If Rock of Ages eventually runs out of variety, it never runs out of charm. The game has a magnificent sense of momentum throughout, tugging you downhill towards the enemy's gates and upwards through the strata of Western culture. It is an oddball offering in every sense.

One of the best games on iOS, a testing blend of strategy and crisis management with a sharp tux and a winning smile.

It sends traditional multiplayer mores into a dizzying spin and, bolstered by a cheery script and amicable tone, creates ever-evolving thrills across the course of the singleplayer campaign.

Occasionally, the glow of sheer ambition nudges polish-related problems away from the light, allowing a few glorious moments to gaze upon what EYE could've been. But un-met ambition isn't enough.

iBlast Moki 2, with its slightly bland charm, unremarkable origins and questionable English, isn't going to be the next Angry Birds. But while playing, you occasionally think it should be.

The only black mark is for the controls: the on-screen buttons feel reasonably responsive most of the time, but you'll experience a definite stickiness when things heat up.

Is it better than Flick Kick Football? It lacks the purity of Pik Pok's original, and isn't nearly so charming. But where Flick Kick lapses into formula after you reach a high enough score, Flick Soccer gets even more challenging – and in full flow, it can provide a magical experience.

The gravitational force is strong with this one.

From its sluggish, restrictive start, Human Revolution opens into a world of scintillating possibility in which your actions' significance reaches far into the future. And with something like that difficult future approaching fast, Human Revolution achieves a rare accolade: it's not just a great game, but a timely one.

It's a potent return to form for Takahashi, then, a glowing comeback for the Japanese RPG, and an injection of creativity for some tired hardware. Xenoblade Chronicles manages to impress, enrich and, best of all, inspire wonder.

It's never worse than pleasant, and the evergreen villages, the jaunty swagger of its cows and donkeys and the peaceful expansion of your city are exactly the kind of recharging experiences Taylor talked about providing four years ago. It's only a shame that the repetition, and a lack of anything to look forward to, mean that you eventually realise your grass still needs to be cut.

But the lack of crispness in the controls undermines everything else here, and too often does the same to the player.

The laser-like focus on the personal side of management is to the exclusion of all else – the lack of a match engine is one thing, but there's no detail whatsoever to the football your team is playing.

The game's underlying sense of humour and its obvious affection for giant robots save it from feeling ordinary. [Sept 2011, p.110]

Zombie Gunship obviously has its influences, but it works them into something surprising: a slow-mo high-score shooter, a grainy panorama of survival horrors, and a greater sense of an undead horde than the rest of the App Store's zombie shooters put together.

It arrives fully formed, with a challenge and aesthetic that's beautifully intertwined and finely crafted. Joyous.

A beautiful disappointment – a great look in search of a great game to go with it. The genre template may be rock solid, but the end result is an adventure that's been strung across a fault line.

Prose With Bros is irresistible: the interface is clean and simple, voting is snappy, and the algorithm producing each game's jumble of words delivers perfectly innocent but eminently corruptible English every time.

A smart idea, executed in a very controlled fashion, but could do with letting its hair down occasionally.

It's a tribute to Me Monstar that, despite lasting a good few hours, you want more.

Unusual, startlingly innovative and engaging. Its nuanced storytelling offers something few games have been able to meaningfully achieve – true conundrum, with little indication from the game telling you what you're supposed to do to be 'good'. Frustrating, beautiful and bizarre, Catherine stays with you.

Solatorobo's short attention span is occasionally 
its undoing – good ideas and mechanics are dropped 
as readily as bad – and the button-mashing combat 
can occasionally fatigue, but this is an adventure both 
epic and bite-sized, with the kind of charm that 
makes its weaknesses easy to forget, and hard 
not to forgive.

QuBit is only held back by itself: as a linear drive-into-things score attack game, it's a great one. But it never quite unfolds in the way that the very greatest do – a Space Giraffe or Geometry Wars – to reveal layer after layer of variation.

It's totally faithful, and if you're of a certain age worth it without question for the nostalgia hit and sheer fizz of the nutty robots and explosions.

Great concept; questionable delivery.

From Dust's not magnificent because of its breezy intricacy and rugged grasp of geology. It's magnificent because it's designed with a playful deity in mind. It's built for a god who knows that to succeed is human, 
but to err – and to be creatively led astray time after time – is truly divine.

If the Old West is anything, it's a giant myth, and one that the Call Of Juarez games have always embodied. What The Cartel replaces this with – a mishmash of 
The Shield and conspiracy theories – is a much less substantial vision, played out within a world with no real resonance to it.

Old hands will still find much of the personality and singular vision of the franchise intact, but it's the newcomers, ironically, who might find Insect Armageddon a jarring mix of old-fashioned thrills and modern gameplay trends.