Dave Ozzy

By rights, December should have no new Xbox games of note. It’s the end of the year: who has any disposable cash? We’re grateful that a few studios have said pooh-pooh and released games anyway. Absolute mad lads.

Geometric Feel the Beats is one of the dullest of dull shooters that we’ve ever encountered. Everything is boringly easy, nothing you shoot matters.

We can appreciate the craft in Robolifter. But even as we were playing its gentle Sokoban block-pushing, we knew that any memory of it would tumble out of an airlock as soon as we stopped playing.

We found Yum Yum Cookstar to be a bit of a hollow doughnut: it still looks good, but we couldn’t shake the sense that something was missing. Our kids, though, gobbled it up.

Babol the Walking Box feels like the original Crash Bandicoot, but worse in every conceivable way.

We would happily go on another date with ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area.

Cramming so many games and levels into a box as small and cheap as the Cronostase Electric Collection is undoubtedly an achievement.

Bones of Halloween is as hollow as a carved-out pumpkin. It works (albeit ploddingly), but that’s the best you can say about it.

If you open up Game Pass today, you will be able to play Battlefield 2042 courtesy of the deal that Xbox struck with EA Play. 

We can see what Bricky To Me could have been. It’s a proof-of-concept, a pilot episode for what a platformer might be as a roguelike

If you’ve played your share of Let’s Sing games, then Let’s Sing 2023 represents a slight stumble.

Super Ninja Miner makes us want to commission a Kickstarter for its benefit. All it needs is an investment in its graphics, an artist to fall in love with it and give it some spit and polish. Because the presentation really is all that holds Super Ninja Miner back.

We couldn’t get in sync with RUNOUT. Try as we might, the screen was too hard to read, the mechanics too quick to come and go, and the basics of the platforming too fiddly, contorting our finger positions into shapes that we haven’t encountered since playing Goldeneye on N64.

We adored Slime’s Journey because it was just pure platforming craft, delivered in the simplest of manners. For £4.99, it’d be greedy to ask for anything more.

What Bratz: Flaunt Your Fashion amounts to is a static playmat. Your kids can dress up their doll and wander about it, looking for treasure chests, and there’s some enjoyment to be found in that. But once you start engaging with the world around you, talking to interviewees for the Bratz magazine, you realise how flimsy everything is.