As an enigmatic whisper of a narrative concludes in delightful, uplifting fashion, you’ll likely be left wanting more.

Those vibrant looks belie a challenge that is sometimes tough but - with one notable exception - exquisitely fair. [Issue#340, p.112]

Rovio's latest is an evolution that feels considerably more ambitious than previous updates.

The gloriously beautiful landscapes; the vital Jim Guthrie soundtrack; the pounding desire to see, explore and accomplish more of this ambient quest: these save the game from itself. It may be uneven in tone, but S:S&S is a triumphant experience nonetheless. It's a brand new page in the dusty book of adventure games, and an inarguable statement as to how much art and music can give to gaming.

The joy of Void Bastards, once it reveals itself, is that no action, no decision, is standalone. [Issue#334, p.112]

We're not sure it's entirely wise to save a game's best material for its back half, when the climb to reach it is so steep. It's hard to judge, even, whether it was all worth it - from the top of the mountain, those struggles at its base tend to seem so small and far away. But as we approach that third act, a game that at times we were struggling to find the motivation to pick back up has become one we cannot put down. As a payoff to dozens of hours of struggle - not to mention eight years of waiting before that - it's undeniable. [Issue#416, p.98]

There are no 'game over's, only a zen-like cycle until you are enlightened enough to progress beyond it. [Issue#340, p.11]

It's almost shocking how seamless, engrossing and accessible Fahrenheit is. It's sad, then, that it shows weakness in the one area where it needed to be stronger than any other game: the script. [Oct 2005, p.84]

Race Driver 3 understands that a processional win from pole is less fulfilling than a hard-fought, championship-saving fifth place from the back of the grid. And though it can't exactly engineer those situations, it does everything in its power to make them more likely and leave them unpunished. [Mar 2006, p.87]

Thematically eccentric, mechanically shambolic and technically stunning, Dead Rising is the kind of infectious experience that yearns for a sequel. [Oct 2006, p.80]

Atlus succeeds in creating another idiosyncratic concoction of narrative and play, one that twists convention as often as it builds upon it. [Sept 2009, p.98]

It gets far more laughs than it should, and special mention to its credits song: perhaps the finest ending on the App Store. Original, funny, and intense: for a game based on Snake, not bad at all.

The faults are present at the glamorous, high-stakes launch party and, as a result, Hitman is once again prevented from defining the genre. [May 2016, p.112]

Combat is thrilling – each weapon packing a solid, vicious blast; movement suggesting heft and momentum. [Dec 2008, p.80]

Rock Band: Unplugged’s heart is genuine and soulful, evidence perhaps that, in game-making as much as music-making, it pays to never forget one’s roots.

Superstar Saga does justice to Miyamoto-san's original vision: a world of deliciously impossible creatures and impeccably illogical logic. A world where you never know what'll happen next but, once it has, you know it's what always should have happened. [Jan 2004, p.100]

Goat Up 2 wears its influences on its sleeve – from Pac-Man to Portal – and its attempt to blend the immediacy and pace of the former with the brain strain of the latter is a unique, effective proposition.

After a lengthy hiatus, the series has returned with a sense of forceful creativity it's lacked for some time. [Issue#416, p.106]

As audiovisually accomplished as any game has been, at least on PC, its deference to prescribed spectacle is an assiduous realisation of blockbuster gaming tastes, with an increasing reliance on 'video' rather than 'game'. EA wants Battlefield 3 to be all things to all people, and it's right in thinking that the addition of a singleplayer duck shoot doesn't detract from its other substantial offerings. But in this act of imitation, and limitation, it disregards the choice and tactical empowerment which make the series near-peerless and preciously idiosyncratic in multiplayer.

When the cards become familiar enough to make zooming a thing of the past, Ascension flowers thanks to its speedy and unfussy online integration. A simple game to learn, it's one that builds into rich and complex battles, big and small. It probably won't impress the airhead in your life, unfortunately – but that's what iPint's for.

There is a playfulness to LostWinds that will surely extend its playtime beyond the bounds of narrative. [July 2008, p.95]

Movement is smooth and fast, recalling the fluidity of seminal arena shooters such as Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004. [May 2016, p.122]

Bridge Crew transforms an ordinarily isolating technology into something irresistibly social: it's an anecdote generator par excellence, and a VR experience that handily overcomes its limitations as a game. [Aug 2017, p.119]

It spits you out, head spinning, with a message about overcoming failure through unorthodox thinking; one last surprise in a game that encourages you to readjust your perspective in every sense. [Issue#340, p.118]

The conservative setting and lack of an engaging storyline may do little to excite RTS veterans but, in its ruleset, Ruse expands upon the genre in a way that goes beyond gimmick. [Oct 2010, p.95]

No but(t)s about it: Takahashi's most complete-feeling game since Katamari sees him operating in a mode that suits him... down to the ground. [Issue#412, p.112]

One of the most memorable JRPGs in recent years. [Issue#364, p.114]

Above all else, it's an infectiously cheery game that marches to a very different tempo. In that respect, Beat The Beat might just be the perfect swansong for Wii.

But perhaps the greatest compliment we can pay to Capcom is that the players who don't have the original permanently branded on their memories and their thumbs will merely have to settle for a supremely varied and expertly paced action game - one that doesn't quite supplant, but makes a fascinating companion piece to, one of the greats. [Issue#383, p.96]

It may not take the genre into uncharted waters, and occasionally stumbles into cliche, but Gemini Rue is an accomplished homage that rivals the very titles that influenced it.

It's done enough to shake a shambling wraith out of its coffin and render it an elegant, challenging treat.

Combat is impressively muscular for a game that presents like a top-down dungeon crawler. [Issue#356, p.102]

Its troop AI is better than that of "FEAR," and environmentally more aware than that of "Far Cry." [May 2007, p.84]

Despite the big budget, SIE London Studio has approached Blood & Truth with a modest ambition: to make you feel special, and strong, and more than a little silly, in a love letter to the city it calls home. It has done so with a flourish. [Issue#334, p.118]

There are moments to savour throughout Hitman 2, and they all have a corpse lying somewhere. [Jan 2019, p.112]

So while Monster Train 2 can initially seem more like an expansion than a sequel, it favours potency over a reimagining of the basics, using trusted design as a basis for even more excessive combat creations. It's all about bigger, weirder kinds of damage. If, that is, you're prepared to think like a mad scientist. [Issue#412, p.118]

One of the finest WWII games of recent memory. Hidden & Dangerous 2 manages to distract you from errors that would cripple a lesser game through its sheer ambition and scale. [Christmas 2003, p.120]

Faraday's enthralling quest is up there with the best games Devolver has published to date. [Issue#356, p.105]

For all the gags, Astrologaster is a romp with no little substance. [Issue#334, p.120]

The singleplayer adventure is yet another sprawling, puzzle-heavy artefact hunt which, truth be told, is far bigger than we had any right to expect. [May 2006, p.89]

What could have been an elephants' graveyard of forgotten ideas instead feels like a series-wide victory lap. [Issue#353, p.96]

Another excellent outing for Codemasters' rally team, but one that has possibly taken the series to its structural - and commercial - limits. [Nov 2003, p.104]

From its overpowered weapons and gormless AI to its pedestrian objecctives, the singleplayer game is as dumb as it is misguided – an embarrassment to the rather splendid mulitplayer game that, fortunately, represents all that's really important. [Dec 2005, p.101]

As forgettable as the story mode is, this is a game that should be judged by the pleasure it can bring to a room full of gamers eager for furious arena combat and a splendid variety of team games. And judged by those criteria, it has few peers. [Apr 2005, p.94]

A squad-based WarioWare? It's better than could have anticipated. [Issue#364, p.122]

This is surely Nintendo's finest piece of DLC to date. [Issue#322, p.118]

As expectations are put aside and the game is explored for its own merits, it begins to provide a vast sense of potential that few games can muster. [June 2003, p.97]

Punch Quest isn't just good for a free-to-play game. It's good, full stop, infused with humour, depth and the most charming violence imaginable. Unless you're a skeleton knight, in which case the violence is offensive, troubling and needlessly graphic.

Yakuza 6's narrative builds to one of the finest climaxes in the series - perhaps, in fact, the best of the lot...When the dust settles, the series fan is given something that no previous Yakuza game, bound as it has been to an inevitable sequel, has ever offered: closure. [Apr 2018, p.108]

In keeping with the original, Otogi 2 is something of an empty vessel, but it's one of the most ornate and accomplished around, possibly the most excessively and obscenely beautiful videogame yet made. Games that are this electric and uniquely rewarding don't come along very often, whereas those with more complexity are commonplace. Take your pick. [Mar 2004, p.104]

As forgettable as the story mode is, this is a game that should be judged by the pleasure it can bring to a room full of gamers eager for furious arena combat and a splendid variety of team games. And judged by those criteria, it has few peers. [Apr 2005, p.94]

Atlus's surgery sim is in rude health. [July 2010, p.103]

Like a Dragon is a JRPG that's at least as interested in its hero's growth as a person as as the incremental increase of his statistics - and a Yakuza game that retains all the humour and heart that made us fall for the series in the first place. [Issue#353, p.100]

The price of this intricacy is that Gwent is anything but accessible... It feels both remarkably grown-up, and finely aged by its years of open development. [Jan 2019, p.120]

A captivating follow-up. [April 2016, p.117]

It's totally faithful, and if you're of a certain age worth it without question for the nostalgia hit and sheer fizz of the nutty robots and explosions.

What will stop you in your tracks is the scale, detail and beuty of the environments. Even after repeated play it's impossible not to pause and breathe in the magnificant view from the top of the Deep Amazon Temple. [May 2004, p.94]

There’s not much that can be said about Shadow Of The Colossus. Not because there aren’t pages to be written about the designs of the colossi, the wisdom of some of the puzzles involved in defeating them, or the deliberately ambiguous implications of the story, but because this is a game with so little content that to discuss specifics would be to tarnish an experience that needs to be approached with as few preconceptions as possible. [Christmas 2005, p.98]

If there’s one great story in The Sims 3, it’s of how the biggest game in the world continues to act like it, expanding in some respects, shrinking in others, but always evolving. And it’s about EA learning more and more how to act like the world’s biggest developer, the production values, build quality and feature set here being almost overwhelming.

A labour of love. The core of the game might be a remake, but the features and polish applied move it beyond the realm of simple cash-ins to one of the finest games to grace PSN or XBLA yet. [Sept 2008, p.92]

QuBit is only held back by itself: as a linear drive-into-things score attack game, it's a great one. But it never quite unfolds in the way that the very greatest do – a Space Giraffe or Geometry Wars – to reveal layer after layer of variation.

Irrespective of talent, taste, spare time or even online connectivity, it has something for anyone with even a tingle in their trigger finger. [Jan 2008, p.78]

Whatever the oddities and missed opportunities of its singleplayer mode, Bad Company 2 delivers a fulsome online game that continues to hone a winning formula. [Apr 2010, p.90]

No matter what comes next, Lawbreakers is a success. It's proof, among other things, that veteran design talent really does mean something - and that the shooters of the late '90s still have something to teach the modern game industry. This is more than nostalgia: it's a paean to the genre's potential, performed by people who know it well. [Issue#311, p.104]

At the core remains the solid, steady hand of Halo, but those hoping Halo 4 would roll back Reach's intricacies and deliver an alternative to the current wave of console shooters will be disappointed.

Much like a summer movie blockbuster, Split Second offers thrills galore, but there's a hint of glossy superficiality to it, too...Yet there are few games in the genre that create quite so many sharp intakes of breath and instances of unintentionally barked profanity as this one, and sometimes that's what racing gaming is all about. [June 2010, p.96]

The details of each individual victory may fade with time, but you’ll never forget the fractal patchwork rippling beneath you, or the stormy static of the clouds that clash overhead.

Developer PAM has reinvented a game that no longer strives to be a thinking man’s alternative to Virtua, but something altogether superior. [May 2006, p.94]

The shift from WiiWare to 3DS, meanwhile, may not see Art Of Balance really benefiting very much from either the handheld's touchscreen or the developer's range of depth tricks, but it does add a generous suite of new levels - and it does raise the chances of a larger audience finally discovering this playful, wonderfully-calibrated puzzler.

Lost Legacy's shorter runtime and reduced scope means it has something many of its mainline forebears lack: focus. There is a game with neither faff nor filler, no sense of a story being stretched too thinly across a game that is too big for it. Once it gets into gear, this is a rare breed: a finely paced action game with a story to tell and no creeping sense that the needs of one are undermining the quality of the other. [Issue#311, p.108]

Minor lapses in cohesion and polish drop Lumines short of the absolute completeness of "Rez," but it expands upon its concepts in ways even Mizuguchi followers couldn't have expected. It's a block puzzle that celebrates the joy of light and sound – to the question of whether the PSP can encourage new experiences, it's a resounding 'yes'.

Gravity Rush might not always live up to the promise of its tutorial, but it's exactly the kind of original game that a fresh-faced system such as Vita needs, taking subtle, thoughtful advantage of its control inputs while showcasing its power.

Where Is My Heart? revels in simplicity, beauty and restraint, yet the experience tempers such qualities by proving challenging, infuriating and exhausting.

Prey is an accomplished game in an under-served genre. Its problems are those of a game that tries to do more, and give the player more, than most shooters aspire to - and to that extent, they're forgivable. [July 2017, p.106]

On the strength of Stray Children's eccentric charm and hopeful outlook for younger generations, whether or not we see another RPG from the studio after this, it feels certain that Onion Games will reveal still more strange and succulent layers yet. [Issue#417, p.112]

It feels rare to play a game that coheres so completely around its protagonist and his value system; rarer still given those values are puppyish enthusiasm, unquestioning compassion and the unashamed pursuit of interactive entertainment. [Issue#395, p.100]

Compared to so many free-roaming games to date, it so rarely stumbles. It’s the very skeleton of the genre, those bones strengthened to the point where they alone can stand as a game, rather than serving as hangers for threadbare ideas to be dangled from. [Mar 2007, p.76]

It might not be a system seller, but provides further compelling evidence of the Wii controller’s lofty potential. [July 2007, p.92]

OutRun 2 remains a pinnacle of the arcade racing tradition, a peak that, through both design and circumstance, may never again be topped.

Playing Ball X Pit is a long ramp of rapturous discovery, a mad scientist's laboratory where the goal is to make the screen as blissfully incoherent as can be. [Issue#417, p.118]

One of the few games of its type you can actually play for an hour, take on one of its missions, and have a meaningful unit of experience. Staight in. Straight out. Gamer satisfied. [Sept 2004, p.105]

Viewtiful Joe will undoubtedly test your patience. But the moments that stay with you after you switch off the GameCube are characterised by inventiveness, wit, verve, charm style, vigour and, above all, fun. And that's not something that can be said of that many other games these days. [Sept 2003]

Strafe styles itself as both "the future of videogames" and "the most action-packed game of 1996", and there's a ring of truth to both gags. In folding together and drilling into layers of FPS convention, Pixel Titans has created a game that is at once sentimental and sharply contemporary. It doesn't so much take us back to '96 as transport '96 into the present, picking up threads left by Doom and Quake and weaving its own tapestry out of them, every time you play. [July 2017, p.116]

Twelve-year-old fights feel brand new because of the inclusion of Yakuza 0's switchable combat styles. [Issue#311, p.110]

Much of the enjoyment comes from the awe and wonder at discovering the simple things in the world. Where previous Harvest Moon titles encouraged workaholic tendencies … the thrill here is in experimentation. [Apr 2004, p.105]

Finally, Sega can dust off that classic marketing line, because once you've played Vanquish, everything else seems a little bit slow. [Dec 2010, p.86]

The new control system may ultimately be an upgrade Samus Aran never really needed, but this is still the best – and most logical – Wii reissue from Nintendo to date.

When it works, however, Infinity Blade II represents iOS gaming at its finest. For all Chair's improvements, the first game's nagging sense of hollow repetition will still set in eventually; it just takes longer to arrive this time. But until that point arrives, Infinity Blade II remains a defining, and essential, iOS experience.

With its bright, clean presentation looking resplendent on the small screen, it's a particularly fine fit for Switch's portable mode; for the next few weeks, your daily commute - and occasionally your stop - is likely to fly by. [July 2017, p.119]

Midnight Suns deviates from the XCOM format in many ways, the biggest of which is eschewing dice rolls in favour of a deck of cards. [Issue#380, p.100]

The 3DS' first fighting game happens to be a version of one of the genre's best, and it's lost little in the conversion to a portable system. Token additions, such as the cute-but-unworkable Dynamic (3D) View, bulk out the package, but it's what's stayed the same that's the real triumph here. SSFIV is just as vibrant, fluid and confident as ever – and it's just been unshackled from your TV.

The best tennis game of this generation, if not ever. A crisp, responsive and consuming sports title where the act of hitting the ball is made so effortless that your focus can be instantly diverted towards thinking about tactics and exploring the subtle depth on offer. [Jan 2004, p.105]

Yet if it's messy at times, then these are traits that the game's story tells us are all part of the vivid tapestry that is being human. [Issue#375, p.110]

Ultimately, Makai Kingdom feels more about brutal stat farming than true tactics… Makai Kingdom’s key strategy isn’t so much tactics as just sheer weight of numbers, of accumulation and refinement of properties. [Oct 2005, p.86]

It’s ostensibly an action game, but much more slowly paced than that term would suggest. It’s not quite an RPG either, although there’s levelling and grinding involved. And while its world isn’t open – each area is segmented into numbered zones – it’s a sandbox game in every other respect. Guild quests offer a skeletal structure, but there’s no pressure to stick to it.

This welcome focus on spectacle – and the highly recognisable cast – makes Injustice more accessible than most modern fighting games, but there’s plenty to appeal to seasoned players.

Amped 2 is Amped with the right trigger gently pressed: it's tweaked. Balance meters take away some of the series' grace, but make it more of a game, like Tony Hawk's tilted downwards. [Christmas 2003, p.122]

It’s difficult to shake the sensation that Killer 7 is an important production, as paving for future creative leeway if nothing else. But its likely love/hate status is testament to just how adamant it has attempted to be in its flair for extraordinary presentation. [Aug 2005, p.84]