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.

Natsume's anaemic offering is a bit of a Halloween zombie, in other words. It's shambling, it's barely animated, and you really ought to avoid it.

Add the odd cruelly-placed save point, and you've got an adventure that occasionally explores the agonies, as well as the ecstasies, of gaming's past. At least it's honest.

As audiovisually accomplished as any game has been, at least on PC, its deference to prescribed spectacle is an assiduous realisation of blockbuster gaming tastes, with an increasing reliance on 'video' rather than 'game'. EA wants Battlefield 3 to be all things to all people, and it's right in thinking that the addition of a singleplayer duck shoot doesn't detract from its other substantial offerings. But in this act of imitation, and limitation, it disregards the choice and tactical empowerment which make the series near-peerless and preciously idiosyncratic in multiplayer.

Festival Of Blood has plenty of ideas, very few of which are its own, but such is the way of the open-world superhero game. Where it succeeds is in casting aside the main game's mechanics in favour of fast, graceful movement around one of the most generous worlds available on the download services.

This is without doubt the most comprehensive entry in Nippon Ichi's once-trailblazing series, packaging its accumulated ideas alongside a clutch of innovations of its own. And yet repetition has dulled the appeal, with the complexities acting as a tall barrier to newcomers while the innovations are simultaneously too meagre to sate any but the most eager devotee.

The inclusion of a food journal, detailing the ingredients you've used and those that haven't yet been found, will be manna for completists in another sparky, generous and amusing offering from Adult Swim.

It's a breezily entertaining flight through seven coloured environments, though it never quite generates the same feeling of mastery as its inspiration: reaching the Violet Zone for the second time isn't as significant an achievement as diving down to the undulating surface of Island 9.

Squids is clever, but it's a cleverness that can slowly give way to devious manipulation: the game has fallen for the easy money of microtransactions, and it's fallen hard.

The present console cycle is expected to last nearly a decade, and there will inevitably be developers advocating the need for more sophisticated tools. But just like Machu Picchu, the Pyramids and every other engineering marvel of antiquity, Uncharted 3 will stand as a reminder to future generations of gamers that enough problem-solving imagination can turn any old trowel into a magic wand.

How apt that this ultimate tale of hero-making should see Nintendo's hardware become the console it was always meant to be.

It's too easy and basic for adults and likely too mellow for children drawn in by its bubbly aesthetic. It's a shame, because Okabu's is a quietly charismatic world, one destined to be overlooked thanks to its grind of an opener and failure to match its visual vigour with mechanics that haven't been used better elsewhere.

The seamless integration of voice commands into a polished, thoughtful upgrade is Harmonix's slick finishing move. Dance Central 2 is a typical music game sequel – it works better, offers more, yet feels fundamentally the same – but it's a practised improvement to an already eye-catching routine.

So if Arkham Asylum was defined by its limits, Arkham City is a careful, considered exercise in stripping those limits away. Its open city lets players be a different kind of Batman to the stealthy predator of Asylum – this is the Batman of dropped smoke pellets and theatrical getaways, the Batman with an ear to the ground for the strong picking on the weak, and the Batman who floats above the city with a gothic majesty.

It's brash and beautiful, and in looking outside its own boundaries has found fresh ways to keep you coming back to the danger zone.