Summing up Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires is tricky. While the fighting action is as spectacular as it ever was, and still remains fun, the management side of things just seems to slow everything down. It feels like a slog and you’ll want for nothing but the next battle. Basically the battles are good, but the rest of Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires is poor.

Dragon Takers is quite a large game, with a lot of things to do, as with all good RPGs. But I can’t help feel that the story is elongated unnecessarily – there seems to be a bit too much filler content.

We doff a cap to Space Escape for taking the endless runner into a new direction, which is more than we’d expect for a lowly 79p. But with such a good idea in the bag, it’s disappointing to find that developers Pixieland have done the bare minimum with it

PAW Patrol: Grand Prix - Race in Barkingburg is the most threadbare of DLC, yet it's supplementing one of Outright Games’ best titles. The mismatch hurts, and we can’t help but feel that Mayor Humdinger and the Catastrophe Crew have run away with the rest of the package.

Games under a tenner can often be forgiven for being short when the story is top notch and the gameplay is innovative, but that’s not DreamBreak.

As a snapshot of a frostpunk future, Dull Grey on the Xbox is evocative, if ineffective. At fifteen minutes long, it’s too short to be anything but a sketch, it offers only one meaningful choice over its runtime, and it struggles to say anything that sheds light on its world or ours. Far from dull, then, but grey in the sense that no clear picture emerges.

So it must be said, Skylar & Plux: Adventure on Clover Island is more than a disappointment. The main heroes are likeable enough guys, and the world you get to journey through is a decent one with plenty of collectible opportunities. The problem is, there are too many glitches, stutters, pauses and loading screens for the duo to ever become really loved.

Pac-Man Museum+ is not the compilation that Pac-Man deserves, but in all honesty, that doesn’t come as too much of a surprise.

Ravensword: Shadowlands on Xbox probably wishes it was 2013 again, but a lot of things have changed since those times, and this isn’t able to stack up to more modern interpretations.

SokoCrab is about as simple a Sokoban puzzler as you are going to get - and it’s equally as gifting as a Gamerscore provider. With nothing to test the mind, this is one of those games in which you’ll need to consider why you game.

Creepy Road is a game filled to the brim with promise. It presents a cool, stylish world with a really vibrant art style, but is ultimately let down by glitchy game mechanics.

It must be said that I didn’t really hate my time playing Prehistoric Dude, but I just didn’t really enjoy it either. There's some challenge to overcome and I always like getting 100 percent achievement completion, but there isn’t anything that sets Prehistoric Dude apart from any other platformer. It’s not a bad game, just exceedingly average.

Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier comes up short in almost every area, except in the motion capture side of proceedings and the great looking characters. It fails to draw you in to its 2-3 hour length, whether that’s due to the lacklustre ‘gameplay’, the drab story, having very little influence on how it plays out, or simply because of the issues plaguing the technical side of the game.

Blackberry Honey is a lot of things, and many of them are contradictory. It’s a Victorian-era visual novel that is uninteractive, sleazy, grim, hopeful, dumb and clever.

It is simplistic and more than a little tedious but, for its price point, it’s hard to expect any more from it. If you need something cheap to kill the time and want to get frustrated at an RPG, maybe Nexoria will satisfy you.

Super Destronaut: Land Wars feels like a love letter to the game it so inspires to be, but loses everything that made it well-loved in translation. The concept is solid, but fails to ever reach the heights to create an addictive gameplay loop.

Minos Dungeon is unlikely to offend you, at times even able to provide some enjoyable gameplay, yet a few sokoban sins, paired with the knowledge that each ounce of fun is lifted from a predecessor, leaves this one bordering on just average.

Manipulating jigsaw pieces with a game controller in hand has always been a problem for game designers, and Alice in Wonderland - A Jigsaw Puzzle Tale not only fumbles that issue, but adds in a few of its own.

It’s not hard to imagine a game that fulfils the promise of a Legend of Zelda game set in a Studio Ghibli world, because it occasionally shines through Baldo: The Guardian Owls. But Naps Team needed an experienced hand to get more than ‘shines through’. They’ve locked so much good stuff behind terrible design decisions and a steep difficulty that your patience will run out well before the fifty hours it takes to complete Baldo, which is a crime against some fantastic art and music.

Trulon: The Shadow Engine certainly looks ready to send gamers on an adventure, especially in creating a world full of fantastical beings, but that’s where the goodness ends in truth. The turn-based card combat system grows tired in no time at all – despite a decent array of enemies – whilst the difficulty spoils and subsequently halts progression through to the end.

Space Station Sprint is lacking polish and feels like something in early access. There’s a number of bugs here and the simple gameplay can leave you feeling bored after an hour or two of playing. With missions being essentially the same throughout, there’s no real sense of accomplishment. It’ll tide you over for a bit, but don’t go in expecting anything more than that.

Escape 2088 feels like it was created by that Jigsaw guy from the Saw series. And it’s not even the most arduous escape room in the OnSkull series. Painful to control, unhelpful in the extreme, and stacked with puzzles that make only the loosest sense, this feels like the most punishing boot camp for escape room fans.

Cube Raiders on Xbox is a choc-a-block package, with more levels and modes than you’ll possibly need. As sokoban-style crate-pushers go, it’s well-designed too, with a punt at originality by incorporating dice. But it needed way more oomph and variety to break the feelings of repetition. Hundreds of levels won’t mean much when you roll out well before the end.

Claybook holds a strong foundation for a positive gaming experience, but at present it still resembles more of the game preview feel than that of a fully complete experience.

Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece sold us on a bright new future for the 8floor series. Things looked golden indeed. Argonauts Agency 2: Pandora’s Box swallows that all up and reveals that the future might be darker, full of old bugs and the same repeated experiences.

You have to salute the ambition of The Dark Side of the Moon: An Interactive FMV Thriller. It’s a conspiracy thriller that goes to the moon and back, delivering world-ending stakes with a budget that probably only stretched to a box of Yorkshire Tea. But for all its adorable ricketyness and hammy acting, the sticky-backed plastic does eventually come apart.

There are just about enough modes to keep things interesting in Richman 11 but it isn’t brimming with content, even after ten other versions of it. But hey, at least you don’t need to pass GO! before gathering up property.

My Little Prince - A Jigsaw Puzzle Tale struggles and sputters as soon as the puzzles get beyond two-hundred-plus pieces. While the tools on offer are great, completing a large puzzle remains a fiddly experience to sort, choose and place jigsaw pieces. One day gaming will get big jigsaws right, but today is not that day.