Conceptually I really like Paper Mario Sticker Star, it looks superb, and the flat levels really benefit from the depth the 3d adds. You interact with the world using stickers, replacing missing items, blocking up holes, and of course using them as moves in combat. I went in to Paper Mario Sticker star expecting to like it, genuinely, since E3 it’s been my most anticipated 3DS game, unfortunately it doesn’t live up to its promise.

It looks like a traditional Mario game in terms of level layout, you complete a stage and it opens the path to the next on the world map. There's 4 'worlds' to choose from the first town, however only one path is really viable. Unlike previous games in the series Paper Mario ticker Star isn’t an rpg, it’s an adventure game, more like the Wii game than previous handheld ones. The various areas are themed, like you’d expect from a Mario game, with the area south of the town hub being the most traditional. It’s there you should start, and it’s that area that is the most linear, progressing through levels in order, only rarely having to revisit.

But that’s not the story for the rest of the game, the game becomes very stop start. Finish a level and move on to a different one and you'll find your path is blocked, you need to go somewhere else to find the item you need. The game doesn't do a good enough job at communicating where you're supposed to go and why, for example, after getting stuck I hit the hint button and was told I was going the wrong way, I needed to get to someone's house, but the only level it mentions is the one I was currently in, and that is “the wrong way“. Like wise there's a level I completed that had 2 exits in it, I'm not sure which one is technically the secret one, but the one I missed was certainly difficult enough to find. When I did get through I then found my progress blocked, to the games credit it did then tell me to go to a specific place, which I did, found the item I needed, and then had to head back.

I really like some elements of the combat, I like that you have to engage with it to do well. You select your sticker, let's say 'Iron Jump', then you have to press the jump button at the right time to continue the combo, dealing more damage and earning coins. What I don't like is that things start to become very samey, you get in to a fight, a couple of extra enemies appear, you use the fruit machine option to earn yourself an extra attack or two, then you select the same stickers to deal with the same enemies. It doesn't help that there's no reason for you to get in to fights, in fact they cost you stickers, so you're better avoiding fights as much as possible, especially as you don't really need the money.

You start to resent enemies too. Because you don't level up (because this is an adventure game rather than an rpg) you encounter enemies that you know you can beat easily, you've fought them 100 times, but you still need to go through it, you still need to waste a decent sticker on them, or 2 stickers, or 3. If this was an rpg you'd be at that point where one round of attacks would wipe them out, you'd get your 10 gold and 7xp and move on. Here you have to concentrate otherwise you'll be using more stickers than you already have to. You can land a preliminary attack to trigger a battle, either using a hammer or jumping on an enemy, and this does seem to gain in strength at certain points in the game.

It’s a shame, the first few hours of Paper Mario Sticker Star are great, it looks superb, really benefiting from the depth of the 3DS screen. The combat starts fun, and the levels interesting to explore, but once you hit a boss fight where you don’t have the right sticker the flaws become all too apparent. The amount of times you feel obligated to check a guide, given this is a portable game, is shaming, Sticker Star is one of the rare occasions where restrictive linearity would have been a benefit.

For whatever reason when people decide to make retro style games, games that play like their old favourites, they always seem to make them look like retro games too. Not so Gunman Clive, while it’s very old-school in how it plays, some of the graphical tricks it pulls off are very impressive

The simplest way to describe Gunman Clive is to say it plays like Megaman. You progress through a level from left to right, shooting enemies and traversing platforms. There’s not a lot of room for error, you’ve got limited health, and it rarely takes more than one shot to kill an enemy. It’s of credit to the game then that Gunman Clive doesn’t feel like simply a reskinned Megaman, it’s got a character of it’s own.

Perhaps that’s down to the way it looks, the game has an old sketch pad look to it, browned by the sun with a scratchy texture. Coupled with the 3D environments it makes everything feel like it’s more animated than it is, it’s a really great look. The character designs are simplistic but nice enough, they look sharp on the 3DS screen and have a nice chunky look to them.

Unfortunately Gunman Clive suffers a little when it comes to gameplay, like Megaman there are times where deaths feel unfair. Enemies don’t activate until they appear on screen, which in and of itself is fine, but it does mean there’ll be times when you’re in mid-air as an enemy takes a shot at you, unable to avoid it. Fortunately you’re very quickly back in to the game, however it does usually mean restarting the stage again. Stages themselves are generally fairly short, and certainly if you do die you’ll be amazed how easy it suddenly seems 2nd time through. A couple of the boss fights can be tricky, especially if you get lumbered with the ‘wrong’ weapon, but they don’t feel especially unfair and are well structured.

Gunman Clive is also out on ios and Android, I haven’t played those versions but I feel safe saying that the 3DS version is the one to get. Firstly with the price being just £1.99 for us in the UK you’re not, for once, paying a hefty premium for buying on a traditional console. There’s also the matter of having buttons, I’ve played a few action platformers on a touch screen now, some work pretty well, but there aren’t many that wouldn’t be improved by having actual controls, certainly not retro style ones like Gunman Clive.

Gunman Clive, while a challenge, isn’t the most taxing game, it’s also not the longest. I feel a little as though had it been a bit harder the short length might have been more fulfilling. Still it’s hard to say you’re being ripped off for the price, and that you could have happily played more is hardly the most damning criticism. Despite the score at the end of this review I’d still suggest you pick up Gunman Clive, it’s a nice slice of retro style gaming on the 3DS, and at a price cheaper than most of the 20 year old games Nintendo puts on there.

It’s easy to be reductive and label Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure as Professor Layton with rhythm games, but then that’s pretty much what it is, it’s even set in an out of time European city. You get a map on the top screen and the backdrop to your current location on the bottom. You tap around the bottom image to find coins that can be spent on power-ups, there may or may not be people in said locale to talk to. It really is very Professor Layton.

Where Rhythm Thief differs from Layton, beyond the use of rhythm games rather than puzzles, is the pacing. In Layton it feels like everyone you speak to has a puzzle for you, if you click around the landscape enough there’s probably one there too. Rhythm Thief drags much more, it’s rare you get a puzzle outside of the main story, and to progress that you’ll have to backtrack between screens multiple times. It’s for that reason the game can take you as long as 8 hours to get through, value for money I guess, but very little of that time is spent doing anything fun.

The story doesn’t help either, it’s ultra safe, twee and trite. There’s no edge, which given this is the story of a rhythm thief is a bit of a surprise. There’s a couple of moments where someone gets shot, both times the animation cuts away and the gunshot is silenced. The animation does look nice though and there is quite a lot of it, so it’s hard to fault the presentation.

What Rhythm Thief does well, and the reason you should care about it, is the rhythm games themselves. What’s there is reused a few times, getting increasingly difficult, but there’s nothing that you dread making a reappearance. The timing can take a bit of getting used to, it’s a little earlier than it looks like it’ll be. The game also asks too much of you at times, particularly if you have the 3D on. The visual cues are often placed to the left and right of the top screen, another cue in the background, then you have to worry about what’s being asked of you on the bottom screen. It can be more a test of your peripheral vision than your skill.

However, when you aren’t being frustrated and you adjust to the timing the games are fun. Especially if you’re a fan of some of Sega’s classic rhythm franchises like Samba de Amigo and Space Channel 5, both of which get a re-imagining here. Touch screen controls are implemented well, and with various button presses and even some accelerator use there’s a lot of variety in what’s asked of you.

If Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure was tighter, with a less nonsense story, and generally less tedious it’d be one of the essential 3DS games, as it is it comes with a fairly large caveat. It’s not even as though you could argue the non-game parts should take the lead and recommend it to ‘non-gamers’ as the rhythm games themselves are pretty tough, and even with the power-ups you aren’t guaranteed to win. It’s an interesting concept though, genuinely fun at points, and good enough I’d like to see what they could do with a sequel

I was never the biggest fan of the original Prince of Persia, and it’s slightly unsettling to think it came out when I was in primary school (although this version came out in 1999 to coincide with Sands of Time), let me just say then that my appreciation for this most retro of games has increased dramatically.

One of the most striking things is that this is a game based around the 1989 original, running on a humble Game Boy Colour, is how well it runs. The graphics are fairly simple, but still plenty clear enough, and sharp enough on the 3DS screen to look good. The animation is the star though, it’s amazing how nice it still looks, it’s a shame there aren’t more games like Prince of Persia.

The gameplay though is much more divisive, but we’ll come to that later. If you’ve yet to reach your 20’s then there’s ever chance you’ve never played the original Prince of Persia, so for your benefit then the original PoP games were ruthless puzzle platformers. The prince moved at a sedate pace, but there was always the chance that his next step would activate some spikes, or maybe open the door to the exit. Sometimes you’ll need to hop past a saw, sometimes take a running jump, sometimes grab a ledge with your fingertips. There’s a huge satisfaction from working out the correct route through a level, solving the problem of how to traverse the platforms.

This sense of reward and progress is exemplified by the addition of a 1 hour time limit. The prince has to escape the dungeons before the Sands of Time run out, you can use as many lives as you like, but each failed attempt is time wasted. It’s a nice challenge for those familiar with the game, and it’s a very good way of seeing your progress. You may only get to the third level in your first hour, but getting there again on the second attempt might only take you 10 minutes. There’s a password system so you don’t have to start again each time, however my experience of it was that it started me with only 20 minutes left, despite it taking me no where near that long to get there. All that being said there are obvious flaws with the time limit, and I think I’d rather the game without it, it’s hard enough on its own.

And that’s where the problems come in. While the animation is great, what it does is create input lag, you sprint towards the end of a ledge ready to leap the chasm, but end up just running off the end into the pit of spikes because the game decided you missed the beat. It’s a problem magnified by you restarting the level every time you die, that’s fair enough and not what I’m complaining about, but it means you have to redo sections you’ve already bested. This means that when you all of a sudden fail to make a jump you know to be incredibly basic.

It’s incredibly frustrating, so much so I rarely wanted to play my full hour, by the 40 minute mark I was often ready to turn off. It’s worse when you feel like your inputs have just been ignored rather than the lag costing you. And this is where the time limit becomes such a problem, you’d happily keep playing until you nailed it, but knowing you don’t have a hope of getting to the end of the game doubles your annoyance.

It’s a shame too because Prince of Persia almost won me around and I’ve had twenty-odd years of not liking the game. I can see that fans will love it, because bar the lag input I kind of want to too. If you feel the need for some retro Prince of Persia on your 3DS then don’t hesitate and pick it up, everyone else I’d suggest be a bit more cautious.

In the past I’ve quite enjoyed a few of the Naruto games, I think the concept lends itself to games quite well, with its themed characters and powers. The two 360 adventure games I played were fairly solid, the Gamecube fighters were superb, and while I didn’t take to the DS polygonal fighter, the first DS game was simple fun.

It’s from that first DS game, and its GBA predecessors that Naruto Shippuden 3D: The New Era takes its cue. You work your way through levels, fighting enemies and leaping from platform to platform. At the end of each level, and sometimes midway through, you’ll face off against a boss. I’m not exactly an expert but I recognised Gaara and Tsunde and pretty much no one else, so more knowledge of the series might help. These fights vary from massively cheap to astonishingly easy, Gaara in particular can be beat by simply making the most of your jump kick.

The combat elsewhere is mostly functional, you hammer the punch button until they’re dead. The problem comes with stronger enemies, there’s no block and the dodge is temperamental, worse; just because you’ve dodged doesn’t make you immune from being hit. The best approach is to wait for your opponent to begin their attack then jump over them and lay in to them from behind, but even this option is removed in cramped conditions. There’s always the option to launch one of your special attacks, however like your dodge they leave you wide open.

The platforming is nothing too involved, but then not broken or frustrating. A nice touch is the way it utilises the gyroscope for some QTEs. The one thing Naruto Shippuden does do well is its 3D, for the best given it includes it in the title. Naruto himself stands out from the background nicely, and there are moments where enemies launch attacks from the background, really accentuating the 3D effect.

But really that’s it, there’s very little that gets a tick in the ‘good’ category beyond how the game looks. It’s not helped that in order to aid your progress you need to collect scrolls to spend on upgrades, which means repeating the same levels over and over. Possibly this is deliberate, as without it the game would probably take you less that 4 hours.

I suspect 3DS owning Naruto fans might not be able to help themselves, but given the game is short and profoundly dull it’s best avoided.