It has a lot to live up to, and although it does manage it on several counts, the frustration from its down points tends to grate just a little raw on fractured nerves.

Those last few major battles will only take five years from your life from battlefield stress syndrome. Six, tops.

Because of the excellent job EA has done in its implementation, this new graphics engine feels comfortable and natural.

A deliciously cheesy romp into the giant monster genre.

It's crushingly addictive, especially with the fascinating new possibilities offered by having your cities trade with each other for resources. Fix the stability, add some scenarios and we might be looking at a five star game.

Often the game throws ten or twenty enemies on screen at once, together with goodness knows how many bullets, but the framerate is pretty much solid throughout.

The graphics and sound both capture the action well, and the character animation is particularly strong.

Animal creation, plot, and fast-paced multiplayer and skirmish options all lend a certain amount of charm to the proceedings, although play is much more boring than you'd expect in a game where you can breed an unholy attack force of elephants with scorpion stingers and pincers.

Unlike the offline game, The Sims Online lacks the mad energy and pleasant frustration of managing a complex system of happiness, goals and limited time.

Does one thing and one thing only: it adds one more RPG to the Xbox line-up, and whether or not that's a good thing depends on how desperate you are for a dungeon crawl.

Treyarch has done a masterful job with this game, satisfying the needs of serious hockey fans without losing sight of the fact that a sports game has to be fun.

A fun game, and the inclusion of a character driven -oh ho - plot to be the right direction for the genre to go. But it’s not for anyone who is either looking for the next-generation visual thrill of its competition, or heavy realism.

The biggest improvement in STUN: DG is subtle but critical: the interface has been greatly cleaned up and streamlined. With one exception, the interface is now intuitive, consistent and quirk-free.

It's one of those rare games that manages to combine detail, historical accuracy and playability to make a truly engaging and entertaining strategy game.

If Silent Hill 2 is your first PC horror game, then congrats -- and woe -- to you. Pleasant dreams.

More like somebody's high-school programming project than an actual commercial game. And even then, it's only worth a D.

Worlds' unappealing characters, boring gameplay and woeful presentation make it one that probably even the hardcore should skip.

Playing this game is as tedious and as painful as your morning workout on the stairmaster, without the pain-for-gain benefit of developing six-pack abs.

A real disappointment.

This is only a bad computer game, after all, even if it is one that is broken in almost every fundamental way and is an uncanny combination of tedium and insane frustration.

An incredible, if flawed, experience. You'll need some tolerance and patience, but ultimately, if you want in on the most realistic mech game ever devised, this is it... To paraphrase the legendary Ferris Bueller: Steel Battalion is so choice. If you have the means, we highly recommend picking one up.

For the gamers who want a combat-heavy fantasy world to lose themselves in without the frustrations of the first generation of MMORPGs, Dereth is where you'll want to head.

If gamers aren't put off by the distinctly lack-lustre character visuals, they will be by the dire English voice-overs, stilted and forced from a poorly translated German script.

For starters, it's boring...You generally just button mash as quickly as possible and hope that the cops fall down before you do.

Could have been great, but relies too heavily on the "Jango Fett is cool" idea, and doesn't have the depth of gameplay needed to hold most people's interest.

The ridiculous frustration in the early levels will deplete most gamers' patience.

Treyarch has done a masterful job with this game, satisfying the needs of serious hockey fans without losing sight of the fact that a sports game has to be fun.

A pleasant surprise. The characters are amusing and a little different, the game is smoothly produced, and while it's somewhat derivative, it's still a lot of fun.