When you could buy Tekken 4 for the same amount, why would you want this average contribution to the PS2 gene pool? Sometimes it can be fun, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and done much, much better.

With such a terrible basic challenge, you’d have to be a dangerous Robotech fanatic to get any joy out of playing.

Despite the huge amount of secrets to unlock we can't envisage this lasting too long and it might be just too sugary for a lot of people. But if you're looking for something to play with the whole family, or with a lot of friends then this is perfect. [Import]

Better visuals and a more complex conversation system would have made this a game to live up to the legendary magazines. Almost.

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."

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.

A game of high scores, precision and unlocking further stages to then score high on. It’s a game that flies in the face of new fads like stealth modes, world-building sims and realism in favour of old-skool thrills and kills.

What you have is a mish-mash of two gameplay styles, neither of which is particularly enthralling. Particularly not when you’ve got games like "Timesplitters 2" hitting the streets at almost the same time.

It's just that every worthwhile aspect of the game is drowning in a mire of stilted gameplay and unfortunate language shortcomings.

Spawn Armageddon is going to go down in the annals of gaming history as yet another licence squandered on a game which is unoriginal, uninspiring, and destined for the bargain bins. Disappointing.

With varied enemies, inventive weapon pick-ups, attach enhancements, four-player link-up, secret areas and, of course, three of the coolest crime-fighters around to play as, fans of The Powerpuff Girls – and anyone looking for a quick fix of button-bashing – will find plenty to enjoy here!

A very dull experience. You can't help but feel this might have actually been all right as a light gun game.

Another glitchy/stupid thing is the CPU AI. On occasions when surrounded and unable to attack the CPU character was literally just standing there, not helping.

Sadly, even with the ideas nicked from other titles, Rogue Agent leaves you with an empty feeling that while EA has studied FPS games carefully, it has no idea how to make one of its own.

The tight and sometimes confused battles may be bad for the gameplay but great for the overall 'Nam experience.

Kings Field – a name that has been emblazoned upon our minds by virtue of its sheer incompetence.

It's worth a look for fans but once again this is a non-essential Star Wars adventure.

Essentially, what we have here is a lightweight arcade-style driving game that’s great fun to play in the short-term. Sadly, the whole thing comes to an end to rapidly.

An average game that may be backed by superior bonus modes and challenges, but which at heart offers nothing new and, taken at face value, fails to deliver a truly thrilling experience.

An unremarkable title that whilst potentially sound in concept (aside from the gratuitous use of a female lead), completely fails to deliver in terms of providing any kind of thrills.

A lame, tawdry and charmless affair.

Not as great as real poker, but certainly the next best thing. Now take those socks off, we got three kings.

The digital equivalent of a Steven Seagal movie or a Yorkie bar - a man's videogame if ever we saw one. Unfortunately, it's also a game to make grown men weep bitter tears of frustration.

Lewd, loud and incredibly funny, Magna Cum Laude is a game that works far better than it should. This is partly because there's very little 'game' there to speak of.

This is a game about a partnership between play styles, and one that wouldn’t seem to work on paper, but like all good buddy relationships, like Starsky & Hutch themselves, it comes through in the end.

The game also has fairly low requirements so will happily run on older systems.

From the balance between crashes and near misses to the graphical detail and track progression, Speed Kings always trails Burnout 2. If you’re a bike fanatic then Speed Kings is the game for you. Everyone else should stick with Acclaim’s other arcade racer.

The jerky framerate in particular is unforgivable and not tweaking the game engine to account for the extra grunt behind the GameCube is something that Midway should acknowledge as a huge mistake.

In its haste to take football back to the streets, EA forgot to make pit-stops at gameplay and fun. When MC Harvey is the best thing you can point to in a videogame, you know something has gone drastically wrong.

Great news if you've never played the games before and have large pockets, but for those who hoped to revisit the entire series in the same fashion as they did the original, this is nothing short of a major disappointment.

The Curse comes in the form of a yellow mist. A yellow mist with some social problems, it likes to posses the dead, hence the zombies and also inanimate objects. So it's slightly different to Resi Evil and the zombies run fast, like in 28 Days Later. Ooooo. Sounds fascinating. It isn't.

It simply doesn't live up to the show's reputation. It's not funny, the style of the graphics aren't the same and, even though Samurai Jack has some totally kick-ass moves, the game lacks enough 'wow!' factor to keep you coming back for more.

A rare victory for the kid's game genre and shining example of how these games should be done.

Where the game stalls is not in what it gives you, but what it doesn’t. Maybe it’s us, but we really enjoyed the mission debriefings that "Ace Combat" offered.

The missions are playable, but nothing to write home about and in fact if it wasn’t for the gore there would really be nothing to recommend this at all. Oh, and it takes bloody ages to load.

Neat little touches such as his over the top armour, and the way Jack loses clothing as his health decrease are amusing enough to draw out the odd giggle from most players. However, when these jokes wear thin, the realisation that the worlds of Samurai Jack are as sparsely populated as areas in the Sahara desert really tests the will of the gamer.

With some excellent kiddified gameplay, superb graphics and enough content to keep the little people quiet – for a while at least – this is a fine example of how to use a tie-in licence properly.

No matter how much extra strategy you put on top of this combat system (as it is, not much), or how convoluted the maps and puzzles (they’re not) you are still going to be stuck with a fundamental flaw in the fact that the in-game fighting just ain’t fun.

We happily sat and wiled away the best part of a day with this. No complaints. The reason? Because Futurama is funny. No matter how average, generic or banal the gameplay gets, it’s still Futurama, and it’s still funny.

The main problem is the dead simple quests that are out of a Nintendo game rather than the most popular book of the last century. Without a decent challenge there is no point in playing!

For the most part though there is a clunky feel to the game. Animation is often awkward and fails to convey the vulgar flamboyance the Eighties wrestling became renowned for and sadly for the most part this is a title devoid of excesses.

If you can ignore the many obvious flaws in the graphics and presentation there is, believe it or not, an addictive game to be had, but the numerous obvious technical problems prevent a higher score.

A touch that I particularly liked was the ability to delegate certain tasks to commanders who join your campaign at various stages. If you don't really want to spend ages establishing a base then it may be to your advantage to delegate this task to someone else, leaving you free to concentrate on attacking the enemy.

Hardcore RPG fans may find it a bit on the easy side and it's not a particularly long game, but there's definitely more to it than EA's effort despite not having movie clips throughout.

A few hours later and with huge smiles on the faces of the whole team it was obvious that Empire’s racer is actually something very special – an original idea which actually works.

It's a shame because The Hobbit recreates the atmosphere of the book quite well, only to bugger it all up with clichés, a wayward camera and maddening difficulty level.

The career mode really doesn't make up for this cookie cutter title, and compared to Weapons Master mode of SC 2 it just cant compare.

The best accolade Philosopher's Stone can receive is that it makes the events of the first story (published way back in the twentieth century) seem fresh for the fans, while hiding nothing from the uninitiated.

The graphics vary wildly from very nice when you’re up high doing a bombing run to absolutely horrible when you get near the ground – what the hell is pop-up doing on a Gamecube?

A let-down of legendary proportions. It’s a resurrected beast of the gaming world, only rather than being intact and brilliantly playable, it’s rotting and bits are falling off in large chunks.

Sadly, there's just not enough action to get you hooked.

The vehicle and character designs seem to have been built from a kit consisting of ideas from games that share a similar theme, and in such a hurry that someone forgot to add grime and wear definitions.

A quick, pointless Career mode and some extremely poor multiplayer options embarrassingly fail to justify the miniscule price tag. Swerve to avoid.

Unfortunately the Dress-up system isn’t enough to save Evergrace from being very average. The horribly bland visuals, limited exploration and short life span (around 5 hours per character) drag down what could have been a rewarding and unique adventure.

Unless you count the prospect of photographing a different playmate as enticing there is little to encourage you to play on. And the Playmates all look reasonably similar anyway.

It still has a definite 'one-more-go' appeal and thus the sense of satisfaction when you complete missions is immense. Whilst not quite as accomplished as the Medal Of Honor games, Crashdown is certainly recommended for those looking for a decent FPS treat.

Despite the fantastic Monster Editing mode and all the game's charm, it's not the exactly the height of originality and can be completed way too easily. Still, whilst the game may not be amazing, it's pretty darn good.

Massively superior to the pre-Xbox original, Headhunter: Redemption doesn't stand up as anything really special in this crowded genre, but instead flashes with moments of quality and intriguing entertainment that sparks life into a strictly one-way stroll through endless corridors.

Certainly a decent enough addition to the genre and less demanding race fans should find plenty to smile about.

Ultimately, while Kingdom Under Fire might be considered a Korean homage to Blizzard, there’s plenty here to enjoy in its own right.

Little more than a shoot -'em-up for beginners. It's easy to play and simple to follow which unfortunately makes it slow-paced and largely uneventful with basic auto-locking trigger-holding action.

If you really, really want a diving game, this is as good as it’s likely to get. You shameless little weirdo.

Sadly, the developer seemingly hates its audience because battle is so maddeningly unforgiving.

A big yawnfest... None of these events offer anything that remotely resembles fun which ideally is exactly the experience you'd expect from a party-style game like this.

Lego Racers 2 races along at a fantastic pace, with extra bursts of speed in places, and the graphics are lavishly colourful, featuring impressively effective weapons. It has set an impressive president as the first highly recommendable cart racer to appear on the PS2.

Too slow-paced to keep the laughs coming and keep the game wacky, zany or at a lively pace for long-term entertainment.

Less of the ‘groundbreaking title’ Infogrames claimed it would be and more… well, crap. We’d suggest renting it at best – and that’s only if you’re absolutely desperate to see what you’re not missing.

Barely a very, very average racing game. There are no notable qualities about the game to justify any sort of high score and the visuals are poor, but it still offers several short bursts of entertainment and at £20 you can't expect much more than that.

Breaking the mould of film conversion failures, this is a great game and (niggling flaws aside) is fun to play.

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."

Fans of the movie series do not want to be solving complex puzzles – they want to be slaying the dead – and A Fistful Of Boomstick gives constant opportunity for this.

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.

All the fun of tagging the enemy is tied together with an admirable level of hyper-reality that manages to convince you that the game is taking a realistic stance, while so obviously being no more genuine an experience than if you had read the story in a comic. Everything is heightened, almost to the point of self-parody.

Risqué set-piece conversations spice up the monotony as things progress, but essentially life in the flat is a painfully hollow experience to which the eventual moment of intimacy becomes an inevitable anti-climax.

You don’t feel anywhere near as connected to the gameplay as you do with "Tetris" or "Bust-A-Move." Another problem is that despite all of the chaos going on around you the game feels quite slow.

Lightweight footie fans will love VS3 for its accessibility; footie nuts will love it for its attention to detail and near perfect gameplay.

We don't like to say this about an X-Men game, but Wolverine's Revenge is an unplayable beast of a game.

A quite shallow, but still rather fun game of combat that can be quick to play and is enjoyable for a short period of time but just lacks the depth that most commanders of armies would like to see.

Whatever the mission, the same problems rear their ugly head. The gameplay is dire; you don’t even want to see what the second mission is, let alone get to the end. The graphics are atrociously bad -- perhaps the worst on the GameCube.

This subtlety, off the wall humour and quaint fun makes Ribbit King multiplayer very compelling indeed.

Without the huge stars of the NBA to play against, it already falls flat next to EA’s "NBA Street" and despite all of its urban trappings this is a very bland and unexciting ballgame.

Is it possible to love a game for a singular sound effect? We certainly hope so.

With a comprehensive (and more importantly, rather good) multiplayer game complementing the rather hard campaign mode, Ghost Recon 2 is at least heading in the right direction now - and for the moment that's good enough for us.

Unlike most other FPS titles, combat can take place at great range, as well as up-close when you and you're squad must move house to house.

The problem here is simple laziness. Constantine is a dull, monotonous shooter with few redeeming features, do yourself a favour and buy some of the superb graphic novels instead.

Who would want to admit to buying this? We’d certainly be too embarressed to show this to any of our friends, enemies, neighbours, random strangers off the street, pet cat...

All the belly laughs in the world can't save such a shameful game. Perhaps it's a lack of pace, or the fact that the puzzles seem more of a chore than a challenge, that makes Futurama such a tame title.

It's not terrible, just rather pointless.

It does two things badly, when we'd rather it did one thing well.

You want to impress us? Be the Grand Theft Auto of BMX games not Beavis and Butthead on a bike.

Some shoddy game design and AI, proves Wolverine’s Revenge to be more Thomson and Co than Marvel; that interactive comic just isn’t interactive enough.

It's the styling and attention to detail that makes the game work...This is not the best game you'll play all year, but it's certainly the most honest.

Freakiest of all though, are those sunken-eyed ghoulish geishas that pop up every five minutes - more chilling than any slathering zombie. Brrr.

The ridiculous handling makes these additional modes practically impossible to play.

To be honest, the game is really quite enjoyable, but four-player Gauntlet-style fighting action would have been superb.

In fact, every element of Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown kinda loses its comedy sheen over time, inviting the doubts to creep in and fester in your mind: Could it be that Capcom aren't actually having a laugh? Are they serious about this game?

Still, at least you get to get out and enjoy easily the worst thirst-person controls devised.

You may be thinking that this all sounds very familiar, and it is, but in terms of enjoyment, Showdown is a vast improvement on its predecessors.