Tales From The Borderlands: Episode 5 is a fitting end to this series. The storytelling did change slightly over the span of five chapters, but it continually took forward steps. Telltale Games has outdone itself with this series, delivering their most consistent effort from one chapter to the next. The end result is the best overall series to date.

That issue aside, Le Havre is a remarkably pleasant game, with elegant, minimalist visuals, an uncluttered interface (which I felt let the game's more complex but thematically similar sister, Puerto Rico, down, by being far too messy), and games are over in 15 or so minutes. It's the kind of Sunday morning game you might play while sipping through a coffee because you're feeling lazy and relaxed. That makes it ultimately forgettable, but entertaining and worth keeping on the iPad nonetheless.

Tenshu General is a competent adaptation of a tabletop style board game. Unfortunately, its lack of depth, content and narrative leave it feeling like merely an engine with good ideas and not much more.

The problem is that it’s not a game that will convert anyone who isn’t already a fan of the sport, and fans of the sport will really struggle to enjoy a game that ultimately fails to capture so much that is core to the essence of their sport.

Something worth a play, but that I wouldn’t consider returning after the first completion.

The tactical strategy on offer is complex and rich enough that you’ll want to master it, and the touch interface works so well that this is really the definitive version. In a year loaded with quality Aussie-developed games, Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy flew a little under the radar, but it deserves notice as one of the best games we’ve produced in quite some time.

If the idea of truly great dungeon exploration appeals to you, Ruzar is a must buy. It's rare that you see a game focus so deliberately on one facet of their genre's appeal, yet Ruzar manages it and absolutely nails it too. Just don't go in expecting a deep character building experience or a rich plot - you're going in alone, and it's just you against the dungeon.

There have been a lot of retro games over the last few years, but I have found the ones that tend to be the most successful are the ones that blend in some sort of modern convention. In this case, the resource system that allows for ship improvement is easily the best part of what is otherwise a solid if unspectacular shooting game. If you enjoy a good retro shooter, Zotrix should be pretty appealing.

Tennis in the Face is indeed a fun and funny game, but is it worth paying for? Given the fact that it's a wholly unoriginal game that barely distinguishes itself from its (free) peers, I would say no. One suspects that, at some point, the developer will be better off releasing a free version.

The game has all the hallmarks of a fun indie effort: an insane cast of characters, good enough challenge, and a cartoony production. It's just in the execution and slightly confused gameplay is where it falters and unfortunately, casts a big shadow over what little positive points the game has to offer.

Brave Souls isn’t the finest anime game out there, but I believe it can be. Even in its bumpy, jagged state, KLab has managed to boil the franchise down to its most appealing elements and turn an intimidating multi-hundred chapter mess into something newcomers can actually parse. Any company looking to convert a battle-driven shounen series into a video game ought to take note.

Baseball Riot is a perfectly competent game, but it suffers from a lack of originality.

As a rhythm game fan, I have to say that Inside My Radio left me disappointed. It might have been an amazing experience had I been unable to follow a simple beat upon starting up the game, but years of experience in the genre made the experience entirely trivial.

I hate to harp on this, but it does need to be said that charades is a game that doesn’t actually need a game console to play. While you do get the benefit of having the 1,500 questions pre-written for you (and therefore in principle a more fair game than asking for everyone to come up with their own), it’s still putting an extra layer of technical complexity between yourselves and a really simple party game.

The best part of Mini-Games Madness Volume #1 is its menu screen, which features psychedelic colours and effects underscored by a fish-eye lens.

This isn't a game with an incredible amount of content, and it's possible to see everything there is on offer after a couple of runs.

What Siralim is, ultimately, is a great deal of fun for a very select audience, and it gets there because it straddles the line between being something authentic, and something that understands that some design elements are best left in the past.

My admiration of the game comes from its self-aware humour, traditional gameplay, and surprisingly unique story.

Blast ‘Em Bunnies might be simple – no, it is simple – but it’s simple in the right way, and that’s something to be impressed with all by itself.

It's a good game, don't get me wrong. On an objective level it works, and there's a reason Fruit Ninja and other such games have been so popular over the years; they're a great deal of fun. The problem with Fire Fu is that it is just so very late to the party, that even an Asianophile like me struggles to get along with it over its genre ancestors, despite the Asian setting and theming.

Being based on a novel I was hoping for a better standard of story and in being short at only around nine hours, Trulon is also far shorter than I went in expecting for a JRPG. This doesn't make the game bad.

This is not a perfect game and its ideas are all over the place. It's rough around the edges, the overworld is tiny and it's over all too soon. I can in full confidence say though, that I've never played a more interesting open world title.

It wasn’t disappointing in that it was every bit as terrible as I was expecting. This is the worst visual novel I have ever experienced. It’s tempting to say it’s unplayable, in that I can’t have it on for five minutes before wanting to give up on games forever, but that would be inaccurate, since a visual novel just involves scrolling through text and performing basic inputs on to the screen. So instead I’ll just a far more accurate pejorative for this kind of game - Parascientific Escape is illiterate.

The game is evolving, which is a great thing for a title like this that has some MMO elements and will live or die with the kind of online community it can put together. More often than not, I enjoyed my time with Kingdom Wars 2: Battles. It has some rough edges and there is clearly room to improve, but what is there has more innovation than the first hour or two with the title might suggest and I found myself having more fun with it than I have with most other RTS games of late.

It's a far more streamlined experience compared to the Civilization games on PC, and that makes it good as a light hearted pick-up-and-play strategy game that doesn't degenerate into free-to-play monetisation nonsense. The only downside on the Vita is that it looks terrible, with low resolution units and environments when compared to the glistening art style that we see on the iPad release.

Xblaze isn't the team at its best, but I suspect that the quality of the visual novels that the team does produce will only improve from here.

But there’s not a single picture in the dozens and dozens of puzzles the game boasts that you’ll actually want to put together. Universally the pictures look like the developer got colour-by-number books, filled them in, and scanned them into the game.

The basic mechanics are all there, and though the game features bigheaded anime-like characters and super shots and the like, it has got a focus on the three key techniques of beach volleyball; a need to time ball strikes well, a need to position spikes as close to the net as possible, and the need to be able to hit gaps in the court with those spikes...It’s not perfect, of course. There’s very little content beyond playing teams of increasing difficulty, and earning points to level up your own characters.