This is one of the biggest disappointments of the system, and the year.

Forget about tactics: it's about pitting your silly custom character against someone else's silly custom character in a giggling orgy of button-bashing. It's not big or clever or deep, but it is fun if you take it for what it is.

Syndicate is a game struggling to be all things to all people and underselling its strongest points in the process. The story is a perfunctory thing, worth playing once for the robust gunplay, but it fails to make Syndicate stand out from the cyberpunk herd.

The character himself simply feels more at home in this shorter, punchier, less laboured and self-regarding form. Freed from the weight of expectation that accompanies a full retail release in this genre, the experience - while lacking the set-piece spectacle and spookiness of the original - is less forced and more comfortably pitched.

As a full-price package, Tekken 3D is more of a technical accomplishment than a portable innovator. If all you want to do is train while preparing for the next battle, then this is Tekken at its purest. But if you're looking for dynamic game types like the generous spread of Story, Legion and Abyss modes in the 3DS version of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift 2, then you'll be largely disappointed.

It's a strategy game of uncommon substance. The painstaking management and honing of your team, the desperate push-and-pull war for territory, and the gradual incursion towards Arulco's heart of darkness offer a hearty feast for anyone who can make it past the more superficial disappointments.

No series has been so willing to switch gameplay styles with such reckless abandon, and The Jak and Daxter Trilogy represents a shining example of what happens when a capable developer takes a huge risk. There's nothing else quite like it.

It's one of the strongest launch titles, offering taut fun and challenge in a rapid-fire, quick-load manner that's perfectly suited to the handheld. It may not offer a vision of the portable future that Sony's creative dreamers were hoping for, but as a video game, it works small wonders.

Warp is a pleasant enough diversion, but with patchwork design that remixes gameplay ideas and stylistic elements from sources as diverse as Splosion Man, Metal Gear Solid and Portal, it never gels into anything particularly memorable.

As culmination of three years in which we've gone from a scattered lineage of average UFC games to a genuine contender for the best sports fighter available today, Undisputed 3 is, on all counts, a round three technical knockout.

Is it a game? I can't say I know the answer, but I do know that unless you're an IGF judge or a prissy dogmatist who sets out to pedantically define the boundaries of an extremely fluid medium, then you shouldn't really care. All that matters is that Dear Esther is worth your time - and that its two-hour long chill will remain in your bones for a long while after.

This isn't the most charismatic racing series around, perhaps, but Road Trip is a surprisingly enjoyable instalment nonetheless. It's colourful, cheerful and a decent showcase for Sony's brand new hardware.

My daughter played Happy Action Theater for about three hours when we first downloaded it. We had to drag her away. She shows it off to her friends, who are equally enchanted by it. She now asks to play it after school rather than watch TV.

A tiresome waste of a strong license, only the most blinkered fan will derive pleasure from this slog of an experience filled with wrong-headed design decisions intended to pad out a game that cannot sustain expansion.

If Virtua Tennis is Nadal - bright, consistent, unafraid to work up a sweat - and Top Spin has the measured elegance of a Federer, Grand Slam Tennis is every bit the Andy Murray of tennis games: flashes of brilliance, prone to a few too many errors, but shows definite champion potential.

Glossy rather than glorious, decidedly wobbly and very limited.

Gotham City Impostors offers a minimum of substantive content - maps, in particular - and a maximum of unlockables that put unrealistic demands for grinding next to a 'buy now' button. It is possible, apparently, to reach character level 1000 in this. I cannot imagine it. The gadget-enabled shooter at the heart of Gotham City Impostors is fun, smart, and hard to dislike. But it's impossible to recommend.

Mutant Mudds doesn't quite have the brash, devil-may-care attitude of Super Meat Boy or the charming personality of VVVVVV, but its refined obstacle courses are a distillation of what made us fall in love with 2D platformers in the first place.

Ultimately, it's this unique style that makes The Darkness 2 worth your time. After years of chest-beating military domination, the FPS genre is starting to show signs of life in more eccentric ways. Everything old is new again, so by concentrating on character, story and giddy comic-book excess, The Darkness 2 is a more compelling offering in 2012 than it would have been in 2008.

Does all the boring, difficult parts of RPG game design very well, and marries them to exceptionally slick combat and a towering stack of stuff to do. This well-oiled machine keeps you motoring through all the sludgy fantasy cliché and through a sluggish first act. Then - just as the world opens out and the story picks up traction - that motor really starts to sing. That's when a solid, workmanlike game becomes one that's virtually impossible to put down.

Anything that was good about Dead Island has been crudely ripped out, and whatever remains has been served up in such a way that it simply isn't fun, even at the basic "look at me, I'm killing zombies" level.

NeverDead feels like gaming's equivalent of Buckaroo Banzai, or Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of those weird B-movies you used to find lurking in the midnight spaces of an old video store and which you often loved for their unlikely concepts or their wilful obscurity more than their actual quality. NeverDead hasn't been given room to get the most out of its strange ideas, but it's still plucky, warm-hearted and genuinely idiosyncratic.

SoulCalibur has always excelled at offering an accessible style of combat with a level of single-player content that other fighting games have only recently begun to match. These qualities haven't changed - and now, after what seemed like an uncertain return, the historical fighter is staging its best performance since that fateful Christmas of 1999. High five!

For all its mechanical cleverness and forward-thinking design, Final Fantasy 13-2 is also convoluted, complicated and unfriendly to newcomers. In Square-Enix's desperation to discover what its flagship series looks like in the modern world, what should be an interesting curio has been inflated to blockbuster proportions.

Resident Evil: Revelations is gorgeous, huge, and offers the most fully-featured online co-op experience on 3DS. The single-player isn't quite the survival horror comeback Capcom promised but, with its brilliant take on score attack, Raid mode ensures Revelations delivers at least once on its title.

Quarrel is still the horribly compelling single-player game it's always been on mobiles, with an extra dollop of polish and a few new tantalising game modes for the console release - and all for the laughable sum of 400 Microsoft Points.

Those with an addiction to high scores will love the many hours they spend smashing themselves repeatedly against the levels' pitiless design. And those who aren't up for the challenge? Dustforce will just take them to the cleaners.

Scarygirl is cute, workable, but otherwise routine - its style inching ahead of its substance.

There's no getting away from the fact that Haunt is a slight experience, but it's also very charming and a game that is carefully crafted to work with both the Kinect controller and its intended young audience. Not a game you'll keep coming back to, but for parents it's still worth the 800 Microsoft Point asking price for the short but sweet entertainment it offers.

Hutch is to be congratulated for coming up with a control system for touch screen driving games that really works in a simple yet gratifying way. It's just a shame that it debuts in a game so determined to penalise you for enjoying its knockabout potential.

This is a nice game that may well turn into a great game: if the players continue to stick around, if the developer doesn't let the micro-transactions take over, and if the design team keeps its eye out for bugs and exploits that emerge as people start to get really serious.

A game that's ingenious but ultimately a little tedious, this puzzle oddity is a brain-teaser that will boggle your mind at least as long as your patience lasts.

It's all just a bit sad really, and while devoted Jackson fans will find more reason than most to gloss over the practical shortcomings of the game, they run the risk of being left even sadder.

It's hardly an arcade classic, in other words, but if you're after nothing more than a friendly and frantic fifteen minutes of action every now and then, Choplifter HD just came to the rescue.

Switching effortlessly between sadistic punishment and boundless freedom, VVVVVV provides more moment to moment pleasure in its scant two or three hour campaign than most games do at four times the length.

Amy fails on all counts. It's plagued by jerky movement, poor scripting, weak puzzles and shoddy checkpointing, but it's also a characterless mess of themes and ideas swiped from a dozen better horror titles. Neither quirky enough to be forgiven its unfinished feel nor polished enough to satisfy the base gaming itch, Amy is a crushing disappointment with little to recommend it.

Love is perplexing, challenging, and confusing. Thus, the cold, calculating puzzles should complement the emotional relationship parable. Hazelden wants it to work. We want it to work. But the sad truth is that in this instance the two simply don't have enough in common. Sometimes love just isn't enough.

Boom Street's left, then, to capitalise only on the love and appreciation we all feel towards our global banking overlords.

If you have the speedrunning bug, be warned: Mighty Switch Force's taunting clockwork worlds are going to be a dangerous, and possibly fairly maddening, compulsion. Even if you don't, this is still clever, personable, and beautifully made.

All Zombies Must Die takes a timeworn premise that should be fun and cathartic and seemingly goes out of its way to make it repetitive, fiddly and annoying. If you have a trio of friends close to hand, the co-op aspect might just be enough to rescue it from the depths of mediocrity, but if you're planning on playing solo you'd be far better served by trying one of the dozens of other zombie blasters on the market.

It's not remarkably stylish or memorable - although it never looks less than charming as it sashays in rich cartoon fashion across the Vita's luxurious high-resolution screen - but it's a splendid ambassador for the console's many functions, and among its better mini-games has the potential to save you from a boring train journey every once in a while when more addictive smartphone games desert you.

It's always tempting to be lenient where indie developers are concerned, and if nothing else Afterfall: Insanity makes for an eye-catching calling card for Intoxicate's graphical skills, but as a game in its own right it's as middle of the road as they come.

Its ideas for first-person puzzling mechanics are original, and when it starts combining them all into larger and more baffling setups it has great moments with a chilled-out pacing all their own. But that creativity is smothered under slavish imitation of the aesthetics and structure of the Portal series, and such a large influence is malign.

It is not bad in the way that a game like Boiling Point is bad, where things coalesce into a kind of awful greatness. This is a tacky and technically incompetent production with no redeeming features whatsoever, devoid of fun and an insult to the name it bears. Flatout once burned bright, but now is gone - and if there is a driving hell, this is surely it.

Super Crate Box may not be new, then, but on iOS it's not to be missed. This belongs up there with Drop7, Solipskier and SpellTower as an example of the very best that the App Store offers. It's endlessly cheerful, and cheerfully deadly, and it's the perfect digital companion for the month of January, with its frosty clarity and new years' resolutions. Here is a piece of design that offers a path to true mastery through careful practice. Here is a game that provides unceasing opportunities for self-improvement.

BioWare has done what many thought might be impossible, and delivered the world's second ever triple-A MMO. That is a mighty achievement and a huge relief. But it may yet turn out to be too little - or rather, too much - too late.

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 selection is definitely more hit than miss, although there are a few stinkers.

There is no doubt that this is the definitive version of a little-known, much-loved title. Sega's humility in collaborating with Whitehead, and artistry in bringing the game's strengths to the fore, is a striking achievement in 2011. For that reason, for the first time in a long time Sega, deserves its richest asset - and for the first time in a long time, those fans deserve Sega.

In many ways, Pullblox is Nintendo's answer to Portal. Both are budget puzzlers released to little fanfare that exhibit the finest qualities of their respective developers.

It's possible you might be picking up The Doctor Who Cloned Me in order to get a glimpse of what Gearbox is planning to do with the franchise for its inevitable reboot. If that's the case, you'll be disappointed: this campaign is the work of Triptych Games, a studio formed to help finish Forever back in 2009. While the new content's got the odd decent joke and the occasional smart encounter, it's lacking the sharp design wit that characterised Gearbox's own download work on Borderlands.

Where ilomilo felt like it was created by rosy-cheeked elves beckoning you to snuggle up to it with a warm blanket and hot cup of cocoa, English Country Tune is more akin to Futurama's smarmy Professor Wernstrom. Rather than being off-putting, its priggish demeanor motivates you to rise to the occasion and show it up. As creative as it is maddening, English Country Tune is an acquired taste.

a stuttering start for F1 on the 3DS.

Assault Horizon Legacy is mediocre, but what's worse is you feel it never even aimed for the stars in the first place.

Charming and witty.

Paid or free, as map packs go, Back to Karkand is hard to fault. The maps themselves are excellent, tried and trusted classics that (Wake Island's diminished scope aside) have been thoughtfully reconstructed for modern FPS play.

Sustained by the strength of the moment-to-moment play, this add-on packs a punch. While Raam's abilities are arguably too straightforward to sustain a full game, they fit a shorter DLC mission perfectly. Meanwhile, the structure that has you switching between two warring sides as they close in on one another is interesting and well executed, resulting in a strong, worthwhile expansion.

£6.99 is unbelievably good value for a near-perfect refinement of what many of us want from a football management game. It has more or less all the leagues you could conceivably wish for, a simple, uncluttered interface, all the transfer and strategic depth you need, and just enough media, player, staff and board interaction.

Super Pokémon Rumble is, at best, a simple and straightforward addition to the Pokémon saga, but in no way a match for its main series brethren.

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.

For more than five years, the PSP version has provided the closest approximation of the stripped-down FM experience that many of us naturally gravitate towards, and this year's edition continues to stick doggedly to those sensibilities.

A short, disappointing downhill slide through clumsy and frustrating renditions of more modern, characterless stages. Drooping from joyous classic to dissatisfying mediocrity in just a few hours of gameplay, Generations on the 3DS provides a surprisingly handy microcosm of Sonic's decline over the years. Not the best anniversary present, then.

A frighteningly moreish game that represents ludicrous value for money, and is highly recommended to anyone taken to competitive twin-stick shooters.

If you've never owned a Simbin game and you own a decent driving wheel, then Race Injection could do the job, but rest assured that you're buying an old simulation both for graphics and gameplay.

A game using this toy technology with the depth and breadth of Pokemon, or the variety and replayability of the Lego games, would be absolutely amazing. For now, "pretty good" will have to do.

On its initial release, this wonderful piece of work was all but ditched at retail by a publisher that didn't seem to understand what it was dealing with. Now Stranger's Wrath has finally received the lavish treatment it deserves, and the gaming world has a chance to reclaim one of its brightest treasures.

The novelty of repeated bucket-kicking has dampened a little. And towards the end, the game just starts throwing high-level bastards in your face to see how many you can take. The core formula that defined Infinity Blade and made it so interesting has been tarnished in the move to write an App Store description with some higher numbers than before.

It might be a little cruel to pick apart World of Tanks like this while it's still in beta, but Wargaming.net is nevertheless charging people for a boxed copy. Still, the game is progressing well and constantly seeing new maps and new tanks added, with a whole slew of French units soon to be released.

I really, really hope the developer gets a second crack at Move Fitness, as the core concept clearly works and there are some screamingly obvious things that, if added, would make the game a much better, potentially excellent, fitness game. But as it stands, what should be Mr. Motivator is very much Mr. Average.

As a lovingly crafted evolution to one of oldest and most respected fighting series in gaming, KOF 13 is - hands down - Playmore's greatest accomplishment in years.

To call this a bad game would be grossly unfair, but it's a truly unexceptional one. For a series like Shinobi, that is dishonour enough.

If you have the free code then there's no reason not to give Bloodbath Arena a try, even if all it really adds is a place to quickly grind your way up a few levels. As a paid download, however, it's uninspired stuff.

It isn't bad, but set next to last year's Donkey Kong Country Returns, or even Ubisoft's zesty Rayman Origins, this winter's other other platformer feels very vanilla by comparison.

It's robust, but it lacks some creative effort on Nintendo's part. Newcomers will love it, while series stalwarts will find its novelties welcome, if largely inconsequential. But it's nevertheless one of the stronger entries in the series, balancing the orthodox precision of the original with the playful silliness of the more recent iterations more successfully than ever.

The convincing banter between the two doctors, the tale of John's carer and her relationship with her children, the stories of friends and families and how they intersect along the passage of life... To the Moon takes the details of human life in its stride, and delivers them with a breezy effortlessness.

Serious Sam 3 does what it set out to do and nothing more. A faithful and heartfelt ode to old-school FPS carnage, it certainly delivers the dumb fun that Duke Nukem Forever so dismally failed to recapture - and that, for many retro-heads, will be more than enough.

A soulless cash-in that has little to do with its license, and nor is it much fun in its own right. If you're lucky enough to not encounter any game-breaking bugs and if you have a friend or two to play with, then it can be pretty entertaining for a few hours. But that's a lot of "ifs" for so little payoff, since overlong levels and axe-sponge enemies inevitably whittle this dungeon crawl down into a slog.

Ironically for a series based around the idea of a carefully staged experience that collapses into unpredictable chaos, you're always more passenger than participant on this visit to Jurassic Park.

Your long-term attachment to the game will also be determined by how much of an experience grind you're prepared to undertake (combined with your attitude towards impermanent purchases), and whether the hack-and-slash combat against somewhat repetitive character models is a meaty enough adventure to keep you satisfied.

In short, Mario & Sonic's London outing is much like their Beijing sojourn of late 2007. It'll keep younger children in particular amused and entertained over Christmas, and it's a safe bet for festive family fun if you have enough controllers to go around.

But the true wonder of the game is in its clockwork structure, the way dynamic story and environments that shift with time thread with the permanence of its collectibles and secrets. There is an intricacy of design here as impressive as any of the miniature towns on view at Legoland.

Ultimate is a finely tuned evolution that should be held in a similar regard to Super Street Fighter IV. It takes the flexible combat system from the previous game, irons out many of the niggling issues and expands the possibilities even further, because no matter how you look at it, that's the type of fighting game Marvel is.

Minecraft is a towering achievement in the very possibilities of gaming, and it does this without losing itself to either esoterica or cynicism. It is a game anyone can play and anyone can get something out of, no matter how skilled or imaginative they are. They will make something and they will have an experience that feels like theirs and theirs alone.

Medieval Moves' downfall is how repetitive it becomes. This is a game clearly designed for kids, yet the sheer exhausting monotony of bashing your way through each level is never rewarded with any meaningful pay-off, just more of the same against a different backdrop.

The Random Encounter makes for a short game, but an extremely enjoyable one, the two-hour campaign providing you with plenty of hectic victories and glorious defeats. It also leaves you with an Endless Mode, some lovely pixelated memories, and that warm feeling that only comes from seeing something very new built from ideas that are very, very old.

It's an adventure for kids, but it's also a museum, a diorama, and a weird kind of historical document - and that's a combination that only video games could have given us.

Where Is My Heart? is a video game about video games - about the possibilities that still lurk within even the busiest of genres, and of great new ideas brought to life by ingenuity, focus, and flair.

Metal Gear Solid is a potpourri of ideas that insists you take the good with the bad. Certainly indulgent, it's also melancholy, exhilarating, clever, and ludicrous. It's never entirely clear what, if anything, Kojima and company are taking seriously - and the end result, in this collection, is a fascinating chronicle of one of video games' strangest successes.

There are traces of that excess here, but they arrive too late and change the formula too little to really make a meaningful difference. It's still a cynical slice of dirty fun, but the most damning aspect of Saints Row: The Third is that where the all-important lulz are concerned, there's precious little here that you couldn't already do in Saints Row 2.

The worst of the game's technical sins is performance, with appallingly low frame rates in our patched PS3 retail version when you brake suddenly or drift through many a corner.

This remake is a labour of love, and it catches the single most important thing about Cave Story. Objectively, it's a 2D game heavily inspired by Metroid. In its details, and in your hands and head, it's another world entirely.

Had Starfire focussed on just a couple of elements rather than trying to be all things to all players, had it made the quests more varied, the progression more enticing, this could have been the start of something really special. As it stands, it's the epitome of a game trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, sadly mastering little.

A delightful, playful, occasionally exhilarating platformer. But while this is a game whose visuals point to a bright, alternative future, its systems too often rely on the dusty past. Half of a classic, then.

Where Brotherhood enhanced the thrill of being Ezio Auditore, Revelations distracts from it. Ezio may look old, but it's the series itself that really shows its age.

It's an awkward reinvention that manages to be at once faithful and a little wide of the mark. But such is the strength of Combat Evolved, this is still an Anniversary that's worth celebrating.

It is the most formally inventive Zelda in a long time (admittedly, that's not saying a great deal). But it's the game's carefree attitude, quick tempo and warm heart that do the most to make it feel new...Skyward Sword will surely be the greatest adventure money can buy.

In weaving together the extraordinary craftsmanship evident in the music, storytelling, adventure and world design of Skyrim, Bethesda has created a very special game indeed - one that's likely to remain in the affections of gamers for many years to come.

You could wish for 3D Land to be a little more challenging in places, then, but you couldn't wish for it to be any denser, any more imaginative, or any more daring. Most importantly, you couldn't wish for it to be any more playful.