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.

For lovers of RPGs, [it's] close to essential. It's much more than a reminder of where they came from; it's a welcome - and long overdue - reminder of one of the genre's strongest voices.

The jackhammer gameplay won't necessarily win over new converts, but for everyone else, this silky remake is a must buy.

In combining an open world monster-rush format with PUBG-esque PvP, Crytek has crafted a stealth survival game like few others. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Omno offers a dreamy blend of platforming and puzzling with a feel for player freedom. [Eurogamer Recommended]

But we've all done Lemmings at one time or other, there's nothing new about this, and as much as it might sound like a good idea in your head it's a nostalgic itch you can scratch without spending £30 on another PSP game that makes you wonder why you ever doubted the DS would kick it all around the playground until its shiny little face was thumbsmeared to death.

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's an absorbing and varied side story that feeds back into the wider Dragon Age universe in subtle ways. What more could you need?

While the setting and inspirations are Filipino through and through, the themes of friendship, love, loss, and acceptance in this visual novel are universal.

Its stunning graphics put most other third person games to shame, the ferocious hand-to-hand combat makes for a more visceral experience than is usual in this rather stale genre, and the heavy dose of Norse mythology provides an interesting and unique setting for the game.

There are easily better fighters on the PS2 though, and so this feels more like an exercise in retro gaming than an essential and accessible purchase.

As a single-player experience, Age of Booty is frustrating and poorly balanced. Take it online, however, and you've got something that's almost worth the 800-Point asking price.

Furious, wasp-in-a-jar electronica does little to diminish the pounding tension, while the restless minimalism of the visuals throws your perception into a blender, morphing seamlessly between 2D and 3D and back again, spinning you upside down before leaving you in a disorientated heap in the face of the next malevolent onslaught.

Kunos brings the full sim experience to console, warts and all, with a few oversights and errors along the way.

Arkham-esque combat and lovely platforming combine in this joyous and colourful game.

Fans of Scott and Cameron's fiction will be delighted to see this iconic universe recreated in miniature, while anyone hankering after a 2D Metroid (let's face it, we're not likely to get one from Nintendo any time soon) will be equally satisfied.

Treyarch delivers an impressive package considering the circumstances, but Black Ops Cold War feels like a step back from last year.

It's an often clumsy and over-ambitious enterprise, one that can wow you with a pirouette and then slip over on a banana skin in the same mission, but the pleasures it does offer are enhanced by the knowledge that it's still the only game offering them.

When it's firing on all cylinders Manhunt is a disturbingly entertaining take on the stealth action genre with the trademark high quality Rockstar production that mask some of its shortcomings. But scratch beneath its grimy surface and it's blighted by serious AI issues, repetitive gameplay and frustrating combat.

If you buy racing games for longevity, innovation and the old-fashioned thrill of besting human opponents, Race Driver's DS debut comes highly recommended.

Frontier's annual management sim offers some small refinements over its predecessor but a lack of major upgrades means it doesn't snatch pole.

More than the script (generally witty and sharp, if occasionally undercut by an iffy voice-actor) or the graphic design (a brother to Fable's faux-fantasy charm), the constant capering of your charges is what gives the game its personality. That is, they have a lot of personality and so does the game.

It's perfectly pitched between the frustration of failure and the high-speed, adrenaline-fuelled euphoria of success, and it's a welcome return to a more old-school Burnout formula.

Blind jumps, enemies that re-spawn almost instantly combined with boss battles that often require repeated attempts make this a difficult game. But the formula has been expertly updated here and, while the game never achieves the excellence of those titles from which it draws heavy inspiration, this is still a competent and engaging proposition.

A glorious ride down a futuristic California that never was. [Recommended]

Despite the odd camera and control niggle, it stands out an unpretentious and largely unique example of how to blend strategy and action in a relentlessly entertaining way.

It's charmingly designed from the ground up to be as fun and accessible as possible, yet despite its astonishing simplicity, it still managed to hold our interest well beyond our expectations.

The squeaky eccentricity of proceedings leaves you charmed, if a little frustrated with the lack of a truly solid baseball game.

Overall, while it certainly captures a lot of its source material on spec, Wallace & Gromit's other strengths - Peter Sallis, Gromit shrugging or staring despondently into the camera, needless contraptions and simple directorial flourishes - are sorely missed in Fright of the Bumblebees.

The marriage of Zelda and Musou is an unexpected success, then - a game that recounts the Zelda myth not just in a new way, but in a whole new language.

An open-world Hawaii and a generously spirited racer, chafed by always-online irritations and a lack of originality.

What really delivers now, however, is Elite mode. Forget the needlessly intimidating name; this is shooter-as-sport par excellence, an exquisitely balanced and enormously fun mode unlike anything else in the genre.

Legion's near-future London is almost too close for comfort, though the game it hosts is a characterless slog.

More of a smash and grab than a smooth raid, then, but you can't deny that it's come away with the goods.

Perhaps the developers were too focused on not breaking all those wonderful toys, or perhaps they were bound to a tight deadline, but the game feels slightly flat as a result.

While the game certainly has aspirations to action-RPG greatness, it falls far, far short of the mark by instead boiling down to a trudging mess of relentless combat, character statistics and more quests and side-quests than you could shake some kind of magic stick at.

The inescapable truth for Konami is that it has not just failed to better itself, but has gone backwards to the extent that it's no longer our favourite horror series ("Project Zero 2" ["Fatal Frame 2"] claims that throne for now). [JPN Import]

It might not take as much effort to overcome or offer as much content as arcade stalwarts "Midnight Club" and "Burnout," but neither game has the same depth online, and only hot seating Burnout's crash sections with a few friends can rival the Hollywood playground DICE has built here for sheer fun.

A couple of omissions grate and it's hardly cheap, but this is a sumptuous collection for the grandest of shmups. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Problem is, with the lengthy time it takes to move between any location in the Sims 2 - especially if you're only going to be there for the few minutes a date takes up - is particularly taxing.

Brilliantly embodies the Wii's dramatic premise: that this kind of control can appeal to people who don't play games and people who used to play games as well as people who've been playing them for as long as we have.

So if Konami Arcade Classics was a bag of Revels, I would happily munch my way to the bottom of the bag with very little spitting and surreptitious dog feeding. With far more good than bad, plenty of variety in the titles and some nice extras this collection sits proudly at the top of the DS retro compilation pile.

There are also some very sloppy mistakes, which are just frequent enough to make you wonder whether the game was proofread and fact-checked.

While there are giant leaps towards putting things right this is a game that seems to be grasping for what once was rather than setting its paths straight into a bright and engaging future.

The polish of the game - the truly glorious soundscape, the astonishing art of the characters and the maps, and the clear joy of the basic idea - do point to a talented crew of developers, but the endless bugs, the limited content, the badly balanced upgrades, and the half-implemented ideas feel like the game was polished before it was finished.

It just would be nice for Nintendo and Game Freak to supply the other demand next time: the demand of something actually more different, or at least palpably new, for our hard earned. Let the pitchfork laden debate begin.

As a freebie to PlayStation Plus subscribers, Me Monstar Hear Me Roar is a cackling feast of projectile-vomiting silliness to while away an hour on, but you might balk at having to actually pay for it.

While not as essential as a title like Geometry Wars, Roboblitz can still be a charming and enjoyable experience, definitely setting new precedents for future Arcade releases. However at times it feels a little too much like an Unreal Engine 3 tech-demo than a game in its own right.

Presentation is what lets Sports Champions down, and not just when it comes to the characters. The environments appear bland, empty and dated.

A fascinating but flawed experimental musical game that fails to live up to some heavenly potential.

At its worst, Tomb Raider: Underworld is everything that's wrong with videogames - clichéd, predictable, frustrating, inconsistent, repetitive and derivative. Legend was supposed to be the game that marked the series' return to form, and it achieved that. Underworld is better than Legend; meatier, more challenging, more atmospheric and with less silly nonsense like quick-time events. But Underworld was supposed to be the first real next-gen Tomb Raider game, and it isn't...At its best, however, Tomb Raider: Underworld is everything that's great about videogames. It's beautiful, exciting, challenging, rewarding and absorbing. Many of the locations are stunning, and so's Lara.

Another merely serviceable theme park ride; a brief, unchallenging jaunt through linear corridors decorated with just enough "official merchandise" appeal to mask the threadbare design.

We're even less inclined to accept the messy control system, the often dreadful AI, the questionable animation, the less than stellar visuals, the fact that following the dark side makes no real difference to the game, and the overall feeling that it's just not that exciting.

Sure, it's repetitive; sure it's not doing anything massively new, but what it does provide is an exceptionally polished genre offering that fans of the series and kart games in general can get a lot out of.

Boasting an intense atmosphere, satisfying puzzles and nail-biting combat, it's a game that will linger long in the memory for those who succumb to its dark allure. If you missed out on this the first or even second time around, then now's the time to pick up a true classic - at the right price.

With 15 levels to romp through, gorgeous, irreverent cut-scenes and various challenges, WTF? proves that talented developers haven't completely deserted the Minis scene. Just most of them.

BloodRayne can be forgiven on a lot of levels because it's so silly it's fun, but for everything it does which is endearing, there's something to frustrate, bore or alienate the player.

An easy game to admire, the concept is appealingly daft and the implementation rich in wit and charm. It's just too laidback for its own good; an approach that pays dividends in those first joyful days but proves less successful in the long term as the rising difficulty curve chafes uncomfortably against the whimsical lack of direction.

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.

Average execution, terribly repetitive combat, lots of reasonable ideas that don't quite work, a general lack of cohesion: it's not diabolical, but it's far from great.

So I'd rather play an erratic instalment of Alan Wake than a highly polished cover-shooter clone, because even when it fails, the former gives me something to think about in the ensuing days. Put another way, The Signal gets better the more I don't play it.

At first, it's just a mild irritation, but the further you progress into this 60-level affair, the more aggressive the drones become and the more it starts to aggravate you when you can't see what to avoid.

There's certainly plenty of nostalgia to be had here - and for the money you can't really complain about a compilation that been created with a great deal of care - but sadly Capcom Classics Reloaded offers only a snapshot of what retro gaming offers.

You'll probably only want to play it a couple of times yourself, but show it to your ageing mates and you're guaranteed to spark a conversation about Mario's Cement Factory within 14 seconds.

Total War goes back to the past, but this spin-off invites uneasy comparisons to the superior recent Warhammer games.

There are improvements, and there are problems - business as usual. The era of EA Sports' FIFA may be over, but the game goes on.

It's difficult to shake off the suspicion that the game is a bit slight. You can get through the whole thing in little over 20 hours, which seems a bit short for an RPG - especially considering the amount of level-grinding.

It's hard. In fact, it's so hard it makes Rainbow Road look like Mario Circuit. It makes Master Level 3 on Super Monkey Ball look like a walk in the park. Super Hexagon? A pussycat by comparison.

Needless to say, Umbrella Chronicles isn't the most long-lasting affair, and in absolute gameplay terms it's probably one of the most wafer thin offerings you'll have experienced for years. But in a landscape dominated by epic, sprawling complexity, it's refreshing now and then to kick back and blast away in a game that's as knowingly brain-dead as this.

Definitely more than the sum of its parts, and a rare case of a game getting there before Hollywood.

For PS2 owners in particular I can think of no finer FPS on the system at the moment. Given that it's technically pushing the machine further than anything else, features 16-player online multiplayer, an action-packed single-player campaign that's no pushover and provides an interesting and well-conceived twist on the saturated shooter genre I'd happily nail my hearty recommendation to all PS2 owners looking for a shooter to get them through the summer.

Slick and overly downbeat, Lara's latest sees the reboot trilogy end just as it began.

A wobbly first-person horror whose moments of splendid unease are spoiled by clunky stealth, casual misogyny and warmed-over scares.

Firefly has offered a level editor with the game, allowing players to compile their own campaigns or swap them over the net, but I can't see this breathing much life into a title that exhausts its appeal so quickly. Nevertheless, it's undoubtedly one for the management fetishists.

Graphics whores will inevitably be put off by the old school look and feel of the title, but if you can get past that, this is one of the best god games the PC has seen in quite a while.

Initially haunting and lonely, then blossoming into something joyous, Drawn: Dark Flight is a triumph of creativity and imagination.

Perhaps the best thing about Serious Sam though is just how pristine it is. It’s a very, very polished game.

Top Spin 2 is a fine tennis title and a game you'll have a lot of fun with off or online, but one that does little to justify its price tag, and is little more than a high def update of the original.

Panzer General: Allied Assault is not for everyone. It will definitely gain a small subset of rabidly devoted XBLA players and rightly so - it's a great tactical turn-based game. But the average gamer will be a long way outside of their comfort zone.

Rebellion serves up another enjoyably pulpy shooter, though Strange Brigade struggles to stand out.

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.

Attaching a score feels a little mean, because in terms of what the games are worth (even collectively) it wouldn't even register on the scale, but as a sensibly priced package it somehow serves its purpose admirably.

It's too easy. Yes, there's a Hard mode, and Evil mode if you can be bothered to play through it that many times, but if you've got a solid grounding in role-playing games, you'll walk through it.

There's real magic at the heart of this brilliantly faithful AR take on Mario Kart, but a fair few caveats abound.

If you're not already invested in the 'brand', then there's an equally good chance that it will come across as fairly unremarkable. Innovation is largely absent, the stylised visuals are good without ever being great, and the stripped-down gameplay is disappointingly undemanding.

A bit of a boost for exhausted gameplay, and a stack of new content for those people wanted to send more crawling, floating, bleeping Star Wars things to their death. That's going to be more than enough for the thousands who were thrilled by the original, but for the rest of the world this is simply another commercial footnote.

A substantial improvement on the original: better-paced, a bit funnier and with the much-needed addition of online multiplayer.

Overlord II feels like a shining beacon of quality. Not only is it a distinct improvement on the original, but the new features add greatly to what was already a superbly entertaining game. It manages to strike an excellent balance between being challenging and rewarding, and does so throughout with a wicked smile on its face.

But for a few missing weapons, then (sorry - a few dozen missing weapons), this is as close to the series' peak as we've been since the days when the novelty hadn't worn off on the PC, and given the right company you'll find it quite approachable, with simple controls and the usual potential for comedy failure.

There's absolutely no doubt that The Mega Quiz is the strongest instalment in the Buzz franchise to date...arguably the first time that the balance of questions, rounds and presentation has been so close to perfection.

Pokémon Sword and Shield's final expansion is a fantastic, enticing endgame area that also shows just how great these games could have been.

But after the dismal Ultra Smash and the lacklustre compilation that was Superstars, Mario Tennis Aces is a return to form for Camelot, even if it's not quite the equal of this series at its very best. It's a good game, if never quite a great one, and one that's still capable of some real magic. This is Mario Tennis serving up a much more full-blooded spin on the sport than we've seen in quite a while, even if its new depths have been pursued to a fault.

Charming and witty.

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.

Although in pure in gameplay terms it doesn't reach match Psi-Ops' thrilling ambition, favouring old school stealth principles over riotous action, it almost makes up for it by being a far more stylish affair - although the occasional lack of signposting can be irritating on one or two notable occasions.

Sticker Star has two sides. One is a world that's a simple, vibrant joy to be in. The other is a set of systems so pared back that they waver between easy and tedious, matched up to a badly signposted set of puzzles. There's just enough adventure and charm to mitigate the latter, but that's the shame of it; Sticker Star squeaks a pass when it could, and should, be spectacular

It's a funny game, it's a better game than its predecessor and there are certainly worse ways to spend four or five hours. Episode Two nudges the series up from Just Okay to Actually Pretty Good. Let's hope that the third instalment continues the trend.

We. The Revolution is a fascinating and provoking descent into a judge's buckled shoes during the French Revolution. [Eurogamer Recommended]