Now one element of Lego Star Wars games, and to have a broader picture, all Lego Games, that never fails to disappoint is the cut scenes. The developers always seem to be able to bring out a humorous action in every single cut scene in the game no matter what it’s about. This is what I’ve began to associate Lego Games with and they certainly do it very well. This game is no exception, you’ll be laughing from the beginning until the end, and in some missions you need to be because they get so frustrating! 10/10 for the comedy involved with the game, they couldn’t have done a better job.

Now one of the new features to this game, and in my opinion the biggest let down, is the Ground Assaults. These large scale ground battles are mission will play out in real time. The battlefield is littered with both republic clones and droid, and you must defeat the other teams’ structures to win. Now in writing it doesn’t seem to bad, but personally I dislike these battles very much. A funny thing is that although these are supposed to be “special missions” they actually occur very regularly – especially at the beginning. Unless you love wide open spaces you will get bored of these missions very quickly, and unfortunately that nearly ruins the rest of the game. Certain parts of the battle can offer no challenge at all – where you can have platoons of droids simply walking past ignoring you, or they can be really challenging where it seems every single droid is trying to kill you! This is a new feature so there is bound to be a few problems but I really think the developers need to redesign this feature if they were to use it in other Lego Games.

However they do say what goes wrong in one area can be redeemed in another. And another new feature certainly does this! Space Combat is completely new to the Lego Series and its rather great. It’s another large scale battle – but this time in space, you’ve got the freedom to fly anyway (within reason) and you often use landing pads to land at your target and follow out the rest of the mission. It reminds me a little bit of Star Wars Battlefront II actually – although obviously not as good. But the question is why? That was 6 years ago and yet the developers still can’t improve upon it. The space battles in this game are good but certainly not good enough to counteract the poor display for the ground assault battles.

Apart from that though the game scores well in other areas – the motion of the game runs really well. Weapon combat has been improved with a huge number of extras. You’ve got basic melee weapons, basic blasters, explosive weapons, rapid-fire weapons, sniper rifles and of course lightsabers. You know get more options with all of these weapons such as the ability to throw your lightsaber more easily and so forth.

Now the story of the game is split into three stages. When you complete the first mission you’ll have the option to pick which story to follow. Pretty much like the previous games this game is only partly linear. You have an option of which story to start from and you can interchange between stories at will, but you can only start a later section of a story by doing the previous mission beforehand. The three storylines are Count Dooku, General Grevious, and Asajj Ventress. And then of course once you’ve completed all three you’ll have a final special mission to complete before ending the game.

Like all Lego Star Wars games though, the game isn’t completely finished when you finish the story. You also have the option to play each mission in “Free Play” mode. Here you can select which characters to play as which let you find all of the minikits (there are 10 in each level). Most minikits can only be found with a special type of a person (such as a small character, or bounty hunter etc) a walkthrough for each level will be posted as soon as possible on this site.

So overall then, Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars is a welcome addition to the Lego Star Wars series but despite many new great features it gets let down by other bad areas of the game making it one of the worst in the series – however it is still a good game nonetheless with a rating of 78/100.

So what makes this game so great compared to the others? Well I think the main thing has to be that it’s so unique. When LEGO Star Wars first came out it was brilliant because the concept of going around a venue blowing things up and collecting studs was new. However as the years progressed the concept gradually became duller until many people found it simply aggravating. Not much had been done to improve this feature in previous games which is why many people including me found games such as LEGO Indiana Jones boring, up to the point where when LEGO Batman came out I couldn’t even face purchasing it. Of course a huge factor is whether you like what the game is based on. I could play LEGO Star Wars for a long time as I like it whereas some people who don’t like Star Wars wouldn’t be able to play it.

The Harry Potter series however is one of the most successful and highly rated series of the decade. But if the game is just about blowing lego up again then surely it couldn’t be very interesting could it? Well actually it could! You see what Traveller’s Tales have done is continue the series from a new angle. Yes you have to blow up lego pieces to be a “True Wizard” but the number of different ways you can choose to blow them up is large.

Lego Studs are unsurprisingly a massive part of the game and return in the usual silver, gold, blue and purple colours. You can collect studs by blowing objects up with your wand by using different spells. This is where things get interesting. There are a huge amount of spells in the game such as Wingardium Leviosa, Expelliarmus, Stupefy and even Avada Kedavra. You see much like how not all objects could be destroyed using the force in LEGO Star Wars (Shiny objects) not all can be in LEGO Harry Potter by using the standard spell. Some must be targeting them and using Wingardium Leviosa while some such as plants can be removed by simply shining Lumos as them! The game may be a lot more technical than previous ones in the series but for this it is a lot more fun.

Making a new addition to the series out Hogwarts Crests: just as Hogwarts School is split into four houses (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin) there are four crest pieces to be collected in each level. But unlike Minikits in previous games which you could just find laying around these crests are much harder to find, most crests can only be found in free play mode. Another new feature to the series are the “Students in Peril”. You’ll find a student in “peril” in every level and if you manage to save them you are rewarded with a gold brick.

As with previous games gold bricks are used to unlock rewards and bonus content with a total of 120 possible gold brick to be found throughout the game. Red bricks can also be found throughout the game but are much tougher to get. Not only do you have to find a red brick you then have to post it using the nearest owl post. This can be of a certain benefit however because if you see an owl post on your travels you can take a well educated guess that there is a red brick somewhere to be found.

Unlike the other games in the series this game is not just made up of chapters for you to play in. In fact a large proportion of the game is spent in the Hogwarts grounds themselves. Between chapters you participate in lessons. Although these may seem pointless at first they are infect very significant as in these lessons you learn new spells and magical abilities which without you wouldn’t be able to progress throughout the game. For example remember the scene in the second film with all of the pixies? Perfect time to learn the new spell Immobulus wouldn’t you agree?

Diagon Alley also plays an important role in the game. Think of it as the Cantina in LEGO Star Wars or as the University in LEGO Indiana Jones. It basically contains all of the shops you need to purchase new spells, costumes, characters and even the opportunity to build your own level. You may remember the lego builder from LEGO Indiana Jones 2, its great fun for a while but it’s puzzling why the developers are still including this feature without any option to upload them to a server and to download other players’ creations.

One final thing that should be mentioned is the lego building capacity of the game. No longer do you need to use your hands to build lego bricks where you can instead use magic. That’s not all though. There are a few puzzles where you have to actually move lego bricks around and stack them to be able to reach higher levels. These puzzles are both challenging and fun which makes the game that much more different.

Overall although the amount of spells can be a bit alarming once you get used to it you’ve got a heck of a game in your hands! I would give it a rating of 85%.

Before I go on to that part of the game however lets focus on the other more familiar points of the game. Starting with controls it’s nice to see the game has gone back to using the four strong grapple routine which hasn’t been seen since Smackdown Vs Raw 2007. No more annoying ultimate control moves that don’t work … although there are a couple still there – but it’s nice to have a few included. I find that the controls are altogether more fluent and there are some new ones as well such as a strong strike for superstars with that ability.

Another thing that has dramatically changed for the first time in the series (including the Smackdown! series before that) is the HUD. Instead of the familiar display in the top left hand corner (if your player 1) you instead get a ring around your superstars feet. There is I feel advantages and disadvantages to this. The disadvantage is you lose the image of your opponent’s body saying if his head if red, orange, yellow etc however I suppose this makes the game more life like. The great advantage comes with the Royal Rumble. Before you could only have six superstars at a time because only six could fit on the screen. However now because the HUD is on the floor you can have more than six making the Royal Rumble seem more real. You can also unfortunately no longer store finishers (except in the Royal Rumble) but this is only a minor fault.

Onto the game modes the popular ‘Road to Wrestlemania’ mode is back with 6 new superstars. You can play as Shawn Michaels, Edge, Randy Orton, Mickie James or even your created superstar! There’s also a special co-op one (which can be done singularly) with John Cena and Triple H. Each of the 6 options offer the final 13 weeks before Wrestlemania. In the co-op mode you even get to play more than 13 matches, sometimes having to do a match at Raw and one at Smackdown in the same week.

Another thing that has grown since Smackdown Vs Raw 2009 is the abilities. There are now more than ever and nearly all of them have been revamped. There are a total of 21 abilities including some familiar ones such as: Kip-Up, Referee Shield and Possum Pin. There are also some new ones such as: Ring Escape, Fired Up and Exploder TB Attack.

The most impressive thing in the game which will give it a lifetime of playing has to be the WWE Story Designer. Well there is a slight lie. The main part of the infinite lifetime is being able to upload it online and then download other peoples and play them. Unfortunately this is only available on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Anyway as you can imagine you design stories. Think of it as creating a show for Raw, Smackdown or ECW. There are set moments in which you can change the superstars involved, add music, change the camera and even input the text. Unfortunately the superstars don’t read aloud the text but that would be impossible anyway. Maybe in a couple of year’s time it will be possible, but not yet. Regardless of that the story designer is still brilliant. You could re-enact the ‘Monday Night Wars’ between WCW and WWF, you could re-enact DX ruining Mr.McMahon’s life. You could even create something completely different such as … DX taking over WWE – well that wouldn’t be new but it would be funny.

With the set moments you can also add matches. When you play the story you play the matches as well. As designer of the story though you get to choose who the player will play as. Who will win, how one superstar will lose etc. Basically you control everything. There is a slight downside to the owners of the PS3 and Xbox 360 as there always is on brilliant ideas. If you were thinking of making a story with your created wrestler I would advise strongly against because it’s just not possible. There is a limit to how many scenes your CAW can be in and the answer is a pathetic 10. You can’t even make a decent rivalry with that many scenes. If you thinking why not make 10 identical CAWS don’t think you can have them in 100 scenes. It’s not 10 scenes per CAW it’s 10 scenes overall which means you could only have a maximum of 10 different CAWS in 1 scene each.

Another new create mode is that you can create up to 3 different attires for your wrestlers. Even for the normal wrestlers. On top of this there are more moves in the create a finisher mode and of course the popular highlight reel is back. You can even use it create a entrance movie for your superstar (you even get a trophy/achievement for doing it).

One last thing that should be said is the new matches available. The Royal Rumble although not a new match has been upgraded. Instead of only having the annoying button mashing mini game there are now two extra ones. It all depends on where you have the superstar you want to chuck out. If they are lying on the apron you have to press any button to try and stop the moving gauge in the ever shrinking blue area twice before the blue area vanishes. If they are groggy against the ropes you must rapidly press buttons but there is a skill involved. You press certain buttons at certain times. Lastly if there in the corner then you mist press three buttons that appear on the screen quicker than your opponent in a row to eliminate them. The other new match in the game is the Championship Scramble match which has the same concept as the elimination chamber (except without the chamber and the elimination), basically whoever pinned a superstar last at the end of the time limit wins the championship.

Overall this game rates well above its predecessor. I would give it 94%.

For anyone who hasn’t played the first game you missed out on a good one. But although there were over 150 puzzles it was a little bit repetitive because you were basically stuck in the small village. However with this new game there are many different scenes all of which have been created to perfection.

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box (or Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box as it is known in America and Japan) has a brilliant storyline in which you have to find out the cause of “Pandora’s box”. It seems that when people open it they end up dead so you have to work out if the cause is because of the box or because of something else. Character’s returning include Professor Layton (obviously!) and Luke but there are also many new characters which you will meet along the way … not all of them are nice.

With a new game comes a new set of puzzles and how the creators have managed to come up 150 brand new brilliant puzzles is amazing. There is a lot more variety between the puzzles such as fitting objects into a certain area, maths problems and of course the old sliding puzzles. There are also some visual puzzles in which you’re given some text and an image. Using the text you must find the right point on the image. The brilliant thing about the game is that even if you get it wrong over and over again it doesn’t matter. You can get 3 hints on a puzzle and after you’ve found the answer you may start kicking yourself realising how easy some of them are. Some of the puzzles can be quite daunting and some downright evil, that’s why you need to save your hint coins because you’ll never know when a near impossible puzzle pops up and you need some help.

Instead of building a robot dog, a picture and decorating each others rooms in the first game this time there are three brand new sub-missions. One is a rather pointless, but quite fun, minigames of helping an obese hamster lose weight. You have to work out a series of problems to get the hamster to travel the furthest to its food. Another game is creating a camera in which you can use to take pictures and the final minigames is brewing cups of tea which can actually help in the game. You just give a certain type of tea to a person and hey presto! They tend to help you more.

The game has sold over 800,000 copies in Japan which shows how good a game it is. Although just because a game has sold a lot of copies it doesn’t mean it’s good. On this occasion thought it does. Having been out for just 2 days in Europe I suspect many people have already got it right now. If you haven’t though I wouldn’t wait around, it may even be out of stock now.

With the new story and brilliant puzzles I would have to rate the game 92%.

Now the fourth Harry Potter game was completely rubbish. It was a totally different gameplay to the other games and the age rating (7+) probably should have been more like 7, because it seemed like the game was made for seven year olds. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the other hand is a lot better. It’s a 7+ again but in this game it doesn’t matter what age you are, you will still enjoy … unless of course you utterly despise Harry Potter but why would you be reading this if you did?

The style of the game is what people call a “sandbox”. Just like games such as GTA it basically means you can go pretty much anyone and do things in your own order, within a certain boundary. An example of this in the game is when you have to collect all of the members of Dumbledore’s Army. The game doesn’t tell you what order you must collect them, so you can go in any order you wish. Another brilliant thing in this game which we have just seen recently in the Sims 3 is that there are no loading screens. The whole of the Hogwarts School and grounds are loaded all the time. You don’t even get a slight pause as you go from one area to the next, it runs very smoothly.

One of the main features of this game is the spells. Owners of a Wii will have more fun casting spells in the game as they simply swish the wii remote in a certain direction to cast that spell. However don’t think if you own a Playstation 3 you are missing out on much, because you also do it on the PS3. You have two options … you can either cast spells by using the right analog stick or you can enable the motion sensitivity function and move the whole Playstation 3 controller to cast the spell. So really with the Playstation 3 version you are getting better graphics than the Wii and also the same motion control. If you’re lucky enough to own both the Wii and Playstation 3 you’ll probably better buying on the PS3.

As you walk around the grounds you will notice that there are quite a few things not quite right: such as paintings on the floor and statues covered up by curtains. You can use your spells on these objects and earn discovery points which in turn make your spells stronger. Another thing in the game is the portraits. As with the film and book versions all portraits need passwords and you need to find out what they are. It’s no use searching for them on the internet because you can’t type them in. The portraits give you clues as to what they are … some even just tell you the password straight away.

One of the unfortunate disadvantages of this game is that is quite short. Although saying that if you don’t rush through it you will find it will take quite a while to get 100% on the game. Many people say they complete this game within an hour. I can tell you that it is completely impossible to do that even if you’re on the easiest difficulty. If you’re on normal difficulty and play it at a steady pace this game should last you at least for over 10 hours … and that for a game is actually quite reasonable.

I think overall this game is very good … although non Harry Potter fans wouldn’t think it was as good as I’m saying. In conclusion buy this game only if you’re either a Harry Potter fan or you like a good RPG game because it is very good. I would rate it 88%

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The games main two characters which you play as are Professor Layton himself (no surprise there) and his self-acclaimed apprentice Luke. The main aspect of the game is to go around a town solving puzzles working out the story as you go. The town itself is called St. Mystere and by the name of the town and the name of the game I bet you can guess it’s quite a mysterious/curious village. Throughout the game there are a total of 120 puzzles (in the story mode) however there are extra puzzles in bonuses you can unlock later. Each individual puzzle has a difficulty rating based on picarats. One objective of the game is to try to get as many picarats as possible. Easy puzzles have a rating of about 10 picarats, whilst the hardest can have as much as 70 picarats.

Also throughout the game hidden in bushes, houses etc are hint coins which are vital unless you are an expert at puzzles. In each puzzle there are a total of 3 possible hints to help you but you can only access these hints if you have hint coins available. Obviously because there are a limited amount of hint coins in the game it makes sense to use them sparingly and only use when you have to on harder puzzles. If you get a puzzle wrong you get another try but the number of picarats you receive for getting it right decreases. The puzzles themselves are really quite cool, this game is bound to test even the most experienced puzzles experts at some time. There are brain teasers, logic puzzles and trick questions.

Combine these brilliant puzzles with beautiful graphics and cut-scenes and this becomes a very good game! The graphics are actually quite astounding for a DS game and it shows that the developers Level-5 have truly tried everything to get the best images possible. There are a total of 10 mysteries in the game but the main one is the search for the golden apple, whoever finds it supposedly will get a lot of money. I’m not going to give away any secrets but the ending is quite surprising.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is clearly one of the best games available on the DS at the moment. The game has won 3 awards those being, The best DS visuals, the best family/causal DS game and the best DS game all from the Official Nintendo Magazine Reader Awards 2009 which shows how good a game it is. A brilliant game which deserves a 92% rating.

To discuss this game and more visit the new XtraGamer forum

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This game has more matches, more special features and more … moves than any of the previous wrestling games and I’m talking about that on all consoles not just the Wii. 24/7 mode in the previous game is replaced by the “Road to Wrestlemania” mode which is outstanding. The only downside is that there are only 7 superstars you can choose from: Triple H; John Cena; CM Punk; The Undertaker, Batista, Rey Mysterio and Chris Jericho. However each superstar has a unique story mode which has cut scenes and storylines made especially for the superstar. For the first time ever there is a co-op story mode with Mysterio and Batista so you can play two players.

Another new mode which replaces the highly criticised GM mode is the Career Mode. In this mode you selected your chosen superstar (even created ones) and play matches to get to the championships. It is very strategy based because you have to try to get a good rating from each of your matches. To achieve a high rating you have to complete little mini-missions such as “use your finisher 4 times” or “taunt 8 times” etc.

One of the best features about this game has to be the “Create-A-Finisher” mode where you go really in-depth into the making of a move. However unfortunately this is not available on the Wii or DS versions of the game.

But the Wii version makes up for that a lot! New to any wrestling game made and exclusive to the Wii version is the entrance. As your superstar is waking in you can get him to raise his arm, taunt the crowd etc while walking in to the ring. A good point for this is that it’s not just a part of the game that means nothing, the more taunts you do the higher momentum you start off with when the match begins. The best part though is the ending of the match. You can pick the person up and go to shake his hand and then knock him out. You can get the referee to lift your arm up and then hit him as well!

The new matches available in the game are great. Inferno matches, gauntlet matches and for the Wii … well normal matches! The wii has over 4 times as many matches as it did last year which seems a lot but remember it only had like 7 matches. Some matches have been readjusted, especially the tag team ones. The main focus for the game is on tag-teams and so the matches have been re-done. New things such as “hot-tags” and even new strategies for the computer players have made the tag team matches brilliant.

Online play is also available for the PS3, Xbox 360 and the Wii version as well as voice chat being enabled on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. The best thing about this is that there will be plenty of downloadable content available which will keep the game from being out-dated.

Overall I think that this game has thoroughly improved on the last version, especially for the Wii console. Which is why I’m giving it a 91% overall rating.

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The concept of the game is based around the World War II period and you will be fighting a lot of Japanese fighters. The main story is split in to two parts. The first part is focusing on the Marine Raiders which are the Americans in which you face the Japanese at the end of the Second World War The second part of the story is you playing as the Red Army which are the Russians. In this story you face against Nazi Germany set in the same time period as the previous story.

That however is what is in the single player mode. Another mode which I will mention first is that of co-op mode which is offline. The difference between multiplayer mode and co-op mode is that you play multiplayer mode with people on different consoles, while on co-op mode you play with people on the same console. So in co-op mode you and your friends can play through missions or other types of games which are really fun. There’s capture the flag, free for all and team death match just to name a few. However one bad thing about this game which I was really let down with is the same thing that I was disappointed with on Call of Duty 4. The fact that there is no online co-op mode. So if you want to play online with your friends its one player only which is too bad, if this was an option then this game could score maximum points.

The multiplayer mode is also really good in the game but like I pointed out earlier is a let down because there is no co-op online mode. In multiplayer mode you can do pretty much all the stuff you can do in co-op mode except that it’s online with other people instead of people on your console. My experience of multiplayer mode is okay but in my opinion it’s not brilliant. To be honest in some cases I found co-op mode being better. It’s good to get a microphone so you can talk to other people online which is cool … if it worked brilliantly. Unfortunately for me it did not, not because I can’t install anything or it was faulty because it wasn’t. The problem is Call of Duty is quite a noisy game and so when you’re concentrating hard on the game and you can faintly hear the other players talking … even when your headphones are turned right up. A brilliant game that uses online speaking greatly has to be Halo 3. The words other people speak are so clear you can hear them fine. I wish I could say the same for this game.

I’d like to point out that although many places point out there is online co-op mode it is not that which I am talking about. They are talking about 4 players on different consoles playing online which is what I have said about as multiplayer. The 4 player co-op mode I am talking about is actually 4 people on the same console playing online together with other people on different consoles in a match.

I would also like to say that the Playstation 2 version is slightly different from the other versions in the fact that it also features an additional story line which involves you taking control of the British.

Overall I think that this is still a brilliant game it’s just a shame about the co-op. 9.4 rating!