All in all, the setting is perfect for a puzzle game built around existential despair...Its clever, creepy and macabre.

It froths with colour and confidence, revelling in its influences as you grind your way to the top. And make no mistake, it is a grind – one best taken in short doses and requiring the basest of mental activity but one that has enough content, unlocks and options to compensate.

It’s a solid concept, but Honeyslug struggles to develop it in any meaningful way.

Codemasters had a hard act to follow in Grid, but with this sequel it’s delivered a dazzling package that can proudly take its place among the best racing games of this generation. It not only smooths off nearly all of the awkward edges that have plagued the studio’s ongoing attempts to cohere its racing games with driver-focused storylines, but it does so with enough pomp and spectacle to send current-generation hardware off with a memorable bang.

It may not be enough to rouse those with shooter fatigue, but this is a terrific genre piece: there’s a pleasing sense of weight and feedback in its gunplay, levels are snappy and replayable, while collectible cards offer an education in the real history of the era.

Reus is a god game, but not one that makes you feel particularly omnipotent. That’s partly because all the divine heavy lifting and occasional smiting is performed indirectly, by a set of elemental colossi, but also because Reus’ complex simulation can be rather daunting. God is in the details, it’s true, but he didn’t have to think quite so hard about them.

Last Light’s pacing – switching as it does between tight tunnels and wide-open abandoned spaces, explosive gunfights and creeping horror, stealth and socialising – could have felt disconnected in the hands of a less-talented developer. Instead it lends its world uncommon depth. The trade-off for a distinctive personality, of course, is that Last Light is occasionally unyielding, but the desire to see what waits in its next tunnel remains a powerful draw throughout.

The game is at pains to highlight its lack of tutorials or explanations, but outside an intriguing opening, its conundrums are unlikely to leave you stumped for long, a result of the ship's compactness and the robot's inability to carry more than one item at once.

It’s a game that leads by example, never keeping still while making sure you do likewise, and is every bit as essential now as it was 12 months ago.

Only a sense of familiarity dogs an otherwise engaging diversion: the Minis cover a lot of ground in these 180 levels, but at times it’s well-worn territory they’re walking.

Those expecting a tale on par with Atlus’ remarkable RPG may be disappointed, then, but Persona 4 Arena’s thoughtfully designed combat system has been well worth the wait.

Haunted Hollow’s charismatically ghoulish visuals can, at times, make for a cluttered board, and its decision to hide certain units and items behind micro-transactions grants those who pay more tactical breadth. Accept this last point in particular and there’s fun to be had with Haunted Hollow, but Firaxis’ creepy monsters can’t quite compete with its extra-terrestrial threats.

Simply for the harrowing elegance of this risk-reward proposition, Impossible Road’s lone developer Kevin Ng deserves to have his pockets paved with gold.

It’s rarely elegant – a horde of zombie cosmonauts exited our ship as quickly as they entered after arriving next to a hull breach – but in battling back from the brink of obliteration there are moments you’ll feel like a surrogate Kirk. Crashes, glitches and repetition break the spell, but when it’s time for some thrilling heroics Star Command proves itself a worthwhile enterprise.

Don’t Starve is by no means a bad trial run for Klei’s new way of working, but it’s a pursuit for those with a wealth of patience and an appetite for pain. Klei may have modelled Hell brilliantly, but that doesn’t mean we want to live there.

The game isn’t clear how its surgeries work – which bits need be cut where, and with what tools – not a problem when you’re merrily and messily experimenting, but annoying if you’re keen to progress. Still, few games take that odd, occasional gulf between what you intend to happen and what actually occurs on screen and fill it with such comedy.

This isn’t Far Cry 3 at its best mechanically, but it’s definitely the game at its most charismatic. Because as a bunch of well-worn VHS tapes at Ubisoft Montreal undoubtedly prove, the ’80s knew how to do personality.

The original HOTD: Overkill is no holy grail of the genre, but it did spice up the ailing niche with some eccentricity and zany thrills. To see it massacred in this way is a shame both for the series and for iOS newcomers whose first taste of this most guilty of pleasures will be a sour one.

It’s a brave game that dares to weaken players in one way as it empowers them in another. Comcept may be wrong in thinking Monster Hunter would be better if it was just about hunting monsters, but Soul Sacrifice is courageous and thematically bold enough to distinguish itself from the clones that have followed in the wake of Capcom’s phenomenon. As with Inafune’s recurring criticisms of Japan, however, it proves repetition isn’t always the best way to make a point.

Few games are as initially opaque as Starseed Pilgrim, and few offer as rich a dawning sense of discovery in return.

Star Trek has more bugs crawling on it than a Fear Factor contestant. Sometimes the results are amusing, as in the turbolift example, but frequently they just make life a drag.

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.

The steadily dwindling friend tallies on our post-run leaderboards are convincing proof that Runner’s sharpest edges remain intact.

Even ignoring all those failings – something at which Dead Island fans will have had plenty of practice – Riptide’s biggest flaw is that it never justifies its existence in terms of plot or new ideas. It’s not simply yesterday’s game, but a time capsule from 2011, a time when zombies weren’t as overplayed and games such as Far Cry 3 and Borderlands 2 weren’t around to cast their long shadows over the action.

It may not be the game of stealth the blueprints and lingo of red exclamation marks suggest, but Monaco’s loot and scoot play has a winning personality that’s all its own.

A level design and stylistic triumph but often a frustrating puzzler for the wrong reasons, They Need To Be Fed 2 is a good iOS game. But it could become a great game if it mimicked its hero and jumped to other platforms.

Evoland’s short length means the conceit never tires, and it does provide a rather brilliant excuse for the game beneath being rather unoriginal. Sadly, Evoland’s barebones take on turn-based battles leads to some other unnecessary padding – but this is still a pleasant walk down memory lane.

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 formulaic, then, but sticking with what you know doesn’t often produce such satisfying results.

Awakening offers an excellent game of strategy, but it’s the relationship system that makes it.

Popcap’s latest digital narcotic is a particularly potent concoction, building on a game we’ve all idly wasted quiet working hours on with an adorable aquatic theme and a ticking clock to make it extra moreish. Be prepared to spend, however, if you don’t want the hit to wear off quickly.

The artwork goes some way to redeeming The Other Brothers; for all the detail to be found in the backgrounds and sprites, everything moves fluidly, but ultimately this is still a platforming game on the wrong platform.

A bigger problem still is the absence of a motivation to work with other players. Objectives are usually thinly disguised fetch quests or encounters where you must defend a character, usually Cass, against waves of enemies.

It’s a solid formula, of course, and like its wrestler star Drinkbox’s game is dressed up luridly and with flair – but this entertaining romp is more about the costume than what’s beneath it.

The presence of IAP can’t prevent Fearless Wheels from ultimately delivering a robust and worthwhile ride for those looking for the colourful bursts of shallow play its minute-long tracks encourage.

It’s a great shame, because with tighter controls Frogmind’s charismatic debut would be a memorable one, but as it is it lacks the power to draw you back into its world.

Bright, colourful and mostly dismissive of current trends, it’s clear The Behemoth wants to delight players with every moment of its latest performance. That it succeeds in only most of those moments is still a remarkable achievement.

Like so many similar games, Zombie Road Trip makes you question why you’ve sunk two hours into it rather than BioShock Infinite, but you grudgingly admit to enjoying the ride nonetheless.

The improvements are largely cosmetic, with everything about this sequel – from the menus to the maps – more polished and user friendly, springing to life on Retina-equipped iOS devices with bursts of colour and character.

Nimble Quest is cute and compelling, but it’s also a cynical complication of a classic design.

Toki Tori 2 deserves praise for asking its players to take a leap of faith; it’s just a pity it’s not always prepared to follow them over.

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.

It’s simply baffling that it manages to make so many mistakes within such a well-worn template.

There’s a workmanlike simplicity to the core of Arcen’s game, one that lets down the powerful atmosphere suffusing it.

It’s refreshingly exacting about timing, though too forgiving when it comes to grading – you can miss several prompts, take plenty of damage and still earn gold.

That Infinite can handle the collision between its philosophical concerns and its dead-end thrills without seeming hopelessly crass or overly portentous testifies to its often touching script, excellent pacing and the kind of unparalleled world building that shows you all of this coexisting cohesively in a golden city in the sky. But it also demonstrates something else: BioShock’s mechanical evolution as a firstperson shooter.

The representation of the xenomorphs is the game’s most damaging failure. They’re just not dangerous enough, reduced by a first mission deluge into a swarm of targets bearing the shape of a familiar, once-horrific symbol of death. But they have none of that pop icon’s grace or deadliness.

Crysis 3 has neither direction nor freedom, though it does have human weapons, alien weapons, a cloaking device, an Armour mode, and a bow. And with this many options at your disposal, Crysis 3 insists, surely you must be having fun.

Only its brevity and the limited multiplayer modes keep Judgment firmly in the ‘not a real sequel’ world, but it’s a template for the next generation of Gears and a licence to experiment with the series’ most sacred mechanics.

Despite the twitchy combat and compulsive collecting, it all comes back to those creaking mansions. Highly polished under their grime and cobwebs, the treats awaiting in their dark rooms prove Luigi’s subversive series still has the capacity to thrill.

There’s a lot of charm to Fetch, and this is as charmingly produced as anything on iOS, but there’s little adventure or arcade substance beneath its surface.

Its game may rarely do anything you haven’t seen done better elsewhere, but the developer knots a slew of disparate elements together with no little skill, leaving the whole feeling irresistibly fresh.

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.

Multiplayer can be riotously scrappy fun as you clash hands and obscure one another’s view, evoking the memories and spirit of manic bouts of air-hockey at local arcades.

For now, SimCity is good for the reasons it’s always been good, and bad for reasons old and new. And yes, we wish we could play it on the train. But after spending two weeks as mayor of a series of teeming pocket metropolises, we’re still ready to spend more.

There’s a satisfying Shadow Complex-meets-Smash-Bros. style romp somewhere in The Showdown Effect, but it’s buried beneath gameplay mechanics that interfere with the joys its premise suggests, and there are currently stability issues with the servers that demand some urgent attention.

Vlambeer’s game is, as its title suggests, ridiculous. In its simple, gleeful rhythms of play, it’s sublime, too.

For an expansion, HOTS is a dense package, adeptly fashioned and hugely enjoyable. But while its core game might be perfection, HOTS itself isn’t.

But for parents and adults, Undercover is a less inviting prospect, even with its satirical undertone. It’s a plastic facsimile of GTA – a game that was hardly humourless to begin with, and one that has already spawned a genre’s worth of more sophisticated rivals and clones.

Persevere, however, and you’ll find the kind of charmingly intelligent design that makes us hope Ambient can eventually realise some of its grander ambitions.

Gorgeous and silky smooth it may be, but the level design feels like it was made with in-app Continue purchases specifically in mind, hiding enemies cruelly – and punishingly – behind obstacles, preventing the game from flowing and dazzling as it clearly has the potential to. Accomplished and beautiful, then, but Sonic Dash shows that, for Sega, learning from the competition comes at a price – one it’s passed onto its fans.

Due to a heavier emphasis on all-out action, however, the gratifying bullet-cam pay-off becomes tiresome even sooner than it did in V2.

A more novel addition is a crafting system lets you convert items you find into items and potions, but it functions more like a secondary currency than an alchemical minigame. There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Mini Ninjas, but nor is there a reason to give up on genre highlights like Punch Quest and Jetpack Joyride.

Ascension’s biggest success is a colour-coding system that effectively lets you know when you have an opening and when to run. Unblockable attacks are signalled by a player glowing red, white denotes invincibility, and blue signals a player in recovery. It’s a simple, smart system further improved by rock-paper-scissors combat (heavy beats parry beats light beats heavy), cooldown-controlled special moves and a logical, consistent approach to hitstun. Consider our expectations defied: this is the star of the show.

This is a sensitive employment of free-to-play, but despite its presentation and name, Real Racing 3 remains an arcade game in sim clothing, and one hamstrung by its host format. Limitations that keep it firmly in the tail-lights of deeper console experiences.

Three times the protagonists gives you three times the number of toys and an engaging, if thoroughly convoluted, story, but it’s not without cost. What Simon, Trevor and Alucard give to the mechanics and narrative they take from its flow: you still feel gated, even when you’ve got all the gear.

An amusing localisation (“he is cleaning his knife with a complex facial expression”) and some enthusiastically squelchy sound effects add charm to a decent challenge, and there’s enough vigour and character here to make it a worthwhile, if fleeting, diversion.

It’s a game about picking dialogue options that are metaphorically represented as potential moves on the board, but it’s that which goes unsaid that makes its semi-improvised conversations so intriguing.

Thankfully Richard and Alice do manage to engage, the awkward stiltedness to their early conversations naturally easing into a more flowing rapport. Neither are as a delight to read as Alice’s son Barney, however, whose perfectly captured five-year-old’s speech patterns provide both humour and heartbreaking moments of poignancy.

It’s accomplished and inventive, but there’s not enough to quicken the pulse, and you feel relief, rather than satisfaction, when the trickier challenges are conquered. The constant metallic clanks are the sound of a game whose nuts and bolts are fully functional, but this tin man of a game is missing its heart.

Whether she’s huddled up against the cold or sending five men to their doom with an explosive arrow, this is still Lara Croft, one of gaming’s most distinctive heroes – and now she has a personality that extends far beyond the bounds of her bra straps. If the purpose of a reboot is to redefine a character and set them up for the future, then this is a job well done.

This first segment is potent. [March 2013, p.106]

Its game may rarely do anything you haven't seen done better elsewhere, but the developer knots a slew of disparate elements together with no little skill, leaving the whole feeling irresistibly fresh. [March 2013, p.102]

There’s a polish here that belies the game’s browser origins, even if the Vita-specific additions – a tilt-controlled camera, rear touch for aiming grenades – are little more than token gimmicks.

Persona 4 Golden is full of surprises. Perhaps the biggest is that a console JRPG is so well suited to portable play, and that a four-year-old PS2 game is, by some distance, Vita’s best game to date.

This is a brave and truly original work, and if this is what happens when Simogo explores its dark side, it should do so more often.

While Rising’s combat is hugely satisfying to experiment with, and a sight to behold when played well, it’s undermined by technical issues and a singleplayer campaign that peters out just as you think it’s getting going. There’s replay value here, and for Platinum’s most devoted fans it won’t matter if the game is five or 50 hours long, but others will, rightly, feel a little short-changed.

Food Run may be unapologetically old-fashioned – right down to its use of impossibly jaunty stock music – but game design this smart never goes out of style.

This is a game for those who grew up in Hyrule but spent more time in Lordran in recent years. Some finicky platforming also frustrates, but then Link didn’t get an auto-jump until Ocarina Of Time.

While the beauty and evocative nature of Kairo’s world has survived the transition from its original PC form to iOS unscathed, the controls have not. Movement is flighty and unwieldy, and in desperate need of a sidestep.

The sense of immersion is about as unparalleled as you can get without an Oculus Rift strapped to your head. But the campaign feels overlong and stretch marks begin to appear towards the end of the roughly 20-hour adventure. This game could have benefited from some strategic dismemberment of its own, performed by a shrewd editor who knows how to sever redundant limbs.

Antichamber is many things – a remarkable technical achievement, a smart subversion of its genre, a game that plays you as much as you play it – but you're more likely to respect it than enjoy it.

With a defined beginning, four distinct seasonal environments and an affecting, surprising conclusion, there's no question that Proteus is a game. But if there's one concern, it's whether this is an island that's worth revisiting once you've seen all it has to offer. In a way, its lack of progression – the absence of skill trees, difficulty levels and save points – works in its favour; you won't dive back in to mop up the last few achievements, or to climb leaderboards, but simply because you want to play Proteus.

Its foundations aren't sturdy enough to hold any longterm weight. [Feb 2013, p.110]

This series offered some of the most memorable hours we spent holding a gamepad during 2012. [Feb 2013, p.102]

At its best, Orgarhythm's disparate ingredients coalesce into scenes of thrilling tribal warfare, a winningly eclectic soundtrack stirring your men to march into battle. Too often, however, you end up feeling like your fragmented cabal: disorientated, frustrated and battered into submission by an unforgiving enemy, with little reason to keep on fighting.

As a platformer it's not Ravenous' best, and as a puzzle game Infestor doesn't quite provide enough material for its parasitic premise to build on.

Like its titular star, the game tends to transform, flipping from triumphant to frustrating, and back again.

Tokyo Crash Mobs might not be the best version of Puzz Loop around, but in allowing us to briefly abandon our traditional British reserve, it becomes one of the most satisfying variants we've played.

The lack of instruction here is telling: Lucky Frame wants people to discover the joy of making music for themselves, and this stylish and entertaining curio represents a fine place to do so.

Approached as the latest work from one of the industry's favoured fathers, The Cave could seem like a tourist trap, packed with old ideas to lure in passers-by. Taken for what it is – a simple, characterful adventure game from an independent developer – it offers just enough to be worth the price of admission.

Temple Run 2 is a beautiful looking, natural extension of the series that never breaks stride for a second. The game's only liability is that, as beautiful as its environments may be, their unceasing repetition can eventually grow wearisome. Like a child hearing about the concept of living in heaven for eternity and asking, won't I get bored?

Level-5 and Studio Ghibli's contributions are harmonious. As a game, Ni No Kuni builds upon classic JRPG foundations, eschewing the evolutions of Xenoblade Chronicles and Final Fantasy XII. But the assured flair with which Level-5 has implemented each of the game's classic components combines with Ghibli's masterful storytelling to deliver a JRPG that's quite unlike any other.

A cynical, if predictable approach to monetisation also sours the experience.

For the moment, though, SOE's MMOG is a remarkable achievement. Games like it often have to sacrifice visual fidelity for performance, but PlanetSide 2 looks stunning, even on medium settings.

The only sour note is the way the game keeps even the most skilled players at a severe leaderboard disadvantage until they've unlocked – or purchased – the final playable character.

This is the best entry in its genre since Bayonetta, and might just be the best game Ninja Theory has made to date.

It's undeniably a one-trick pony, then, but it's a good trick, performed with flair and polish. Those inclined to correct grammatical howlers in friends' Facebook missives will find this a far less confrontational way of sating their inner pedant.