Given its lineage, it should hardly be surprising to discover that Blizzard has once again demonstrated such a keen sense of balance: with Wings Of Liberty, it offers established players a welcome return to familiar battlegrounds, while providing intrigued bystanders with their best chance yet of engaging with a bewildering, brilliant and punishing genre.

It’s a game that builds gradually and then becomes irresistible, a beautiful lump of an RPG that continues beyond the close of its main campaign, and will have you thinking about it when you’re not at your 360. [Dec 2008, p.79]

The freedom of movement requires a new level of spatial imagination. Before Prince of Persia, platform games were like playing Tetris with only the blocks and bars. [Christmas 2003, p.100]

This is a remarkable sequel, one that takes its predecessor not as a template, but a jumping-off point. And for all the justifiable concern about its chosen business model, its implementation of the free-to-play model prizes players’ hearts above the contents of their wallets.

The racing, in itself, is excellent. Striking a wonderful balance between simulation and thrills. [July 2007, p.86]

Perhaps Gone Home’s greatest surprise lies in the apparent ease with which The Fullbright Company has joined the game’s subject and its medium: it’s a domestic tale of girl-to-womanhood told with the tools of an action game. As a statement that games can express emotionally resonant stories, Gone Home is a triumph. But that’s not why you should play it. Engrossing, touching and rewarding, it’s well worth the experience on its own terms, too.

Outrageously pretty. [Feb 2015, p.108]

As Bernadetta's heartwarming lethality proves, the payoff is well worth the investment. [Issue#336, p.110]

When those big swings connect, just as when we manage to knock several bottles off a wall with a single shot, Despelote offers an exhilarating reminder of the narrative ground games have yet to cover. [Issue#410, p.120]

This is brand new, yet it tastes vintage. Because it's nothing less than Capcom at its best in the genre it defines. [May 2010, p.101]

Peerlessly classy, funny and perverse in the same breath, Peace Walker is the most surprising Metal Gear Solid to date.

It encourages you to really TRY, even though no one else besides you will see the outcome and the game will happily continue on either way, because creation doesn't need to be about having something you can show to people, but about the process of DOING it. This is where the real joy lies. And even in its darker moments, Chicory is absolutely dripping with the stuff. [Issue#360, p.116]

It's an utterly huge, ambitious game - 100 hours MIGHT do it - but it never feels anything less than lovingly handcrafted, its every component part given the same special attention. Its individual elements, the combat, the writing, would be high points in any other game, but Divinity: Original Sin II has it all. [Dec 2017, p.116]

What the game asks of you might be fairly standard shooter stuff, but the act of playing it out with your own hands lends it a fresh magic. That's Alyx in a nutshell: this is a Half-Life game almost to a fault, the old formula polished to a 2020 shine, made new again by the way you manipulate it. The Gloves aren't the new crowbar or Gravity Gun, the defining tool of Half-Life: Alyx. Your own hands are. [Issue#344, p.102]

Far from simply feeling sufficiently old-school, Pillars of Eternity II is a game of systems and setting working in wonderful harmony and with a pioneering spirit, exposing what it is that players miss about those particular 'good old days' on the first place. [July 2018, p.110]

It still requires a deeper commitment than most games ask for, but the rewards positively tumble forth, year after year, generation after generation, treacherous vassal after treacherous vassal. [Issue#351, p.94]

Crucially, though, it understands that such grandeur means little if what lies beyond doesn't reward both your curiosity and the lengths to which you've gone to unlock it. On that front, Cocoon is a triumph. [Issue#390, p.116]

So, is this what we were expecting from Capcom – a revolution in survival horror? No... It's an interactive B-movie, but one filled with sights, sounds and thrills that will linger in the memory long after the content of more sophisticated titles has been forgotten. [March 2005, p.76]

This is still a game with a formula, then, but it has never been better, and there are few areas where it could be improved. [July 2016, p.104]

One of the best games on iOS, a testing blend of strategy and crisis management with a sharp tux and a winning smile.

No other game takes on whole eras of combat with such a combination of respect and fetishism for the rules and wisdom of battle, and no series treats history like such a serious playground of possibilities, yet features such comic-book characters. [Apr 2009, p.114]

These moments are why you play Skyrim, because in the instance of breathless excitement, triumph or discovery, you invest completely in its world.

Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, but OlliOlli World pulls off that rarest of tricks: it's a sequel that loses none of its capacity for challenge, while lowering the barrier to entry sufficiently to welcome in a new audience. [Issue#369, p.116]

This series has always felt like a breath of fresh air in a genre that grows ever more obsessed with the fidelity of its simulations. With Forza Horizon 3, Playground has flung open the biggest window in the building, then stuck on a few fans for good measure. [December 2016, p.106]

Even as it wraps up within four hours, Mixtape feels like an exemplar of the form: generous, indulgent and expertly curated, a crowd-pleaser with just the right number of deep cuts. If it doesn't persuade you to make one of your own, it may well convince you to call up an old friend to reminisce about the moments you spent together. When the world simultaneously sucked and felt so full of potential. When you were bored and rudderless and didn't realise how good you had it. [Issue#424, p.114]

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.

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.

This one's for the fast and the curious. Whiplash or no, brace yourself. [Issue#366, p.100]