Excellent little city builder brings plenty of charm and entertainment for free.

A wonderful, engaging and ambitious fantasy adventure that combines the best of classic RPGs and smart, match-three puzzle gaming. Essential.

Ni No Kuni is a miracle. Doused in character and constructed with depth, its first half hour is awe-inspiring yet the challenge can carry beyond the hundred hour mark.

An App Store curiosity that blends two genres into something compelling yet occasionally frustrating. The bizarre concept will deter some, but the rhythm-action crowd will love it.

The Cave's built from the same bedrock as Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, after all, and the trademark Double Fine humour is here in abundance. If some repetition is the price to be paid for hours of clever conundrums and charming gags, it's a deal well worth striking; a few lumps of coal in a goldmine of entertainment.

DmC is a superb reboot that delivers on all fronts, and does it with aplomb. For the first time in ages, we're excited to see where Devil May Cry goes next.

More than anything else, it puts up a great fight. More immediate than its predecessors and certainly easier to get to grips with, SCV still retains the special flavour of the series - the weapons make its fights fast and deadly, the kind of battle where one slip ends everything. The mix of tension and frantic violence is more potent than ever. It never really went away, but Soul Calibur V feels like a comeback.

If BioWare can get over their identity crisis and make TOR increasingly more unique with future updates, this could be one of the best MMOs ever. For now, it's 'merely' excellent, and a bold experiment in bringing a worthwhile story to an online experience.

Superb - and cheap - HD update for a criminally ignored, highly original action game.

As complete a racing game as you could hope to play. All that's good about the previous Karts, distilled and mixed with a trillion ideas of its own. Excellent.

More like an FPS than a racer, The Run lacks the performance and depth of Gran Turismo and Forza, but delivers on insane speeds and nail-biting arcade thrills.

An abundance of recycled gameplay sours what is otherwise an entertaining, imaginative and memorable end to Ezio's story.

Take Halo's combat model and place it in the worst spaces imaginable and you can still have fun with it - it's that good.

Well, who'd a thunk it? Ubisoft's horrible jumble of body parts in a genuinely wonderful game. Better dust off those reflexes: 2D platforming is back.

A huge departure for Zelda and a proper arrival for Wii's motion controls. Link's latest is rule-breaking, dream-weaving, tech-loving, heart-soaring stuff. If it Wii's last hurrah, they don't come more impassioned than this.

Conflicted throughout, but still an undeniable 3DS achievement. Wait for it to get its act together and the game soars. Well, flutters.

If you're an Elder Scrolls veteran, you'll already know what you're in for. This is not the next evolutionary stage of the series: rather a loving refinement of what made Oblivion and the now-aged PC title Morrowind so special. It's those games with better voice acting, a slicker interface, a richer world and an improved story. It's also the most polished and user friendly games in the series, with smarter character progression and a gentler learning curve.

Modern Warfare has always relied on smoke and mirrors. What surprises us is how ably the conjurers perform despite the much publicised Infinity Ward departures. After many months of doom-mongering it's great to find a game as confident and capable as those that preceded it.

Sonic Generations hits its target well - with the genuinely bruising qualification that it can frequently be difficult to look at.

Taken as individual pieces, only Battlefield 3's regular multiplayer is really strong. The co-op and story are both perfectly well executed, but lack true greatness. So, that third elephant: is Battlefield 3 really better than Call of Duty? It's a matter of personal taste, but for us Battlefield 3's incredible multiplayer edges this ahead of it's accomplished rival.

All of which makes this a big step on from Uncharted 2 in terms of visuals, gameplay and performance - but its biggest achievement is that, barring minor lapses, the threads are brought together into a superbly cohesive whole.

Battlefield 3 then, from a campaign perspective, delivers the goods and then some. It's not perfect, but it's bloody close... infinitely more impressive than Bad Company 2 and irrefutable proof that DICE have now firmly stepped into the hallowed ranks of the absolute top-tier developers. COD or not, this deserves a place in your collection - not to mention a place in your heart.

This is the same Football Manager you know and love with a number of really good decisions running throughout to give more depth and more control.

As opening gambits in a DLC strategy go, The Missing Link is a hard act to follow.

It's a belief in the character and, most importantly, a belief in itself that has seen the studio deliver one of the greatest Batman interpretations of all time. And you know what? Maybe even one of the best games ever.

Adding some of Modern Warfare's gritty realism gives the Ace Combat series a shot in the arm, while its arcade accessibility and enjoyability remains intact.

A fabulously rewarding drive and the finest Forza yet, but one that comes with an Advisory Notice: more single-player focus and diversity will be needed next time out to prevent the franchise from suffering a potential misfire.

The house of Doom delivers a masterful single-player shooter with top notch gunplay, let down by a disappointing final third.