An amazing game, easily one of the best I've played in any medium. Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 is its best video game translation yet, a perfectly pitched blend of hard strategy and endless tinkering with unlocks that just keep on coming.

After spending several days exclusively on Close Quarters matches, I dipped into a Rush match on Kharg Island and in the first five minutes shot down a helicopter with a rocket launcher, crashing it into an enemy jet for a spectacular double kill. That is why I play Battlefield.

The true strength of Heroes of Ruin is in the pleasing flexibility of the online experience - and it's a model Nintendo itself could learn a few things from.

Spectacularly miserable licensed fare - a tie-in game that recalls the bad old days when a movie title was leased out to some mom-and-pop developer in the middle of Siberia and put together with the help of a broken woollen loom and old chopsticks.

This compilation captures Ratchet & Clank at their innovative, genre-bending best. Great games at a great price make for a compelling if disappointingly businesslike package. If you have any fondness for the platforming genre, you owe it to yourself to sample this greatest hits compilation from arguably the last worthy faces to grace the genre.

A strategy smorgasbord rather than a focused expansion of any one area.

Grasshopper's latest really is a bit of a lollipop: it's sugary, colourful, insubstantial - and perhaps a bit sickly with it.

4am is too obfuscated for serious music producers who will grow frustrated at the limited number of samples and the lack of visual feedback over which tracks and effects are active at any one time. And the experience is also too inscrutable for beginners, who will find themselves lost in the matrix of noise, unsure of how it may be truly directed or tamed. A fascinating toy, then, but a toy nonetheless.

Virtua Fighter may no longer be at the cutting edge, but Final Showdown proves that it still runs deeper than any of its peers.

Babel Rising has a killer hook, but ultimately fails to use it for much more than the basics. Its entertainment value is simple and occasionally cathartic, but is exhausted far too early.

A bad game? Not really: just an underwhelming one. Your pulse may quicken occasionally, but your world is unlikely to turn upside down.

When I finished Floating Cloud God Saves the Pilgrims, thanks to liberal use of the restart button, not a man had been left behind. It's a question of self-respect. Not many games can make you feel like that.

Velocity looks like a blast from the past and plays like anything but; it's some sort of triumph of substance over style. That sounds like a good thing, and it is, but a little more of the latter wouldn't have hurt.

Harley Quinn's Revenge doesn't offer much that you won't have seen before, but it's unexpectedly tart and pleasantly grim. It's a chance to get back to the city, to rough up its thugs once more, and to leave with a few new bruises and a few extra memories.

Is it that surprising that Joy Ride Turbo seems a little confused? Not really, I guess.

It's the little things that add up, one by one, to an often hypnotically bland, slapdash campaign. The core is sound enough, but Burning Skies is far too shabby in places for what is supposed to be the flagship first-party shooter on the Vita - indeed, the flagship shooter on handhelds, full stop.

It's a solid adventure game with high production values and sharp design. There's a courageous allure to an indie team trying to stand toe-to-toe with LucasArts' masterpieces, and that they've come this close with their first entry in the genre is no minor accomplishment.

The Eternity Clock is shambolic and underfed, even by the Timelord's previous low gaming standards.

Gravity Rush's mission structure may not be all that special - it's basically follow the waypoint, collect this, fight that - but the place you're exploring definitely is, and the way you get around that place is even better still.

You'll love pretty much every minute, and then you'll move on, and the 'downloadable game' suspicion will suddenly make sense: Dirt Showdown's wonderful, but it's probably also a flash in the pan. As long as you know that going in, then you shouldn't be disappointed.

While Future Soldier risks losing itself in the crowd of similar widescreen War on Terror blockbusters, it at least borrows its elements wisely, serves them up with style and polish, and retains enough of its strategic core to make it an easy recommendation for those hungry for another tour of duty.

Diablo 3 is more than slick, and more than deep. It's a turbo-charged romp through the conventions of action, role-playing and online games that plays to the gallery but tears up the rulebook on the sly. It has been awfully compromised by its launch and by the lack of an offline mode, but it deserves better than to be remembered for that. And I'm certain it won't be.

If anything, it's the Move controller rather than that clumsy apprentice or his mysterious cat that emerges as Sorcery's true star. If you're an eight-year-old kid, this short burst of adventure is going to offer you an afternoon or two of vivid fantasy with a wand in your hand and an arsenal of spells in your head, and your only major complaint will be that it doesn't last a few hours longer.

Ambitious, grand, at once derivative and pioneering, Dragon's Dogma may not be a classic but it's an important title nonetheless - the first example of a blockbuster Japanese RPG attempting to marry its own heritage with contemporary Western expressions. Expectedly, coming as it does from an action game developer, its jewels are to be found in the dynamic combat, stat-tweaking party-building and defining boss battles.

What the game lacks in ambition and depth, though, it makes up for in the ageless pleasure and pain of a finely-balanced multiplayer battle. The ability to dip in and out for a quick, engaging match is a compelling proposition on a handheld. But after seven long years, it's a shame there aren't bigger ideas to rally around.

You can't escape the feeling that Rockstar just isn't as good at a pure third-person shooter as it is with the open worlds of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, and in this linear context it's much harder to put up with its usual missteps in mechanics and difficulty.

What impressed in 2007 is no longer enough, and while Starhawk is a perfectly fine entry in the third-person multiplayer shooter genre, it's unlikely to inspire much long-term passion in its current state.

It's better with Move because it was made for it. It's not, though, reason enough to buy one. But if you do have Sony's under-supported device stuffed in a drawer, Datura is a flawed experiment that's worth a look if only because it reaches towards - and occasionally touches - something that feels genuinely fresh.

It's a good deal less aimless in this new 360 version, which makes a few notable concessions to accessibility for this notoriously inscrutable game.

If there is a poignancy to A Valley Without Wind, it's that you really are playing through a post-apocalyptic world, just one that's failed creatively rather than ecologically. The designers were too ambitious, built to high, and you're free to explore what's left.

It lacks the ambition and style of some of its four-wheeled contemporaries, and you could argue that this license would have been better served by a semi-simulation like Milestone's own SBK. But by focusing on what makes motocross fun to watch rather than ride, it replicates the excitement of jumping from lip to lip astride a two-stroke tearaway... just about.

This is not a sophisticated game in ethos or execution: it's a series of environments in which you shoot men's balls off in slow motion. But this singular calling is, on the whole, well served, and Sniper Elite V2's perfunctory ancillary mechanics don't distract from the practice of cinematic Nazi gelding.

There's simply not a single thing that Risen 2 does well, not its stilted combat, not its transparent towns, and definitely not its plot, which feels like something you'd come up with after passing out with the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD menu music in the background. Then again, there's nothing it does badly either, so it's no thief.

It doesn't really work, as the game never finds the right way to balance the two modes of play, but this brief flicker of ambition offers just enough ballast to prevent this otherwise tiresomely unremarkable game from sinking completely.

This is a deep, engaging, beautiful game, a welcome alternative to DOTA and League of Legends for the console crowd.

By turns clumsy and clever, annoying and addictive, Fable Heroes isn't as different from the series that inspired it as it initially seems to be. It turns out one of the golden rules of being Albion's king also applies here: surround yourself with good people and you'll enjoy yourself all the more.

Judged against any reasonable criteria, Modern Warfare 3's first serving of extras is an unmistakable success. Fun and challenging Spec Ops missions, plus excellent maps that have been precision-engineered to complement the COD play style, all add up to an essential download.

There's no excuse to the get the basics this wrong and there's no reason why slicing your way through a wall of enemies shouldn't be fun. Yet there's nothing that's fun here, only a monotonous bloody grind that copies everything from its peers except their polish.

Me? I would grudgingly buy it, despite feeling that I was being charged too much for too little. I guess that makes me part of the problem.

This is still an explosive, exhilarating and sometimes rather exhausting game in which the heroes have sharp hands and bottomless appetites for innocent bystanders and the villains expire in floods of gore and take whole city blocks with them as they go. By this point, Prototype doesn't feel like a sandbox series in its own right so much as the mad, babbling id of the entire open-world genre - with all the inconsistencies and extravagances that implies.

Another one of those weird little offerings that is as much a place as it is a game: an old tree filled with strange life, in which dazzling secrets lurk under every stone. Click!

It's true that Lone Survivor owes a lot to the atmosphere of early Silent Hill, and there are a few thematic nods to David Lynch's '90s weirdo drama, Twin Peaks. But beneath them lies an intricate and unique game that takes the best of old-style survival horror and warps it into something all of its own. It's brave, uncompromising, and a little bit knowing - and, crucially, it's got more than enough substance to back up its style.

It's a scope and scale that can be daunting, but it allows for an unparalleled level of player agency within an RTS.

It's hard to dwell on missed opportunities when a game gets the core gameplay so right, though. The emulation is superb, the physics are spot on and the prospect of more tables to come is downright tantalising. Between this and Pinball FX, flipper fans now have the best of both worlds.

Despite these reservations, Skullgirls is a welcome addition to the genre's bustling roster. While Street Fighter 4 has acted as the catalyst of a fighting game revival, for the most part Japan has led that charge, with few Western studios chancing their hand at the genre and next to none of their games featuring on the tournament circuit. So an American-made game that not only understands the fundamentals but is able to build upon them in interesting ways is a welcome sight, even when the execution around the core is lacking.

As with so many gaming oddities, Cell is haunted by the ghost of the game it could have been. Though, unlike so many of them, Cell barely ever lets you get bored. The screen's always bursting with poison voxels, the world s always a little bit of a mystery.

Middle-aged role-players should need no encouragement to plunge into Grimrock's depths, but for new players discovering the genre through sprawling epics like Skyrim, its robust reliance on the strength of squares will make it a refreshing experience.

It offers simple, one-player gameplay that uses leaderboards to provoke excitement and competition among strangers, and in this sense it has a lot in common with the original Xbox Live Arcade games. The way that it makes its challenging content accessible to a majority of players, however, is what singles it out as one of the best.

Tribes Ascend is, by more than 300kmhh, the most exciting first-person shooter I've played in years.

Pineapple Smash Crew's weapons are by far its strongest point, an arsenal well engineered enough to support a much more intense game. Here they're wasted on a shooter that starts slowly and never speeds up, with solid foundations but nothing on top.

It's a slightly old-school adventure with a vibe reminiscent of Castlevania (especially the PlayStation 2 sequels). But while those games under-delivered on a compelling world with a consistent structure, Pandora's Tower will draw you in and make you care.

The Witcher 2 has an air of unique wonder about it. There's a weight and detail to the mythology that is beguiling, but CD Projekt's skill has been in making this relevant and meaningful to the player.

The simple joy of exploration is at the very heart of the appeal of video games. In Fez, it's absolutely unfettered.

For the faithful, it comes highly recommended. It's newcomers who should really consider giving this a try, though. Carve your way through the crude visuals, archaic menus and seemingly inexplicable features and you may just find your new favourite game.

Mutant Blobs Attack is exactly the sort of game Vita needs lots of if is to survive and thrive as a platform. It's got the pick-up-and-play moreishness of the best of iOS with a level of complexity only possible on bespoke gaming hardware.

A game that has a great little concept, a wonky campaign, AI bots that aren't quite up to the challenge of challenging you and somewhat dodgy netcode. It's incredibly frustrating, because the core concept works, and it works well. It's just all the rest that's falling apart at the seams.

It's a game that doesn't have the luxury of distracting you with clever mechanics and satisfying challenges to excuse its lack of narrative. It's just you and the story and how exactly you digest it. If you're interested in dystopian sci-fi and intriguing mysteries and like getting angry about patriarchal misogyny, then it's certainly something you could enjoy.

Kinect Rush certainly lives up to its title, but only for the first hour or so. After that, the rush wears off and the grind sets in. That wide-open field turns out to be not so wide and not so open after all.

The Emperor's Treasure doesn't just have rhythm: it also has soul.

In what's turning out to be a regular Kinect refrain, then, try not to think of this as a flawed game so much as one that's been quietly and consistently undermined by its hardware.

Like the hardware it lives on, this is the PlayStation brand getting to grips with the era of iOS and Android - and the results, while rather conflicted in this case, are interesting.

Some of DMC HD's content is far from classic, and there are undeniably rough edges. But as a package it offers two fighting games of exceptional quality, with Devil May Cry slick and stylish enough to overshadow its creaky camera, and Devil May Cry 3 still one of the genre's highpoints.

An incoherent and clumsy compilation, one driven more by brand synergy than any creative imperative.

Wrecked offers a tissue-thin single-player mode, poor frame-rate and camera, bland track design and clumsy online multiplayer, all for a premium price with expensive community-splitting day-one DLC.

Superb. It's a game that can be played in 30-minute bursts or sessions that stretch long into the night, and its balance of instant gratification and long-term pay-off is beautifully done. It's the perfect game for people who love the idea of raiding, but can't afford to invest the time all MMOs require before the really good stuff - and all for free.

We really should expect better treatment for titles of this calibre. Nothing better sums up the sheer laziness of it all than a glaring typo scrolling past in the new credits.

This is a cautionary tale: nowhere in Unbounded does it tell you that you have to hold down the drift button the whole way through a corner, going against instincts built up by every other arcade racer ever, in order to have fun. When you do hold it down, though, Ridge Racer Unbounded is brilliant.

There's no denying that this year's edition plays a good game of golf, and the changes to the game's core systems are well-judged - but they're arguably not enough to make it worth buying again for anyone but the most ardent fan of the sport. While the likes of FIFA have made clear progress in recent iterations, it's hard to see what benefit there is to having a Tiger game every year.

Bit.Trip's carefully poised fusion of old-school difficulty and retro-futuristic aesthetics won't be to everyone's taste, but anyone with an interest in distilled arcade design owes it to themselves to at least have a go.

If a game is going to force you to play like an a**hole, it should have a stronger reason for doing so than 'You're a ninja, duh.' Ninja Gaiden 3 has none.

Although Creative Assembly hasn't quite overcome all of Total War's traditional shortcomings, this latest interface nevertheless feels better, much as the combat AI feels better and those battles at sea feel much, much better.

It may not shock you, but it can at least build a thick, oppressive atmosphere as the relatively clever plot keeps twisting and the grot and grime pile up and threaten to choke you. It can't handle fear - but it does a neat line in mild intrigue. Silent Hill: Downpour won't freeze you to your seat, but it will probably keep you playing to the end.

It's still the hardcore spectacle we know and love, with its Moonlight laser blades and hidden AC parts, but by bringing mecha enthusiasts together in a team-based environment that isn't restricted to one-on-one arena battles, we finally have a game on which an online community can be built.

At 1200 Microsoft Points, this isn't a particularly cheap experience, but for those devotees who will spend months, even years, forcing every last twitch and dodge into their muscle memory, it's money well spent. Clearly not one for casual players, this is a heartfelt love letter to one of gaming's thoroughbred genres and one that fans of the right temperament should experience without delay.

Operation Raccoon City is an under-designed and under-produced nightmare, a game that delivers the bare minimum in every category and stops right there.

Its weave of systems hauls you back in to replay stages time after time; the sense of progress and acquisition is a powerful, irresistible loop. Most significantly, it reveals a Nintendo we haven't seen for some time, eager to innovate in ways that will excite its hardcore fans, focusing on competition, struggle and mastery. Reaching for the sky.

There's something endearing about invulnerable enemies dropped into the action to create tense stealth bottlenecks, but whose AI is so bad they frequently end up falling off cliffs and killing themselves before they've laid a claw on you.

This is still unpretentious fun, but now it's also a surprisingly deep and characterful little sports game, and a welcome stopgap between FIFA 12 and 13.

It's unlikely that fans will be left with anything other than positive memories of a franchise that never quite got the praise it deserved.

Next comes across as a game that's embracing the Vita wholeheartedly on a surface level while being much more reserved in terms of Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity.

These issues with pacing and balancing are compensated by the manic euphoria of the action, so if you have three reliable friends with a penchant for manic gunplay and surreal RPGs then Shoot Many Robots can be an enjoyably unpretentious distraction. Those who prefer to play solo should steer well clear, however.

It's only shortcomings are its dated design, repetitive nature and visuals that could pass for a re-mastered PS2 game, but if you're looking for a hardcore experience with solid shinobi substance, this ranks as a viable christening for your shiny new Vita.

Microsoft is attempting to do pretty much everything the purists will hate with Flight, but everything that is necessary to save the IP. How well it's doing it is open to debate, and much will reside on what steps it takes next with the DLC. At present, it's not really a simulation, and nor is it fully convincing as a game experience. But it's definitely no longer scary and that, at least, is a step in the right direction.

This game would clearly benefit from a more rigid and thought-out structure for a start: focus for some of the better ideas found within.

A lacklustre port of a fantastic game. The sad thing is that the improvements to manoeuvrability and updated visuals show us what the ultimate Metal Gear Solid 3 would look like - but then Snake Eater 3D fails to deliver that due to stodgy aiming, low resolutions and a choppy frame-rate.

What I Am Alive lacks in originality, though, it makes up for in execution, because it really nails the tone.

Look once at Unit 13 and you'll probably write it off as a non-entity. Look twice, and you'll see a game where some really smart ideas are lurking just beneath the surface.

Between the single-player being an obvious afterthought, limited multiplayer modes, shoddy graphics and some online kinks to work out, Twisted Metal can't hide its roots as the multiplayer-only PlayStation Store title it was originally developed to be. With all its flaws, it would be easy to write off this full-priced retail release as a polished turd - but that's not fair...It's more of a diamond in the rough. Take the time to get to grips with its minutiae and the combat is extraordinarily complex and balanced.

As with any game that dares to be ambitious, deconstruct Mass Effect 3 into its constituent parts and of course there are flaws, but taken as a whole this is arguably the first truly modern blockbuster, a game that transcends the genre boundaries of old and takes what it needs from across the gaming spectrum in order to finish its story in the most compelling, thrilling, heartbreaking way possible. Few gaming sagas come to a definitive close, but this one signs off in breathtaking style.

This ripped, boisterous crossover game arrives in a blaze of creativity, one of an intensity rarely seen in Japanese game output of late. A fierce, passionate marriage then - but one that just might last.

A pleasantly weird update, then. It offers warm familiarity, with a safe selection of modes and a reassuringly lovely pile of new skins, alongside tiny, precision bursts of innovation like the shuffle block. It's another incremental improvement - but, if you ask me, this has always been a game that Sony's handheld needs if it's to feel complete. Lumines will be wedged in the Vita's card slot for months to come.

It all adds up to shallow pleasure that quickly gives way to a litany of niggling frustrations. Nexuiz is fine with the broad strokes, thanks largely to a tried-and-trusted style of gameplay that is inherently appealing, but it's in the nuance and details that it really comes unstuck.

If Journey is about God, then God has played an awful lot of video games. One of the most fascinating things about thatgamecompany's sand-blown chunk of spiritual eye candy isn't that it reinvents gaming, or extends the medium's reach: it's that it takes old ideas - sometimes very old ideas - and repackages them in clever, stylish, and unexpected ways.

Super Stardust Delta doesn't deliver anything entirely new, but it's a refined variant of one of the best twin-stick shooters around that can now be played on the go.

Few series have enjoyed such an assured and enjoyable update in the current generation of consoles. Far from being a weary evolution, SSX is a vibrant, eager advance for the Cool Boarder/Tony Hawk's lineage of extreme sports video games. EA Canada has effortlessly married the score-attack DNA of arcade gaming's earliest days with some of the most interesting and exciting multiplayer design seen in the past few years. A towering achievement then, as tall as the mountains it so diligently reconstructs.

It's an absurd bargain. With online multiplayer, it would be a miniature classic. As it is, it's recommended for PS3 owners, all but essential if you have a Vita - and for lovers of RC cars or top-down racing, it's a rare treat.

The old-style defending, rushing players by holding X and square, now feels rather simplistic, and close control is a bit unresponsive next to what we're now used to.

A game a few degrees short of greatness, an intense and hectic romp that needs that final level of polish to compete with the very best.