If there’s a space in your heart for the Transformers then there’s definite appeal here, but as a regular Joe looking for an action game, there’s plenty better on the market.

Facebreaker shows some promise at the start; it’s plucky, full of spunk, and mildly charming. But play it more and it becomes apparent that it’s nothing but a one tricky pony. That charm and dazzle soon withers away along with your enthusiasm, and Facebreaker ends up punching itself in the face.

Dead Island: Riptide is simply more of the same dumb fun, and while it still might not be the game it could be, I’ve learned to embrace it for what it is, absurd.

Evoland is a small game, but if there’s anything it could have learned from the big titles it draws inspiration from is that it should have picked one style of gameplay and fleshed it out. Instead there’s several subpar reflections of olden styles, painted in a fresh coat of nostalgia.

It’s a punishing game but rewarding in equal measures, and will draw you in like no other racing game quite has managed so far this generation - bring on BAJA 2: World Tour.

ACE has mostly succeeded in creating an interesting setting – but the joy of exploration is quickly tempered by the game’s reliance on fighting mechanics that are too simple, and too rough to be engaging.

With a decent array of modes and a charming exterior, you could do a lot worse for your money than PictoImage.

It's a hint of what could be a fun little title, if the level design was scripted tighter.

The game’s combat system needs an overhaul, the levels lack inspiration, and the presentation will make your eyes water. When compared with its contemporaries, this game lacks the shine and polish that gamers are expecting when they try out their DS for the first time. This is shameful way to start the new batch of DS games.

There could have been so much more to Samurai Warriors Chronicles…but there isn't. Unlike its source material, this game will never make history.

It's a shame that our final goodbyes to the cityscape of Omega is so passionless and dull. If Bioware intends to release more episodic content for ME3, I hope they don't rely on their increasingly tired combat system to do all of the work next time round. Let's have some more of that character back, okay?

Add in an epic, bombastic orchestral score by Kevin Riepl (he also worked on Gears of War) and a surprisingly robust and easy-to-use level creation tool and you have one of the better games to be released so far in 2011. Highly Recommended.

The major characters are all here and in full action, giving a decent variety of fighters to choose from. However, the bland, uninspired combat system leaves something to be wished, no matter how many Rave and Shadow Stones materialize onscreen.

The whole game feels like a bland and unambitious platformer with a Crash Bandicoot skin stuck over the top to increase sales. It’s shamelessly repetitive and predicable and collecting mojo feels even more pointless than Wumpa fruit did, but none of that truly matters when playing.

Bottom line: the whole game feels remarkably uncomfortable despite looking so smooth and natural.

While it tries to do a lot with its MMO style quests, EXP, multiple campaigns and Conquest mode, it never really focuses on making the basic gameplay mechanics a success.

Building zoos is a piece cake and there are enough options to satisfy most players. Serviceable graphics detract from the experience, as do technical limitations, but those can be forgiven.

To their credit, Trion Worlds’ support has been admirable so far, and there’s hope for growth, but in its current state Defiance strikes a precarious balancing act between fleeting enjoyment and impeding flaws.

Conflict: Vietnam earns another medal for a split-screen co-operative mode for up to four players. When your friends are controlling each person in your squad the game becomes much, much more enjoyable.

Fans will be happy with its fairly large roster of classic Guilty Gear characters, but gamers savvy with Jump Superstars and Bleach DS may not be impressed.

Although one could classify Wario: Master of Disguise as a platformer, I'd say it has more in common with a puzzle-genre game. Apart from the boss encounters, there isn't a lot of action here.

Zack Zero is strictly amateur hour. Everything from its awful production values to the way it bungles simple platforming is an indicator that the developers lack direction. Even if the player manages to look past the dearth of new concepts and the poor execution, the crashes and profoundly obnoxious pop-up messages will ensure they've given up on Zack Zero long before the credits role.

The side missions are exciting, and the brawls and precision aiming are superior to most of the gameplay mechanics in "GTA." It’s just too bad the whole game feels unpolished and the slowdown is so annoying.

Ill conceived and illogical if following orders, Heavy Squad is the weakest slice of this anthology.

The graphics are piss poor and the AI a joke most of the time, but generally this is the best of the bunch.

Touch Detective is terrible in all the ways that make an adventure-puzzler (like the aforementioned Phoenix Wright, or Monkey Island, or Grim Fandango, or etc.) worth its salt. Go spend your £20 on Cluedo, because at least then you're controlling the pathfinding.

While Space Siege is by no means bad, it is a very typical and uninspired video game.

A nifty little gaming card of good-old addictive goodness, and a bargain bin must-have if I ever saw one.

It’s not that the Art of Fighting Anthology is necessarily bad. It’s just that its games haven’t aged well.

The game reminded me very much of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which did not go down well with this particular reviewer at the time, or now even).

This deserves pride of place in a gaming museum, but sadly not in your DS.

Hardcore WKC fans may be willing to pour hundreds of additional hours into this sequel, nay - expansion - but most will likely be turned off by the confusing story, niggling flaws and generally repetitive nature of the combat and questing.

It may have been fun back in the 1990s but now there’s just not enough depth to gain any sort of prolonged enjoyment out of it. Short bursts in multiplayer can be mildly enjoyable, but for 800 points it’s simply not worth it. It’s crazy to think they were originally going to charge 1200 for what is a bare-bone remake.

It's a shallow, lazily-upgraded and rushed game that could have done with being taken back to the drawing board at an early stage to better encompass the power of the new hardware on offer.

Even with a few muscle knots, MicroBot is a thoroughly enjoyable adventure through the human body for any gamer with an ounce of patience.

Mister Slime is the dictionary definition of bland.

Even Shikigami fans in particular will be displeased, because MLB2 isn't the flawless port that it easily could have been, featuring horrible dubs: Like school in summertime – no class (An enemy really pulls that unfunny Fat Albert insult out of his ass, I kid you not.)

Splatterhouse is wildly gory and wildly uneven. It has unrealized potential, and maybe if the kinks were worked out it would've been a great action game.

With better pacing and a lot more balancing, Mars: War Logs could have been a fresh, satisfying take on BioWare’s proven formula. Its intriguing premise and characters eventually succumb to its broken systems, creating a fiction you’ll hope sooner to finish than completely understand.

With poor combat and clumsy controls, repetitive gameplay, and many frustrating design issues, Hyrophobia is not the wet dream we all wanted, just a conceptual one.

For what it’s worth, you could do a hell of a lot worse than The Spiderwick Chronicles. It seems perfectly happy to get through the six or so hours of game time merely meeting criteria to an acceptable standard and never anything more.

It's not that From the Abyss is a bad game. It's just that it doesn't do anything interesting or innovative.

If this was the final project of a programming student who waited to the last minute to complete, then we can at least chalk up all the errors and poorly written storyline as factors needing improvement. Sadly this is not the case.

This is a very basic FPS game that might entertain you for a while, but it’s pretty boring and repetitive and I just couldn’t get that excited about it. Sure, it’s got a lot of flash, but there’s no substance to the game.

It’s never truly bad, so I guess that’s admirable, but now that I’ve been there, I certainly won’t go back again (see if you can catch the nerdy reference in that sentence).

It’s not an abominable game, and is moderately entertaining in short bursts. It’s just that there are so many better alternatives out there that you’d be hard pressed to find a reason to pick this out of the bunch.

An above-average eye(s)-trainer.

Something like Fist of the North Star deserved something better than just a blatant copy/paste job. Ultimately, all the buckets of blood in the world fail to hide this is the same thing players have grown disenchanted with a generation ago.

With its inadequate online play, starved features, and questionable arcade perfection, Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection is, at best, a nostalgic purchase.

Despite the bugs and flaws here and there, the idea behind making a magazine empire is quite compelling, and it’s actually pulled off well. Just be sure to proceed with caution.

Sorry, Victorious Boxers veterans. This game is a step back from the titles you know and love. This was the series’ chance to shine, and it’s been doomed to obscurity yet again.

For a game where the sole mechanic is to draw lines, it’s ironic that not long after starting, you’ll feel like the ink is already starting to run dry.

It may be dubbed the ultimate collection but even on consoles the BFG Edition is far from ideal. As a PC game its existence is highly questionable; any esoteric changes made on id's part have already been done better by a dedicated modding community.

Murdered is a game that does a lot of things sub-par, but what it does offer is an engaging, well written story. You just have to look past the mess.

It's a bog-standard shooter with some cool graphics. Honestly, Alpha Prime feels like the product of a first-person-shooter checklist. It hits all the marks that, if missed, would bring a game's score down. Multiple enemy types? Check. Narrative? Check. Slow-motion? Check. Good graphics? Double check. Aside from the embarrassing acting.

All in all, Entwined is a flawed game with some good ideas, but none of them coalesce in a cohesive, interesting way.

Sometimes it's frustrating and sometimes it puts you on edge.

Archaic button mashers such as Beijing 2008 just aren’t relevant anymore.

The awkward camera, the incredibly repetitive levels, and lackluster enemies make the game seem far more tedious than it should have been. The concept of having a traditional samurai stuck in the middle of a spaghetti Western is hilarious in itself, but it can’t save the game from its own mediocrity.

It looks great and the core gameplay mechanic is solid, but you just can't help thinking we've seen most of this before. It's certainly easier to play than "The Sims" and it features better A.I., but it doesn't feature as much depth as EA's title.

The combat mechanics are easy to exploit, effectively leaving the gameplay unbalanced and somewhat shallow. The utterly lacking multiplayer and somewhat inaccurate motion sensing don’t help, either. But hey, at least your arms will get a workout.

Its simplistic gameplay and utter lack of complicated mechanics make it far easier to pick up, but the shallow gameplay will be a turnoff to skateboarding game enthusiasts.

It's not a bad action game by definition, but it lacks everything that made the series endearing, making it an overall unmemorable outing for fans that fell in love with the white-knuckle action and hair-pulling difficulty found in previous Ninja Gaiden titles.

At around 40 minutes Battle of Forli is also an extremely short piece of DLC. The cheap price of 320 Microsoft Points can justify it, but for such a small amount of content and the same gameplay we’ve already spent 15 hours playing, it isn’t really worth it.

TMNT feels like a really, really early build of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, stripped to its bare bones and given a movie license to shift copies.

An unfortunate conclusion to a once promising trilogy.

If you’ve grown weary with the formula that Capcom has regurgitated on a yearly basis, Star Force just isn’t nourishing enough.

As an ARPG it’s average at best, but its MMO trappings only compound the frustration.

Until K2 pull their finger out and bring the game engine into the 21st Century, Tenchu will be remembered as a Playstation classic with a load of all too similar sequels.

The franchise to this point has been both slick and punishing, providing a variety of ways to hone Ryu's ninja craft; Ninja Gaiden 3's new direction simply doesn't cut it – especially when played alone.

Though the collection features a few gems like Billiards and Laser Hockey, much of the lineup is composed of half-assed mini-games with little to no depth whatsoever.

Mega Man X7 is a decent follow-up to the travesty of a game that was Mega Man X6, but it will still come off as a lacking action title for the gamers that have never been interested in the series. Nice try, Capcom.

It’s not really all that scary, and the action isn’t all that great. There. That wasn’t so hard.

The menus are needlessly tedious to use.

Maybe the fans will find something enjoyable about controlling their favorite heroes via a randomized deck of cards. For the rest of you, go play some Solitaire. You deserve it.

If none of this sounds particularly interesting, it’s because it isn’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with STX, but that everything it does has been done better before. Its slapdash blending of styles reinforces its image as a generic title trying to catch up to the first Gears of War while jumping on the military shooter bandwagon and being cartoony at the same time.

The most innovative feature is that different creatures may appear depending on what time you dive.

Even if the game were technically sound, Puzzle Quest 2 has since been released, so going with the lesser option of Puzzle Chronicles would be a poor investment on just about every level.

The thought of turning epic Gundam combat into a fighting game is quite awesome, but Battle Assault falls far short of its potential. The story and characters are almost non-existent, giving you a game with little personality.

Those going into SOL: Exodus should be warned that it's a thoroughly average space shooter that doesn't innovate and is going to deliver a boilerplate experience.

I was literally crying with laughter when I pulled this out of the post bag at the office, waiting to rip it to pieces and label it as a glorified sex toy. Well it is, but there’s some damn fine gameplay there too.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest is indeed awesome, but it’s the kind of awesome derived from watching people falling out of trees on YouTube or seeing your friend get punched in the nuts at a party. It’s the sort of game nobody in their right mind can take seriously, but because it’s so ludicrous, it winds up being fun.

Behind the poor soundtrack, outdated visuals and general lack of presentation is a beat-em-up with rock-solid gameplay mechanics and ample multiplayer appeal.

The game is £20 and does have an online mode, but why bother? There are better FPS's out there, better robot transforming games out there (like Robotech: Battlecry for instance) and better games with bikes in.

Breach suffers from being bland. There is no visual style, it sounds dull, and without hardcore mode turned on the level design is uninspired and weapons lack impact.

There's some initial promise here, but it's ultimately a regressive, if not a lateral move from the last game, hampered mostly by its own lack of ambition, scope, and an overly demanding release schedule.

Rockstar take three years to produce masterpieces, benchmarks of game design, but Reflections have taken almost double that time and give us an unfinished, unpolished mess.

Naturally, mediocre graphics can be overlooked if the gameplay is there, but some considerable problems hinder this aspect of the game as well.

It’s cheap, plays well and is a nice little time waster. Unfortunately, it's a forgettable experience that will only occupy you for a few hours.

Modern TCG fans will probably either love it for being simple and different, or hate it for being old and unlike the current game.

The only thing Death By Cube has to offer that its competition doesn't is an excessive level of blood (or red robot oil), but that alone doesn't warrant a purchase.

A likeable adventure. While it contains many frustrating aspects that gamers would do well to stand, there’s something in the game that makes it oddly appealing.

There are a number of good ideas in Spartan, and though they aren’t particularly well-executed, some of them are fun to tinker around with and try out. But only tinker: Spartan is a slow and boring game that few will enjoy.

Despite its solid foundations, Velvet Assassin doesn’t have the brute strength to be anything more than a brief distraction for extremely patient, hardcore fans of the traditional stealth genre.

Even to the most hardcore of point-and-click fanatics, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend Da New Guys, and if we were still in the '90s this would remain so.

While its console counterpart had no problem loading up, the PSP version of All In suffers from some atrocious load times that cripple the experience (four minutes to get into a game!) which turns an average poker simulation into a game that you really shouldn’t even bother with.

Unless DynamoKid has some drastic updates down the line, there isn't any compelling reason to download it.

The “multiplayer only” tag is sure to put many off from considering the purchase at the current time.