It’s refreshingly exacting about timing, though too forgiving when it comes to grading – you can miss several prompts, take plenty of damage and still earn gold.

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.

The representation of the xenomorphs is the game’s most damaging failure. They’re just not dangerous enough, reduced by a first mission deluge into a swarm of targets bearing the shape of a familiar, once-horrific symbol of death. But they have none of that pop icon’s grace or deadliness.

Crysis 3 has neither direction nor freedom, though it does have human weapons, alien weapons, a cloaking device, an Armour mode, and a bow. And with this many options at your disposal, Crysis 3 insists, surely you must be having fun.

Only its brevity and the limited multiplayer modes keep Judgment firmly in the ‘not a real sequel’ world, but it’s a template for the next generation of Gears and a licence to experiment with the series’ most sacred mechanics.

Despite the twitchy combat and compulsive collecting, it all comes back to those creaking mansions. Highly polished under their grime and cobwebs, the treats awaiting in their dark rooms prove Luigi’s subversive series still has the capacity to thrill.

There’s a lot of charm to Fetch, and this is as charmingly produced as anything on iOS, but there’s little adventure or arcade substance beneath its surface.

Its game may rarely do anything you haven’t seen done better elsewhere, but the developer knots a slew of disparate elements together with no little skill, leaving the whole feeling irresistibly fresh.

It’s ostensibly an action game, but much more slowly paced than that term would suggest. It’s not quite an RPG either, although there’s levelling and grinding involved. And while its world isn’t open – each area is segmented into numbered zones – it’s a sandbox game in every other respect. Guild quests offer a skeletal structure, but there’s no pressure to stick to it.

Multiplayer can be riotously scrappy fun as you clash hands and obscure one another’s view, evoking the memories and spirit of manic bouts of air-hockey at local arcades.

For now, SimCity is good for the reasons it’s always been good, and bad for reasons old and new. And yes, we wish we could play it on the train. But after spending two weeks as mayor of a series of teeming pocket metropolises, we’re still ready to spend more.

There’s a satisfying Shadow Complex-meets-Smash-Bros. style romp somewhere in The Showdown Effect, but it’s buried beneath gameplay mechanics that interfere with the joys its premise suggests, and there are currently stability issues with the servers that demand some urgent attention.

Vlambeer’s game is, as its title suggests, ridiculous. In its simple, gleeful rhythms of play, it’s sublime, too.

For an expansion, HOTS is a dense package, adeptly fashioned and hugely enjoyable. But while its core game might be perfection, HOTS itself isn’t.

But for parents and adults, Undercover is a less inviting prospect, even with its satirical undertone. It’s a plastic facsimile of GTA – a game that was hardly humourless to begin with, and one that has already spawned a genre’s worth of more sophisticated rivals and clones.

Persevere, however, and you’ll find the kind of charmingly intelligent design that makes us hope Ambient can eventually realise some of its grander ambitions.

Gorgeous and silky smooth it may be, but the level design feels like it was made with in-app Continue purchases specifically in mind, hiding enemies cruelly – and punishingly – behind obstacles, preventing the game from flowing and dazzling as it clearly has the potential to. Accomplished and beautiful, then, but Sonic Dash shows that, for Sega, learning from the competition comes at a price – one it’s passed onto its fans.

Due to a heavier emphasis on all-out action, however, the gratifying bullet-cam pay-off becomes tiresome even sooner than it did in V2.

A more novel addition is a crafting system lets you convert items you find into items and potions, but it functions more like a secondary currency than an alchemical minigame. There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Mini Ninjas, but nor is there a reason to give up on genre highlights like Punch Quest and Jetpack Joyride.

Ascension’s biggest success is a colour-coding system that effectively lets you know when you have an opening and when to run. Unblockable attacks are signalled by a player glowing red, white denotes invincibility, and blue signals a player in recovery. It’s a simple, smart system further improved by rock-paper-scissors combat (heavy beats parry beats light beats heavy), cooldown-controlled special moves and a logical, consistent approach to hitstun. Consider our expectations defied: this is the star of the show.

This is a sensitive employment of free-to-play, but despite its presentation and name, Real Racing 3 remains an arcade game in sim clothing, and one hamstrung by its host format. Limitations that keep it firmly in the tail-lights of deeper console experiences.

Three times the protagonists gives you three times the number of toys and an engaging, if thoroughly convoluted, story, but it’s not without cost. What Simon, Trevor and Alucard give to the mechanics and narrative they take from its flow: you still feel gated, even when you’ve got all the gear.

An amusing localisation (“he is cleaning his knife with a complex facial expression”) and some enthusiastically squelchy sound effects add charm to a decent challenge, and there’s enough vigour and character here to make it a worthwhile, if fleeting, diversion.

It’s a game about picking dialogue options that are metaphorically represented as potential moves on the board, but it’s that which goes unsaid that makes its semi-improvised conversations so intriguing.

Thankfully Richard and Alice do manage to engage, the awkward stiltedness to their early conversations naturally easing into a more flowing rapport. Neither are as a delight to read as Alice’s son Barney, however, whose perfectly captured five-year-old’s speech patterns provide both humour and heartbreaking moments of poignancy.

It’s accomplished and inventive, but there’s not enough to quicken the pulse, and you feel relief, rather than satisfaction, when the trickier challenges are conquered. The constant metallic clanks are the sound of a game whose nuts and bolts are fully functional, but this tin man of a game is missing its heart.

Whether she’s huddled up against the cold or sending five men to their doom with an explosive arrow, this is still Lara Croft, one of gaming’s most distinctive heroes – and now she has a personality that extends far beyond the bounds of her bra straps. If the purpose of a reboot is to redefine a character and set them up for the future, then this is a job well done.

This first segment is potent. [March 2013, p.106]