Despite some obvious talent on the part of Griptonite Games, Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines smacks a little too much of an unloved, unwanted by-product birthed from the success of the franchise.

Children will garner some enjoyment from the cute mascots and simple gameplay but the game fails utterly and completely in its attempts at being a practical brainteaser.

The characters exude life and soul despite the game’s clunky animations and less than stellar voice acting – that’s the power of Bioware’s effective writing. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the environments: all the rote forests, castles and dungeons tend to blur into a single indistinguishable mess. It’s also too bloody hard in places, with a wonky difficulty curve comparable to a diagonal line drawn by a Parkinson’s sufferer sitting on a moving bus.

Fans of the series will no doubt relish the opportunity to spend some more time with the duo, and even those not so enamoured with them will still find something to enjoy – that is if they are able to put up with its shortcomings.

There is a deep and rewarding combat system in place likely to please fans and newcomers alike but the series is fraying at the edges due to technical limitations both online and off.

There is a wealth of content growling under the proverbial hood, but the game comes perilously close to lacking any real enthusiasm to show us exactly what it is that makes it so special.

Insomniac have a gift – the ability to forge games of such a high quality – and to ask them to stop would be a crime against gaming humanity.

Minor technical quibbles aside, it’s all at once charming, engaging, innovative, interesting and humorous and perfectly pitched at its target audience (namely kids and adults with kids!), not to mention reasonably priced.

Unfortunately tedium occurs sooner than it should as a lack of diversity and online play cut your attention short.

Decent by yourself, fantastic with friends.

FIFA 10 is a game that’ll make you run around your living room, shirt pulled over your face screaming in unbridled delight. It’s a game that’ll make you fall in love and obsess over its every detail. It’s a game that’ll make you smash your pad in anger, swear like a sailor and curse the day you bought it.

Unfortunately, Way of the Samurai 3 left us bored, uninspired and desperate to play something or, rather, anything else. The game fails to live up to even the most basic standard of quality, offering an archaic play style that falls short of even the most charmless of current-gen titles.

Altogether more successful than other recent Xbox 360 forays into the lifestyle gamer territory (You’re In The Movies anyone?), Lips excels because it feels like there is a clear vision underpinning the franchise, one that has gone from the first idea to the final design with a cohesion lacking in the actual tracklisting.

Brutal Legend has clearly been a labour of love for Double Fine Productions, and this is reflected in the degree of ambition demonstrated on nearly every level. Unfortunately, like the LOVE and HATE tattoos emblazoned on the knuckles of many a Hell’s Angel, with one you must have the other, and Brutal Legend is no exception.

Left me wishing I had enough time and luxury to jump straight back in and take the entire journey again. It's destined to enter the annals of gaming's classics in years to come.

To see WayForward’s lovely creation as a mere respite from the messy business of warfare and killstreaks is almost an insult to what they’ve achieved here. A Boy and His Blob deserves to be in everyone’s Wii collection, whatever their age.

It’s being billed as a niche title, but there’s enough joy within Half-Minute Hero to make the game an entertaining experience for anyone.

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a challenge. It will challenge your perceptions of today’s shooters, challenge your ingrained behaviour but also challenge your patience.

Once it sinks its claws in, you'll find it nigh on impossible to escape until the Kingdom of Boletaria is free from the horror of The Old One. In short then – Demon's Souls is a modern classic.

The iconic series has always been first and foremost about the driving, and Polyphony Digital has managed to encapsulate that perfectly. It’s just a shame that some of the more endearing bells and whistles have had to be removed.

Q-Games' quirky tower defence title is as competent as it is colourful, and the heap of additional content supplied in the PSP version makes it worthy of the deluxe title. Issues with frustration and repetition aside, the quick and accessible nature of the gameplay makes it a vital addition to the PSP's catalogue.

A must for all Dead Space fans, then, but what it lacks in scares and scale it makes up for in visceral heart-pounding action.

That Big BIg Studios have managed to squeeze an experience previously only available on the Playstation 3 into your pocket is a genuine marvel – Motorstorm: Arctic Edge is feature rich, beautifully polished, graphically ambitious and, above all else, retains the oil, smoke and tears that fans know and love.

It is, in many ways, a very meek and understated game…but under its mild-mannered exterior lies an engaging, diverting and enjoyable title that, for the price, offers a heap of entertainment.

It turns out that EA, first with FIFA and now with Need For Speed, had the answer to beat the cynics all along: simply make a good game.

The Beatles: Rock Band raises the bar to such a nosebleed-inducing height that we also wonder where the genre is going to take us to next. The rate of acceleration is phenomenal.

With the arcade racing innovation of Split/Second and Blur just around the corner, and the simulation behemoths of Forza 3 and Gran Turismo 5 occupying the other end of the scale, DiRT 2 – with its ultimately well-judged balance between substance and style – is perfectly placed to occupy the niche that exists between both racing camps.

Section 8 isn’t very good. It’s bland, generic, lacking in original ideas, poorly executed in nearly every department and you’ll probably grow bored of it within the few essential hours it takes to complete the awful single player campaign.