Racing across the USA for a cash prize is a great concept, and perhaps there's a Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay collaboration in there somewhere. Or possibly there's a sequel that can inject some variety and fun into proceedings, rather than a succession of thankless, exhausting rubber-band races against faceless opponents and stereotypical rivals. Need for Speed: The Run does generate some memorable highlights, but they're simply too few and far between.

A disappointing entry in the Lost Planet series that occasionally shows flashes of potential, but ultimately ends up being marred by numerous problems, Lost Planet 3 manages to eke out a mildly compelling story and a solid multiplayer mode. More akin to the first game, Lost Planet 3 will nonetheless leave you cold.

A fairly mediocre follow-up to the original not so much in terms of content, but the sports you're left to play and how they play. Online play is a great addition, as is more voice control, and the darts and the golf are great fun while they last, but the skiing is way too simple, American Football is dire, tennis is a substandard version of table tennis from the original and baseball is barely passable. So yeah, not exactly blowing us away.

If Blades of Fire manages to strike a chord, it won't be for its narrative, nor its world, but its violence.

Last seen swinging into a time portal towards the bargain bin, we'd recommend you save your cash until it gets there. Spider-Man: Edge of Time is not especially terrible but is far more mundane than a hero of Spider-Man's ilk deserves.

In attempting to start over and give PES its most substantial revamp in a long time, Konami has given the franchise a much-need shot in the arm. There's a lot more to like here than previous, but PES 2011 still feels like an also-ran that's still in dire need of some additional refinement and some of that old fluid magic that once made PES sheer footballing alchemy.

The Dragon Ball series has been trying to peddle long range, multi-tiered combat for quite some time now and it never seems to pull it off. The controls and combos in Raging Blast 2 can be fiddly at the best of times and fights can become decidedly one-sided which is annoying, even when it's in your favour.

Flawed it may be, but Simulacra is an interesting thriller in which you get to play detective. The found phone concept is a smart hook, while the storytelling delivers a yarn that will keep you engaged from beginning to end.

Bland and uninspired, the achievement list will make for easy gamerscore points, but it won't be very inspiring in the process.

After the brilliant Lair of the Shadow Broker episode though, it's a shame that BioWare ends Mass Effect 2's run on such a substandard piece of DLC... a piece of DLC that strips everything that we loved from the main game and left us with nothing more than a run-and-gun shooter.

While we would have liked to see the Gex Trilogy scale up the resolution and bring the gameplay more up to date, it's nice to be able to play Gex, Gex: Enter the Gecko, and Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko on modern platforms, with some neat refinements for good measure.

State of Decay 2 is a perfectly fine game. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, it may be buggy and it might be a step back from the original, but it is nevertheless still a fun game, albeit one that doesn’t really motivate you to keep playing. To keep grinding. I imagine it’s what a real zombie apocalypse would be like, we just wanted more from a game about it.

After a rocky start, No Straight Roads settles into a rhythm, but its action is off-key, in spite of its edible looks and funky soundtrack. Regrettably, No Straight Roads is an action game that doesn't quite hit the high notes, with execution that falls some way short.

LA Cops is a neat game of cops and criminals that's just too short-lived and lacking. The 70s style is a nice touch and the partner dynamic adds a strategic bent (even if we did mostly just use the second cop as an extra life) to what is otherwise a fairly sterile twin-stick shooter.

Despite its decent presentation and simplistic gameplay mechanics, Avatar is as shallow as the kid’s end of a Hobbit’s swimming pool. Whilst there is nothing overly wrong with the gameplay mechanics per se, after you’ve spent 8 hours going back and forth planting explosives or collecting objects for your mission objective, you’ll be ready to use Avatar as a coaster.

A handsome remake that loses some of the original’s power.

While we'd hoped for better things from Aspyr's remastered Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection, this is nonetheless an adequate way to revisit a couple of shooter greats from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I mean the mid 2000s. No doubt further patches (there's already been a significant one) will improve things somewhat.

Afterparty is a disappointing follow-up to Oxenfree, one held up from being an absolute car crash thanks to two wonderfully written protagonists and some crackling dialogue between the two. With lame mini-games, bugs galore, and a story that promises so much and delivers so little, Afterparty will be an Afterthought in no-time at all.

Little more than a cash in on the first Lips and one that I would only recommend for people who do not own the original, but even then you are hard done to as you would be missing out on better songs and more achievements. Madness.

Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut isn't a bad game, it's just not a particularly great one. If you're screaming out for a space combat game in the Colony Wars mould, however, this will certainly fit the bill. Just don't expect to be playing Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut for a particularly long time after you've beaten the missions the first time around.

Buried beneath Lake's innumerable mundane tasks are some really cool characters and stories. It’s just a shame you have to dig deep to really reach them.

A disappointing end to a promising tale, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 is a turgid and inconsistent sequel that fails to live up to its forebear.

Bithell Games assumes your passion for Tron, but what is here stands on its own, though it doesn't truly succeed on its own.

A solid, precision-based time trial racer, Phantom Spark won't satisfy those WipEout and F-Zero cravings, but it will keep you occupied for a fair few hours, if you manage to dial in to its 'just-one-more-go' wavelength.

Ubisoft Toronto has done a fine job in bringing a broken, near-future London to grim life in Watch Dogs: Legion, and playing as anyone you like has a certain appeal, but ultimately, it doesn't quite work as well as one might have hoped.

A solid but sadly unpolished Lovecraft-inspired detective story, The Sinking City has all of the key ingredients to be something compelling, but it's rough around the edges. Dodgy combat drowns an otherwise robust horror-tinged bout of sleuthing, drenched in intrigue.

SnowRunner is a slow game, requiring a lot of patience to get through. If you're willing to give it the time investment it asks, then you will find a satisfying experience here, with each contract you take, and each road you traverse, unfolding into one big puzzle to tackle. A hoard of customisation options also allows you to tinker with your trucks to your heart's content. If that sounds up your street, then SnowRunner might be for you, but don't expect to get anything done fast.

I wish I could report that Zockrates Laboratories served up a playground of emergent sparks, but with such a promising trick I couldn’t help but hunger for more.