It can't reach the heights of SSX or the first and second Amped, but what it lacks in precision, it makes up for in slightly mindless fun.

The voiceovers are also crushingly generic, featuring the kind of stereotypical scripts that gamers ought to be well and truly sick of by now.

While its battles can be surprisingly punishing and occasionally uneven, there's a lot of heart in this gorgeous turn-based tactics anthology, and the scale of its ambition just about sings through.

It's filled to the brim with brilliant ideas, and then barely uses them.

And, for my money, they fared brilliantly.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is enjoyable enough, and has glimpses of vintage Metroid shining through, but this game could and should have been so much more.

The individual stories are crafted with the same level of care as the main series, but divorced from a larger, more personal tale, these scattershot scenes show their hand as unused B-sides. More ambitious, but less focused than Season One, 400 Days feels like its setting: a serviceable pit-stop on the way to a (hopefully) brighter future.

A charming and entertaining Japanese RPG which adheres to the conventions of the genre far too much for its own good, but will still provide many, many hours of entertainment.

What perhaps saves Kiryu's latest adventure is an absolutely fantastic combat system, bolstered with wild gadgets, and minigame offerings that just about work with an approach to breadth instead of depth. This is another entertaining, idiosyncratic, action-packed romp for the Yakuza series, but it feels as though Like a Dragon Gaiden needs to do more to justify its undermining of Kiryu's perfect sendoff in Yakuza 6.

These three games are worth buying for a tenner on iOS if you have never played them (or if you have a real need to play them again and your DS makes you sad).

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.

So Arcade Edition is exactly what it appears to be: a tempered update that lacks the immediate wow factor of its predecessor, but offers an extra layer of refinement on an already winning formula.

The control system is a bitch, partly because the storyline is fairly boring and partly because there isn't much innovation.

A strong if slim shooter that lays down strong foundations for the future, while feeling a little unfinished.

This bout of monster mashing is still fun, yes, but Devil May Cry has now reached the point where it desperately needs to evolve into the 21st century as with "Resident Evil 4," or fade from the spotlight like "Dino Crisis."

Soul Bubbles definitely has enough distinct charm to override the inevitable "LocoRoco" comparisons, with a superb control system and delightful art style carrying you through for the entire game. Were it not for the slow start, it might have left a deeper impression sooner, but some wonderful level design and smart ideas later on eventually deliver on its obvious promise.

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."

Minis on the Move is a thoughtfully constructed puzzle game, built around an appealingly simple premise that then gets reexamined and evolved in multiple ingenious ways. More than that, it shows Nintendo adapting to changes in the online and mobile market that suggest the best is yet to come.

Creature collecting has never been quite so ruminative and beautiful.

All in all, a bit of a must-have.

The phrase "one for the fans" has never been applied more honestly than in this case; it may be flawed, but we're happy to recommend Rise of a Ninja to Naruto fans - albeit with a few reservations. Believe it.

Stealth, horror and procedural scrambling converge in a thrilling package. [Recommended]

A tough, well-wrought action-platformer distinguished by some toe-curling portrayals of sin. [Eurogamer Recommended]

With those missteps cast aside, Toy Story 3 is a rare treat that appreciates the fine line between play and playing, and hints at a future where movie tie-ins could actually be something to look forward to.

Dark Forces emerges from Nightdive's bacta tank refreshed and ready for action, combining classic FPS mayhem with thrilling espionage-themed missions.

First Strike, then, is a well-balanced collection of different styles of map, its highlights undoubtedly favouring those who tend to play away from Free For All and Team Death Match.

While Silent Hill Origins cannot offer its legions of fans anything they haven't seen done before (and done better), it still represents a solid stop-gap release, and is worth checking out if you're a series die-hard with a desire to fill in some gaps in the story.

Nobody Wants to Die doesn't bring much invention to the table - but while it lacks originality, it has atmosphere, heart and relevance in spades.

You won't find a game on PS3 right now that will work you harder than Active 2 – but I want to see EA Canada working up more of a sweat next time.

There are new Achievements, and lots of new things to tinker with, but not a lot of incentive to plod through the campaign missions again or start over ranking up your multiplayer stats.

Sure, the poop gags are a little wearisome, but a sprinkling of the old Gilbert magic makes it a worthwhile ride.

A moody, well-wrought action role-player with striking, desolate landscapes and a couple of great dungeons. [Eurogamer Recommended]

It's not without its gripes - it locked up on me several times during our brief relationship, and I'm not a big fan of its commentary, but once it has you in its grip it won't let you go until you've utterly exhausted it, and vice versa, and that should be enough for anyone.

What Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga delivers in spades is an interesting, atmospheric RPG experience with an enjoyable battle system, fabulous music and an excellent visual style that set it well apart from RPG cliches of recent years.

With some retailers pricing this at around the £14.99 mark, it's hard to resist such a great value compilation, even if there are only about a handful of real nailed-on classics in the 22-game set.

Perhaps more importantly is the inexplicable disappearance of dead bodies. Literally five seconds after they've flopped heavily to the ground, apparently not man enough to withstand a nail-filled 2-by-4 in the cranium, they - *ping* - vanish.

Thankfully, when you die, which will be quite frequently, the loading times are kept mercifully short and don't add to the frustration like so many other PSP games.

For dedicated PC strategy nerds it might seem a little lightweight in comparison to what the desktop platform currently has to offer but, for accessible, deep, pocket-sized empire-building this is a game hard to fault.

Swery's brand of wonky mechanics underlined with impeccable writing and atmospherics proves just as effective in the 2D platformer field. [Eurogamer Recommended]

A rare Stadia exclusive presents a simple, touching story, matched by mechanics that are a touch too slight.

The third of LCB's weird narrative experiences is a reminder of what makes this series so special.

Don't Nod drops the melodrama for a poignantly performed story about grief and injustice, where the difficult choices tug at your heart and principles.

This is a love letter to childhood innocence, to that age where truth and justice and awesome costumes seem almost real, as well as the coolest things in the world. In that light, picking at it seems churlish, because The Wonderful 101 doesn't make you feel like a hero; it makes you feel like hundreds.

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

Standing back from the relatively minor niggles and the impatient desire for Tecmo to push on with the series in a slightly more forward-looking direction, it's still a labour of love playing a title that leaves you lying awake at night pondering on every palpitating detail.

The natural comparison is with Everybody's Golf - which, of course, developer Camelot was responsible for in the first instance - and while the Vita game has, by a distance, the superior single-player structure, World Tour is more than a match for it in the quality of its courses and the breadth of its options.

If you never caught the original, then this is almost a must-have. It's stuffed with charm and clever ideas like the score-maxing hint sections displayed upon level-completion. In fact, this is classic platforming with the added bonus of individuality and innovation.

The primal joys of a perfect parry followed by a killing blow against a hulking monster mean that Infinity Blade 3 was always going to be good fun where it counts. But between distracting feature creep and the inclusion of in-app purchases just because everyone else is using them, it feels like a game that exists more to serve a publishing agenda than an essential closing chapter in a coherent trilogy.

A solid and visually impressive shooter, it never manages to feel essential - and clearly exists mostly because all first-party franchises are obliged to put in an appearance on a new console - but even as a relatively minor entry in its own series, it still sets a new benchmark for portable shooters.

The combat is the highlight, frantic and cinematic, but Chorus' open-world narrative ambitions let it down.

My Friend Pedro's two halves of the banana reveal the perilous balancing act of game design. The first half is a stellar example of how to build an action game, of how to engender a sense of creativity through the player's toolset, and how to bake seamless flow into complex and challenging environments. The second half isn't quite the opposite of that, but it tries much too hard to be clever, with humour that's less goofy and more edgy, and level design that's too exacting in its structure.

Clever tweaks make this far more than a greatest hits package. [Recommended]

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream offers luxurious cutscenes and a focused twist on stealth by remaining intentionally inflexible, but doesn't quite pull it all together.

It's a fine, fine shooter, capturing a micro scale in a macro story, with a remarkable capacity for maintaining alert attention.

Of course the idea with Deluxe is that even if that's beyond you so much has been brought together that there's enough to entertain regardless.

There's no denying, however, that the platforming feels a little tired and the constant blibbering of the characters is rather trite.

Demake visuals are the perfect match for a game that's both direct and gloriously weird.

With its pleasantly non-fascist checkpointing, sensibly compact level design and satisfying combat system, you'll appreciate Soul Of Darkness all the more. It's short, sweet and entirely unoriginal, but for all the right reasons.

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.

The good outweighs the bad here for sure, and Penumbra's pacing, story and genuine sense of uneasiness makes for an intriguingly dark adventure tale.

A lack of flourish and invention, along with a tired set of on-foot mechanics, rob it of a higher mark - but too much stands in its favour not to recommend it.

This entry, the last from original developer Climax, could have been the one to finally make that breakthrough. A triumphant, genre-defining swansong. Instead it's a safe and solid continuation of what's worked in the past. Existing fans can therefore rejoice, but all those fabled mainstream gamers may still find it a snarling pitbull of a game and back slowly away. Their loss.

The incredible intensity and vividness of Wings of Prey's dogfights is built on the authority of its flight models, the verisimilitude of it graphics and the quality of its bandit AI (excellent, apart from the odd sleepy moment) but there are other smaller factors at work too.

NHL 2K7 represents the best value for money out there, and it plays like a dream. Seriously, you're doing yourselves a disservice by buying all those guns-and-tits games that get hyped.

If you're looking for a more entertaining game of attacking football - and you can laugh about it when one of the game's many remaining rough edges fires a moment of absurdity into a finely poised multiplayer game against a fierce rival - then PES 2012 is well worth investigating.

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

State of Decay is unrefined but never anything less than interesting. And in video games, interesting has never been at such a premium.

It's rare that you come across a game that dares to blend two such disparate genres, let alone one that does so expertly.

There are tried-and-tested action-game formulae in Sonic Colours, and while they're consistently well-executed, there's little inherently new or innovative on show. For me, Sonic Colours' pace and thrill-power overcome these concerns. It's a simple, neon-tinged blast of action gaming, and sometimes, that's all you really want.

Doubly annoying is the fact that you actually have to play through the entire Instincts campaign before you can even unlock the Evolution levels, so any existing fans might be better off buying the standalone Far Cry Instincts Evolution on Xbox and swallow the minor technical step down.

A rare balance of playfulness and genuine strategic depth, plucked from the margins of history. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Anybody with an actual Sims fetish will love it to bits. Granted it can be fiddly and confusing to start with (why hide so much of the critical new stuff in the depths of the catalogue?), but once you're up and running there's a definite attraction to it.

The lighting system more than makes up for this lack of colour though, with pyrotechnic multi-coloured dynamic lighting, and full day and night cycles.

It is the best looking space combat sim we've seen so far... Unfortunately it is let down all too often by poor mission scripting and incompetent wingmen, not to mention the occasional random crash.

A beautiful but flawed game, with easy controls and imaginative design marred by a surplus of platform hopping puzzles and a disappointing finale. It's also rather short.

Sure, as we've mentioned a few times, the quality of the writing, the voices and the humour are absolutely spot-on, but rather than disguise the mediocre game within, this excellence merely serves to amplify the crushing disappointment of the one dimensional gameplay, and we're left wanting much, much more than this half arsed effort.

Radiant Dawn's core of creamy white strategy nougat does shine through its horribly drab exterior, but only just. We've seen it all before, and this can't help but seem like a wasted Wii opportunity.

When it's firing on all cylinders, AlphaBounce can be a riotous diversion; full of inventive ideas and bold scope, the potential's clearly there. But rather than make a tight, focused design that continually entertains, MotionTwin waste far too much of your time.

Unexpectedly original.

An undeniably alluring little isometric shoot-'em-up with some tolerable flaws, and if, like me, you plan to get stuck into the PC sequel in the near future, then it offers a succinct and vital refresher of key plot points.

Offers a smorgasbord of treats to delight and infuriate in almost equal measure. The mean, almost contemptuous difficulty curve is something that shouldn't be celebrated, but almost everything else is golden.

A new developer doesn't rock the boat in what's an enjoyable if only gently iterative outing for the construction and management sim.

Grid Autosport is a fine racing game, though it's never a thoroughbred one. It's the muscle car that was Grid 2 stripped out and retooled for the track, but too often you can see the solder-work at the seams. In 2008, Race Driver: Grid was a partial reinvention of the racing genre, equipped with a handful of fresh ideas. Six years on, Grid Autosport - while a definite return to form for Codemasters - is simply a rediscovery of it.

But if you can break through the periodic pain barrier that comes with such exacting physics-based challenges, you'll be able to bask in the warm glow of manly gaming satisfaction. And with around six hours' worth of it to roll through, it'll put hairs on your chest. Not so good if you're a lady, obviously.

Infinity Ward had a chance here to throw down the gauntlet for the next hardware generation, to set the new standard, to show that this hugely popular, much derided behemoth can dance to a different tune. It's chosen to play a Greatest Hits package instead.

This glorious game about movement and adventure also feels like a rumination on something deeper and more personal. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Supporting up to four players at once, the game lends itself brilliantly to playing with your mates (locally or online), but is equally good fun against the computer in the hugely challenging campaign mode.

Among the Ruins is The Walking Dead doing what The Walking Dead does well, but it's spinning its wheels when it should be racing towards the finale.

Despite something of an overdeveloped plot, Crisis Core Reunion goes beyond just a quick upgrade, making some fundamental improvements to visuals, sound and controls, and implements them with care. There are flaws, but it remains a joy to spend time with favourites Cloud, Aerith, and Sephiroth once more. [Eurogamer Recommended]

The games that are presented on Metal Slug Anthology are a marvel of art and design. There are, frequently, excruciatingly tough but all of their peaks are surmountable by the persistent and/or the talented.

It might not have quite the same wow factor second time around, but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 builds on its astonishing predecessor with intelligence and precision - making an already impressive achievement richer and more welcoming.

There's plenty to like here, and Blitz is an undeniably enjoyable arcade game in short bursts. But it feels like an awkward offshoot for the Rock Band name, a little desperate in its push to get people downloading more songs, and an altogether lightweight experience that is unlikely to reverse the decline of the music genre.

As for the new cards, the cunning behind many of them is likely to echo throughout the seasons, even though not all of them are showing up in regular play at the moment. And if you're anything like me, you won't want to be without them.

The weather effects are quite wonderful, and there's something perfectly cosy about having a snowstorm fluttering outside the window, but they only change the game as much as you want them to. After the tenth rainstorm, the novelty starts to wane.

It's almost too playable and satisfying for its own good, or in other words, not quite annoying enough to lure you back endlessly. Perhaps there really is only enough room for one game as annoying as Angry Birds.

More elegance in the interface, fewer lulls in activity and a better way of gently directing you towards its hidden delights would have carried the score higher, but even with its flaws Viva Piñata is a game that deserves to be played and refreshes your belief that games can be friendly as well as fun.

Offering encouragement and useful tips, as well as warnings about common exercise mistakes and pitfalls, the on-screen trainers are a fantastic resource.

Despite the silly roulette wheel thing, it's still addictive. I've played it for hours.