If you can ignore the story, It Takes Two has some of the best co-op gameplay in years. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Inclusive and often thought-provoking, this is a daring portrait of a game-world with all the failure cut out, and it's hard not to love a game that loves you so much in return. Fable II will charm you, thrill you, and leave you very, very happy.

A masterful combination of the many things that have striven to define the series in the past, each presented at its best and accentuated by considered design.

Whereas once we treated Left 4 Dead as a stopgap between Half-Lifes, this is no longer a weird little side project with modest expectations, and Valve is confident enough to play around with it, safe in the knowledge that you can trust your players. Left 4 Dead proved it. And whereas that game had a personality, this one is overflowing with it.

It'll still have the piss ripped out of it for being a spreadsheet number crunching exercise, a game that reduces passion into numbers, but take no notice. It's an abstract extrapolation of emotions. A beautiful game of the beautiful game. Chaotically absorbing.

Genres combine with beautiful precision in a game that offers simple pleasures and terrifying depths. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Another deeply professional, personality-filled and progressive take on the shooter from Valve. In a cultural landscape that has as many zombie touchstones as ours, it takes something special to make them shamble appealingly, and Left 4 Dead, both literally and metaphorically, makes them run.

Whereas once we treated Left 4 Dead as a stopgap between Half-Lifes, this is no longer a weird little side project with modest expectations, and Valve is confident enough to play around with it, safe in the knowledge that you can trust your players. Left 4 Dead proved it. And whereas that game had a personality, this one is overflowing with it.

It's just so devastatingly addictive - and the fun doesn't even truly start until you've got some competitive friends on the in-game leaderboards.

Action fans will find the combat too simple, while RPG fans will find the inability to customise their character to any major degree frustrating.

Monolith Soft closes out its loosely connected trilogy of epic RPGs with its most adaptable, malleable and high-spirited adventure yet. [Eurogamer Essential]

An unqualified triumph. It's stuffed with content but rarely for the sake of it, and knowing Criterion it will be handsomely supported for months to come, even though it's already the best pure arcade racing game since Burnout Paradise.

No matter how much is going on at any given time, the frame rate is a rock solid 60, and for a game as fast as this that's a godsend.

Yes, just to add an even greater degree of random nonsense, you can shake the device to jog the coin a little, and therefore give you a chance to influence its direction. Once you start employing this tactic, of course, you can't bloody well stop, and so spend most of the game spasming like a drunk with an involuntary tic.

But you also suspect BioWare's on the right track, and until it pulls it off - and the initial noises about the sequel seem promising - Mass Effect offers us a singular universe of excitement and drama to lose ourselves in.

It's the heady energy at the heart of every Super Mario 3D World level, pushed out across an entire map for what's a hugely entertaining, and very different brand of Mario action. There might be more polished Mario adventures around, and more coherent ones. But when it gets to the core of what makes these games so special - the inventiveness, the imagination and the eccentricity of it all - then this new pairing might well be peerless. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Taking a healthy dose of inspiration from Ridge Racer Type 4, Inertial Drift is a unique arcade racer with an exquisite core mechanic.

Although Hot Pursuit 2 is an excellent racer, well worth buying and stuffed with many hours of gameplay, "Burnout 2" is all that and more, without having to obey strict license agreements regarding damage.

Perhaps Tony Prince does nothing to drag the series forward - somewhat fittingly for a man with his head stuck in the eighties - but the episode Rockstar has named in his honour is a colourful and pleasingly unpredictable adventure that gets better throughout and ends on a high.

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

Developer Coal Supper's relentlessly inventive absurdist comedy might, by necessity, keep a tight rein on players, but this is an impeccably constructed masterclass in gag-telling.

If you can accept that it won't last you as long as you might like, then your quest is clear: leave no stone unturned in your search for this game, and then leave none of its stones unturned either.

Marginally better than the original. The single player game is undoubtedly more enjoyable, whilst the multiplayer is still flawed but nevertheless worth a few games.

Tetris gets the Tetsuya Mizuguchi makeover, to dazzling effect. [Eurogamer Essential]

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

While a fine piece of craft and a sumptuous reworking of the setting, EA Motive's Dead Space remake sheds a little of the 2008 game's enchantment.

If this game had been released on the NES 20 years ago, it would be recalled by a generation of players as a high point of the 8-bit era. The fact that console gamers are only getting their first crack at Cave Story in 2010 doesn't make the experience any less memorable.

The array of character builds and focus on warring guilds makes it a dream for those who enjoy online rucks. The more off-line adventurer has a huge world and extensive plot to fight their way through.

Borderlands 2 is still a hillbilly moonshiner sort of game, then, but it's the hillbilly at his canny, tinkering, big-dreaming best. It's the hillbilly at the peak of his powers. It's the hillbilly made majestic.

Most obviously, the control system on the PS2 is far more intuitive and user friendly than the comparatively clunky original that suffered from a hateful inventory management system.

The best version of the best football management game ever made... The best just got better. Again.

Part of the team behind Sang-Froid are back with a spiritual sequel powered by some truly dazzling thinking.

Fire Emblem goes back to school for the most epic, generous and dynamic outing for the series yet. [Eurogamer Recommended]

It's an instantly appealing refinement of smart ideas, served up with gorgeous production values and back-to-basics strategic muscle. It's intelligently structured, so you can lose yourself for hours or indulge in a quick twenty minute skirmish, while the multiplayer mode is an absolute monster if you're willing to submit to its co-operative style.

Traffic Checking might irk you to begin with, but as long as you've got the patience to get over the easy first half and play the game in the right spirit, there's tons of face wobbling fun to be had. Stick with it, go for the Perfect rankings and go online with it - it'll be worth every penny.

At its best FIFA 11 is enormous fun and brilliantly engineered, but in its battle to be more varied and realistic it has lost some of its momentum, and off the pitch returns are starting to diminish too.

If you've somehow lost your inner child, you might find it skulking impishly in the confines of Casey's Contraptions. Even the price is from your youth.

A rich and rewarding expansion to the Final Fantasy MMO, with a strong storyline, but a little inaccessible to less committed players. [Recommended]

It's not that it relies on a healthy suspension of disbelief to overcome its contrived elements; it's about bringing order to foggy chaos. This, it does with aplomb.

Through Cave's uncompromising vision, Espgaluda II manages to squeeze one of the most frenetic, frenzied and thoroughly enjoyable shooters onto iPhone without sacrifice. That should, without hesitation, be fervently embraced.

Bungie sticks the landing as it finally brings together the threads of its epic first saga.

L.A. Noire is slow but quietly engrossing; its mechanics are suspect, but you can't fault the ambition, attention to detail and commitment that went into its making. It risks stumbling over its own earnestness at times, but it's saved by its star – and I don't mean Staton, who does his best with a dry character. That star is Los Angeles.

A busier, louder, and more emotionally resplendent take on this singular hiking sim.

In the final analysis, it just maybe lacks the creative edge and imagination that would have catapulted it into classic territory. We just didn't really care about what we were fighting our way through.

None of these criticisms will detract from your enjoyment, provided all you want from a game is the opportunity to repeatedly turn evil monsters into red mush in gorgeous HD detail. Dead Space easily delivers on that promise, but fails to turn its polished production values into something truly memorable over the long haul.

Violent stakes once again meet zany shenanigans in Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the series' much-improved second RPG.

Re-imagining? Remake? Whatever it is, XCOM brings back and revitalises a classic...This game is a winner.

One of the most impressive strategy games we've seen in years.

Norco is a beautiful, surprising, human, and utterly magnetic debut. [Eurogamer Recommended]

It's a tightly wound adventure well worth setting aside time for, backed up by a multiplayer angle that will have greater staying power.

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.

Considered in isolation, Dead Space 2's ambience, brute frights and player toolset are good rather great. But in combination, these three elements prove as irresistible as the pull on Isaac exerted by a malfunctioning airlock. For once, you'll want to let go.

One of those rare games that knows you can't be perfect all the time, and that you have the right to change your mind about your actions later. It just wants to be played with and enjoyed - and when you finish, you just want to play with it again.

Often masterful, rarely boring, and beautifully presented - from the minimalist HUD and maximalist visuals to the reactive Gregson-Williams-inspired scoring and conversational feel of the dialogue. It is a critical darling because it dares to keep changing and still manages to maintain a high standard in spite of this. It satisfies our lust for variation and our lust for technical excellence.

The AI is still taking the piss rather than pumping the lifeblood as it should be... After four games, it's shocking to discover that the AI cars still follow a clear line around each track, heartlessly cut back in front of you even when it's obvious you'll hit them as a result, ram your back end and allow you to crawl around the inside of them on corners you have no right to overtake on by using them as buffers.

The Beatles were fascinated by the number nine. 09/09/09 is no coincidence. So it's only fitting that the game gets...

The fact that RedLynx then has the gall to put mountains of tracks, skill levels and modes into a technically impressive package is likely to mean you'll gorge on DrawRace 2 for so long you'll want to send the developer more money out of sheer embarrassment. 69 pence, for goodness' sake!

Sure, it's a classic, but it's so obviously a £35 mission pack, and is probably double the price it should have been. Unless you were utterly captivated by the original and spend every day pining for more, or never owned the original, it's hard to justify why you should shell out for it.

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.

The Papers, Please creator offers up an intricate and mesmerising puzzle game with a rich and detailed sense of place. [Eurogamer Essential]

This is a genre that demands brilliance of concept and execution, variation in play conditions, subtlety of design and careful management of the endgame, and while most of the best-rated puzzle games come close in a few areas, Lumines sweeps across the lot.

In some senses, Insomniac does need a clip 'round the ear for doing very little to innovate the gameplay in any meaningful sense, but if you're happy to play through a wonderful high definition version of an old classic, put your money down - you won't be remotely disappointed.

While it's a shame that the Xbox 360 experience doesn't do more to move the established template forwards on the multiplayer front, it would also be fairly nit-picky to allow such concerns to detract from the fact that Peggle was, and still is, a wonderful, maddeningly moreish gem of fuss-free game design. Every home should have one.

And I've done this sort of thing before hundreds of times across thousands of days in what feels like a dozen Mario games. I still love it.

Mother Base, co-op and Extra Ops are great additions to the Metal Gear formula and luxuriously comfortable fits for handheld play. The subdued campaign is not Kojima at his histrionic and surprising best, but it arguably offers the tightest stealth gameplay since Snake Eater or even the first Metal Gear Solid.

With an online mode that actually works and a wealth of new goodies to round up (not to mention the lure of Gamerpoints making us more likely to push for the higher ranks or actually play through arcade mode for once), we love it even more. Best fighting game on the 360, easily. Best fighting game of this generation, easily. Best version of this sterling beat-'em-up, easily.

If variety is the spice of life, then Wario Ware is the digital equivalent of Phall curry, burning the inside of your face with its charm and originality.

Most of that score is attributable to the superb quality of the core Valve games rather than the shoddy conversion work which sees one game out of the five ruined, and another badly compromised. That being the case, if you own a PC, even a relatively lightweight one, that version will almost certainly be the better - and definitely cheaper - purchase.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a work of considerable finesse and technical bravado, but it falls into the trap of past Guerrilla games in being all too forgettable. For all its skin-deep dynamism it lacks spark; somewhat like the robotic dinosaurs that stalk its arrestingly beautiful open world, this is a mimic that's all dazzle, steel and neon yet can feel like it's operating without a heart of its own.

It is a hard and maddening slog at times, but one that still has its moments where it surprises and quietly delights. Like the original, this isn't an RPG designed to make you feel good - you continue to be little more than a passenger in this historical tapestry, following along behind the horse tails of Henry's betters, and clearing up the mess they leave behind. Some will revel in that work, but I for one won't be chomping at the bit for another sequel any time soon.

If entertainment is fun without failure and progress without pain, you'll have to find it somewhere else. But you'll be missing out on one of the best games of the year.

A game that will live long in the memory, and needs to be played from time to time just to refresh the senses and reinvigorate the gamer inside us all.

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

It stands as one of the essential games to own on the platform, providing it's your one and only games system.

In truth, I would have preferred to select events on the fly, change vehicles on a whim, and restart failed events when I choose, but nor is it a deal-breaker that these features have been omitted. Once you (reluctantly) adapt to the demands of the game, a massive amount of fun awaits.

Studio Liverpool has come up with a near-perfect equation for this sort of game, layering everything up in a manner that keeps you coming back hour after hour, with enough tracks to beat under subtly but crucially different circumstances that you never find yourself tiring of a well-beaten track.

The Beatles were fascinated by the number nine. 09/09/09 is no coincidence. So it's only fitting that the game gets...

War of the Chosen is a generous expansion that's bustling with brilliant new systems that's a must for anyone who's completed XCOM 2. [Recommended]

So - here's a rating for the casual gamer. Add one point for every air show you've ever attended.

There's more to do here than any other sports game we can think of, it's one of the few multiplayer sports games that just about anybody will play whether they care about golf or not, and it's well executed and designed in a great number of ways. What's disappointing is the sense that the game's unsure of where to go next, and anybody who played the previous versions will probably feel a bit let down by EA's lack of ambition.

It's a game that will delight gamers old enough to recognise the classics it celebrates, while captivating those oblivious to its inspirations.

Feels like a complete package from the start; the three gameplay areas - solo, co-op and multiplayer - all feeling like parts of a cohesive whole, driven by a clear and honed declaration of intent.

An elegiac, memorable and affecting tale of the misfortunes suffered by the members of a deeply eccentric family. [Recommended]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is still a wonderful game, but as with the other three boss battles, I can't help feeling that this Director's Cut would have been even better if the directors had, you know, cut it.

This is a muscular and confident game, one with the utmost faith in its own fiction and a dedication to gameplay satisfaction at a microscopic level, paid off in dozens of situations that feel completely random and organic, even when they've clearly been planted there for you to find. Tighter control and a more generous approach to replay value would elevate Dishonored to true classic status, but it stands as one of the year's best all the same.

It's a short game, and quite a painless one, then, but it feels dense: rich and imaginative and the result of some insatiable curiosity for putting things together in new ways. Even at the end of the adventure, five or six hours in, Cocoon was happy to introduce a new mechanic. By which I mean, of course, it was happy to wordlessly teach it, complicate it, turn it inside out and then twist it into something almost unimaginable. I'm sorry to be vague, but you need to see this for yourself. There are no easy words, but also seeing it, witnessing such clarity and ingenuity, is where the pleasure lies.

With Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo weaves together interlocking puzzles, infinite timelines, and supernatural mischief with only minimal clumsiness.

Bold, accessible, deep and rich, Mario Kart 8 is premium video game development. It feels expensive. But this isn't the vacuous lavishness of the Hollywood blockbuster; its excesses and indulgences work towards a common goal - or rather, finish line.

Namco has gone all out to present the ultimate Tekken experience for long-term fans while enticing potential newcomers with its sassiest ever line-up of characters.

Glorious fun. Slow motion gun battles tied to an engine that articulates carnage with the furious eloquence of a caffeinated linguist, bound together by people who've seen a lot of Asian horror, uniting to spread memorable moments over a bed of visceral excitement.

Innovation takes on many guises; this isn't this generation's "Super Mario 64" in terms of reinvention, but given its comprehensiveness and attention to detail, you might liken its impact on us to that of Yoshi's Island. Except, you know, this is funnier.

It is a spectacular, affecting journey, even if its destination is perhaps the creator's alone.

To quote my good friend the Air Daschund: what a rush. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a real delight, a game that revels in both its genre and its own heritage, delivering some wonderful combat and exploration. All that and the odd secret door. Sold.

A less openly provocative game than its predecessor, and one that will capture less attention, but while it may be damned for subtlety it is every bit as deceptive, and perhaps that's the greater of the series' illusions regardless of what else a BioShock sequel might have become.

In short, then, you should buy this game, and if you play anything online this year, make it Tribes 2.

Nier: Automata isn't the most elegant title on the market, but it's the most captivating game I've played in ages. You don't need to look far to find its glaring flaws, but those searching for an endlessly imaginative dreamlike journey will find Nier: Automata too mesmerising to look away from. There's nothing else quite like it - and that includes the original Nier. [Recommended]

It turns out that randomly scrubbing the screen with your stylus in moments of panic may inadvertently link things up and get you out of a tight spot. It's divided opinion of the game, with a lot of people holding off giving it top marks because they see scrubbing as a fundamental flaw.

By starting with a great control and camera system, building on that with excellent combat and a wonderful spin on Ico's platform adventuring, and then topping it off with a decent storyline, Naughty Dog has cooked up one of the most relentlessly entertaining, fat-free games to emerge in ages. Topped off with the most stunning use of the PS3's underused technical prowess yet, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is, for my money, the first must-have PlayStation 3 title.