There's plenty of potential and good ideas here but very little fun, in a game that tries to make a pirate's life seem as frustrating and repetitive as possible.

A classic case of a racer that doesn't know whether to be a simulation or arcade game and in the end never ends up a satisfying example of either.

The visuals are amazing but the game's moral quandaries are impossible to care about without any context, let alone any decent gameplay or controls.

A disappointing misstep for Harvest Moon's sister series, where neither monster fighting nor crop planting offers any real entertainment or variety.

First person shooters clearly do work on the PS Vita, but proving that fact is the only real achievement of this otherwise insipid portable experience.

There's a decent a story to be salvaged here, and one that could happily be adapted for the show, but as a video game this fails miserably.

The problem with the latest Kingdom Hearts is not a lack of new ideas but that almost all of them are awful, and that's before you even consider the script.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in name only, this will infuriate old timers reliving their youth and seem archaically simplistic to everyone else.

A distressingly old school movie tie-in which instead of making imaginative use of the movie's setting creates only a bland copy of the Lego games.

The cinematic atmosphere is highly impressive throughout, but that's about the only thing that is in this weirdly inconsistent 2D survival horror.

Hearthfire is certainly a download that shatters preconceptions, but only in the sense that it never really allows you to do any of the things you thought it would.

There are some fun ideas here, and Arkedo are clearly a very talented team, but this action platformer is neither as amusing nor as fun as it likes to think.

The world needs a top notch open world samurai adventure, but sadly it's not to be found here in this strange mix of the perverse, the peculiar, and the downright boring.

Depressingly banal in every way, it's not impossible to be entertained by Warfighter but it is impossible to be surprised by it.

One of the least worst Kinect games this year, which although it suffers from all the usual control issues is at least mindless fun while it lasts.

A horrible disappointment that not only fails to capture the magic of its predecessors but seems oblivious to what made them popular in the first place.

The most disappointing Mass Effect 3 download so far, which once again emphasizes overfamiliar action instead of meaningful storytelling.

There are some great ideas here, with clever use of the dual screens, but the game in which they find themselves is far less entertaining than it should be.

A beautiful-looking space combat sim with many fine ideas… all of which are almost ruined by horrendous difficultly spikes and the galaxy's stupidest spaceship pilots.

The Wii U version has slightly less control issues than the original Kinect game, but also less of the novelty – although it's still mindless comic book fun while it lasts.

The whole idea was probably doomed from the start but this is a disappointingly slipshod effort, with a story campaign that somehow feels more old-fashioned than the decades-old movie it’s based on.

There’s probably no way to make After Burner interesting again without turning it into a completely different game, but there was no need for Sega to prove that fact yet again.

It’s a genuinely revolting vision of the future, of a games industry that treats its players as enemies to be bullied and manipulated – not customers to be entertained and attended to. If SimCity really was a city we’d realise we weren’t welcome and move out immediately.

Cheap, obvious, and unambitious but the zombie theme does at least help to circumvent the technical problems of the original, and offer up some novel co-op options.

A hugely disappointing side venture from the creators of Pokémon, which barely seems to understand the rhythm action genre let alone try and evolve it.

A mix of low budget, (relatively) high ambition, and mediocre execution, Defiance is a hard game to hate but an easy one to lose interest in.

It’s clearly been made in a hurry and with no more care than the deeply flawed original, which means only the truly zombie-obsessed should apply.

A very poor first person shooter buoyed up by the promise of things to come, and an impressively ambitious attempt at a cross-format connected universe.