There’s more fluency to the [Hitz] gameplay, and the “on fire” element is handier than EA’s aptly named “gamebreaker”.

It's not every day you get to roll a decapitated dominatrix robot head around in the name of quality mobile entertainment.

For your massive 59 pence outlay, you get 27 tricky-as-you-like courses, rendered with the requisite loving care, and the chance to obsess over your times with your equally OCD friends. Honestly, what's not to love?

Dissidia certainly isn't without its faults. The rate of descent once airborne is too slow, and the combat fundamentals occasionally feel jerky compared to more traditional and refined fighters. But these minor criticisms aside, it's a very accomplished fighter that's worth your time - whether you're a fighter nut or Final Fantasy fan.

Stellar Blade has a fair bit of weirdness, but its killer tunes and vibey, flow-state combat - plus a transformative hard mode - are enough to leave you entranced.

It offers highly refined gameplay married with a rich art style, and by acknowledging fan feedback in an effort to make a well-rounded game even more polished, Ultra feels like the work of a developer that's content to please its core audience rather than trying to grab everyone else's attention. That's rare, especially from a studio that was responsible for Resident Evil 6.

If nothing else, it's entirely fitting that a game that's always been brilliantly brainless is now genuinely brain-dead as well. Oh, and I finally got that bloody Mario-themed Achievement. SCORE.

As for its translation to Xbox, it's a revelation. Not only is it as visually faithful as anyone could reasonably expect, with no discernible compromises save for the resolution, but even the controls feel right.

With simple, intuitive controls making combat and exploration a pleasure, what starts off as a fairly routine blade-swishing blizzard soon settles into a more interesting groove. With secret-packed levels offering countless opportunities to poke around, it's a formula that's familiar but satisfying.

Bejeweled 3 is one-more-go gaming at its most polished.

Not everyone is going to enjoy this. Some people will never warm to Ubisoft's anarchic little fiends, many will find the constant enthusiasm draining. This isn't a purchase for hardcore enthusiasts or steely battlefield veterans with a thousand-yard stare and a pico-second response time. The rest of you, should you be able to engage your inner child, could well find a big old slice of the fun pie cooling on your windowsill.

It's not the easiest game for newcomers to approach (the tutorial's dreadful), but even stealth virgins will see the light after an hour or so in the dark, and probably ought to add another mark to the score. Make ours a double.

Innovative, unique and utterly charming in its self-contained universe, it comes highly recommended to open-minded 360 owners.

Ultimately, Madden is a sensational game in the literal sense, delivering unparalleled replayability for those with open minds.

With simple, intuitive controls making combat and exploration a pleasure, what starts off as a fairly routine blade-swishing blizzard soon settles into a more interesting groove. With secret-packed levels offering countless opportunities to poke around, it's a formula that's familiar but satisfying.

It's about getting behind the rhetoric and gaining a meaningful understanding of the many dreadful things we're doing to our home.

Back when all games cost upwards of £30, it wasn't easy to keep up with games like Death Rally. Nowadays, you've got literally no excuse to hold off buying the best top-down racing available on mobile platforms. Better late than never.

In motion, it's a painfully beautiful game: in the saturated richness of its colours and the raw exuberance of its backdrops; in the soaring melody of Magical Sound Shower and the husky elocution of the girl who voices the menus; in the hard, brilliant, arcade brashness of it all; above all, in the unique balance and beauty of its handling.

With simple, intuitive controls making combat and exploration a pleasure, what starts off as a fairly routine blade-swishing blizzard soon settles into a more interesting groove. With secret-packed levels offering countless opportunities to poke around, it's a formula that's familiar but satisfying.

The gameplay is solid enough. Although the level design of the five short campaigns doesn't really inspire, the sticky quirk keeps things interesting and makes replays worthwhile. The higher difficulty levels are insanely punishing, offering plenty of challenge for completists.

It's long, it's tough, it's huge fun, and it's cheap. But it will never be perfect.

And there's the trade-off: the tight, narrative flow of Chaos Rising may be gone, but in its place, there's enormous diversity, and more toys than you could possibly hope for in a £20, standalone expansion.

Better than Midway’s "RedCard," and more violent than the average ice hockey game, Sega Soccer Slam is pure arcade fun, albeit not very long-lived.

It's exactly as the name describes - the ultimate incarnation of the game so far.

An enchanting, emotionally charged visual novel with a new take on deck-building and tarot divination.

But a few missteps and one notable absence can't derail what is otherwise a timeless fighting game in high definition.

Ms. Pac-Man is still a joy to play. Simplicity itself, elegant, addictive, manic and somehow timeless.

For all its borrowings and influences, all its sleights and feints, Eldritch's dark alchemy ultimately lies with the way it uses a blocky, cheerily primitive art style, silly sound effects and a surprisingly forgiving level of challenge to summon the kind of creeping dread that H.P. himself would be delighted with.

Most importantly of all, it's re-introduced a thoughtfulness to play that's been absent for too long. As the game settles down after the disruptive influx of new gadgets and gizmos, you sense there are plenty more remarkable inventions hiding in plain sight, but they're waiting for a curious mind to start tinkering with them.

But if you can deal with that, the useless camera doesn't sound like a showstopper and motion sickness isn't a problem, then strap on your simian capsules and spout some unintelligible Japlish, because the monkeys are back and your Cube needs this game.

It's a Ubisoft open-worlder to its core, but this spin on the world of Avatar has some really special moments.

Right now, though, the game as it stands is a rough diamond - very good, bordering on great thanks to a regular stream of comprehensive patches from Funcom.

Gemini Rue gets things right from the off by virtue of set piece intrigue, inclement weather, sharp writing and half-decent voice acting. And unlike most modern day point and clickers, it doesn't hold your hand at every opportunity.

Rockstar's skill in creating a believable, functioning world with a distinct, coherent and consistent atmosphere is peerless. The broad-brush vision is masterful.

A fantastically involving and solid fighting game, enhanced by being set in one of the most imaginative and beautiful universes in the medium.

Offers quite a different approach to any other RTS games we've seen recently, and neatly occupies a middle ground between the incredibly hardcore "Total War" franchise and the more lightweight gameplay of something like "Age of Mythology."

Every time you think you've had enough, a spark of inspiration drives you on to the next one, and the next thing you know, you've missed your stop and you don't even mind.

Sure, the slightly inexact nature of the controls make it somewhat hard to be as effective as you might be, but The Hero is still well worth checking out.

The relative simplicity, the choice of structured or freeform play, the ability to mingle with your populace... it's all very successful. If Monte Cristo could just turn the volume up a fraction on the interesting social conflict dimension, and add a few extra building models to make skylines a bit more varied.

Even when it stumbles, it stands as a fine reminder of why LucasArts at its prime was seen as the industry at its best, and few other adventures have deservedly gathered so much affection. It was an instant classic back in 1998. It's still very much a journey worth taking today, albeit ideally with a walkthrough.

Once you're onto the medium levels and beyond, you'll be cajoled into smack-talking the level designers and laughing like a drain when it all slots into place, as if you're exacting some strange form of revenge by solving their unseemly riddle. It's that kind of game.

Go and bust some heads and sever some spiky limbs in the name of slightly disturbing entertainment.

Not only is it quite cheap and full of play options, it offers something more than any previous Tetris game in its ten-player mode.

Beneath the glorious tech, and once the writing relaxes a little, Sunset Overdrive's wonderfully lurid and heartfelt - a bit like playing an old 4AD album sleeve. If you get that reference, you'll probably get this, too.

If you like collecting things, going fast, beating times, posting scores... If you like videogames, basically, you ought to like this.

Had the crash problems not made it into the retail code, we might have scored it higher, but Rockstar's programmers are in detention this week sorting it out, so hopefully within a few days of your reading this we won't feel like beating them up behind the bike-sheds as we do now. The fact we're so happy to be playing Bully again in spite of this ought to speak for itself.

Majestic in scope, impressive in detail, Assassin's Creed Shadows honours the beauty of feudal Japan, even if its strongest moments are saved for the personal stories of two protagonists.

You also have the delightful option of capturing squealing princesses and holding them to ransom (also present in a dedicated princess ransoming mode), while also roasting any daring thieves that try to make off with your gold. Cheek.

Fun though DKC is, it is - as many have said in the past - rather on the short side. Stumbling through the game with a fairly good idea of where everything was, it took us about four hours to get to the final boss and dispatch him, picking up some 70 per cent of the game's secrets along the way.

With numerous unlockables and online leaderboards to fight it out on, this is a fine first attempt from developer Binary Takeover, and well worth losing a few hours to.

It is, simply, a game where you want to see what happens next, because whatever does happen next will be delicate, beautiful and pleasurable, and never so hurried as to overburden the spectacle and sense of immersion.

Split/Second requires exactly the right combination of skill, memory and reflexes from you while maintaining a permanent high of tactile feedback, sensory assault and knife-edge excitement. If that's Black Rock's elevator pitch for a modern arcade racer: sold.

Remnant 2 is an ambitious sequel stuffed with delightful - and deadly - surprises.

Heroes could be a whole lot prettier. There's a hell of a lot of washed-out colour and bad camera wobbles in there.

Even for those people who hated the previous generations of the strategic break and enter, I suspect you'll come away loving this.

All round, it's a compendium of disappointment, and something to which only super-hardcore Ridge Racer fans need subject themselves.

A taut, time-hopping horror game that playfully subverts expectations at every step, and is all the more refreshing for it.

Almost every area of the game can be customised in line with your tastes to the extent that, if you ask nicely, Tiger will probably even dress up as Sailor Moon and call you Susan.

As it is, it's a game that veers between excellence and anguish a little bit too often.

But for those who can shrug off the contradictions and the limitations, ignore the tearing cityscape and lingering qualms about value for money, this will shove you so deeply into the experience of being in someone else's body, and taking it on a terrifying, breakneck joyride, that nothing else will matter.

Star Ocean isn't a game that everyone will instantly like, thanks to the real-time battle system which is likely to divide opinions significantly, but it's a game which has moments of absolute genius, wrapped up in a solid, competent but not particularly remarkable whole.

Moonring adds modern convenience to a classic Ultima-style RPG to create an approachable and appealing adventure with a huge amount of depth and discovery.

Best to think of this release as planting a seed, rather than an end in itself, with potential to grow into something quite wonderful with some canny updates from Relentless and a dash of imagination from the players. For now, it's nothing more, or less, than the most polished and entertaining quiz experience on this generation of consoles.

The bosses, too, are consistently inventive.

Santa Ragione delivers a subversive, sometimes shocking, often funny first-person narrative horror that, while perhaps a little insubstantial, remains an engagingly unconventional exploration of some timely themes.

A cheap, polished online-enabled offering that fans and newcomers should embrace heartily to their bosoms. It's exactly the sort of quality offering that Microsoft should be extracting from developers of Live Arcade titles and one that should bring a smile to the faces of any right thinking gamers.

While the absence of multiplayer means it won't last you as long as previous instalments, new control options have allowed the developers to line the seams of Drake's adventure with flashy tassels and detailing that make for a varied and entertaining outing - perhaps even more so than its big brothers.

The truth is that Hudson's perennial classic is still best played in its original form without the associated fluff, so if you've held out for the last 27 years, perhaps it's time you succumbed to being continually blown into little chunks by your friends.

Those savvy enough to see beyond Yakuza 2's slightly dated visuals will enjoy a richly rewarding openworld brawler - one that's every bit as immersive and entertaining as the original.

At less than the price that airports charge for a packet of Extra, Quell is yet another way to make you feel Zen about spending hundreds of pounds on Apple hardware.

This is a game about Going Fast and Jumping, and, at last, its designers have realised that that's exactly what we want to do with Sonic. The Going Fast is brilliant, the Jumping is fantastic, and we have big smiles on our faces. Sonic is back.

With spectacular landscapes and soothing music, Europa is a deeply zen experience - yet is also capable of delivering some hard-hitting messages.

Graphically Syphon Filter is impressive and the musical score is utterly fantastic, though unfortunately the voice-over work features more racially stereotypical accents than your average mobile phone ring-tone advert.

This is not a pompous blockbuster, nor a long-term proposition. This is about men hitting each other with swords, and the hitting part works great. Chivalry is a simple pleasure, and a funny game indeed.

It's charm which cements Dawn of War in the affections. In fact, it charms so casually that the contrary parts of the gaming world will just lazily dismiss it as a bimbo. It really isn't. Charm lures us in, but there's enough happening upstairs to keep it firmly in our affections.

It's expertly paced, with bite-sized levels that walk a tightrope between pull-your-hair-out maddening and knowingly easy – and while it can be overwhelming and cause you to doubt yourself, it's always worth it for that moment of relief where it all slots into place.

The action starts off nice and gently before smashing you around the room with a two-by-four. No one said that puzzle genius couldn't be tempered by abusive madness, and you take the rough with the smooth in this game. Bloody Chillingo.

It doesn't play out quite like anything else, veering between brutal and whimsical all the time, and at its best it hits that shooter sweet spot: when your brain is absorbed, fingers moving in advance, the music's pumping, and your eyes observe genius skills emerging from some subterranean consciousness. So please don't quote this out of context, but I'm a big fan of DRM.

It's exactly what meets the eye - which is to say a good-hearted festival of a game about talking robots shooting and smashing each other, shouting itself raw-throated in joy at the toys it gets to play with, but no more than that.

FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage isn't perfect, and doesn't quite live up to its promise; but it's sitting on the doorstep of absolute, legendary greatness. Everyone with a spark in their soul for high speed, ultra-destructive fun should play this game, and cross their fingers that just that tiny bit of extra care can be lavished on the next game in the series.

A great tennis sim. It's certainly less fun than "Virtua Tennis" (especially the career mode) and it's damn frustrating at times, but it's still the best representation of strawberries and cream we've ever seen.

Pokopia succeeds in capturing the spirit of Pokémon's past without sacrificing its uniqueness, as one of the best spin-offs the franchise has ever seen.

Continuing improvements to the 3D match engine also help drag it kicking and screaming into the present, although it's still a long way short of FIFA Manager in that regard. But, frankly, sod that. The dogged purist in me prefers to see the match unfold via elaborate text commentary, rather than see the painful truth of my tactical inadequacies laid bare.

The thing that really marks The Darkness out, we'll repeat, is its "minute-to-minute gameplay". You can't argue with that. It's a game which offers thrills arguably as intense as anything the genre has to offer. It is, for the most part, an extraordinarily entertaining game with precious little fat around the edges,and often technically stunning.

While on the surface of it Darksiders feels like a game with a lot of good ideas but only a few of its own, where even a brief flying section on an angelic mount owes rather a lot to Panzer Dragoon, overall the silly old story and wonderful art style give terrific heft to the universe, and the clockwork of the puzzles and game systems are precision-engineered in a manner that you come to trust implicitly.

iOS has got the version of Clash of Heroes that it deserves, rather than the one that it's capable of.

It feels familiar, but it's unlike anything else - and even on DS, where good RPGs are plentiful, this is in the top tier. It should have been called Awesome Robot-Riding Dog Adventures, of course. But you can't have everything.

A thoroughly enjoyable game that matches its predecessor in every way. It's true that the plot never becomes as epic as Golden Sun hinted it might, and it's also true that the game will be a little too 'freeform' for some RPG fans, but it is basically the middle of a story - and thus plays as such.

It's hard, it's obtuse. It's big, it's beautiful. It's cruel, it's arbitrary. It's an adventure.

Simultaneously brain-frying and fiendishly satisfying, Ancient Frog is another puzzle revelation. And with 100 beautifully presented levels to unpick, it's a keeper.

By putting accessibility and instant enjoyment at the forefront, 2K Czech has cast all the old frustrations aside at a stroke, and the fact the developer has eased passage into the game without sacrificing any of its depth is also remarkable. It feels as though a balance has been struck, which should suit players of all skill levels.

A must-have purchase for any action gaming fan, and is a testament to what can still be done with the genre with the proper amount of thought.

A subtly tweaked and well fleshed out return to the dirty streets of Dunwall, and its handful of shortcomings and taste for blood over stealth are never really enough to stop it from being essential.

It's not big or boisterous, the characters don't squeak at you in comedy accents and you don't get to unlock Bowser or anything (at least I should hope not), and that's what high-end golf is often like: quietly dignified, a sport of concentration. The occasional lucky chip-in is satisfying, but the real pleasure comes from getting it right because you thought about it.

EA should take a page out of FIFA's book here: focus on the game. Every iteration - pre-alpha onwards - sit down and play a full game, 15-minute quarters. If it feels 'right', then you're on the right path.

War of the Roses is modest and pared-down, then - but it offers a challenging, chaotic and sometimes comic take on multiplayer. It's an innovative game and I'd like to see it succeed, I'd like to see it grow and, quite honestly, I'd like to see it turn into an eSport.

You'll laugh, you'll die, you'll blow the teeth out of a wandering Borok the size of a small camper van. Compared to the heights of Mr Torgue's Campaign of Carnage, with its masterful blend of Kayfabe jokes and sustained bar-fight intensity, Hammerlock can't quite match up. But it provides several great new reasons to return to Pandora, and that's enough to seal the deal.

By putting accessibility and instant enjoyment at the forefront, 2K Czech has cast all the old frustrations aside at a stroke, and the fact the developer has eased passage into the game without sacrificing any of its depth is also remarkable. It feels as though a balance has been struck, which should suit players of all skill levels.