While you won't necessarily win without some loyal subjects from your friends list, there's a deceptive amount of fun you can have while trying. [Oct 2009, p.94]

That teetering battle between pride and strategy than ensues every time you decide whether to comprehensively flatten a villain with an unnecessary monosyllabic flourish or gamble on saving it for your next target, hoping the board doesn’t get scrambled before you get a chance to show off.

Puzzle Bobble's hardly become a bad game, it just doesn't seem interested in getting any better. [Oct 2009, p.99]

Sports Resort is controlling, and even solemn, about just how much fun you should be having with it. And that’s a development that should chill every Wii owner to the bone.

‘Splosion Man lives up to his name, providing a burst of exciting, arresting fresh IP that significantly changes the landscape around.

Every moment feels like it's been lavished with attention; Little King's Story is as rich as it is long, and it's a very lengthy game indeed. [May 2009, p.90]

What felt greedy before is on yet more dubious ground here - the feeling of tactical scope missing from the singleplayer campaign is largely due to Square Enix cutting out the goods to sell at a later date. [Oct 2009, p.99]

A simple, finely tuned and comprehensive shooter that only rarely wobbles. [Sept 2009, p.100]

A perfectly sized, expertly-crafted romp, Pacific gives other download games their marching orders. [Aug 2009, p.97]

ArmA 2 isn’t just dogmatic and unforgiving – it’s also very awkward in its construction and the weight of its ambition frequently proves too much for the sometimes-brilliant main campaign to pull off. Nonetheless, its vast, detailed world and unapologetic dynamism turn the game from sandbox to snowglobe – something you can’t resist shaking up just to see how it looks.

There's enough skill on display to suggest that these tales might actually be worth telling. [Sept 2009, p.99]

A rare bit of vindication for Nintendo's oft-misused service. [Sept 2009, p.101]

It's the first game we can recall, for instance, to feature a them tune comprising a single note. [Sept 2009, p.96]

A charming jaunt. [Sept 2009, p.94]

Far more polished than its ragged forebear. [Aug 2009, p.100]

A debut of rare success in the genre: one at once fresh yet familiar, both visually arresting and mechanically enticing. [Apr 2010, p.99]

Heroes consistently relies on its cartoon charm to plaster over its messier elements. [Sept 2009, p.92]

A clever game, then, but not a particularly fulfilling one. [Sept 2009, p.99]

Genre-defining as it is, the drama of Fight Night remains squarely within the ropes. [Aug 2009, p.103]

Nintendo is claiming that The Conduit might attract Halo fans to its console, but this game isn’t fit to wait Master Chief’s table.

Atlus succeeds in creating another idiosyncratic concoction of narrative and play, one that twists convention as often as it builds upon it. [Sept 2009, p.98]

The components here function and rarely frustrate, but the machine they comprise only manufactures mediocrity. [Sept 2009, p.95]

Even if some of the fundamental stuff has been sacrificed to the creation of this huge world, Fuel still makes it across the finish line on a far-from-empty tank. [July 2009, p.97]

A charming adventure, and a lengthy one, but the overwhelming amount of rough edges rather spoil any indulgent feelings toward its foibles. [Aug 2009, p.99]

So, then: the best expansion so far and the game at its worst. Such a contradiction could only be made by Bethesda.

Unite doesn’t offer the kind of transformation at its higher levels that you might expect – the essential purpose is the same throughout: kill monsters, craft new shin pads out of dino-bladders, and swap your pig’s wings for a magician’s hat. Nonetheless, these simple motivations give way to a huge depth of execution which empowers and requires four players.

With a little more in the way of technical polish and a few more hours of playtime thrown in, this would have been one of the best film-based games of all time. [July 2009, p.90]

As a script, Flower, Sun And Rain is, for at least two thirds, hugely witty and effortlessly mad, eliciting enough regular laughs to cover for the game's otherwise painfully tedious forms of interaction. [JPN Import; Dec 2008, p.96]