. And that's a shame. A massive shame.

You get fifteen minutes of on-rails shooting where you don’t get to move or even aim - not really. Green Soldiers Heroes does all of this for you, whether you like it or not, leaving you to hold RT and watch as enemy life bars deplete.

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.

The Blobs Fight on Xbox One is supposed to be a party game. Yet, because of its wonky, imaginative controls, and a huge lack of content, it falls extremely short. True, it has some distinctive map designs, but these are ultimately dragged down by the poor color choice and visuals.

Goat Out of Hell might work better had it been titled Game Out of Hell, as that is how it feels. A lack of innovation or introduction regarding stage design and mechanics, leaves the couple that are present to burn out and fade away about ten minutes in.

Whether or not we actually needed Super Arcade Soccer 2021 on the Xbox Store is another matter. It commits the cardinal sin of a B-list football game: it’s just not fun. There’s nothing that would warrant the ‘Arcade’ moniker, and certainly nothing approaching ‘Super’. Alongside the host of glitches, it barely holds together as a game, and you’re left wondering more about Xbox’s quality standards than where the next goal is coming from.

If you played the first Electronics Puzzle Lab, then there is absolutely nothing new here in Electronics Puzzle Lab 2. It feels like a majorly missed opportunity to add something, anything, new. Instead, there are fewer levels, fewer components, and the same frustrations. To many, this will exist purely for achievement fodder, which, if you can believe it, is exactly how the first game felt too.

It’s very sad to say that Friday the 13th: The Game, after all the hype and excitement of a game that could have truly represented the incredible franchise, is the most unstable, unreliable and underwhelming game I’ve played in a long time.

Velocity G is a racer with very few things going for it. It’s plain, generic, boring, and, for much of the time, frustrating.

Unfortunately, if we told you that King Leo was worth playing, we’d be lion.

RAID World War II feels broken. Nothing really seems to work, and everything that is in it looks like it has seen better days. The developers have a lot of work that they need to action in order to fix this game, or at least make more of it work before asking for people to fork over some cash.

ACA NEOGEO Sengoku isn’t a game that I can recommend to anyone but the most ardent retro fiends. It has aged horrendously, and even judging it by 1991 standards, it isn’t a fun game to play.

If you’ve ever wondered what early game builds might be like, play Sapu. It’s the building blocks of a game, but not a game yet. It hasn’t yet coalesced. If you can muddle through the self-sabotaging then you’re better people than us, but we found Sapu to be borderline unplayable.

You can strip a 2D platformer back to the basics, but those basics have to be in the topmost of drawers. Unfortunately, Acalesia on the Xbox has made a home for itself in the bottom drawer. Shortcomings are papered over with more shortcomings, as the designers try to make up for slippy gameplay with benign levels that barely offer a challenge.

Charging $40/£20 for this game is borderline criminal. Associating it with Road Rash is disrespectful. Unless customizing motorcycles is your sole passion in life, avoid this one.

99p or not, a broken game is a broken game. And that means Mr Trials should be avoided at all costs - unless you have the patience of a saint and are happy to run through completed levels over and over again.

Tanky Tanks on Xbox One is a bit of a mess really. It feels way out of its depth on the Xbox, and instead would be much more at home as a £0.99 mobile app or, at a stretch, seeking out a new life on the Nintendo Switch, preferably only after some major improvements. As it stands, this is one battle worth avoiding.

The 90 seconds is less about the length of matches, and more about its shelf life. You’re going to retire 90” Soccer faster than you can say Jack Wilshere.

If you really must engross yourself in some 1980’s film culture, then drag out that old VHS recorder and watch Terminator for the millionth time. Just don’t bother spending time, money or effort on Tango Fiesta.

If Blacksmith Forger was a free-to-play mobile game, we’d be complaining about the lack of material. You could barely make some tinfoil out of it. When there are dozens of alternatives for Overcooked!-style games, you’d have to be desperate to pick Blacksmith Forger out of the line-up.

When a title like Shing! on Xbox comes along, I can’t help but feel annoyed. Its uninspired combat system, lack of narrative cohesion, and insultingly crass writing makes the game one that doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near the enormous collection of well-made titles the industry has to offer. If you give Shing! a try, I promise that you’ll be wi-shing! you hadn’t.

Clever use of an interactable radial wheel aside, Police Simulator: Patrol Officers should be handing in its badge for lack of care to the community, well before its shift is over.

Lord of the Click on Xbox One doesn’t do anything to keep you playing. The act of clicking is uncomfortable, not to mention worrying, and the upgrades are about as boring as you can get. At the end of the day, the only real selling point is the cheap price and easy Gamerscore. Unless you’re desperate, I wouldn’t recommend picking this one up.

There’s no argument for spending £1.69 on Dou. You can’t even point to some easy achievements, as it has none. It’s a clinical, charmless little platformer that pokes you in the ribs and demands that you make pixel-perfect jumps without any feeling of reward for doing so.

Ammo Pigs: Cocked and Loaded is a glitchy mess with little to no incentive to play. Frustrating mechanics with boring gameplay means the final recipe equals a low quality game.

There’s not much mystique to it. Little Mage Adventure has got all the challenge and satisfaction of putting the bins out, but thirty times over.

The frustrating gameplay and unintuitive design made this one a real slog to finish, hence I wouldn’t really recommend Wings of Endless unless you feel either the comedy will land for you, or the visuals can hard carry the experience.

There are much better fishing games than Ultimate Fishing Simulator, and my strong advice is that if you want to go fishing on Xbox One you look elsewhere first.

It may have a penguin on the cover, but The Super Penguboy is a lame duck. He comes with a jetpack that barely works and a gun that’s more effective at sending him to his doom. You could buy this shoddy little morsel for 2000G and the cheap £4.99 price, but you’d have to wonder if you were giving up a little fragment of your soul.

Castle of Pixel Skulls is a game that is lacking in almost every department – originality, controls and gameplay. It fails to deliver on its promise of challenging platforming. In fact, the only real battle is dealing with the inconsistent jumping mechanics.

It has a nice idea and if done better – dare I say maybe even with Kinect from back in the day – we could have been looking at a very interesting game. Sadly, that’s not the case and within just a few minutes of play, you’ll have seen everything you’re going to experience in Tetsumo Party.

Everything about AeternoBlade II feels like a recipe concocted with all the wrong ingredients. Every corner of its world is a slog, the combat becomes increasingly more boring and the story is inaccessible. While playable on a basic level, it is a fantasy world with a lack of magic, and I never want to visit it again.

The action is too frenetic that any enjoyment you could get out of Plunder Panic is stunted by not knowing what is going on around you. With fewer players you can get a bit of enjoyment out of it, but even that quickly goes.

It’s a shell of the version that is available in The Four Kings Casino and Slots – that I hasten to add is free-to-play – and doesn’t offer anything substantial over that version. There is easy Gamerscore to be had, and that’s about it. You would be better off spending the £4.19 it costs to buy Four Kings: Video Poker and put it towards microtransactions for the larger casino instead.

Snowland Adventure gets points for trying. It’s better than the average sub-£1 game on the Xbox Store, in that it’s colourful and knows its way around a puzzle. But it mostly gets melted away by bugs and a runtime that wouldn’t get you through an episode of Ice Road Truckers.

Super Street: The Game is bad – outdated graphics, outdated gameplay and outdated objectification of women, bad.

I’ve been left wanting pilot schedules, food decisions, and many more options in regards time management. But instead I’ve been left with some very dull, very boring gameplay that will struggle to appeal to anyone.

What really kills Outbreak: The New Nightmare is the generally unpolished feel of the whole game. It must be said that the developer clearly has his heart in the right place by trying to revive the classic style of survival horror in this way, but it takes more than copying a classic to make that happen.

If you’re looking for a Zuma game, go and play the original. Or maybe even spend time with Zumania. Whatever you do, keep away from the Zumba - Treasure of the Marble Sea. There ain’t no treasures hidden here. Or if there are, they are buried so deep that you'll drown in frustration before you get anywhere near them.

The main problem that On The Road on Xbox has is not in the tedium of the driving, it's not in the poor visuals, it’s not in the game crashes and it's not in the clunky, amateurish menus. Nope, it's found in a combination of all those things along with an asking price that is verging on disgusting. And that means this is one trucking simulator that is going to struggle to make any form of headway on any console street.

It gives me no pleasure at all to say that I didn’t enjoy Crimson Keep. At all, if I’m being honest. It drove me mad, and not in that tough, but satisfying, Dark Souls way. It just drove me mad to a point where I didn’t want to play it again. It’s a tedious, nightmarishly dull experience that I have no intention of going back to.

In the end, our sweeping generalisation of 79p games was correct. Monster Blocks: Get 9 Puzzle doesn’t come with achievements, and it’s colourful but with no substance, like a Smartie with the chocolate sucked out.

Pity Pit looks bad, even by the standards of 8-bit looking retro titles, it plays poorly, with no real idea what you are meant to be doing and because you have to put up with dodgy hit detection, it just isn't fun.

Sentry Paragon feels like a cash grab in the worst possible way.