A solid and intricate Armored Core with the best online offering yet, lacking only the visual sheen to make the energy and pace of its combat shine. It's still an acquired taste, but once you've whetted your appetite, it's hard to resist.

It's an attractive game, too, its painterly art style and creative enemy design sullied only by the occasional drop in performance and that persistently unhelpful camera. If wrestling with the right analogue stick is no one's idea of a good time, such frustrations are worth enduring for a daring and sometimes exhilarating boss rush.

With incessant dialogue boxes and the option to tweet every other scrap of text you come across, this second iOS outing from Fable designer Dene Carter has picked up some of the worst habits of smartphone gaming.

The bare-bones Training mode does little to help the inexperienced either. [Apr 2012, p.124]

Sakurai's prints are all over Uprising, providing a comeback that balances depth and accessibility with little compromise. [Apr 2012, p.122]

There's no doubting that Circadia's ingenious, of course: at heart it's a clever idea expressed with stylish economy. In the teasing out of that idea, however, it arguably turns into a game where it's the designer, and not the player, who's truly having most of the fun.

As a free download, Frobisher Says may not be a waste of your money, but there are many better diversions on Vita to occupy your time.

A game betrays its obvious understanding of scratch music with its mechanics: turntablism involves releasing a scratch at exactly the right moment, something that doesn't seem possible here.

SFXT successfully combines the best of the most popular 2D and 3D fighting games in the world, proves Capcom's most newcomer-friendly fighter, and boasts a combat system of bewildering depth. If any company was going to move the genre forward, it seems fitting that it's the one that invented it.

For all its luxurious visuals, it knows little about how to marry them to gameplay, or how to end the suffering of artists who 
see their work butchered to meet gameplay's demands.

It's a resourceful little game, then, mining laudable variety from an economy of ideas. It's amusing, too, littering its backgrounds with visual gags, including a sly reference to Angry Birds - even if one cake-related joke proves a meme too far. And it saves the best for last, with a final level that offers some thrillingly silly catharsis, managing to one-up its most obvious inspiration in the process.

The game occasionally drags, arguably due to representing the bleakness of its environment and the challenges of existing within it a little too keenly. Autosave points are few and far between, which means that on anything above normal difficulty your frequent restarts will result in much repetition. Likewise, I Am Alive's platforming is occasionally cumbersome and inexact. But nevertheless this game offers a journey worth charting, one of physics, social decline and welcome terror in a market overrun by zombies.

It's a third and final chapter, then, with all that implies. It's off-putting to new players, too busy tying up loose ends to dangle any threads of its own, and fails to stand up as its own game in the same manner as its predecessors. But it's also a spectacular, powerfully imagined and dramatically involving final act to one of gaming's richest sci-fi sagas.

It's not perfect, and even skilled players will struggle with some of the more demanding multitasking required for certain scenarios (the level-skip is an acknowledgement of the inconsistent difficulty), but it's clever, cunning and entertaining.

But with Tetsuya Mizuguchi's often bland musical experimentation replaced with some of electronica's finest moments, Electronic Symphony breathes new life into a series that had previously appeared stagnant.

With Delta, Super Stardust has found a pulse. Perhaps all that's missing now is the soul to go with it.

It's a generous package, and even more so given that a purchase of the Vita version nets you a PS3 copy as well, your progress persistent between the two versions. Other launch games may better sell Vita's touch, tilt or AR capabilities, but there is no better advertisement for its connectivity.

Balancing real-time action with tactical micro-management proves beyond Vanpool. With arbitrary limitations placed on an already meagre cash supply, and towers and fortifications proving equally flimsy, what little money is available is best poured into single-use items and permanent ability boosts for Dillon.

Journey's real issue, if it has one, goes much deeper than that. It's a resolutely linear game in which your range of interactions is minimal. For some, that will make it a pretty but hollow novelty; boring, perhaps. But for those who play games to explore strange lands, see beautiful sights and to immerse themselves – for however brief a time – in a new world, Journey is perfect. And what's more, they'll find someone like them to share it with.

Waking Mars is ultimately a game about ecological balance, but it's the balance of a different kind – of art, narrative, and puzzle mechanics - that makes it so very satisfying to play.

When the curtain drops on Binary Domain, you're left with the sense that, while accomplished, this game is largely a rote exercise in genre. It adequately, but not outstandingly, mimics the nuts and bolts of the western cover shooter, while bringing little new of worth to the table.


In looking outside itself for inspiration, SSX has found a worthy infrastructure to establish an online community and culture. But this same approach has found the brand veering away from some of the fun and fireworks of yesteryear, leaving its more seductive silly side out in the cold.

For all its inconsistencies, complexities, inadequacies and oddities, The Last Story offers an entrancing and seamless flow of interesting experiences. And surely that, in the final reckoning, is what counts.

For a game with a premise as simple as kill the aliens before they kill you, Ziggurat's stylishly retro visuals, gleeful arcade precision and deeply interlocking mechanics trigger a chain reaction that kicks off like some interstellar combustion. Not the sound of a world ending. But the sort of bang that would make Richard Dawkins lean back, fold his arms and grin like a chimp.

It's good shooting, of course, pulled off with the studio's signature style, but it's come at the cost of Syndicate's imagination and ambition.

There's a remarkable consistency to the design even as the levels gets steadily bolder until, after hovering vacuums, teleporters, and levers that freeze time, Simogo throws in a climactic boss battle that is as nerve-wracking as it is joyous. It's a compliment to say that Beat Sneak Bandit feels like a Rhythm Tengoku minigame taken to its logical extreme; it's constructed with a precision and a sense of mischief – and, in its final surprise, a generosity of spirit - that echoes the best work of the WarioWare team.

It's a pity that Remedy seems intent on making you eat your soggy story vegetables before tucking into American Nightmare's only real confection.

Packed with detail, both in terms of its environments and mechanics, this is a game that pays back investment in spades. [March 2012, p.122]