Combat Elite makes an ideal rental title, three days being a good length of time to gauge whether you can tolerate quite so many invisible walls and German soldiers shooting you from nowhere.

Aside from the somewhat devastating problems with the camera, Combat Elite is a nifty little number that has all the addictiveness, interaction, and 'pick up and play' of many retro titles that people still cherish today.

Gladiator has a well-planned multiplayer mode that works on and offline so we're left with a fairly empty, meaningless experience of stupid weapons, coin collection and weapon upgrading that makes you wonder why you're playing. The answer: Multiplayer or you're recovering from a coma.

Why publishers can't just leave classic titles to die gracefully in the warm glow of our misguided reminiscing, is beyond us. Taito Legends represents the crème of the crop, but it still tastes a little sour with age.

LA Rush is the grubby Downtown district of LA to "Burnout's" Hollywood, if you will - the two games aren't exactly that similar but with so many better options out there, Midway's offering will be lucky not to simply be left on the shelves alongside a few rotting copies of "Turok Evolution."

The unnecessary complications lie in the sheer volume of convoluted commands crammed onto the DualShock for use throughout the game.

It's good fun, but the novelty of these funky worms waving goodbye in surreal style can wear off pretty quickly.

Race Drivin' was one of the earliest 'real' driving simulators but doesn't remotely stand the test of time. It's deadly slow and bereft of any excitement whatsoever. Unfortunately this describes most of the games on this disc.

Our demon-manifesting rage at the total mediocrity of this series isn't helped by the dodgy jaggy graphics or frequent and annoyingly long loading times, but if you played the original and kept an end of game save, you may want to continue your story.

At the very least this is a good-looking wasted opportunity, while at its most, it's a snazzy disappointment.

Sadly, Genji gameplay appears to be as stuck in the past as its setting and there's no amount of elegance that can cover a flaw like that up.

Having old enemies join forces against Apocalypse is a decent idea for an X-Men story, it's a shame that it has been rendered into a series of dull maps and substandard action. One for collectors.

Like the billions of other platformers fighting for shelf space, it's just kind of... there. The lack of frustration means it's good for kids but for everyone else, why settle for Kimberly when you can have Cheryl?

Despite there being a massive selection of attacks at your disposal, you won't use them, and after battling through your seventeenth batch of Oni bastards, you'll soon settle for the simplest and most effective means of disposal and trade any style for progress.

Our only problem with The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is that, after a while, the brainless stomping does become a little one dimensional, but then again that is the nature of the comic book licence and this is certainly a step above recent titles such as "The Fantastic Four" and "Batman Begins."

The Live options are up there with the best of them and cover everything from team support to Live stats and leaderboards. However, as with many titles that focus on the thrills of Live play, offline it is fairly run of the mill. The game's saving grace, though, is the huge scale of every battle.

The different game modes are good for a giggle, but they aren't good enough to compensate for a tennis game that promises a great deal more than it serves up.

FlatOut wants to be a cool racing and rallying game with an arcade edge, but it ends up being a routine disappointment. [XBM]

A quirky curiosity, not always enjoyable to play and not always fair, either. It'll appeal to small minority - if you like the way that the game looks, then you'll get something out of it, if you don't, then you should avoid Killer7 at all costs... It's just not much fun to play.

No matter how you approach Maximum Impact, it will disappoint. In trying to drag a 2D series into three dimensions, SNK Playmore has forgotten what made its own King Of Fighters games so celebrated and what makes 3D fighting games fun to begin with.

Seven Studios has tried its best to offer a mix of gameplay elements with rescue operations and mini-games included but these aren't enough to break up the monotony of the copious smash and saunter sections.

It's rare for a game of this type to actually be more than a mad single-button-mashing romp that creates more blisters than excitement; it's just unfortunate that the whole game wasn't as polished.

Had the develop[ers] only thought about what it was doing a little bit more it could have made an astonishingly good game using the source material provided.

Caught in an awkward middle ground where it's not as accessible as "Street Fighter Anniversary Collection," not as deep as "Capcom VS SNK 2: EO" and not as buoyant as "King Of Fighters 2002."

The biggest problem with Batman Begins is that it tries to imitate both "Splinter Cell" and "Burnout," two fantastic games that ought to combine for a very successful title. Unfortunately, with Batman at the helm, they turn into parodies bordering on farce.

The story mode is tough, but relatively short, and it becomes quite clear that Samurai Western is more of a blood soaked sprinter than a legendary long-distance athlete of a game.

The multiplayer is okay, with nine additional maps, but it's otherwise a fairly short adventure without much variety and, annoying as it is, you won't return too often.

Perhaps the game wouldn't have been so mind-numbingly average if the developer had allowed the player a little freedom - perhaps by granting movement of the camera.