Unlike the creature at its centre, Isolation isn't structurally perfect, but it is brilliantly hostile in a way that's likely to shock many players. [Dec 2014, p.102]

Unlike a good spy, however, it flubs its final execution. [Nov 2014, p.116]

The game's fusion of rhythm-action and RPG never quite fits as neatly as you'd hope. [Nov 2014, p.115]

Its successes drown out its flaws. [Nov 2014, p.112]

An uneven season finishes on a high. [Nov 2014, p.110]

There is a tremendous amount going on, to the point that it's all too easy to miss a mission-critical SOS. [Nov 2014, p.108]

A conservative sequel, one that drills down into the bedrock of what The Sims has always been. [Nov 2014, p.104]

Sega's loss is Nintendo's gain: Bayonetta, twirling away from a gigantic demon's maw and smacking the highest choir of angels on the nose, has just given Wii U its first true classic. [Nov 2014, p.100]

The craftsmanship is easy to admire, but 1001 Spikes can be a hard game to love. [Sept 2014, p.117]

Supernauts is both too limited to succeed as a town-builder and frustratingly restrictive as a creative tool, while its superhero interludes are disempowering and dull. [Sept 2014, p.116]

For all its delightful art and writing, the cold logic in its Gordian design is unrelenting. [Sept 2014, p.115]

There's a whiff of trial and error at times, but no puzzle's Eureka moment comes by accident. [Sept 2014, p.114]

A love letter to the NES era, Shovel Knight is punishingly difficult, a game of quick reflexes and exacting precision. [Sept 2014, p.112]

A colourfully written and often funny game, but one that doesn't deviate much from the fantasy rulebook, an area where a more substantial break from the past would have been welcome. [Sept 2014, p.108]

Boss fights aside, Ubosoft's consideration for its subject matter throughout is striking. [Sept 2014, p.104]

Infinity is extremely limited, both in terms of what little content it offers and your ability to access it. [Aug 2014, p.119]

It’s the combination of this collective roleplay with direct competition that makes the game so compulsive. As such, Blade Symphony is as close as you are likely to get to the fantasy of slowly becoming a master swordsman.

The revelatory finale will leave you winded, but also heartened by Krillbite’s assertion that firstperson horror needn’t be confined by crumbling walls and straitjackets.

For your money, however, this is the best new MMOG since Guild Wars 2 and arguably the most feature complete an MMOG has ever been on launch.

Crucially, Autosport’s career structure and nuanced vehicle handling combine to alleviate any potential frustration for players weaned on effortless victories.

It feels, in other words, an awful lot like classic Street Fighter, and praise doesn’t come much higher than that.

But content is no substitute for quality, and while Sniper Elite III might have made for an engaging design document, it isn’t much of a game.

A nice core bit of gameplay tarted up with unnecessary pretensions and stretched too thin, even over its short playtime. It feels like a minigame from a bigger title – specifically, those minigames from God of War and Dead Space 2 in which you guide a plummeting hero through falling debris. What it doesn’t feel like is a full a game – let alone the artsy indie hero Sony would like it to be.

This is a remarkably assured game for such a young studio, the work of a small team that knows exactly what it wants to do and executes it almost without error.

A delightfully strange and often surprising piece of work; it’s more plaything than game, perhaps, but the smiles it generates will be broad and frequent.

Much as it saddens us, given the promise of seeing a 3D Ghost Trick, we pronounce this dead on arrival.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted needs something more – a change in objective, focus or challenge to sustain engagement beyond the point when snatching teleporter pieces from robots on the coast loses its sense of mystery. As it is, it’s caught in an awkward hinterland of its own.

The New Order is, above all, brave. Its odd mix of ’90s-style FPS excess and Nazi atrocities could have come across as outdated and crass. But MachineGames maintains just as much respect for its difficult subject matter as it does for its players, and the result is a game that indulges the mature and juvenile parts of your personality in equal measure.