It's derivative, gratuitous and needlessly profane, but beneath the gruesome veneer lies a tale of – believe it or not – genuine tenderness.

Monkey Bump lacks the gooey intricacy of the team's best games, perhaps, but it's still an elegant time-waster with fine-tuned controls and an excellent handle on the things that keep score-chasing gamers happy. Slight and chirpy, this may be PomPom at its least idiosyncratic, but the expanding boundary has never looked more at home.

Word games are only as good as their dictionary is reliable, and while Quarrel has one of the best around, it's occasionally hamstrung by Microsoft's Victorian sensibilities.

This is a big game, clocking in at about the 40-hour mark, but the lack of challenge in combat combined with the formulaic missions and frequent cutscenes too often make it feel like a sticky trudge.

Thanks to this astonishing overhaul, it's now quite impossible to ignore. [Feb 2012, p.120]

Puzzlejuice may ultimately be too hectic and exhausting to stay on the front page of your iDevice forever, but it's the perfect game for an unhealthy binge every few days. Enjoy it as much as you can, and try not to burn yourself out for good.

It takes the best and worst of Resident Evils past and present, and spot welds them together unevenly. If the designers had committed wholeheartedly to either polarity of action or horror, Revelations may have been a headshot, but what we're left with is more like a glancing blow. [Feb 2012, p.112]

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]

Successful only as an interactive showcase of Jurevicius' art – and arguably the Flash original was more effective in that regard – it's almost criminal that a world this vivid should be so wearying to explore.

In its present form, Hero Academy is a fairly lightweight confection, but it digs its nails in until you find yourself impatiently anticipating the notification alert, and then starting a fresh battle with a random opponent to shorten the wait.

Like any good zombie fiction, the real enemy in AZMD! isn't the walking dead, but the humans who created them.

An acceptable game rising from the foundations of a great one. Hutch has proved it can do amazing things with Apple's touchscreen but, this time at least, it's provided dubious implementation of almost everything else.

Worst of all for a game hoping to sell itself on scares, Amy is never frightening. Instead, its horrors are derived from the game's shoddy execution, weak puzzles and frustrating play rhythms, a nest of poor game design decisions through which disappointment, not fear, are hatched.

Mage Gauntlet's an action RPG that's perfectly tailored for the pick-up-and-play crowd, in other words. It's a likeable confection that's as witty as it is insubstantial.

It's becoming a 5th Cell tradition: strong ideas compromised by erratic level design and structural weaknesses. One day, the developer will find the right balance to support its undeniable creativity, but sadly, it hasn't found it here.

It may tread more carefully around its psychiatric themes, but its puzzles still toy with minds as easily as they play with space.

In-app purchases require delicate balancing, but with T-Coin bundles costing up to £69.99, and annual T-Club subscriptions available for £20.99 a year, EA could hardly be more obvious in letting you know that, as far as it's concerned, the 69p you paid to download the game was only the beginning.

Ferociously compulsive.

BioWare hasn't cast itself as a guerrilla movement trying to subvert the MMOG with The Old Republic. Instead it's been the Empire, working to produce a slick, gigantic experience that, in the time of free-to-play, feels polished enough to demand monthly fees. How long this empire – vast and imposing, but archaic in structure – will last in the face of newer MMOGs and their rebellious payment models isn't easy to discern. This isn't the first of a new order of MMORPG, but it may well be the last of the old.

As tightly designed and finely balanced as it is, it's hard to shake the feeling that you're endlessly replaying a tutorial.

Bugbear built the FlatOut brand, and bred a following on a balance of silly stunts, destructible environments and rewards. It crafted the game's zanier side with care, with the aim of keeping players invested in its often cheap kicks. Team6 has abandoned that manifesto in favour of haphazard thrills via haphazard design. As a result, FlatOut 3 crashes and burns.

Corpse Party is often too rigid in its ways, requiring players to examine objects several times, occasionally in a very specific order – a problem exacerbated by a structure that locks out later chapters until the correct ending to the previous episode has been found. Some wrong (in every sense) endings are worth seeing once, but repeat plays of scenarios dilute the tension the studio takes such pains to build.

Pinballing between boost blocks on the shorter stages is an undoubted thrill, but when a single, late mistake on the lengthier levels proves decisive, the less patient among us will likely find that an old-fashioned punishment too far.

The highscore table and note-perfect humour (which, just like the pixel-art graphics and whimsical audio, strikes the perfect balance between faux-naivety and self-awareness) proves more than enough to keep you playing in the traffic.

The final third of the game abandons grubby criminality for altogether more lurid, excessive and enjoyably silly climes, testifying to the fact that Saints Row is at its best when it rejects the expectations of the series and the strictures of the GTA format.

Economical and clever, Pullblox is full of leftfield ideas that turn odd congregations of technology into quiet magic. At last, 3DS has a puzzle game with real depth.

It may look chaotic, but this is as controlled as iOS gaming gets. Immaculately calibrated touch controls give you the tools to escape even the most ferocious barrage, while the five stages challenge twitch reflexes, muscle memory and pattern recognition equally. One of the toughest games you'll ever play, then, but also one of the fairest.

It's clear that Disney's ideas are far from drying up.