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.

You'll find well-executed entertainment here, some moments worth fighting for, but without the glue of a good script or the polish of a blockbuster to hold its disparate parts together, Sleeping Dogs feels as trapped as its hero. It's incapable of committing fully to the action movie thrills it seems so enamoured of, perhaps due to the resources that have been siphoned away to fuel its open-world obligations and scale.

There's a pleasingly wide range of enemies to fight. [Sept 2012, p.110]

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.