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.

As Sid Meier once said, games are a series of interesting decisions. Well, Balatro has those in spades - and hearts, clubs and diamonds besides. [Issue#395, p.120]

For those already playing Final Fantasy XIV, Stormblood is a beautiful, essential expansion...It's not only a great expansion to a much-improved MMO. It's also, in story terms at least, a game that stands tall among the best Final Fantasy has to offer. [Sept 2017, p.112]

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.

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

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.

The game's parts are by turns novel and enjoyable, but when played in longer bursts feel repetitive. Brotherhood is Assassin's Creed II 2, its new mechanics feeling more like extensions of an existing form than innovations. It's a greatest hits disc, then, a weighty, good-value deal that plays the series' best bits – but there's the constant danger that you've heard them before.

This is a delightfully risky experiment, and the end result is pure alchemy: the blending of two fiercely traditional genres into something both unique and entirely natural. [Apr 2009, p.125]

It would be easy to take The Minish Cap for granted, left as it is with little to do but shuffle and tinker with its immaculate heritage. That, however, would be a grave mistake... Maybe you can't go wrong with the Zelda template, but they haven't always gone this right. [Christmas 2004, p.91]

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.

It's a third and final chapter, then, with all that implies. It's off-putting to new players, too busy tying up loose ends to dangle any threads of its own, and fails to stand up as its own game in the same manner as its predecessors. But it's also a spectacular, powerfully imagined and dramatically involving final act to one of gaming's richest sci-fi sagas.

As a whole, it's remarkably cohesive, a compound puzzler that should be added to your collection with express speed. [Issue#395, p.123]

It homes in, with a clockmaker's precision and a playful gleam in its eye, on what Mario does best.

Some may argue over what the series should have become, but what’s important is that it has made that tough decision for itself, and established a rock solid foundation for inevitable, now justified successors. [May 2006, p.86]

Offbeat, occasionally twisted, frequently funny and never boring, Horace is the best kind of attention-seeker: it demands you sit up and take notice and never stops rewarding you for doing so. [Issue#354, p.120]

Whatever you conclude about the bigger picture, this is special stuff. The claustrophobic buzz of flies, the distant muezzin drone, the desperation as you crouch uncertain in the dust whilst your men call frantically for orders will lodge in your mind long after you've walked away from the game. [July 2004, p.98]

Schlocky and silly in places, but potent and reflective in others, Nilin’s tale has bags of heart to play off against its flamboyant bosses and existential quandaries, all grounded by a charismatic female star. While the world building isn’t on a par with the best – hampered by a civilian population as robotic as its metal cohorts – a rich backstory and architectural detail make Neo-Paris a place worth visiting.

Sonic And Sega All-Stars Racing is the most fun karting game on iOS, and an update taking care of those online hiccups can only make it more essential.

There's a beauty and a strangeness to Tenderfoot Tactics fans of gardens or grid combat owe it to themselves to discover. [Issue#354, p.122]

What a rare delight this is: while other games concern themselves with the big moments this funny, sincere tale reminds us that it's the gaps in between where life really happens. [Issue#354, p.123]

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.

It’s resplendent with detail and vibrancy: each of WHD’s eight tracks is a shimmering, 1080p rhapsody, played at an unwavering 60fps. [Dec 2008, p.93]

Whether this is the best Spider-Man GAME will likely be debated at length, but in so vividly capturing the intensity of the superhero experience, it is unquestionably the best Spider-Man simulator. [Issue#391, p.106]

Deliriously funny. [May 2018, p.114]

One of the year's finest grid-based strategy games, a steely and engrossing work of calculation. [Issue#349, p.102]

Its nonsensical charm – cartoon aliens, sweeties that make planets, and a robot T-Rex – as well as a winning extra mode (which basically makes planets into timebombs) after completion rounds off an original and deep hybrid.

As a game of corners, conditions and the times in which you master them, DIRT is an outstanding engine of online competition, powered by an outstanding engine of sight, sound and physics. [July 2007, p.88]

Chaos Theory is the game that the original Splinter Cell was meant to deliver: a tight play experience within a trusty framework, one more of enjoyment than irritation, and a game that’s no longer exclusively for fans of repeated reloading. [Apr 2005, p.97]