Isn't a hard game, but it is occasionally a taxing one. [Sept 2012, p.108]

A tiny game with some big ideas. [Sept 2012, p.106]

It's a long, repetitive grind that fails to reward your efforts. [Sept 2012, p.100]

The most satisfying stages give you a generous toolset with which to experiment, but one too many involves painstaking repositioning of a few items.

Anarchy Reigns sits awkwardly, then: its balanced multiplayer mode means a fixed moveset and an unremarkable singleplayer campaign, while the high online player count means matches too often descend into scrappy pileups. Neither its on- or offline offerings are essential, but Platinum has shown that an online brawler can work. It's rough around the edges, sure, but it's a proof of concept to build on.

The frame-rate occasionally chugs, but little else can truly hold Mr. Dreamer back. This is a confident twist on a popular genre, and a case study in how a good idea needs little embellishment.

For the game's opening third, this all works brilliantly as you move through claustrophobic, yet forgiving, urban environments. But a trip to the city sewers further down the line places platforming over survival and reveals that Deadlight's controls just aren't up to the task.

While Neversoft's course design holds up, its objectives sadly don't; setting high scores is as thrilling and rewarding as ever, but we're less forgiving of being asked to collect five objects dotted around a level without a right-stick camera than we were at the turn of the millennium.

Moops isn't a bad idea for a iOS title, then, but it's extremely poorly implemented. For a game about bug hunting, it's failed to catch enough of its own.

It's a simple rhythm-action title at its core, with a set of bolted-on RPG mechanics of little worth. But then players aren't here for those mechanics, they're here for the memories. Bearing that in mind, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy achieves exactly what it sets out to do.

Despite its lunges for the mainstream, in other words, The Act has forgotten one of the most important things about escapist cinema and cartoons: they generally don't require this much effort.

Its prudence, that veil of simplicity masking a system of astonishing possibility and depth, makes it one of the purest fighting games on the market today.

Suda is an undisciplined designer. As with his comedy, he throws every idea at his game design, hoping something will stick. He's an artistic, if idiosyncratic, thinker, so invariably some ideas do succeed, but the assault of jokes, ideas and vignettes ends up as unwieldy as it is characterful. The result is a game in which there's as much to celebrate as to berate, as much to admire as there is to admonish.

There's an overall level of polish to Inversion that shows a developer improving its skillset. Though the game never fully stretches its ambitious premise beyond the confines of the cover shooter genre, it's a game with the noblest of intentions: to provide wall-to-wall, or, rather, floor-to-ceiling, entertainment.

It's not bad at all, but it's not different. It might add to Skyrim, but it doesn't enrich it in doing so.

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.

Rowdy and knockabout? Perhaps. Fun? Not quite.

Fantastic Four and Captain America-themed tables complete a package of rare value on the eShop; this may not be the finest version of Marvel Pinball you can buy, but Nintendo's store can only benefit from more third-party offerings of similar quality.

Spelunky digs its way so deeply into your brain and often pops up when you're busy playing something else. You'll flashback when another game's arsenal reminds you of just how powerful Yu's simple toolset is, or when another level designer tries and fails to encourage a different approach and reward convoluted strategies.

It's the misjudged reuse of ideas like this that makes the game feel like a classic '80s rock song being played by the band's contemporary line-up.

With global events offering in-game rewards for communities who team up to service a single destination, it has a shifting short-term goal to keep you checking in, but you may struggle to justify your continued involvement in the long game.

It draws you in after your first few taps of the screen, and it's smart enough to keep things brief, topping off a short campaign with an endless mode and a limited selection of unlockables.

It would also be an overstatement to call it profound: in any other medium such themes would hardly be revelatory, and although The Line is a thoughtful and well-intentioned game, the level of its writing is carefully engineered to be accessible to those expecting a brainless bullet exchange. Even so, it is brazen in its critique, and a rarity besides. It may not be subtle, but it engages with problems that the bellicose ilk of Modern Warfare and Medal Of Honor have yet to acknowledge.

That it largely fails to deliver does not quite snuff out its allure – not, at least, for devotees of the fiction. For those yet to be tempted by Martin's work, however, the blunderous combat, mangled dialoguing and profoundly unlovely looks will make it seem, as a Westerosi idiom goes, a mummer's farce.

Sadly, too often your powers feel anything but godly.

With its unusual blend of Kinect and controller – of simple missions and complex control – Heavy Armor is a modern rarity: a game designed to be hard work. Whether that translates directly into it being a game for the 'hardcore' is debatable, but From Software has made the best of a bad situation and, aptly, delivered a game that asks you to do exactly the same.

If you're the right age to appreciate the irony of an over-powered Care Bear attack, Saturday Morning RPG is going to take you right back to your distant past.

Despite its reheated fantasy trappings and formulaic design principles, it also remains surprisingly easy to get hooked on the steady dopamine hit of each fresh loot acquisition and the rhythm of the game's combat pulse.

It's a sparse recipe that makes for a sometimes infuriating, but always compelling, puzzler which is spiced up by the inexorable progress of your dot.

This is a game that lives well within your comfort zone no matter how many bullets are flying, and how many enemies are kiting along behind you. It's a game about games, in other words – and a very good one, at that.

The game is divided into four tournaments, each containing four unique courses. It's when you get to the second stage of the first tournament that the game's major failing makes itself apparent: there's only one composition to race to. Presumably, the developers thought this would be enough, as differences in course layout and sound effects provide a little variety, but in practice it's just too repetitive.

The convincing sense of speed is dulled by a lack of weight to the handling, while collisions betray some erratic physics: you can easily be shunted into a respawn by other racers, yet left relatively unscathed by a head-on smash into trees.

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.

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.

It's a game confident enough in its core ideas to simply offer greater volume and variety of enemies in its later stages, and it has the balance and poise to ensure that's more than sufficient.

Despite its hectic invention, then, Velocity retains a rare kind of focus. Vita owners finally have something tart to see them through the drought, and the Minis just got a new standard bearer.

Gauge, then, is throwaway, minimalist, score-chasing brilliance, a game that's pulled together from the smallest selection of pieces, but that also feels bold and new and intensely imaginative.

And though a clutch of score-based challenges are both too few and too brisk, they contribute to an iOS game of rare generosity and substance.

The series' modest ambitions are here scaled back to a glum inventory of FPS conventions, its spectacle dampened by hardware limitations and dormant art direction, and its platform-specific novelties largely revealed as fussy irritations, presumably born of a need to promote the struggling Vita's features.

Showdown is not just a party game, nor is it the limp refurb you might expect this late in a console life cycle. It feels like something as crucial to Codemasters Racing as any of its predecessors – less a spin-off than a deliberate change of tack.

The game's angled view and coloured stacks mean that some of the best moments – cascading chains that ripple outwards as the landscape collapses in a shower of points – can sometimes be the result of luck instead of judgement.

A bitter reminder that pedigree is no guarantee of quality.

Beneath EA's layer of crafty monetisation, however, Flight Control Rocket is a stellar effort. The generic sci-fi visuals and overly busy menus might lack the instant appeal of Flight Control's handsome '50s styling, and that game's purity is sorely missing here, but underneath all that EA sheen is a game with genuine heart.

Future Soldier exemplifies a developer honouring the 'fun first' ethos of its publisher's canon, even as it stays true to the seriousness of its espionage licence. Yes, it's lost some tactical edge, but a disciplined commitment to entertainment focuses the experience. In the overmasculine world of the thirdperson shooter, this is a game that stands out for being delicately beautiful even as it delivers brutal thrills.

You may think you know Diablo, but you don't know it with this level of polish, from the clean brilliance of interlocking skills and classes to the sheer amount of chaos the game's comfortable with conjuring in its later dungeons. It's a testament to what money and confidence (Blizzard's own equivalent of mana and health) can do.

If Spellsword's enemies are disappointingly generic, there's a tactile joy in dispatching them: slimes and bats explode messily as blasts of wind launch them into walls, and it's possible to enjoy a brief game of swingball with the laser-shooting eyes that dangle elastically from the ceiling.

Its magpie picking of influences leaves it with too little personality of its own, and comparisons with its sources are often unflattering. Still, it boasts scale, action and variety that make it a welcome addition to PS3's multiplayer roster.

Cheap bosses and stingy save points ensure that it's a drag as well as a bore, while a handful of crash bugs do very little to improve proceedings. My Little Hero's greatest charm is its air of sweet innocence, perhaps, but in truth this adventure is primitive rather than childlike.

They're gimmicks, sure, but good ones, rounding out another strong title for 3DS. [June 2012, p.126]

Capcom might not have crafted the kind of world in which players will invest, but it understands the powerful draw of party building and gear tweaking, the immediate thrills of slashing and spellcasting, and the spirit of adventure in sallying forth on a dragon hunt. [June 2012, p.106]

A surprisingly conservative game from Rockstar. Its absorption of cover mechanics makes Payne feel more familiar than he should, but even then his signature tricks are over a decade old. This is a game about a world-weary killer doing the only thing he knows how to, and for all its spectacular action beats there's something apt about Max's fatigue.

Its rudimentary puzzles may not satisfy point-and-click fans, but those who enjoy interactive drama will be happy to tune in for Episode Two after this solid season premiere.

The detection of item-grabbing slashes is often fumbled, and since moving your finger can leave you prone to missing punches, it ruins a promising risk-reward system.

Its keen sense of drama is as authentic as it is exhilarating: arcing a 40-yard free-kick around the wall and into the top corner in the last-minute of a cup final is as thrilling a moment as you'll witness in any FIFA match. It's hardly the beautiful game – its visuals are perfunctory at best – but Simon Read's creation smartly captures the capitalism, the artistry and the sheer, glorious unpredictability of its subject.

Colourful, crafty, and cheerily free of ambitions, it's the perfect companion for a drowsy early morning commute.

You'll trudge endlessly around the forest, cursing your protagonist's languid walk speed as you wander from one already visited landmark to the next in the vague hope of triggering the next bit of scripting in a narrative which goes out of its way to confuse the player.

Schneider's presentational style may be a little sterile for some tastes, but while his games may not have the same force of personality as Minter's, he demonstrates an equally astute mind for augmenting existing genres.

Ronimo has made an ingenious Trojan horse by delivering the structure and systems of a cult PC genre on consoles, wrapped in the glamour of classic console gaming. Rather than alienate the wrong audience, Awesomenauts could – and should – make plenty of converts to its cause.

Occasionally gripping but frequently unfulfilling, Sniper Elite V2 comes in at a heavy price for a package that's all gore and little reward.

Fable Heroes' appeal is all Fable, rather than its elaborations on the well-worn, side-scrolling brawler. Played in a group, there's a knockabout charm in vying to emerge the victor, but unlike those gold coins there's not quite enough longterm value beneath the outer sheen.

While undoubtedly nectar of the gods for series fans, the incremental tweaks and polishes to the game's mechanics that a decade of sequels grants make it by far the most rewarding and investible Musou game to date for all-comers.

Crytek's landed on the App Store, then, but it's only half of the company: the wrong half.

It purports to be a cross between pinball and puzzle game, but lacks the bells and whistles or tactile joy of the former, while the conundrums are nothing more than busywork.

Its clumsiness of presentation and lack of explanation might be partly excused as aesthetic choices that enrich even as they frustrate. But perhaps its truest accolade is in returning the horror of survival itself to the survival horror genre.

There's a dazzling seamlessness to every aspect of Prototype 2. You feel it as you traverse the world, sprinting powerfully up buildings, bounding high into the air just as you reach the lip of the roof and then transitioning with a tap of the right trigger into a glide that will take you to the next rooftop.

This isn't a deep game by any means, but it's colourful, noisy, and approaches iOS's limitations with cunning.

Though it occasionally goes pear-shaped as an adventure game due to the stinginess of its feedback, Botanicula is never less than a breath of fresh air.

Those seeking a healthy eating plan are advised to look elsewhere: this is more likely to encourage consumption of hallucinogens than fruit and vegetables.

As always, the perception of good value lies with you, but even without a penny paid this is still one of the most fluid, elegant, and strategically rich online shooters available. It's a beautiful game to play – in the elaborate motion of its tactics as much as its bright, crisp worlds.

The ambitious, exacting craftsmanship of Evolution goes a long way to ensuring that every person who gives the game a proper chance will be seduced into becoming precisely such a fan. [May 2012, p.106]

A little slicker, and Pandora's Tower could have provided a surprisingly effective alternative in the character-action genre. Its blend of pointer controls and button-based combat begs to be further explored. But as it is, this a clunky action title – albeit one with a flicker of genuine emotion at its heart.

The Splatters ultimately feels as much like the heir to Trials HD as to Rovio's feathery world-beater. Maybe it belongs on XBLA after all.

It can't have the same gobsmacking impact as its inspiration, but this is a simple, engaging and occasionally baffling journey in its own right, with plenty of hooks to snare the newcomer.

Pig & Bullet is certainly an amusing distraction, but Spiceworx's thin veneer of polish can't hide the simplistic Flash game lurking beneath.

SpeedThru is a game best experienced in short bursts, not least because the startling image depth may prove a strain for tired eyes. Still, this is further evidence of the eShop's relevance in the face of strong competition from Nintendo's peers.

The route you pick through Polytron's floating world is nearly impossible to verbalise, while its puzzles resolve themselves in your mind unexpectedly, in clear, wordless chunks. There's really no language to cover many of the things you get up to in Fez. For a videogame in 2012, that may be the ultimate endorsement.

It's the tutorials that stick in the mind: Skullgirls' real win is via Zaimont grasping that fighting games needn't be easier to play, but should be easier to understand.

It says a lot that a dancing game is the best thing on offer in this muddled, cynical package. For the most part, Kinect Star Wars feels ill-conceived: kids will be bored, and adults will be embarrassed.

The series' daily challenges return, and the team's flair for simple, yet interesting, map design remains undiminished. Refinement's never quite as exciting as reinvention, of course, but with so little to fix, Rodeo's clearly spent its development time rather wisely.

Warp tends to the lightweight - almost a confection - but as with anything that offers this sort of energetic sugary high, sometimes it's good to be left wanting more.

As far as plot-twist clichés go, Downpour trots out all of the usual suspects.

It's another shining example of a European developer handling Japanese IP with care, remixing and refreshing the genres Japan's native developers often struggle to enhance and honour.

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

A less accomplished but more immediate Ninja Gaiden, then, one that will temporarily distract newcomers and disappoint dedicated followers. Yet it feels destined to be forgotten by both audiences, chalked up as another casualty in the east's drive to conquer the west with bravado rather than its sought-after, ever-rarer Japanese steel.

The results are uncommonly nuanced and tactile, though perhaps that's no surprise given its creator's keen interest in digital sculpture.

Slant Six Games cut its teeth on handheld SOCOM games, but no tactical subtlety has filtered down to this title. Operation Raccoon City is a gory duck shoot in a series that's already produced the definitive action game, and letting you experience its gore-soaked trudge with friends is its only genuine appeal.

The action-racing genre has delivered numerous treats this generation, but not one of them has been as rewarding and relentlessly entertaining, nor as feature-packed, as this. This is Ridge Racer unbounded from the shackles of its heritage, rebuilt from the ground up into one of the most subversive, sublime street-racing games ever made.

You'll find a number of technical issues plaguing the game, from scenery clipping to inconsistent collision and some hideously low resolution textures. But the game's relentless dedication to giving you violent bangs for your bucks goes some way to compensating for them. Because Twisted Metal at its best delivers exactly what it sets out to: a messy, manic and tasteless treat.

A solid and intricate Armored Core with the best online offering yet, lacking only the visual sheen to make the energy and pace of its combat shine. It's still an acquired taste, but once you've whetted your appetite, it's hard to resist.

It's an attractive game, too, its painterly art style and creative enemy design sullied only by the occasional drop in performance and that persistently unhelpful camera. If wrestling with the right analogue stick is no one's idea of a good time, such frustrations are worth enduring for a daring and sometimes exhilarating boss rush.

With incessant dialogue boxes and the option to tweet every other scrap of text you come across, this second iOS outing from Fable designer Dene Carter has picked up some of the worst habits of smartphone gaming.

The bare-bones Training mode does little to help the inexperienced either. [Apr 2012, p.124]

Sakurai's prints are all over Uprising, providing a comeback that balances depth and accessibility with little compromise. [Apr 2012, p.122]

There's no doubting that Circadia's ingenious, of course: at heart it's a clever idea expressed with stylish economy. In the teasing out of that idea, however, it arguably turns into a game where it's the designer, and not the player, who's truly having most of the fun.

As a free download, Frobisher Says may not be a waste of your money, but there are many better diversions on Vita to occupy your time.

A game betrays its obvious understanding of scratch music with its mechanics: turntablism involves releasing a scratch at exactly the right moment, something that doesn't seem possible here.

SFXT successfully combines the best of the most popular 2D and 3D fighting games in the world, proves Capcom's most newcomer-friendly fighter, and boasts a combat system of bewildering depth. If any company was going to move the genre forward, it seems fitting that it's the one that invented it.

For all its luxurious visuals, it knows little about how to marry them to gameplay, or how to end the suffering of artists who 
see their work butchered to meet gameplay's demands.