When it works, however, Infinity Blade II represents iOS gaming at its finest. For all Chair's improvements, the first game's nagging sense of hollow repetition will still set in eventually; it just takes longer to arrive this time. But until that point arrives, Infinity Blade II remains a defining, and essential, iOS experience.

Chaos reigns in the brackish bayous of this endearingly ramshackle racer from Hydro Thunder Hurricane developer Vector Unit. An erratic police presence might attempt to uphold the law, but between the fluctuating prices of its illegal trading posts and the trail of destruction your air boat leaves in its wake – not to mention a frame-rate choppier than the winding waterways themselves – this is a world without order.

Playing against AI can throw up a challenge, but requires patience. Higher difficulties give the AI more time to think, but DTOL's real problem is its interface. It's simple to the point of crudity, but functionally it can be opaque and cluttered, making a reasonably complex game seem even more so while you're figuring out the rules. Get past that, and there's an acute psychological game to be played in DTOL, but it'll require time – and an extra player – to find it.

The Run doesn't have the structure or production values to carry off its concept. Even if it did, its successes would be smothered by a procession of awful technical flaws. Lacking charm and polish, only the Need For Speed name will sell the game – which will no doubt mean that it fares well enough. But in a year that has seen gaming's biggest franchises one-upping each 
other and demanding players' attention like never before, The Run simply doesn't cut it.

Mildly charming but fiercely superficial, Kinect Sports remains undermined by the lingering inconsequentiality that tends to gather around all but the very best compilation titles.

A hybrid game of mixed success, Legacy reconciles Ace Combat's past and present while failing to offer enough diversity and features to make the results essential.

A brainteaser that's nervy, humbling, and strangely energising. If you can handle the stress, SpellTower is magnificent.

Nintendo has clearly been experimenting with how to better exploit its system's obvious potential, and its solution is a natural, graceful implementation of 3D that complements and even improves its games, rather than feeling tacked on.

SideScroller's final stages are arguably among the best things Q-Games has ever done, but be warned: if you're used to the puzzley pace of Shooter, you won't find its playful nature here.

A fleeting novelty.

The central achievement of Minecraft is a willingness to let the player define the experience; to make them the most interesting element in a world that's already dynamic and fascinating. It's a decision that has made designer Markus Persson a millionaire, and it's ensured that the most important PC game of the past five years is also the most timely.

Where Is My Heart? revels in simplicity, beauty and restraint, yet the experience tempers such qualities by proving challenging, infuriating and exhausting.

The framework is here for a truly great game, then, but it's the need to lengthen - and, for some players, monetise - the campaign that stops ShortRound's debut from living up to its obvious potential.

With its pulsing, ever-changing playing fields and foppish rhythm-action audio elements, one of the main reasons to play Fractal is simply to enjoy its wonderful aesthetics.

Overkill couldn't, for whatever reason, give Payday the development time it needed for its rough edges to be sanded down, but it remains a game with great potential.

While this elegant underwater world may be a little too twee for some players, then, there are still plenty of reasons to dip into Bit Blot's inventive genre piece. Aquaria's as personable on the iPad as it was on the PC and Mac, and now you can cross the oceans on your morning commute.

Ultimately, Gamelion's lacklustre effort serves as a helpful case study for anybody interested in investigating why no-one's ever made a successful platform game about a character with almost no body weight before.

In a world whose sales charts are regularly topped by ever-more-homogenised military shooters and action games, playing Origins feels like stepping into an alternate reality in which the 16bit era evolved by increasing in fidelity, not dimensions.

Unlike the elegant lead, who's grey-haired but unbowed by the end of the adventure, Assassin's Creed has been quietly compromised by age.

Ultimate's new characters, improved online offering and Heroes And Heralds make for a generous package given its budget price-point, and once it clicks, it dazzles.

Halo exhibits a single-minded focus that the modern FPS, with its choreographed set-pieces and thrilling scripted sequences, largely disregards. This is a game about the arc of a perfectly thrown grenade, a game about tense games of cat-and-mouse with foes as powerful as you, a game about constant improvisation with the tools at your disposal. It's a game that always feels tactical, and a game that – even now – has the capacity to surprise.

It's a detour into new territory that will satisfy co-op players as it maintains, rather than distills, the essence of its ancestry. [Dec 2011, p.122]

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

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

An over-complicated take on a classic recipe.

An emphatic, feature-packed and sometimes stunning final act.

For the majority of Tintin's adventure you'll be happy to kill time hopping and skipping across its gorgeous stages, but unlike the contours of Hergé's timeless stories, there's no hidden treasure to be found beneath its dazzling veneer.

A reminder of both what you adore and abhor in a series that's had its simple joys diluted by flash-in-the-plan iterations and ideas.