In total, it is an ugly game which misuses its aesthetic, feels archaic and unfinished in its execution. Final Exam sits as a poor relation within a genre which has already given quality titles like Guardian Heroes, Metal Slug and Viewtiful Joe.

Overall, then, FM2014 is a quality product; an enjoyable entry point into the series for new players and customisable enough for series veterans to add or remove the features they want to make the best experience for them.

Pirate fans will merrily pick this up and discover a solid purchase, but the rest might want to hold out in hopes of something different from next year’s iteration.

But for all that it still stands head and shoulders above a lot of the equivalent open world action games out there, and for those happy to go back to the well one more time in this generation, there will be lots to enjoy here. For everyone else Arkham Origins is exactly the game you thought it would be, for better and for worse.

You’ll march through a campaign with an imagination as wide as its corridors, but be enthralled by a lavish if largely familiar multiplayer suite.

Flawed and silly, but also ambitious and heartfelt, this is a game with a clear vision, like it or not, that follows through with utter conviction to the end.

Roguelike games have become increasingly popular of late and it’s great to see one which rewards you for all the time spent by allowing a form of character progression. It’s mitigated to a point by having you lose all your money before entering a castle and each purchased bonus makes all the others more expensive.

Puzzle elements are integrated incompletely with the platforming elements, and while both have moments of retro-inspired genius neither is quite sufficient to truly stand alone.

Grand Theft Auto V is the rare entertainment experience that simply won’t let you down.

It’s a fascinating experience and one of the stranger topics for a video game.

It’s easy to overlook a lot of what makes Brothers unique from first glance, its unassuming style belies a title with a lot more on its mind. But stick with it and you’ll be rewarded with something really quite special.

Ultimately the game feels like a risk, an antithesis of much of what gaming currently aspires to be, but it also uses the medium to its advantage, to tell a personal story in a new and innovative way. Hopefully it leads to more developers stepping out in a similar fashion, and together pushing the medium forward in equally interesting and unexpected ways.

It is, however, hard to open-handedly recommend it to everyone: One Piece fans will find far more to like in it than non-fans, and the stylisation can be a divisive visual look.

The game is short, as I said before the page break; you’re able to race through events in a matter of minutes, which is why this is better played with multiple players to make awful choices together. Ten dollars feels like a lot for a short, independent game, but the amount of different options and the varied repercussions for single actions make it feel like better value than the great but ultimately linear Dear Esther or 30 Flights of Loving.

Full of potential and desperate to push away from its own mediocrity, Lost Planet 3 could have burst onto home consoles in a fountain of glowing orange. As it stands and regardless of what might have been, there’s not enough reason for a jaunt in the frozen wastes.

Were its opening acts more strongly defined, and the characters presented initially as less one-note, then it would be a far better game.

There’s no good reason to play Scourge: Outbreak. It functions (sort of), I’ll give ‘em that. But realistically, and even at a cheaper asking price, why would anyone ever want to play this game? Even the most middling third-person shooter is more desirable, and thankfully the last eight years has got your back pretty well covered in that regard.

It is bound to have its critics then, but when you get to see Darkstalkers’ Morrigan fighting alongside Ghost and Goblin’s Arthur and a grandfather-clock, salt and pepper-shaker tossing Dynamite Cop, it’s almost impossible to stop yourself falling just a little bit in love with the whole affair.

It may not be especially creative or unique, but Urban Trial Freestyle makes for a welcome distraction while RedLynx plans its next move. It may be a wannabe, but it’s a decent one all the same.

As a primer for Walking Dead’s upcoming sophomore season, 400 Days is absolutely a worthwhile stop-gap. More importantly, it is a great reminder that Telltale can continue to deliver on a quality of writing and characterisation far beyond many of its contemporaries, even when placed into a single chapter so fleeting compared to a full season’s worth of escalated drama.

It’s not a complete overhaul of the series, but it’s an entry that intelligently pushes Animal Crossing into new areas of control and creativity.

It encompasses the audiovisual elements, the neon graphics and low-rez music, and the joyous bloodiness of early shooters. But at the same time it also encompasses how dehumanising and routine the old games were – how the violence was immature and gratuitous and just a way of dressing up limited gameplay mechanics with visceral feedback to actions.

The Last of Us is the type of game that could only be crafted by a developer willing to take risks. Were Naughty Dog to have thrown its money at yearly iterations of Uncharted, it would likely still have found its audience, but with The Last of Us it has struck out in a bold new direction that asks some very big questions about some of the fundamental aspects of videogame culture and the relationship that exists between gamer and game.

For now though this collection is the perfect excuse to experience some of the best, most unique games of this generation and either encounter them for the first time, or dive back in for one more play.

If you are fine with crazy difficulty in your platformers then it’s a really rewarding game to play and so beautiful it puts the NSMB series to shame.

Regardless, if you like exploration, stress, permadeath, free-roaming games and don’t care about how the arm hair on your man looks, then this is definitely a game for you.

In Diggs Nightcrawler Sony have definitely hit on something, even if whatever it is doesn’t fit comfortably within any particular art-form and it will be interesting to see whether or not the high production values on show here can be sustained for future Wonderbook releases.

CastleStorm represents the best of its muses’ ideals – namely those belonging to the tower defense genre and Angry Birds – and fuses them into something specially made and distinctly enjoyable. Minor quirks don’t leave a damaging impression, either, which can’t be said for every joyously destroyed playhouse castle you’ll come into contact with along the way.