Let all the vision-obscuring dust settle and it transpires that Battlefield 4 is a more conservative sequel than we were led to expect.

Many will be satisfied by the simple existence of a COD game on the day next-gen hardware launches, but this is a missed opportunity nonetheless. The studio that defined the console FPS in the current generation has declined to do the same here. By the time it gets another chance, it may be too late.

Sokobond introduces complexity via level furniture that breaks bonds or lets you adjust the position of bonded atoms, but even the basic chambers provide ingenious challenges. Forget chemistry: it takes alchemy to produce a puzzle game as refined and smart as this.

There’s a good game here, but that game was built and finished two years ago. Origins adds little to its mechanics and nothing to the mythology. The story of a raw and inelegant Batman in his early years is better told on the big screen and the printed page, rather than in a raw, inelegant game in a generation’s twilight years.

Stealth games are only as good as the flexibility of their encounters, and in that regard Black Flag is the most generous Assassin’s Creed game to date.

Dual Destinies is an Ace Attorney game, all right, and that’s perhaps the best result anyone could have hoped for.

This Arkham Origins is a brawny, brainless offering, then, that takes one aspect of the series and remixes it for iOS in a way that should temporarily scratch that Batman itch ahead of the main event.

There’s a familiar, welcoming charm to Wii Party U, which offers an evening spent in the company of nice-but-quiet friends. We wouldn’t blame you, however, if you snuck out to visit the more vibrant party hosted by Wario or Bumpie next door.

Sonic games, and platformers in general, have always been about memorising the lay of the land, but rarely have mistakes been so costly or heavily punished, and it says much that one retailer’s preorder bonus consists solely of 25 additional lives.

Simogo’s greatest triumph, perhaps, is to intensify the potency of the written word. In using its text both as narrative and as geography – and through its impressively restrained use of illustration and sound – it generates an almost unrivalled sense of place.

140 is a magnetically moreish experience: delicately balanced and well thought-out. If this is what the programmer can achieve during the downtime from his day job, Playdead’s enigmatic second project can’t come soon enough.

And while The Walking Dead had its share of technical problems, here they’re even worse, with lengthy loading times on 360 fracturing the pace and some several-second freezes completely killing the tension during fight scenes.

It’s a game designed to intentionally test your stamina and patience, meaning that if you fail to prepare yourself for Hookball’s relentless pace and harsh difficulty, then prepare to fail.

This is a game that takes its fantasy as seriously as it needs to be, which is to say both lightly and with rigour in homage to the communal games that make up videogames’ heritage. But it’s also a real original.

It lacks the original’s elegance and surprise, but as F2P spin-offs go, this isn’t nearly as villainous as you might expect.

This is a far more systemically diverse game than Heavy Rain, and its story is certainly more believably told through Holmes, Dafoe and a fine supporting cast. Yet this is a game almost entirely bereft of tension, one in which failure goes largely unpunished and is almost always inconsequential. There is emotion here, but it’s felt passively, as spectator instead of player.

Rain’s core ideas remain frustratingly underdeveloped throughout, and it comes off more like a watercolour sketch than the oil painting that was promised.

Make no mistake: this is a pair of games that will lead to formative moments in young lives, moments of the kind that will inspire a lifelong passion for the medium.

In the games’ improved communication features, too, X and Y are truer to their narrative’s ethos: the joy of sharing moments of beauty and surprise with others. It’s a delightful message to send to a new generation of players, many of whom are just starting out on their own gaming journey.

With no meaningful equivalent to the communal goals and tactical layovers that gave Planes a stay of execution, once the paywall stalls your progress like leaves on the line, there’s little reason to continue. Even for those who’ve ‘supported’ NimbleBit with regular IAP donations, you suspect the Bux stop here.

Flying Wild Hog has re-imagined a cult classic while maintaining Shadow Warrior’s unique personality in a shamelessly flawed and flimsy shooter concerned more with laughs and blood-letting than balance, and the team’s bold embrace of the game’s roots goes a long way to excuse the game’s problems.

There’s no sense of strength or weight to your actions despite how extravagant the carnage becomes.

The breasts get in the way. Dragon’s Crown’s 30GG bosoms have made any discussion of the game impossible without first acknowledging that, yes, those things are preposterous. While art director George Kamitani’s assertion that he exaggerates male characters’ masculine characteristics to the same extent holds water, the saucy fairy and spread-legged female monk don’t help combat the suggestion that Dragon’s Crown is wantonly objectifying women.

Final Fantasy XIV’s shine wears off as your level increases.

Where Escape From Butcher Bay and Assault On Dark Athena showed how games can complement and expand a film franchise in unique and interesting ways, The Merc Files feels like a rushed, irrelevant addition to David Twohy’s B-movie universe; one that would have been best left on the cutting room floor.

With a clutch of intricate puzzle stages and some tough daily challenges for players chasing mastery, Ookibloks challenges mind and thumbs in equal measure.

While the original aimed to capture our hearts, the sequel only seems to be after our wallets.

Blackbar tells a satisfying dystopian short story, one that invites you to engage directly with its censorship theme.

No one makes worlds like Rockstar, but at last it has produced one without compromise. Everything works. It has mechanics good enough to anchor games of their own, and a story that is not only what GTA has always wanted to tell but also fits the way people have always played it. It’s a remarkable achievement, a peerless marriage of world design, storytelling and mechanics that pushes these ageing consoles to the limit and makes it all look easy.

Buy into Arma 3 now and you’re buying into many promises. Bohemia’s pledge of a coherent campaign, its promise of a wider array of military toys to play with, and its intent to tweak and update AI errors, scripting issues, and pathfinding problems. But these promises are backed up by thousands of the world’s most dedicated players, people who’ve spent years crawling through Arma 2’s rough terrain to find the comparatively even ground of Arma 3. Buying Arma 3 at launch is buying a promise, then, but few games are so meticulously realised, or show so much promise.

The Chinese Room’s temporary stewardship of the series has resulted in an undoubtedly slicker experience, but one that comes at the cost of some of The Dark Descent’s memorable urgency. But there are as many gains here as there are losses.

Lucid is carrying on the spirit of its PGR days with this sim-arcade hybrid, but where Bizarre Creations’ driving games pushed their platforms’ boundaries, 2K Drive is incapable of breaking through the limitations of iOS.

When directing death from above, Strike Team offers a glimpse at what might have been, but when it’s time to go loud, the whole thing collapses as limply as the enemies you’ve dropped.

When the offscreen narrator, voiced with arch-Britishness by Stephen Greif, welcomes you to “the magical theatre of the strange and fantastic”, his adjectives are right on all three counts. And you rarely get magic that feels quite this immaculately handcrafted.

A Disney game that finally lives up to the name.

Outlast’s combination of stealth, platforming and horror is exceptional, the benefits of the diverse experience of its highly talented development team always in plain sight.

It is, in other words, a competent handheld version of Killzone, and those who bought a Vita on that promise will be amply satisfied. Others will squint, line up their sights on a speck in the middle distance, squeeze the trigger and hope for the popup confirming their aim was true, and wonder if this is really what handheld gaming should be.

Unlike iOS title The Room, here intricacy proves a weakness, and Open Me doesn’t have the rich atmosphere of Fireproof Games’ award-winning puzzler to compensate for its mechanical awkwardness.

It’s big and beautiful, but it’s also too swollen, too slow, and too buggy to sustain its lofty ambition.

It’s perhaps easier to admire than to enjoy, but those who are prepared to meet its bracing challenge may find themselves hooked by one of the smartest iOS games in some time.

Diablo still contains enough impulsive monster-slaying to entertain, but the trek from its home on PC has left it diminished.

With Suda we’ve come to expect the unexpected, but the most disappointing thing about Killer Is Dead is that the unexpected has become predictable. By adhering too rigidly to its creator’s esoteric template, it gives us pretty much exactly what we were anticipating.

Try and play Shelter as a perfectionist and you’ll fail, the victim of a cruel world and occasionally clunky, unclear rules. Better to simply do your best, allow Might and Delight’s fantastical art to enthrall, and let nature take its course.

It may well have been a great game at its initial deadline, but the staggering level of detail in its amplified incarnation helps it run rings around its already estimable predecessor.

In its current form, Payday 2 is a slog, and it’s no fault of the game itself but all the bloat that surrounds it.

If Race The Sun’s tracks remain as consistently well-paced and tiered as the raft of stages we’ve experienced to date, then it can be considered a success rather than an experiment: a confident genre hybrid worthy of your time and patience because who knows, today could be your day.

Games have mastered action – the amplified and instant reward – but Papers, Please finds satisfaction in the tedium of bureaucracy, and twins it with genuinely human stories and an underlying, dread-filled tension. It’s rare to play a game about something, about a time, a place and a theme, and for a game to embody those ideas from meaning right down to mechanics.

What had the potential to showcase to the uninitiated what makes fighting games so special has become a game aimed too squarely at those who already know.

It’s a slick slice of B-movie alien blasting, in short, but we’re glad it’s standing alongside a more authentic take on XCOM rather than wearing its visage but not quite acting the same.

The Wonderful 101 draws on ideas from Kamiya’s previous games – Viewtiful Joe’s cartoonish charm, Okami’s brushstroke mechanic, Bayonetta’s setpieces – but in concert they’re messy, hamstrung by cluttered visual design and a clumsy central mechanic. Stretched over a large frame, they wear thin quickly. There’s a good game in here, but it’s smothered by the need to conform to its host platform’s feature set, and a distorted concept of value for money.

Perhaps Gone Home’s greatest surprise lies in the apparent ease with which The Fullbright Company has joined the game’s subject and its medium: it’s a domestic tale of girl-to-womanhood told with the tools of an action game. As a statement that games can express emotionally resonant stories, Gone Home is a triumph. But that’s not why you should play it. Engrossing, touching and rewarding, it’s well worth the experience on its own terms, too.

That player-considerate attitude is offset by less reverential treatment of its inspiration, however. Ittle Dew isn’t really a parody, more a loving pastiche, but its gently sassy mockery of Zelda’s conventions ties with the beautiful, vibrant art to ensure that while this really is mostly block puzzles, they’re some of the best presented ones you’ve ever played.

By the time you reach the end of Blacklist everything has grown so big and so explosive that you’re left exhausted but not entirely satisfied, and maybe after all that incoherent action you’ll recall the time when a single flashlight in Chaos Theory’s Panamanian bank made you hold your breath.

If some activities are variants on familiar parlour games, they’re enlivened by creative twists and side objectives, while others are brimming with invention.

One thing’s for sure: it’s the one we’ve been waiting to play.

Europa Universalis IV is the game you graduate to when you’re tired of Civilization. That’s ultimately also why all those numbers are there, beneath the surface: because you never graduate away from Europa Universalis IV. It drops you in the deep end before you’re ready, but if you can swim back towards the shallows during those first five hours, you’ll unlock a game so rich, it’ll be helping you tell stories for years.

It’s easy to admire the developer’s evident love for the NES game – it’s clearly been handled with the kind of care only a genuine fan would provide – but after a few repetitive hours bouncing around DuckTales’ pretty but unremarkable worlds you’ll begin to realise that some treasures aren’t worth the effort of unearthing.

What’s left is, while smartly streamlined, a thoroughly orthodox game within a well-established type, a niche within a niche that’s getting smaller all the time.

It hangs together because its distinct strands feed into one another just enough, even if that relationship is as crude as a dialogue tree leading to you gaining a stat-altering card that you can play during the campaign phase.

In-app purchases, however, are handled with more nuance and kept pleasingly out of sight.

Compulsive and beautifully tuned, Pivvot is a tense, nervy challenge to relish.

With its best ideas exhausted long before the developer tires of them, some moments of real ingenuity are swamped by busywork. At times, you’ll admire the craftsmanship, but Sky Tourist is often too busy trying to be clever to remember to be fun.

You’ll never be able to play enough Dota 2 to totally master it, and although it’s an F2P game it can be too cruel and unusual for some. But persist through the tough start and accept the idiosyncrasies, and you’ll start to understand why so many have stuck with it for more than a decade. Why would they need something new when they’ve got this incredibly deep, rewarding multiplayer experience?

Atmospheric, tense, and sometimes unfairly hard, Test3′s roguelike is another welcome entry in a resurgent genre.

While the logic-based puzzles are never too perplexing, they can require a little too much back-and-forth travel between adjacent rooms, occasionally wearing out the good impression made by each gorgeously rendered setting.

While we’ll accept that Deadpool the character is an acquired taste, this is an indisputably poor game, one whose knowing winks and quips come off not as metacommentary but as tacit apologia for its litany of specific failings.

That’s what Shadowrun Return provides, of course: it’s not just a single tale of murder and techno-conspiracy. It’s a ruleset and a tileset, and a promise of more to come.

It only takes a couple of playthroughs for events to start recurring, and that severely diminishes The Yawhg’s spell, but it can’t take away the charm with which Carrol and Sommer’s game weaves together fairy tales.

Rogue Legacy offers the silly, slapstick cruelty of the best roguelikes, but twins it with something just as appealing: a tantalising hint of control over your fate.

Hexodius’ dungeon sections aren’t involved enough to offer interesting choices or exploration, but last just long enough to qualify as clunky menu screens.

Realmforge is clearly a student of the genre, but budget is king here, and the studio lacks the financial clout to even pierce the flesh of a crowded market. Despite being crafted with noble intentions, Dark succeeds only in sucking the life out of itself.

A Toyko Tale is brief and entirely linear – in the main, you’re simply walking between numbered waypoints, though you can unlock certain dialogues by losing your servant status – but Ayabe transports you so utterly to an unfamiliar time and place that it matters little. By the outlandish and oddly touching final act showdown, you’ll be a rapt spectator, cheering on the heroes alongside Sohta and his newfound friends.

Familiarity is both the worst and best thing about Pikmin 3. Twelve years after the original and nine after the sequel, little has changed – but little really needed to. It may not sell systems on its own, but it’s a fine addition to a sparse software library that brings one of Nintendo’s most vibrantly characterful series into the HD era and, critically, makes convincing use of the GamePad.

There’s nothing here that wasn’t done bigger, in more detail, and with more options, in Eidos Montreal’s game, while the story so far fails to introduce new ideas or themes.

This is a remarkable sequel, one that takes its predecessor not as a template, but a jumping-off point. And for all the justifiable concern about its chosen business model, its implementation of the free-to-play model prizes players’ hearts above the contents of their wallets.

Matches are brisk, varied and tense, but you might face a long wait to get one. An idle mode allows you to browse the internet or check emails until a challenge arrives, but alerts are sadly infrequent. Local play is a fine substitute if you have a willing partner, but Gun Monkeys is a two-player game too often lacking a player two.

Coming from the studio behind Wave Trip and Bad Hotel, Gentlemen’s sharp, stylish menus and app icon were always a given, but a conceptual curveball like this was hardly guaranteed to hit its target. That it does so emphatically is convincing proof that this Edinburgh studio is no one-trick pony.

The game is also lumbered with a tragic split personality. On one hand, there’s a lot to do, and if you like the look of one of the initial five heroes you can do all of it for free with a little grinding. On the other hand, Marvel Heroes is so eager for you to spend – and so keen to extract the most out of your wallet when you do – that the price tag of the game in real-world terms can soon become astonishingly disproportionate to its quality.

Following the excellent Inside Story was always going to be a big ask, so it’s hardly a surprise AlphaDream never quite manages to conjure up anything better than being Bowser. Still, while the comparison to its predecessor does it few favours, rest assured that Dream Team Bros’ additions and curiously entertaining battles do enough to reawaken the desire to see this adventure through to the end.

Scourge: Outbreak may seek to mimic the thrills and achievements of its blockbuster inspiration, but it serves merely to underline their superiority. Tragnarion has clearly put effort into polishing the game, but it’s fatally neglected to work on the underlying basics that were crooked three years ago.

Rather than developing the original’s ideas, it’s content to simply reuse them. Zipping around via a network of boost tiles no longer carries the same thrill, and though squeezing the shoulder button as a monster passes by a translucent platform remains one of the most deliciously cruel ways to dispose of an enemy, repeating the trick diminishes its impact.

Exploration feels clumsy and laboured, and it’s all too easy to be overwhelmed by a swarm, bumped from wasp to ant and back, stun lock preventing you from firing again as your health bar steadily depletes. We didn’t expect high art, but criminally, Bugs vs. Tanks doesn’t even offer low-budget thrills.

Production values are high, with iPad providing the best canvas yet for Level-5′s animation and colouring. And though the puzzles and narrative take on a different rhythm to the core series, the delicate balance in their concoction and the demands of their solution – requiring equal amounts of logical and lateral thought – echo those of father Layton’s finest.

The main quest’s predefined battles do throw up enemy combinations that require more complex tactics, but there’s no denying that, having breached the fourth wall, Behold Studios’ charming game is content to head back inside the building.

Magrunnner’s story is confidently told, and it’s a welcome point of divergence in a game that’s too in thrall to the title that popularised this genre. The Mag Glove’s no less capable of sustaining a game than the Portal Gun – it’s quite possibly better suited to experimental, player-authored solutions. But it needs its own game, not just to be inserted into the framework of another.

In its shrewd monetisation aspects and as a watered-down but sturdy entry in the series, Revolution unarguably achieves its goal. The King Of Iron Fist Tournament is now closer than it’s been for a long time to its arcade roots, but the sense of friendly competition has been replaced with an initially hostile, rich versus poor and, at times, pay-to-win atmosphere.

The game never judges you, offering no morality system despite the frequent dilemmas and difficult choices its systems organically generate. But it certainly tests you. This is as close as we’ve come to putting our lazily daydreamed zombie survival plans into effect.

At its best, New Super Luigi U is an exhilarating test of skill, but on occasion it dangerously approximates a fan-made ROM hack, mistakenly believing that an increased enemy count equates to satisfying design. Some will undoubtedly find its challenge inviting, but others will rightly expect more ingenuity from Nintendo than this.

Attempting to explore the Eastern Front thematically proves misjudged, while persistent unit stupidity is wearing thin after seven years and four games. Counteracting that are the core mechanics, which are as enjoyable as ever, and there are smart new missions to test series veterans. It’s not a glorious revolution, then, but COH2 is a solid continuation of the finest WWII RTS around.

This core loop of planning and upgrading defences while plugging the gaps in your frontline is enriched by art that imbues surprising amounts of character into your microscopic soldiers, and sound design that turns the clash of swords and crackling fizz of magic spells into a compulsive symphony.

This is a puzzle-platform game pared down to its base essentials, with a sweet, simple tale and an artfully imagined world wrapped around that core. [July 2013, p.122]

Given his rich history, Wario deserves better than this. [July 2013, p.116]

Fortunately, it has a reliable stream of Gilbert gags, puns, and musical numbers to fall back on, ensuring that just as the challenge eases off, the charm comfortably picks up the slack.

If Fuse had been made by a lesser known studio, it would simply be forgettable, but set against the expectations of a new game from the house of Rachet & Clank and Resistance, it’s a crushing disappointment.

With Dust, CCP promised something that had never even been attempted before, and it delivered. Dust takes place in Eve. The setting is the same, the currency is the same, and the corporations can hold players from both universes. It’s just not enough. Because without Eve, there’s no point to Dust, a bland free-to-play FPS that can’t even capture the continent-spanning scale of PlanetSide 2, despite having a whole galaxy to play with.

Like all great puzzle games, you’re beholden to the whims of fortune, forcing you into leaps of faith that often prove frustratingly fatal. But like all great puzzle games, Stickets’ surface simplicity is merely a cover for mechanics of astonishing depth and longevity.

Naughty Dog has delivered the most riveting, emotionally resonant story-driven epic of this console generation. At times it’s easy to feel like big-budget development has too much on the line to allow stubbornly artful ideas to flourish, but then a game like The Last Of Us emerges through the crumbled blacktop like a climbing vine, green as a burnished emerald.

Even in its current form, there’s a wealth of ideas and a set of powers that few games twice this length manage to pack in.