Overall, Days of Ruin is a fitting sequel to the popular Advance Wars franchise.

For those that dig Shatter's depth and style, the rabbit hole goes pretty deep: it offers plenty of strategy with its vacuum system, and the variety of levels and smooth graphics, sound and music make for a great value for many gamers at only $7.99 on PSN.

The immense quality of the track selection in DJ Hero 2 gets you by with a pretty solid score this year, FreeStyle and Activision, but that isn't going to last forever.

It's a solid add-on, especially if you don't care for the engineer and would just rather have solid FPS gunplay over the high-tech gadgets. It's not perfect, but the launch did go smoothly and it's a blast to play.

The relatively short playtime and lack of new music or any major Hollywood voice talent are all a letdown, but the gameplay is great and the imagination that went into the Madgod's world really makes this expansion pack shine.

While it doesn’t innovate that much, it adds just enough and gives you a more than satisfactory amount of new areas to explore to make it a worthy sequel.

I find that Aggressive Inline is definitely one of the greats, and that it raises the bar for the genre. It's not revolutionary like the first THPS was, but it certainly offers higher replay value and more crazy places to trick from than any other game of its kind.

As I said at the beginning of this review, all of this is great as long as you actually enjoy the game's mix of arcade and sim racing. If that's not your kind of game, then Project Gotham Racing 4's many gameplay modes and unique features might just pull you in long enough to hook you.

Any fan of the genre owes it to themselves to give Ni no Kuni a try, but I won't go so far as to guarantee that you'll love this game even if you've hated past JRPGs.

UFC 2010 is an absolute knockout of a game and despite a few minor disappointments, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to pretty much anyone that's even remotely interested.

Overall, Guitar Hero 3 is a mixed bag. While it is a lot more of the same from the past, it also has some issues. The battle modes can be slogged through, but do get annoying quite often. The ramping up in difficulty may turn some players off too.

Aside from these small issues, though, Tatsunoko’s one of the best you’re going to find as far as current fighting games go, and is without question the best available for the Wii.

With the new melee action gameplay and a brute-force approach with dozens of arenas, characters, mutators, and options, there should be enough here for any online gunslingers to just go crazy with.

Fight Night Champion may be the best boxing game I've played, but with competition from all sides in this rekindled fighting genre, this franchise is starting to look and feel a little like the sport it represents: increasingly outdated and out of style.

It essentially puts a PS3/360 game in the palm of our hands.

City of Heroes is a great MMORPG with solid, fun gameplay and a style all its own. It doesn't seem like high level players have much to look forward to, but time will tell if new and exciting stuff will open up for them.

There are a metric buttload of Pokemon to catch and you'll be hard pressed to finish everything this game offers in under 100 hours, much less 150 or maybe even 200.

Irrational Games' SWAT 4 delivers an interesting first person shooter experience that rewards superior tactics and patience above all else.

The only thing that really irritated me while I played were the swimming controls – they just don’t feel right. Otherwise, this is an excellent game that you should, at the very least, rent and play through once.

Hotline Miami is difficult and violent, but it's not aggravating when you lose, and it's very rewarding when you win.

Guitar Hero: World Tour has some interesting pluses - the drum kit is excellent, and there are a few gameplay perks to be found here and there. But to me the touch panel on the guitar is a bust, the mic is still wired (even though that Microsoft karaoke game Lips figured out how to do a wireless mic), and the game is rather light on content both before and after you're sick of the on-disc set of tracks.

In the end, Dead or Alive 4 is to fighting games what Halo 2 was to first person shooters.

Buy this one without hesitation, especially if you haven't played it before.

It still doesn't recapture the magic of the Dreamcast original, but Soul Calibur IV is still a great game with many hours of solid fighting action to offer.

There's nothing really like Forza Horizon out there right now, as the wide-open world to explore and solid handling of the Forza franchise come together beautifully. Yes, Playground and Turn 10 had to compromise on what feels like a rather hefty list of features and selling points in order to make Horizon a reality on Xbox 360, but the relatively few new things this game includes add up to a massive impact on how it's played and enjoyed.

It seems doubtful that this port of an already inhospitable game will make many new fans, especially with the kind of treatment it got in the conversion to PC, but there will be some that will swear by it as one of the best games made in a very long time. If you think there's any chance at all that you'll be one of those people, then you owe it to yourself to drop the cash and find out.

Peggle is probably the biggest surprise game of the year for me so far. Normally, I avoid PopCap stuff because it is so simple and makes me want more 15 minutes in. Peggle, however is different – while it is simple and seems to not offer much on the surface, there’s a whole other game buried deep within for the hardcore gamer.

It's still a wonderful, hugely fun game, because the fan service and foundation of its 3-on-3 fighting action is very sound.