For those of us with purer nail-hitting, dog-poking and badger-stomping in mind, the pleasure will have to remain in the doing.

DaWindci's a sedate, slow burning thrill.

Is it better than Flick Kick Football? It lacks the purity of Pik Pok's original, and isn't nearly so charming. But where Flick Kick lapses into formula after you reach a high enough score, Flick Soccer gets even more challenging – and in full flow, it can provide a magical experience.

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.

When Tunic gestures towards Zelda games of old, something it does with all the subtlety of an air traffic controller, it's indicating an attempt to chip away the intervening decades and get back to the feeling of playing those games for the first time, when they still held what seemed like bottomless mystery. [Issue#370, p.104]

Bar a handful of bosses, Dark Dawn is a pushover, never requiring you to brave the combat's depths. Yes, it grants breathing room for testing unlikely combinations, but we'd have liked to put our mastery to the test. [Jan 2011, p.101]

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.

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.

The characters, however, are what make it sing. [Issue#370, p.106]

From its overpowered weapons and gormless AI to its pedestrian objecctives, the singleplayer game is as dumb as it is misguided – an embarrassment to the rather splendid mulitplayer game that, fortunately, represents all that's really important. [Dec 2005, p.101]

There's no question that Wipeout Pure is a very fine Wipeout game and, thanks to its lively, dynamic soundscape and its distinct, exhilarating handling, it deserves three out of three just as much as a score out of ten.

Most of all, BioShock 2 has one quality that makes us much more hopeful for the future of the series and its inevitable onward growth as one of gaming’s big franchises: it shows the capacity of Rapture to utterly change itself for the telling of a new tale, while somehow remaining the same.

It takes more than caffeine, luck and a nosebleed to truly become master of these streets, and this is Revenge’s greatest achievement over its predecessor. The eight locations, split as usual into varied circuits, are arcade racing dreams given form. [Nov 2005, p.98]

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.

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.

At its core, though, is Hydro Thunder Hurricane's handling model. Swerving between subtlety and throttle every few seconds, it graces tracks that provide both competitive dashes and full-on fairground rides. All this is wrapped up in a perpetually rewarding structure that keeps these precious elements fresh, making up a comeback that holds its first principles close.

It’s difficult to be too nitpicky about one of the most flat-out entertaining games of recent times. Overkill resurrects an old franchise as anything but a shambling corpse, and raises the bar for third party production values on this generation’s best-selling console. [Mar 2009, p.89]

iBlast Moki 2, with its slightly bland charm, unremarkable origins and questionable English, isn't going to be the next Angry Birds. But while playing, you occasionally think it should be.

DMC4 is not the grotesque misstep it so easily could have been. DMC4 is hardcore. [Mar 2008, p.90]

It isn’t any kind of reinvention, but a revitalisation, with a style so rich that it becomes an integral part of the game’s substance; Psychonauts breathes imagination and individuality as effortlessly as most games steal from one another. [July 2005, p.84]

It's still a Soul Calibur game, but Project Soul has successfully designed it for a wider audience of casual and hardcore players alike, which was a key factor in Capcom's successful reinvention of its revered series. [Feb 2012, p.108]

It demands persistence on the part of the player to uncover its inner workings, but when you do start to move in tandem, it's an undeniably exhilaratnig dance. [Oct 2006, p.86]

In the end, it's only a singleplayer mode away from true greatness - but if we've learned one thing from fighting games this generation, it's that none is ever going to get everything right. [Issue#344, p.118]

Florence strikes a chord that resonates long after the cello fades. [May 2018, p.120]

Journey's real issue, if it has one, goes much deeper than that. It's a resolutely linear game in which your range of interactions is minimal. For some, that will make it a pretty but hollow novelty; boring, perhaps. But for those who play games to explore strange lands, see beautiful sights and to immerse themselves – for however brief a time – in a new world, Journey is perfect. And what's more, they'll find someone like them to share it with.

Although the basic joy of rolling realistic water around might be short-lived, it's bolstered by the far greater satisfaction of solving the game's intuitive, well-paced puzzles. [Jan 2011, p.102]

It's clever without being intimidating, delicate without being volatile, and immediate without a sense of panic. [Feb 2011, p.99]

This new outing for Sega’s ever-appealing sports series is a deeper, more serious and demanding beast than before, yet happily manages to retain the series’ lighthearted atmosphere and is, on occasion, utterly bonkers. [Apr 2007, p.84]