There is so little replay potential here, so little urge to top high scores or perfect shoddy make-do attempts, that completing each task feels more of a relief than an achievement.

It is an exercise in immense frustration and painful tedium. When it works, and this feels a stupid sentence at this point, it does manifest the correct semiotic indicators of first-person shooting. You are mowing down literally hundreds of baddies with big metal guns. But that's it. And it isn't all that much.

With about triple the number of mini-games, or a budget price launch, we'd probably recommend it as a quirky curiosity/novelty purchase, but if we have to hear another squeaky kid utter the word 'like', we'll probably self-combust.

Terrible graphics and extremely limited interaction. Even my girlfriend, who normal gets obsessive about these sorts of pet games, lasted a day before she gave up.

You might somehow eke a crumb of satisfaction out of discovering new weapons, but the chances are it'll just make you want to boot up the real thing on a home console. The sooner this stench of mobile putrefaction is buried out of sight, the happier we'll all be.

In short, this isn't going to please anyone, apart from the few of you who are after a decent Virtua Racing for the lounge.

It's fun for half an hour, but that's an awfully expensive 30 minutes. Don't buy RIDE unless you want to be taken for one.

I'm certainly not averse to this sort of thing appearing on WiiWare but My Aquarium feels like half an idea, lazily executed. If you like the idea of a virtual fish-tank, and don't mind that your input is minimal, then the price is about as right as it'll ever get for this sort of thing.

A gaudy glimpse of the bad old days of mid-1990s 3D. And no-one wants that.

Catwoman becomes beyond sloppy. Ultra-sloppy, if you will. Like the Houston 500, right men?

The bottom line is that the core gameplay is tedious beyond belief - so much so that I doubt you'd even get value from renting it.

Right now, the Samurai Shodown series is like a wandering ronin bereft of its former honour; with its sake-sodden stare and rusty katana, it doesn't stand a chance against the superlative Super Street Fighter IV or BlazBlue: Continuum Shift.

A tiresome waste of a strong license, only the most blinkered fan will derive pleasure from this slog of an experience filled with wrong-headed design decisions intended to pad out a game that cannot sustain expansion.

What should have been a dramatic return to form for Sonic, as signalled by the hugely promising trailer videos from earlier this year and the bold decision to use the original Sonic the Hedgehog name, has turned out to be an absolute mess.

Barrel Blast is an abortive and uncannily anachronistic attempt at a character racer with impossible controls, dreadful, imbalanced AI and boring design. It's not even worth the hour of your time that it takes to get completely sick of it.

Players wanting an exciting, fast-paced, on-rails light gun shooter on the Wii are far better served by SEGA's Ghost Squad and House of the Dead: Overkill. The developer's failure to fully embrace the arcade approach ensures this game serves no-one, least of all its tired licence.

A fairly limited package that quickly runs out of ideas.

There's nothing devastatingly awful about this, it's just thoroughly outclassed by most of everything else on the market.

The only redeeming quality is the echo of ambition that can be faintly heard in the ruins of execution.

And so rather than allowing you to feel like an armoured avenger, Iron Man's videogame outing merely offers the chance to lurch awkwardly around the sky like a drunken wasp while holding down a button to blow stuff up.

If you're a fan of online multiplayer slaughter, then it's a safe bet that you've already got plenty of games that do the same thing as War World, and do it a lot better.

As a game, though, it's so cripplingly inane it makes me want to eat my own teeth and replace them with sweetcorn prongs.

By favouring tired run-and-gun scenarios over actual sniping gameplay, you're left with a technically inept entry in the most over-populated gaming genre around. Show some mercy, put one in the back of its head, and leave it for the vultures.

With the mood alternating between boredom and exasperation, Sanctum Of Slime is a spirit-crushing exercise that only a committed masochist could appreciate.

It's just a waste of time. Too clumsy to satisfy any action gaming urge, and too wrapped up in its own turgid mythology to realise it's getting things so badly wrong, releasing it right before the onslaught of massive winter releases is a decision more audacious than any design choices in the game itself.

Simply too generic in pretty much every way, a collection of ideas done hundreds of times before in other games, offering nothing new to excite or surprise the player. A wholly unremarkable and totally avoidable game.

SEGA might as well have released this as The Adventures of Fiery Boob Lady, and left their mothballed franchise with at least modicum of dignity.

A frustrating package. There's a wealth of gameplay, across the two discs, but very little variety.

But there are flashes of inspiration here, clues to the competence and ingenuity of the developer. Sadly these are drowned out by unnecessary bulk and repetition, resulting in an experience that's flabby and uninspiring regardless of your appreciation of its aims.

If you really, really want to play tennis with your Move controller, Racket Sports works well enough to fulfill that function. But think carefully about whether that experience is worth £25 (it isn't).

Everything works pretty much as it should - the controls and camera rarely freak out and leave you confused and defenceless - but it's just utterly uninspired and devoid of life.

Playable within its faulty parameters, yet at the same time, something we've seen a million times before, and in many ways better. Roll on the next one, please.

It's competent. Solid. Inoffensive. Somewhere down the line, DnS Development got mired in the details and neglected to inject the spark necessary to make the run-and-gun fun.

Cheerful, perfectly pitched and instantly addictive, Mr Driller is the sort of thing that makes you want to grab those tiresome moaners and say "Look! This is casual gaming! It's what games are all about! And it's brilliant!"

The more interesting large-scale fire fights and planning truck upgrades provide some reasons to stick with it, along with nostalgia for dear old Interstate 76. If only Targem had concentrated on lending the missions more of the depth I76's sported, the other faults would be far more forgivable.

Even the most ardent JRPG fan will baulk at the roughshod simplicity of the game's systems, restricting the game's audience to Japanophile anime fans who can overlook the experiences shortcomings as a videogame and approach it as a cultural curio. That is, a sexist, senseless and ultimately stupid cultural curio.

It's repetitive, disposable and artificially inflated. Most of all it's frustrating: frustrating because of the poor execution of a promising concept and because it's nowhere near the game that it could have been.

But it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not worth the effort. The DS, as hopefully this constructive and helpful review will have shown, is the perfect medium for recreating management sims. Just not this time.

Watchmen Part 2 therefore manages the rather impressive feat of actually being a worse game than its bone-headed predecessor.

It doesn't help that the game goes from mildly challenging to ridiculously easy within the space of a few hours, and once you hit level 50 nothing in the game will pose any kind of threat.

Anything that was good about Dead Island has been crudely ripped out, and whatever remains has been served up in such a way that it simply isn't fun, even at the basic "look at me, I'm killing zombies" level.

The most striking thing about SOE2 is its tragic pointlessness. As a sequel in a franchise that is almost entirely unloved, in a world where there are countless games which do any part of this game better, it's sad to think that a group of people developed it, because then we'd have to blame them for putting out such a diabolical piece of cack.

It's an exercise in frustration and annoyance, and the payoffs aren't worth it - nothing you unlock makes this game any fun.

Devotees may still play along, through fandom obligation if nothing else, but there's no spell that can change the fact that Harry Potter's videogame saga ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

Despite the lacking port, the game is one of the more enjoyable super-vintage titles to appear on XBLA and it's a testament to the core design that its fun hasn't dulled too dramatically in the past twenty-five years.

It's not thunderously bad, but it is offensively plain, and there are some really daft design decisions lurking among the ridges of this DVD.

A terrible mess.

Mediocre, unimpressive and uninspired. The handling and physics are competent, but the missions are dull and the presentation is shoddy. The most fun to be had is in laughing at the voiceovers.

There is a place for more substantial 3D games like this on the platform but Street Trace: NYC provides nothing to recommend itself over the slew of more tightly focussed and expressed rivals on the platform.

Later levels tend to get merely more irritating rather than more enjoyable, and the many fans of the Oddworld series would have been better served with handheld versions of "Abe's Oddysee" and "Abe's Exoddus," rather than this frankly overpriced, lame effort.

I realise that it's financially unrealistic to expect a property as offbeat and niche as Hellboy to really benefit from ambitious game design, but that doesn't stop me from wishing that someone would let Blizzard loose on the character, for instance.

This is one of the biggest disappointments of the system, and the year.

If you can look past the lack of polish and horrible graphics, there's a compelling and unique take on cover-based shooters here, along with an interesting lesson on how games deal with plot. It's a rewarding little game, if you can hack it.

Even the best endeavour seems futile in the face of a clunky control system and a lack of strong visual feedback. To call it a relaxing piece of leisure software doesn't excuse it, either.

With a frustrating yet easy single-player mode that can be exhausted in less than an hour, it falls to multiplayer to improve the score - and it's true that playing with other people does liven things up a tad.

Were your movements less plodding, the weapons a bit meatier, the enemies even basically tactical, the story and dialogue more than perfunctory, the environments remotely imaginative, or the co-operative mode online-enabled, Terminator Salvation would still be far too rough around the edges, far too short, and far too cynical to withstand much critical inspection, but as it is, it's rubbish on virtually every count.

If Churchill had died, we might all be speaking German, but at least we wouldn't have to put up with nonsense like this.

Monster Jam is a terrible racing game, and a laughable attempt at recreating the hefty impact of monster trucks to boot. With zero challenge and aggravating control, I don't think "MotorStorm 2" has much to worry about.

New Rally-X is fun for about ten minutes, but that's all, and for the price that's just not enough.

Flushed Away is absolute toilet. Sorry, again (but not as sorry as anyone involved in making the game should be).

The original Ape Escape was charming and innovative, but this entry is as basic as motion gaming gets. What really hurts is that there's no reason why Ape Escape couldn't have been the game to take the waggle genre to the next level, if only it had a bit more passion behind it.

Oh, Haemimont. You've broken my heart...Omerta: City of Gangsters is patchy and clunky, but it's also dull and frustrating.

Right from first touch, it's clear that Republic Heroes hasn't undergone nearly enough of this sort of testing, and the uninspired foundations are further compromised as they are built upon. As a result, this is a product that will make children frustrated and unhappy, the very opposite of that to which Star Wars should aspire.

Even the staunchest of Myst fans can't deny that this is a pretty poor port. Despite being faithful to the original in sound effects and atmosphere, its glitches and lack of new, DS-specific functions ultimately inhibit its worth.

Star Trek becomes a rare movie game that rises above its peers and delivers something genuinely fun. It's only ever a partial success though, too bogged down by timid design and technical rough edges to really be the game that Trek deserves.

It deserved to be left dying in the gutter, begging for loose change, and is in no way a glorious representation of a fondly remembered era of classic arcade gaming. It's a clunky, somewhat charming period piece that's interesting for five minutes if you have childhood associations with it, but, for everyone else, it isn't even worth going beyond the free trial version.

Right from first touch, it's clear that Republic Heroes hasn't undergone nearly enough of this sort of testing, and the uninspired foundations are further compromised as they are built upon. As a result, this is a product that will make children frustrated and unhappy, the very opposite of that to which Star Wars should aspire.

Bliss Island is about as uninspired as mini-game compilations get, with a flavourless selection of challenges and a half-hearted attempt at adding charm and character.

Naughty Bear sold itself to a lot of customers by pretending to be adult, gritty and brutal. In fact, it's childish, facile and more pointless than manning the phone-lines for the Rob Green retirement fund. Avoid at all costs, or at least wait until it's inevitably slashed in price if you're really desperate for some sledgehammer humour and cheap Gamerscore.

The gameplay in Undercover: Dual Motives consists entirely of finding a thing, using it to do a thing, then having a conversation with someone who tells you you need to find another thing, and going to find the thing. There is no sense of suspense or mystery whatsoever.

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

If you can look past the lack of polish and horrible graphics, there's a compelling and unique take on cover-based shooters here, along with an interesting lesson on how games deal with plot. It's a rewarding little game, if you can hack it.

With the mood alternating between boredom and exasperation, Sanctum Of Slime is a spirit-crushing exercise that only a committed masochist could appreciate.

As we perch on the cusp of a bold new console generation there's simply no justification for games this anaemic and sloppy, especially at full price. Even in its best moments, The Sopranos is dull, shallow and repetitive - a game already five years past its sell-by date.

Just consider the gorgeous and stunning packages of Resident Evil, Maximo, Devil May Cry or Killer 7. How are we supposed to accept this unpleasant lump of gristle in comparison?

A lazy and predictable slog through 20-year-old game design, stultifying 'action' and glaring, ridiculous omissions. There's no defending it on the grounds of being a kids' game, since most astute children will likely find this turgid, unengaging blast every bit as tedious and repetitive as their adult counterparts.

There's no excuse to the get the basics this wrong and there's no reason why slicing your way through a wall of enemies shouldn't be fun. Yet there's nothing that's fun here, only a monotonous bloody grind that copies everything from its peers except their polish.

Ultimately, all Funky Punch has going for it is the price. It's certainly cheaper than Tekken, but it's also a pale shadow of virtually all its genre peers. If you value frugality over actual value for money, then by all means give this a spin.

Regardless of it being very hard to picture how its tedious, clumsy mechanics could possibly evolve into something fluid and entertaining, any game that puts you through a good 15 or 20 hours of overwhelming despair to get to even a chance of something worthwhile - which the server-wide near-silence suggests actually isn't, and certainly won't be until if and when there are enough players to populate large-scale tussles - is a failure.

This is a poorly thought out, drab racer that might have been considered passable on mobiles but on dedicated games machines we deserve better. Don't buy this. Don't let anyone else buy this. Don't let the games industry know it's okay for them to port mobile phone games to superior hardware without upgrading them in any way.

A wonky also-ran.

It may be fun and it may make you sweat, but as an interactive fitness companion it's a feeble, infuriating effort that lacks the stamina to compete.

As interesting an idea as Sky Diving is, sadly the concept fails to deliver thanks to clunky motion sensing.

Whoever, wherever, whatever you are, there is absolutely zero reason to own this atrocious excuse for a video game.

American Football fans looking for a cheap retro fix will probably squeeze 400 points worth of fun out of Cyberball before déjà vu sets in, but the absence of any real multiplayer challenge means any amusement comes with a built-in expiry date, one that arrives sooner than you'd like. It's no Speedball, that's for sure.

To make matter worse, the race will stop dead at certain points to forcibly initiate a mini-game in the guise of one of Dastardly and Muttley's futile foils.

If you're the parent of a five year-old boy, you can sit them in front of Emergency Heroes and leave the room, confident it's less graphically violent than an episode of The Archers. Just be aware that for anyone over five, it's also less thrilling.

Aside from championship you get standard quick race, split-screen and time trial options, and Drift Combo, an incongruous, aggressively arcadey and frankly unplayable mode that challenges you to string long sequences of slides together.

The ideas aren't all bad and on paper this must have sounded like a rich and promising game. However, the game far overreaches itself and the coding, visuals and execution of those ideas is comprehensively unpolished.

The games are irritating and forgettable, the scoring system is bizarre, the play modes make no sense and the constantly shrill urban-cartoon-hipster presentation feels like some ninja chav just injected a pint of boiling hot Red Bull into your eyeballs.

Frankly terrible considering the rich potential the Wii controller offers for games of this ilk.

As a relic to amuse your friends with it serves a purpose, but you could probably achieve the same result by visiting YouTube.

From this point it's clear that in terms of being a shooter, 007 Legends is dismal - but in terms of being an actual James Bond game, it's a genuine insult.

The art style, character models and environments had the shonkiness of a shareware title at the time, so seeing them run in high definition is hardly going to help. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

A wonky also-ran.

So, yes, there's definitely a decent game lurking somewhere in Iron Man, but we haven't seen it yet. This one isn't a disaster, but it can be a rather bleak experience.

The graphics are horrible, and made even worse by that hellish "smoothing" filter. Your powered-up hero has a bulky weightlifter's body with a tiny comedy head on top, while enemy designs are lumpy and ugly.

As the Story Mode can be cleared in a couple of hours you're left to find fun in one of the game's simple multiplayer modes (download play or Wi-Fi) but these do little to enliven the repetitive and staccato move, stop, point, shoot, flow of play leaving a meagre and shallow title that's difficult to recommend.

Charging 800 points for this when the aforementioned Castlevania: SotN comes at the same price is taking the proverbial. Steer well clear of this one.

Inevitably, it's the mini-games that really muff things up though.

Its skill system is like a twisted version of EVE Online's, without the intricacy or CCP's talent. Its mise-en-scène is somewhere between the grittiness of Conan and WAR's orcs and humans. Underneath the lack of originality, there's a hole where the game should be: a loose, incongruous mess of bad controls, horrible user interface, and broken combat system.

505 Game Street has been commercially smart to jump aboard the Brain Training bandwagon quickly, but it has made a huge mistake in throwing a faceless copycat effort out there. Hopefully people will not be remotely fooled - we're certainly not.

Usually, spin-off games can fall back on their inherited audience of existing fans, but with a pointless story that adds nothing to a tale already completed, it's hard to see how even the most devoted follower could get more than an evening of mild amusement from such a scrawny experience.

It's yet another example of a distinctly average "extreme sports" game that lacks the polish and creativity of the real-life sportsmen it's trying to emulate-slash-harness.

Hopefully this is the last we'll see of the human d-pad experiment. I spend enough time under the thumb as it is.

Is it unfair to demand £19.99 for something that's as unfinished, badly designed and devoid of deliberate entertainment value as Aurora Watching? Definitely.

I realise first person shooters are getting shorter these days, but, come on. Did Saber Interactive really imagine that releasing a movie tie-in that you can sleepwalk through inside an hour was going to be acceptable?

The controls are awful, the camera is beyond appalling, the graphics are hideous, the environments are bare, the gameplay is unbearably repetitive and the whole thing is an utter chore to play.

Settlers II is a great game. A classic. This version isn't. It's a travesty, and one that should never have been released. Without the fatal bugs it'd be a disappointing put passable conversion but you can't play a game not knowing when or if the game will actually work the way it's supposed to, or if saving your progress will cause it to crash.

I expected better from Terminal Reality. Ghostbusters wasn't quite the real deal, but it suggested a studio that could go on to much better things - and then Kinect Star Wars, and now this. If you don't want The Walking Dead tarnished forever, then avoid Survival Instinct: it is simple hackwork, fan exploitation at its most crude.

The Eternity Clock is shambolic and underfed, even by the Timelord's previous low gaming standards.

The controls are awful, the camera is beyond appalling, the graphics are hideous, the environments are bare, the gameplay is unbearably repetitive and the whole thing is an utter chore to play.

Insultingly simple and clumsy Live Arcade puzzle game, unworthy of your time.

To be fair to publisher Rising Star, it does deserve tremendous credit for regularly bringing unheralded, obscure Asian titles to Europe. Sadly though, in the case of Ju-On: The Grudge, it has picked probably the most excruciatingly leaden survival-horror game of all time, and that took some doing.

For those of us living in the now, it's joyless tat and should be smashed with hammers. Big ones.

Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad might have been enjoyable, in a silly, disposable way, if the gameplay was halfway decent. It isn't, and not even the nicest bottom in the world can make up for that.

Since you can pretty much exhaust the available gameplay within half an hour of switching the DS on, it seems likely that this curiously half-baked compilation was simply a way for Activision to use the Tony Hawk brand to get their motion sensing peripheral into the market. Yet so flimsy are the games that it feels like they simply bundled the internal tech demos designed to test the hardware and dressed it up as a commercial game.

For everything else in its amazing catalogue of flaws, errors and catastrophes, though, the biggest problem is that the game just stops whenever you can't work out what to do.

Chronically poor AI and a lack of challenge aren't the only problems Code of Honor suffers from. The levels are highly linear and feel artificial, with areas boxed in by fences, barbed wire and impenetrable bushes.

If it's erotic imagery you're after, just get some porn. The visuals will be more realistic, the acting will be better and the plot will make more sense.

It doesn't really work, as the game never finds the right way to balance the two modes of play, but this brief flicker of ambition offers just enough ballast to prevent this otherwise tiresomely unremarkable game from sinking completely.

It's pretty clear that Pimp My Ride is not aimed at us. And by "us" I mean "people who have at least a basic understanding of what makes a good game". It's the equivalent of a movie like Norbit or a TV show like...well, like Pimp My Ride.

As the back of the box says: Identify (that the game's a bit rubbish). Eliminate (it off your shopping list). Survive (with your dignity intact).

Let's not beat about the bush and get straight to the obvious: Simpsons Skateboarding is diabolical... a cash-in in the purest sense of the term.

For 25 quid, you could hire Richard Blackwood and Daniel Bedingfield for the afternoon and still have change for an egg sandwich, a Panda Pops and the bus to Lewisham Travelodge. You'd have more fun.

If you have a flagrant disregard for your sanity, your bank balance and enjoy the kind of masochistic self flagellation that true weirdos get up to in the privacy of their own home, then by all means pop down to your local gaming emporium and pick up Rise of the Machines and remind yourself how good all the other games in your collection are by comparison.

Would Heavy Armor be a better game if it ditched Kinect and focused purely on the tried-and-tested buttons? In all honesty, no - because without the novelty of raising your arm to pull down a periscope or punch your fleeing co-pilot in the face, this would be a comparatively dull experience.

The DS's wireless abilities means that it's able to offer two-player mode on a handheld, which would be tremendous, if it didn't require two copies of the game to play. A ridiculous rip-off for a game nearly two decades old.

It has some redeeming features and won't be the most depressing footballing experience most of us endure in the next 30 days, but rather like most professional footballers, it would do better to focus more on its football than the surrounding pageantry - and on the pitch it can't even get the accents right.

Even Harry, Ron and Hermione's limp-wristed spell-casting animation looks half-hearted. It's an insult to the fiction, an insult to the increasingly good films, and an insult to bad videogames.

At no point was it an unpleasant game to play, it's merely completely retrograde in several key areas and lacking any sense of presentation or style. It's an ugly game, but one which, crucially, works as a game at its most basic level - which, to my mind, weighs heavily against the problems it has in most other areas.

The generic can't-be-arsed title says it all. It's the sort of thing you might consider buying for your Dad, should you spot it in the GBP 1.99 bin at the supermarket two days before his birthday, even though you know he doesn't really play games all that much.

The game's central conceit, which has you infiltrating giant towers with the aim of bringing them down from the inside, encourages uninspiring, repetitive internal environments, a problem the game's art team fails to overcome.

It could have been an interesting title but the problems with control, weird gameplay style, terrible graphics and rigged, repetitive games just kill any joy that would be garnered from playing it.

Every aspect - from concept to execution - is so sorely flawed as to make even "GoldenEye: Rogue Agent" blush and to find a game so virtually meritless in this day and age is a rare thing indeed.

It's a stupid idea, and one that pretty much breaks Midnight Bowling. It's too silly to work as a bowling sim, but it's also too open to unfair play to work as a fun multiplayer game.

As a whole the game feels undercooked, unpolished and ultimately unsatisfying.

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution has botched controls, faulty technology and unsympathetic style, but I suspect there's a half-decent arcade fighter residing somewhere underneath it all. Even if there is, though, it'll need to go back to the gym for some serious work before showing its face in the ring again. As it is, it dances like a buffalo and stings like wet cabbage.

Absolutely horrible execution.

A relatively pretty update of the classic formula, but one that lacks the soul or spirit to make it even vaguely interesting.

Off Road is not as hateful as, say, RealPlay Racing, but you still shouldn't buy it.

The idea of an interactive comic as narrative expansion is a sound one, but Ignition entirely fails to do the concept justice.

While Sniper: Art of Victory is superior to its brother in arms, and the sniping mechanic itself is reasonably well implemented, there are still too many flaws here to recommend it.

Once the novelty of the game concept has worn off, which doesn't take long, the frustration caused by the controls really kicks in.

At best, it's a functional third-person platformer that sometimes acts like a shooter. At worst, it's an astonishing collection of poor design decisions, half-hearted implementation and mindless narrative clutter that will only lead to buyer's remorse in all who decide to give it a try.

You've lost a lot of respect and you've ruined the enjoyment of hundreds of your admirers. Look me in the eye and tell me you're not ashamed.

But the really depressing thing about PlayFirst's spirit-crushing little game is that it'll probably sell enough to result in a deluge of the bloody things, and force us to question the sanity of mankind. Again.

Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball is due for release soon, and that's a far more instinctive and entertaining affair. Save your points for that, and send this one for an early shower.

Even if you loved the film, even if gullible children are tearfully begging you to buy them this game, even if there's been a nuclear holocaust and the only games to survive are this and "Army Men: Green Rogue"; please, just say No.

The idea of an interactive comic as narrative expansion is a sound one, but Ignition entirely fails to do the concept justice.

Go away, George of the Jungle, and die horribly in a fire.

The results feel neutered and unfinished.

King of Clubs doesn't play a very good game of golf, and the unlockable elements do little to counteract this rather glaring flaw.

Apocalyptica's lazy design and sheer lack of imagination is more than enough to ruin any chance it had of developing the relatively interesting premise. Forgive Konami, father, for they have sinned.

Archaic and lethargic, The Expendables 2 seems far more likely to break a hip than a sweat.

It's as if Pandemic's once shiny, happy puppy grew old and tired, as is the way of things, but then instead of being put down was handed over to a bunch of tramps. Who shaved all its hair off and fed it on Tesco Value Pilsner and let it get mange. It's time for THQ to get the shotgun.

Amy fails on all counts. It's plagued by jerky movement, poor scripting, weak puzzles and shoddy checkpointing, but it's also a characterless mess of themes and ideas swiped from a dozen better horror titles. Neither quirky enough to be forgiven its unfinished feel nor polished enough to satisfy the base gaming itch, Amy is a crushing disappointment with little to recommend it.

But Declassified also exposes failings of Call of Duty's form and fashion. The game is a cliché, its thrills limited, its time-stretching ploys clear. It's infused with the character of Call of Duty, but stripped of the spectacle it reveals the underlying game to be wholly plain and an uninteresting use of your time.

AMF Bowling Pinbusters is like Wii Sports bowling only several thousand times less good. The game mechanics are awful and the presentation is a disgrace.

Objectively this is a game that basically sucks. It's technically limited, characterised by treacle-slow, far-from-original gameplay that's beset by niggles, and sorely unadorned by fancy cut-scenes or easy-to-navigate menus. But subjectively, in spite of all of its flaws, what emerges is something that has the potential to be hypnotically absorbing and, yes, even fun. [JPN Import]

You'll flail your way half-heartedly through a miserable procession of encounters, against enemies that seem as thrilled to be there as you. In between, you'll weave through generic platform negotiation sections, before inevitably being forced to dispatch another prescribed gaggle of bored foes and, gasp, maybe a boss.

Horrendously bad. It makes you realise how spoilt we are with modern masterpieces like "Raven Shield," which combine realistic counter-terrorism with addictive gameplay and produce enjoyable scenarios for single and multiple players.

This game gets a low score because there is no point to it.

To make matters worse, you get sent back to a tedious menu screen every single time you learn one of the hundreds of thousands of stupid moves.

But the really depressing thing about PlayFirst's spirit-crushing little game is that it'll probably sell enough to result in a deluge of the bloody things, and force us to question the sanity of mankind. Again.

Up against World at War, Killzone 2 and Halo 3, it's a complete joke. The worst FPS I've played since Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.

Half an hour and one hundred percent done.

Game development has evolved to the point where it's pretty rare that a PS3 or Xbox 360 release is actually anything worse than mediocre, but Rogue Warrior is easily the worst game I've played on either platform for a long, long time. You could call it cheap, exploitative trash, but it's not actually that cheap, and the exploitation elements are probably the best thing it's got going for it. Trash though? Absolutely.

The characters make annoying noises all the time and their hit-and-miss one-liners are repeated too often. All in all Acme Arsenal is a chore to play, even if you're...

Even with expectations duly lowered to allow for the usual make-do approach taken to most licensed kids games, the sheer hideousness of this title still crept up and sucker-punched me right in the soul. There's not a single element of this game that is fun, even in the most tangential use of the term.

The controls are awful, the camera is beyond appalling, the graphics are hideous, the environments are bare, the gameplay is unbearably repetitive and the whole thing is an utter chore to play.

Perhaps Sports Island Freedom is best summed up by the person I forced to help me test out the multiplayer mode. His verdict, following several long minutes of tedious menu navigation and 48 seconds of gameplay: "What is the point of this? It is appalling."

It's not funny, it's not fun to play and it's less erotic than psoriasis. As the Smurfs would say: **** off, Larry.

The Game Party experience is like going to a party where there's nothing to drink but Tesco Value brandy and there are only four other guests and they're all racist and then your ex turns up and gets off with a Danish supermodel. Would you pay GBP 19.99 to go to that party?

It's the worst-looking Wii game I've ever played and frankly that takes some effort. It's no fun to play either.

It is not bad in the way that a game like Boiling Point is bad, where things coalesce into a kind of awful greatness. This is a tacky and technically incompetent production with no redeeming features whatsoever, devoid of fun and an insult to the name it bears. Flatout once burned bright, but now is gone - and if there is a driving hell, this is surely it.

This PS2 incarnation of the cross-platform offence is entirely without worth. It's agony in 1s and 0s. Don't even touch your bargepole with a bargepole.

My wife insisted on having a play as she was intrigued by the idea, although after five short minutes she declared, "What the hell's the point of this?" and went back to playing The Sims 2. Which just about sums it all up, really.

If you're even slightly tempted, just remember that at the maelstrom's core is a very basic and ugly game made by a company that is both dishonest and incompetent. Combining disgraceful ethics with endemic failures of design, The War Z is a real disaster.

Ninjabread Man lasted half an hour. HALF AN HOUR. Three levels down and I was booted straight back to the main menu without fanfare. I thought I'd pressed the Quit button by mistake... Half an hour and one hundred percent done.

These are dross of the highest order. Rip offs at budget price.

SPOGS Racing at least gets the honour of being the worst game on WiiWare. It looks awful and it plays even worse. It's the most inept game I've played on any format, in any genre, in recent memory.