It's a smart concept, skilfully realised in the main, and yet it's compromised by a truly boneheaded piece of design: the default perspective offers such a limited view of the field of play that you're forced to squeeze the zoom button throughout to make it playable, with no option to toggle it.

It's a game that tries to be everything, in other words, yet through the sheer all-encompassing nature of its irreverence finds an identity of its own.

There's enough warmth and wit here to make Middle Manager Of Justice one of the more palatable exercises in building a game around waiting and offering micro-transactions to skip the wait, but sadly all our spider-senses detect is a missed opportunity.

Admittedly, there's little here to quicken the pulse, and some of later objectives are troublingly fiddly, with sensitive motion controls and increasingly intricate level design proving uncomfortable bedfellows. But otherwise this is an unusually clever, polished and robust eShop release that offers several hours' worth of dizzy delights.

It's a masterfully constructed piece of tabletop theatre, whose spell is only broken once, as we were delayed for over an hour by some key loot that took over a dozen attempts to drop. Many won't make it past this preposterous roadblock, but those who persevere to the bitter end will be heartily glad they did.

Embracing and supporting a community project like this is still a commendable move, and one that Mega Man's passionate fans may see as encouraging. But only his most die-hard followers will be willing to overlook such unwelcome, avoidable flaws.

Where COD maintains a smooth 60fps, Warfighter gets a nosebleed trying to put out 30fps. Modern Warfare boasts near-instant restarts after death; here, lengthy loading times merely add to the frustration.

This is a whirlwind romance, a week-long fling rather than a lasting love, like Lumines or Tetris. But for those first few days, the sparks will fly fast and frequently; you won't be able to keep your hands off it.

A bold experiment, then, if not a perfectly balanced or successful one.

There's tactical depth, then, but it's squandered on a game that doesn't understand the importance of balance.

Being among the first of the console MOBAs, Guardians Of Middle-Earth could've been a gentle introduction to an intimidating genre, providing a welcoming hand for players new to the MOBA, but a split focus between accessibility and complexity means neither genre greenhorns nor greybeards will end up feeling truly satisfied.

As it stands, you can only cast your actors and dress your sets, so Unlimited doesn't quite live up to its name, but for those willing to span the game's structural deficiencies with their imagination, it's intensely rewarding.

Sluggish loading times tend to cause frame-rate hiccups at the outset of a multiplayer game, and such issues are exacerbated in the busier environments with a full complement of players.

It's a surprisingly tense juggling act, in other words, and while some will lack the patience required to climb its steep learning curve, the stress is worth it for the soaring sense of accomplishment you'll feel at the end of a hard day's work.

Where 999 gave you a more passive role in proceedings, Virtue's Last Reward makes you a key participant in its twisted tale – and that serves to make its mysteries that much more invigorating to unravel.

Yes, QatQi is a roguelike with words, and by the time it dawns, this ferociously smart game will have you hooked.

One day you sense Shin'en will make a game that plays as good as it looks. Until then, this is a polished and attractive shooter that you'll likely have a reasonably entertaining few hours with before forgetting it ever existed within a month. An ideal launch game, then.

Lego TLOTR is, despite its many flaws, still broadly enjoyable. It has charm, it has its moments and the series holds an undeniable attraction for kids both actual and inner. It's a Lego game, in other words. But it's bloated, too, full of half-formed, shoddily executed ideas and frustrating glitches.

There's enough charm here for Little Inferno to get by, but sometimes you might consider taking its advice and stop feeding the flames.

There are small gripes – having to use an undo button rather than pick tiles back off the grid irks in 'standard' scenarios, for instance – but they slowly melt away in the face of such eclectic gameplay. Seating arrangements have rarely felt so intelligent, knowing, or inventive.

There's an unexpected clarity to solo play that's lost amid the tumult of human competition, but what's never obscured – and what stands as its great accomplishment – is its fond and intricate celebration of all things PlayStation.

Intelligent Systems takes great care to shape its RPG for portable play. The world is divided into Super Mario Bros-style levels that each pack a tidy little narrative. Levelling is removed in order to keep these vignettes grind-free. And it's all wrapped up in Nintendo's typically hilarious localisation.

Far Cry 3's main missions are nothing special in and of themselves, and include one or two exhausting slogs and limp stealth sections, but the campaign does a better job than Far Cry 2's storyline when it comes to providing an alternative to the open emergence of the player-authored escapades.

As a package, it's generous and deep, but Sumo has fallen victim to its own success. While enjoyable in their own right, boats and planes simply can't match the moreish handling of the karts.

Contracts redeems Absolution, but it doesn't absolve it. The game has taken a unique formula and diluted it, allowing the fashionable trappings of other stealth titles to intrude upon a series that has always confidently eschewed convention.

A smart and engaging exploration of what Nintendo's strange new machine can muster. Historically, thirdparty releases on a console launch day have been chequered and timid affairs made by inexperienced teams fearful of losing their footing on unknown terrain. When Ubisoft Montpellier's ZombiU works in smart union with its host console, however, it frequently delights.

The Power Of Two may have fewer technical issues than its predecessor, but it's a less adventurous, less courageous, and overall less interesting game. It struggles to make you care about its world, and as a result its one big idea – that of the Wasteland reacting to your choices – feels decidedly flaccid.

Beyond the obvious aesthetic appeal of the jump to HD, New Super Mario Bros U doesn't make a particularly convincing case for Nintendo's new console, and there's very little here that couldn't have been done on Wii. But if it isn't a great showpiece for the console, it may have to settle for being a very good Mario game, perhaps the finest of the plumber's side-scrolling adventures since his 16bit heyday.

Could Nintendo have made similar cuts, sliced out singleplayer, and left us with the perfect party game? The shadow of missed opportunity occasionally looms over Nintendo Land, but as with any good theme park, there are moments where you'll yell, scream and laugh yourself silly. Just add friends.

The unspoken promise of Sony's portable is console quality on the move, but a thoroughly bloodless version of a massive franchise only feels like going back on that word. This wasn't what Jack Tretton had in mind when he talked about having "a triple-A shooter in the palm of your hands". Rather, Declassified is a single A: awful.

Fussy collision detection and what can only be deliberate slowdown are perhaps nods too far to the 48k era, yet the developer's ageing tools have sculpted something that feels surprisingly new. Not bad for what looks like the oldest game on Vita.

For tenacious players and those inclined towards the genre, Fallblox could prove an irresistible draw, with clearing its parade of cryptic conundrums a delicious prospect. For others, the game's difficulty, and its visual and thematic linearity, will prove tiresome, their enthusiasm for its self-evident ingenuity petering out before each of its challenges has fallen.

Any time you're ready to lose yourself to some head-down, three-chord fun, whether you're playing on Vita or PS3, When Vikings Attack is waiting to show you a real cool time.

Backed by Activision's fantastic investment and support, Treyarch has succeeded, and made a sort of ultimate current-gen Call Of Duty. Not a reinvention – that, hopefully, comes next year, on box-fresh hardware and a new engine – but a refinement of the most successful series of its generation. Black Ops II is an excellent Call Of Duty game, then, but it's only a Call Of Duty game, with all that implies.

An easy recommendation for newcomers. [Dec 2012, p.108]

The cold heart beneath the cuddly surface fits the dark tone of the game, which beneath all the whimsy tells a melancholy story. Even so, players drawn in by Pid's dreamy visuals might end up feeling betrayed.

While Cargo Commander might be an occasionally limited platform game, it's nonetheless an entertaining ode to the simple pleasures of an honest day's work.

Control can be an issue at times – the one button combat system relying on the distinction between taps and holds makes it easy to muddle attacks – but challenge seekers will find plenty to get stuck into, impaled on and cut to shreds in this macabre, frenetic onslaught.

Fundamentally, it's hard to bear a grudge against a game with such generosity of spirit and pleasant delivery. But having tangled with mythical sea beasts and alternate Londons, isn't it time for Layton to solve the greatest mystery of all: where does he go next.

It's a puzzle game and a strategy game as much as an action game, then, and like Rockstar's Manhunt, it will sicken you even as it provides its murky thrills.

Liberation's narrative is rather picaresque, while the less said about its asynchronous multiplayer mode, the better. Yet it avoids the console game's occasional longueurs to offer something altogether more compact and focused. It may not be a true Assassin's Creed experience on a handheld, then, but this sensibly streamlined game is a fine companion piece.

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.

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.

This sense of restrictiveness filters through to ACIII's mission design. There are surprisingly few assassinations here, and relatively little freedom to plan an approach to them. It's mostly eavesdropping, tailing, chase sequences and battle scenes.

Once again, Criterion still manages to stand out and offer something fresh, setting a new standard in open-world driving games with - that word again - a seamless feast of quality. [Dec 2012, p.98]

Previous Forza entries showed glimmers of personality, hinting at a broader approach to accessibility, but were too shy and reserved to truly let loose. Horizon boldly goes there. It's a magpie game, assembled from pieces of other series, but it delivers a driving game precision engineered to offer all levels of player the best possible experience.

Though generous with its ideas, Flexile can't quite make them stretch across 60 levels, and while the controls are as good as virtual buttons can be, some challenges are too fiddly to be fun, with a curious fussiness when it comes to triggering your blob's powers. Even so, this is a bright and attractive puzzler that is, thankfully, far smarter than its title would suggest.

If The Unfinished Swan didn't do such a marvellous job of tantalising players with its patiently evolving visual signature, it would be easier to sense the messy whiteboard of ideas churning beneath the surface. It's not that the game feels unfinished, just ungainly.

This is a game built with Kinect's limits in mind, and one that never risks defying them. The result is a modest, mechanically simple on-rails shooter, but it's one that offers a voyage with epic sweep for those looking to re-immerse themselves in Fable's world.

If you've come this far on Lee's journey, Around Every Corner's ending will make the final chapter a near essential purchase: not just to see how this supposedly reactive, in part player-authored story ends, but to see if Telltale really can pull it off.

Hell Yeah! may wear its warm immaturity on its sleeve, but its jokes are strong, its protagonist and antagonists likeable and its rhythms satisfying.

It's a surprisingly effective template for an action game, offering all the explosions and feedback of a shooter, while leaving you with a warm feeling of smugness when things go according to plan.

For all Team Ninja's talk of keeping it more real, DOA5 is mostly business as usual. There are tweaks to the formula and aesthetic, but nothing too sacrilegious or enticing. It's disappointing, then, that this has little to offer over its forebear.

For experienced players, though, this is as fluid as Tekken has been for years, the tagging doing much to revitalise a combo system that, with its over-reliance on juggles and wall combos, was in danger of growing stale. But it's taken a 12-year-old mechanic to do that, and other games in this increasingly crowded genre boast a deeper level of mechanical complexity as well as a more generous welcome to newcomers.

Fair, competitive and, above all, relevant. [Nov 2012, p.100]

Wickedly irreverent and cartoonishly outrageous. [Nov 2012, p.96]

Charting a course through Earth's imminent destruction is as unashamedly difficult as it was in 1994's X-COM. It's possible, through bad planning and bad management, to doom the planet early on, making the game feel unfair. Get it right, however – survive the stresses of management, and the strains of aliens – and you'll feel like world's greatest hero.

It's a rare delight to play a game with such consistency of vision, its art design, level architecture, rulesets, storylines and writing all working in lockstep.

It's a smart idea in an enjoyably brisk score-attack game that sadly feels a little undernourished thanks to the brevity of its campaign and its repetitive play rhythms.

Jokes are in short supply, as is the serene abstraction often associated with modern puzzle games. The platforming segments and spaced-out checkpoints might annoy the more cerebrally focused, but all told they're a fairly minor part of the game.

Sadly, the early learning curve is far too shallow, while creative freedom is often illusory, with a single solution to many stages. Rovio does eventually loosen the reins, but the combination of rickety vehicles and unforgiving level design only heightens the frustration.

It makes no spectacular breaks from the past, but it does reclaim the mood – if not the tone – of Diablo II. It's living proof that the values of 2001 still have worth over a decade later.

It's a bloated, often incoherent game, but the most frustrating thing about Resident Evil 6 is that (Chris's focus on cover shooting aside) it's not an unimaginative one. It might feel padded at times, but Capcom always has something new to show you after the filler, such as a fresh campaign, another repellent boss form, a surprising enemy type, a co-op vehicle section, or an odd location to explore.

What Fireproof has done, in other words, is to literally wrap the mechanics of a point and click adventure, with its abstract puzzles and occasionally opaque logic, around these fantastical contraptions, before suffusing the experience with an air of ghostly mystery.

As the studio name suggests, this is a game design team that's in love with books, and so it's amongst books that its first offering reveals its true potential.

The levels here are every bit as inventive as they were in Origins and, by the time your moveset has expanded to include a hover, wall-run and punch, every bit as punishing.

Sadly, the developer's good work is all but undone by its publisher's demanding IAP structure.

Unaided solo players at the moment will either have to grind through normal to upgrade specials and stances to overcome the higher difficulties, or just take their chances alone. That aside, this is a smart, funny and faithful update to a game that hasn't aged well, and another feather in WayForward's retro cap.

Like Spelunky before it, survival often depends on what you're carrying, and when you happen across life-prolonging shops and lucky weapon drops. But FTL is a less masterful game than Derek Yu's cave diver, throwing more chance into the mix.

Smilebit, led by Masayoshi Kikuchi – who has since moved on to work on the Yakuza series, another franchise that pivots around vivid city-building – swam upstream with JSR, defying the rush to photorealism, celebrating rebellion and individuality in one of the most memorable genre mash-ups you're ever likely to come across. Its HD revival is every inch that game, serving as a reminder that originality and passion retain their lustre when all else fades, and that such treasures are worth buffing up to display again.

Guild Wars 2 is a few brushstrokes short of a masterpiece, then, but ArenaNet has succeeded in trying to paint over the worst of the genre's cracks. Thanks to a rigorous programme of restoration, only sometimes do its underlying imperfections show through the glossy veneer.

Borderlands 2 might not develop extensively on its forebear, but it has even greater power to hold you for hours on end, deftly weaving RPG stat development with skill-based play. It's enough to make every decision you make meaningful and fun, and lend the realisation that Gearbox knows more about the fundamentals of the shooter than almost any other developer.

Whether you're serious about climbing the leaderboards or just looking to race a teetering cupcake monster around on a pushbike, Hello Games' victory lap has you covered. May the instant restarts never falter. May the boosting never cease.

Ugly, punishing, and extremely satisfying, Gets To The Exit is a raw kind of fun. [Oct 2012, p.110]

In spite of its balance wobbles, Orcs Must Die 2 is a frenetic blast of co-op joy - the ideal 30-minute post-pint pick-me-up, be it a step-change sequel or not. [Oct 2012, p.106]

The true measure of this journey isn't where you end up, it's how fast your pulse is racing when each luminous tube finally spits you out into the darkness again. [Oct 2012, p.92]

And if this animalistic chaos all sounds a little too weird, consider this: strip away the surface strangeness, and you're left with a surprisingly identifiable tale of a mammal negotiating the pits and pitfalls of the concrete jungle, constantly worrying about sex and death as they try to make their way in a hyena-eat-elephant world. Well, at least until the velociraptors arrive.

A puzzle game that's more puzzle than game, Huebrix is a quiet pleasure – a soothing rainy Sunday afternoon to Super Hexagon's hedonistic Saturday night.

If you've been writing the series' Vita appearance off as a compromise or a contractual obligation, you're in for something of a treat. That 5 inch OLED screen is a chance to see Media Molecule's staggering achievement afresh, and to witness one of this generation's most intriguing engines of creativity at its most energetic and effective.

Beyond the sharper picture quality, there's little here that couldn't have been done on DS, though it matters little in the face of such ageless design. Picross E may not do much more than the basics, then, but sometimes that's all that is needed.

Super Hexagon weds zen-like design purity with the highest order of twitch-reflex athleticism. It revels in the ineffable dance of muscle memory, the act of shutting off your brain and trusting your thumbs to guide you improbably to safety.

Klei's Saturday morning cartoon style visuals intersect smoothly with your ninja's slinky animation and flowing moves, and the range of visual effects (position-betraying lightning strikes, a blurred fog of war-style filter on activity beyond your sight line) folds neatly back into the game's light-and-shadow based stealth systems. The result is a slick and striking game, one with presentation worthy of the potent and flexible set of powers at its core.

This is a rich, interesting design, then, but one whose capacity for long-term competitive play is questionable.

Throw in a typically generous range of levels and a surprisingly engrossing hidden object game, and Snapshot becomes a recipe for a candy-coloured afternoon of elegant brainteasers.

Part auto-runner, part RTS, and part puzzle game, there are enough strange ideas here to make up for a grindy campaign and awkward aiming controls. Shellrazer's an odd kind of game, perhaps, but it ultimately benefits from its own eccentricities.

It's good to see Inman opting for something other than a straight sequel, but this is one space odyssey that won't last you much longer than a pleasant hour or so.

Toybox deserves a wider audience. Chunky, colourful and challenging, this is a game that makes the most of its strange conceits. Occasionally those Nobel laureates are onto something, then.

Like the very best narratives, Thirty Flights Of Loving relies on economy more than excess, and it races you breathlessly to its conclusion rather than herding you through an awkward gauntlet of false choices and bottlenecks.

Even at its best, when using the AV8R stick, Damage Inc feels clumsy, badly implemented and lacking in imagination. Mad Catz is unlikely to drive sales of its peripherals with a game in which every flight feels like work and every kill is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory in a tedious war.

It remains disarmingly single-minded throughout, yet any repetition is offset by intuitive, precise controls, and satisfying audiovisual feedback.

There's a sizable adventure here but the repetition of basic tasks makes it seem padded rather than epic – too many dungeons send you on fetch quests for plot devices wherein the rule of three is doggedly applied.

Messy but oddly mesmeric, Bad Hotel is perhaps more successful as a curious plaything than a game, but it's no less essential for that.

The guns and costumes you'll be buying make Random Heroes a little more appealing, perhaps, but they're poor compensation for a wider lack of imagination.

The thrill of the chase is still present, then, even if we've come to expect something a little more subversive from Adult Swim.

More old than new, New Super Mario Bros 2 is an inverted Galaxy, more content to remix old stomping grounds and sprinkle on new gimmicks than take Mario to places he hasn't hopped through before.

It's a smart iOS game that reduces a sport to its basic elements like this - and an even smarter one that can then turn those elements into something that feels entirely new. Three points.

Should a game about surviving an alcoholic, abusive parent be fun? Probably not. But it gains nothing from being wearying and frustrating.

So while the campaign's filled with visual pleasures and colourful tricks, it's in the stark white spaces of the editor that Sound Shapes really dazzles, stepping away from the museum of hallucinations that all rhythm action games offer and threatening, at times, to become a genuine musical instrument in its own right.