When you first take a gander at Daxter, you see a beautifully recreated Jak & Daxter game on the portable Playstation. Some thousand bug squishings later, you’ll realise that looks can be extremely deceiving.

Imagine a free-roaming King Kong game, with a main plot line that you can ignore as you run through the jungle, beating the piss out of dinosaurs with tree trunks and rocks. That would have been awesome. Instead, we were given this six to eight hour snooze fest.

But in all honesty, this is a game I'd be embarrassed to own, and I own "WCW Nitro."

We want interesting levels. We want a variety of enemies that challenge us. We want cool guns to kill them with. Instead, the developers did what they wanted. They put doors on ceilings and tables on walls and little switches to hit to pull you where they want you to go. They forgot everything that makes games fun.

The graphics and sound might be a great leap forward, but the rest of the game fails to meet any of the current criteria for a good first-person shooter.

This reckless, half-cocked release is not just insulting to the thousands of gamers who’ll pay full price to receive an inferior product that others will buy cut-price a few months down the line when it’s finally been chopped and changed into a playable state, but detrimental and damaging to a team of developers who clearly have a real passion and love for the games they create.

With no story or true narrative to latch onto, there's no reason for players to care about what's going on. And there's only one thing ever going on in Dear Esther: nothing. Broken up into individual pieces-the graphics, writing, and music clearly show talent and might have led to interesting stories or games-but together they form a dull, lifeless experience that's quickly forgotten.

Without the tactile use of a proper analogue stick, or a significantly more forgiving sense of level design, Cling! is a game only suitable for the most dedicated masochists. And, before playing this, I might have included myself in that distinguished fraternity.

Its incredibly short stature makes ZOE an almost pointless re-release, and the de-evolved frame rate handling of 2nd Runner isn't much to pine for unless your PS2 copy was lost, stolen, or destroyed. If this is an effort to get people amped and ready for the recently announced Zone of the Enders 3, fans certainly deserve better than this.

A poor game shrouded in an illusion of mediocrity.

This lack of polish could be forgiven in a game with tight gameplay, but that’s not Battlecry. Your Veritech feels wimpy and clunky in every mode.

The blue stuff could be an analogy for the game at large – unexpected, cool to look at, but utterly, maddeningly infuriating and with little resemblance to what the forces that birthed it set out to achieve.

The whole notion of a scored review seems a little arbitrary in the face of the niche and dedicated fanbase this game will attract, and its attempts at populist window-dressing are virtually pointless because for the rest of us, the whole entity is at its most lenient completely mystifying, and at its most uncompromising utterly impenetrable.

From the sleep-inducing gameplay to the wooden dialogue and stale story, the whole project feels phoned in Hunting ghosts has never been so bad.

As far as driving games go, this is a must-skip.

For ancient king and Elvish lord, Guardians of Middle-earth is stuck in the Mystical Bog of Latency Irritation. Its system's solidly built and there's the appearance of depth crying to be uncovered. However, those cries aren't being heard. This isn't the first time a multiplayer-only XBLA title has effectively been broken online. It deserved a better fate than this.

This is a sub-par licensed shooter without any real sense for what it wants to accomplish.

It's highly energetic in attitude and then does all it can to hamper and slow the player's progress and enjoyment. All filler, no killer.

Clearly a lot of love and effort has gone into making this game and both Endeavor Bros. and Monkube should be applauded for creating one of the best-looking and most endearing games on the casual market, but the fundamental gameplay issues cannot be ignored.

While its myriad of technical issues are certainly detrimental to anyone’s enjoyment, it’s the lack of ambition in reinventing its aging mechanics and tired mission design that leave Unity treading water.

The straightforward progression is perfectly suited for a diet RPG, but the underdeveloped systems and mindless combat bring the breakneck pacing to an exasperating crawl.

In a way, the game does live up to the hype: they wanted to ban it for its gratuitous violence and I can see why. Funny how they didn't just get out and say that the game isn't worthy to be played; that would've made things much easier.

It seems set with doing the bare minimum (a lot of the time, not even that) and expects it to be acceptable just because it’s splashing around in a small pond starved of enough shooters to hold the flag without it.

When you play a game and find the most immersive sections are cut-scenes and the game isn’t called Metal Gear Solid, then you know something isn’t quite right.

It’s a shame that the concept was implemented so poorly, an example of sacrificing quality for mindless movie-licensed mush. With the absolute lack of difficulty and simplistic design, it’s a real wonder as to what Activision was expecting when they unleashed this game upon the masses of unsuspecting gamers.

Alice: Madness Return has a terrific visual style and intriguing ideas, which is why it's so frustrating to see what could've been a clever game turn into such a tedious, drawn-out mess.

It shouldn't be a gamble for online multiplayer to work though. In the end, Quake Arena Arcade rings its own death knell and doesn't give Quake III Arena the justice it deserves.

A bitter disappointment. It's a soulless, miserable outing that manages to make zooming around on crotch-rockets dull and frustrating.