Download Games Roundup

Top Darts

• PSN (PS3 with Move) – £6.29

There's a bizarre psychological condition in the world of darts known as Dartitis, where the player finds it difficult to release the darts. Well, good news, sufferers – Top Darts is the game for you.

What may constitute a debilitating, career-ending issue is a mandatory requirement in Devil's Details' Move-only PSN title; throw your Move controller at your expensive telly and you'll be bellowing louder than an irate Sid Waddell after a bottle of Jack. Chuck it like a teeth-gritting Dartitis sufferer and you'll be checking out with Bully's special prize.

Unsurprisingly, the main problem is that pretending to check a chunky old Move controller at a pretend dart board is all a bit unwieldy, and it's practically impossible to be as precise as the game requires you to be. You can zoom in on the board, take aim, line up your shot just so, do a pretend chuck and end up absolutely miles off.

That said, it's possible to compensate and aim miles off, safe in the knowledge that you'll get somewhere near where you originally intended it to go. Practice doesn't exactly make perfect, only slightly less rubbish. Occasionally you'll nail those treble 20s and check out, but you'll be buggered if you can reliably repeat the feat.

As long as you're all in the same boat, Top Darts is fun in its haplessness, and a cheap bit of Move-related throwaway entertainment.

6/10

Zeit²

• Xbox Live Arcade – 800 Microsoft Points (£6.80)
• Steam – £6.99

As the title implies, Time Squared is about being able to do two things at once. But Brightside isn't trying to get us to pat our heads while rubbing our tummies; rather we must take on the scourge of alienkind by duplicating our actions in time and space.

At first glance, Zeit² looks like another Gradius refresh: the sort of side-scrolling shmup Thatcher would have enjoyed in her secret arcade in the bowels of Number 10. But after clearing a few perfunctory waves, you quickly accumulate time, and have the option of rewinding the last few seconds of the action at any point.

Rather than simply being a way of cheating your way through a tricky videogame, reversing time duplicates everything you did in those preceding seconds, allowing you to deal with enemies elsewhere on the screen or enhance your firepower by staying where you are.

You might well ask why you don't just ignore the other enemies, and I'm glad you asked. It's not as if they're hitting your ship, is it? The issue is one of energy drainage. If you allow enemies to pass you by without killing them, they take away a small percentage of your health. Allow too many of them to slip past you, and it's Game Over, but unleash some multitasking fury, and you'll end up gaining extra health – up to of 200 per cent.

Although the novelty soon becomes second nature, Brightside has had the foresight to throw in five extra modes to unlock. As in the similarly mode-happy Geometry Wars 2, the shifts of emphasis keep the gameplay fresh for longer. Wave mode, for example, ends as soon as a ship gets past the left edge of the screen, while Tactics turns the game into essentially a puzzle shooter.

All that remains is competition. If you can persuade your friends list to join in the time-shifting fun, Zeit² threatens to become another score-chasing obsession.

8/10