Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is quite simply a superb package, with neither single-player nor online feeling like it's been given short shrift.

As a game, Silent Hunter 5 fails because the bugs and UI render it a chore. As a simulation, it fails because the bugs and UI render it ridiculous and incomplete. As a product, it's just overwhelming disrespectful to this long running series' fans. And finally, as one of the first games to receive Ubisoft's new copy protection, it's an embarrassment.

Alice in Wonderland is surreal, dreamlike, well-crafted and very beautiful.

This will split the Supreme Commander 2 fanbase in two. The game's made enormous compromises, but it's also brought in a superb sense of mayhem and variety.

Mega Man 10 doesn't quite perhaps have the sparkling feel of reinvention that its predecessor enjoyed, but if you were one of the many who considered MM9 a welcome return to form, then this is another must-buy. Everyone else is perfectly entitled to look confused.

The truth is, when it comes to DLC, nobody is doing this stuff as well as Gearbox's team at the moment.

The truth is, when it comes to DLC, nobody is doing this stuff as well as Gearbox's team at the moment.

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.

Make a game with controls that don't work, and lovable presentation and playful creativity can't save it. It always hurts to punish a game that tries something different, especially when such obvious care has gone into its presentation, but Fret Nice fails to execute its ideas with competence.

Set over an impressive 80 levels (including five tutorial run-throughs), Sarbakan's game is an instantly engaging bite-sized affair with plenty of replay value. Screenshots don't really do it justice.

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.

If you can stand a bit of trial-and-error though, and feel like taking your brain on a bracing walk once in a while, echoshift is a very well presented, well thought out and enjoyable piece of mental exercise.

It may also be the only game you play this year where pulling the trigger makes you really feel something, and I can think of no greater compliment.

Multiplayer mysteries aside, Napoleon represents a healthy step forward for the Total War series.

Multiplayer doesn't offer much, either.

It doesn't help that the game goes from mildly challenging to ridiculously easy within the space of a few hours, and once you hit level 50 nothing in the game will pose any kind of threat.

The truth is, when it comes to DLC, nobody is doing this stuff as well as Gearbox's team at the moment.

If this were the only console RPG available the numerous flaws might be worth suffering, but when compared to the ambition and polish that other games have brought to the genre in recent years Risen demands far too much and offers too little in return.

It's a genuinely peaceful and relaxing experience, with a wonderfully becalmed atmosphere, subdued beauty, and an earnest, innocent attitude - all of them rare properties in games.

With its distinct Voxel 3D visual style and some engaging puzzles, there's a core of good game struggling to get out here, but one that is ultimately thwarted by the fiddly controls.

For only 200 points, you get a good few hours of beautiful entertainment, and an Endless mode to pick through once you're done. More of this kind of thing, and Nintendo's best kept secrets won't stay that way for long.

Completists will certainly enjoy the three Templars' Lairs bundled alongside The Bonfire of the Vanities, but being forced to buy the accompanying memory sequence to access them leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

It's the Amy Winehouse of videogames: rambling and incoherent, a bit of a mess and not much to look at, but with a unique and distinctive voice that's very hard to ignore.

This is, above all else, a supremely confident game: confident in its charm, in its challenges, and in its unique identity. If you thought Braid gave puzzle-platformers a soul, this one is all about personality.

Whether you play this via DLC or as part of the forthcoming Gold Edition of Resident Evil 5, it's an essential episode.

Scrappy where it needed to be polished, clumsy where it needed to be nimble, the game wears its iconic characters as a shield, happy to serve up scripted shocks but offering nothing that might actually surprise.

It's bursting with happiness. And so am I when I play it.

Maybe it's the classic, solid city-building gameplay. Maybe it's the unique style and sense of humour. Maybe it's the fact that, despite all the niggles, the game is still so absorbing you can spend hours on it without realising just how much time you've wasted.

It extends the series in intelligent and welcome ways.

With two-player co-op and versus modes adding a welcome dose of multiplayer fun to the package, Art of Balance is nothing short of essential.

Innovative, unique and utterly charming in its self-contained universe, it comes highly recommended to open-minded 360 owners.

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.

Dante's Inferno is worth considering if you're a diehard hack-and-slasher fan who loves blood, gore, fire, brimstone, layered but simplistic combat systems and tits. This is more than one big lava level and it's not a terrible game. It's just not an original one, and it's arrived a little too late.

The original Super Monkey Ball wasn't designed with a balance board in mind, any more than monkeys are meant to wear waistcoats, and the end result is just as odd and incongruous. It might well be time to stop grinding that organ.

But despite sounding infuriatingly complicated, Link 'n' Launch very quickly gets under your skin. The only problem is it's a bit lightweight. With just 10 missions and 100 pretty simple puzzles to barrel through, you're soon left wanting more.

A lack of depth doesn't stop Chime from quietly turning its own genre on its head either. Zoë Mode's game shows what can happen when you give up destruction in favour of creation, and exchange tension for a kind of dreamy calm.

Only the slight sensation of datedness prevents this from scoring higher, and no doubt once the mods start flowing the value for money will get even better. But there's plenty here to keep the faithful feeling extremely optimistic about the prospect of a proper sequel. And there's still nothing out there quite like STALKER.

Despite all of these complaints, those hordes of starship captains are quite happy. They may not have many different things to do, and the missions and UI may be rather buggy, but there does seem to be enough content to sustain them - at least until the endgame - and even at its worst that content is knockabout fun with more instant appeal, and more suitability for casual, short-session, low-commitment play than most MMOs.

Despite their relative strength, the disparate halves of White Knight Chronicles fail to gel in meaningful ways.

It's a shooter without eloquence or crunch, an MMO without content or personality, and as an experimental combination of the two it's missing ambition.

By any objective measurement, this a poor attempt at adding a new sequence to an excellent game which already boasted a generous amount of content. Had it added more explorational elements, or another secret location to discover, it would have been worth the effort - but to simply stitch together forgettable melee encounters and chases with new cut-scenes is some distance from being enough.

Perhaps BioWare's greatest success in Mass Effect 2 has been taking a complex RPG and making it effortless to understand, play and enjoy on a constant basis, because it has done this in a manner that should prove utterly essential to veterans and newcomers alike, and more than enough to suggest Mass Effect 3 will be the most important game in BioWare's history.

The game's concessions to traditional game design make No More Heroes 2 a more palatable, satisfying experience. But in doing so, you feel Suda 51 and his team have moved away from Grasshopper's boisterous 'Punk's Not Dead' slogan.

To say it's a good stopgap for Super Street Fighter IV would be an injustice, as it's a fighter that stands out on its own merit. Those who look beyond the tinted visors will discover not just an excellent Wii game but an all kinds of awesome 2D fighter.

The irony then, is that the game which can accommodate the greatest numbers of players in the history of the medium will be best enjoyed by a dedicated few. For those players, at least, numbers really aren't everything.

The sad truth is that there are better looking, better designed twin-stick shooters on the Indie Games channel for a fraction of the price, produced by inspired individuals who have moved on from Beat the Blockoids. Give them your Microsoft Points instead.

The game succeeds with this approach simply because it has so few contemporary rivals but it's a modest sort of success, one that proves the strategy RPG in its traditional form has run out of steam - but suggests that nevertheless, there's enjoyment to be had in revisiting old flames.

Dark Void's extremely short campaign - with no motivation for replay and no multiplayer options - is more like a portfolio of half-baked concepts hurriedly crammed into an uninspired package for ease of presentation, more show-reel than show-stopper.

Starship Patrol presents a package of rare calibre on DSiWare, a game that, through its tight breadth and expansive depths, would make for a worthy defining title on a service still trying to find its identity.

It comes down to this: Muscle March is shallow, stupid, short, repetitive and crude. It's also the best WiiWare game I've ever played.

Suffice to say, feeble half-baked offerings like this are a step in the wrong direction. Hopefully Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening will do a much better job next month.

There's little doubt that anyone who fell in love with the first game's slender charms will be enthused by the prospect of more of the same delivered with a higher degree of HD polish. With its A-list production still held back by B-list ambition, though, there's ultimately not enough of substance to lure players away from the multitude of other co-op gaming experiences for more than a few days.

Painfully thin.

If you're on a budget, or just don't have access to a DS, then this is a fine way to sample its abundant charms, provided you don't expect anything special in the presentation department.

The sheer unabashed evil that Eko Software has managed to cram into a seemingly cute puzzler is something to behold.

The story is compelling and well told, and there's certainly enough flow to put it in the category of "just ten more minutes" games - but you'll need a lot of patience to get the most out of Ego Draconis.

It's not a terrible game, just an utterly unoriginal and instantly forgettable one.

While on the surface of it Darksiders feels like a game with a lot of good ideas but only a few of its own, where even a brief flying section on an angelic mount owes rather a lot to Panzer Dragoon, overall the silly old story and wonderful art style give terrific heft to the universe, and the clockwork of the puzzles and game systems are precision-engineered in a manner that you come to trust implicitly.

While on the surface of it Darksiders feels like a game with a lot of good ideas but only a few of its own, where even a brief flying section on an angelic mount owes rather a lot to Panzer Dragoon, overall the silly old story and wonderful art style give terrific heft to the universe, and the clockwork of the puzzles and game systems are precision-engineered in a manner that you come to trust implicitly.

A game that exemplifies so much of what commentators claim has died in the Japanese game industry. A blast of creative brilliance, both technically accomplished, strategically deep and infused with rare imagination, Bayonetta represents the pinnacle of its chosen niche. [JPN Import]

The story is compelling and well told, and there's certainly enough flow to put it in the category of "just ten more minutes" games - but you'll need a lot of patience to get the most out of Ego Draconis.

More developed than a throwaway Flash game, yet less self-conscious and showy than a WiiWare or Xbox Live Arcade effort, it's a product that ignores the spectacle and bluster of gaming in order to more clearly celebrate the raw elegance of good design.

Borderlands' latest DLC has shown me the combat rhythm I've naturally settled into: the regular back and forth between whittling away at enemies with SMGs before disappearing in a puff of magic, to either slink off and let my shield charge up again, or pop up behind an unfortunate bruiser in order to blast chunks out of their neck with a shotgun.

Don't buy this expecting an epic RPG, and consider keeping someone under the age of 12 at hand to help you justify the twee nature of the game as a whole. But there's something here which is notably absent in any number of lushly produced and scintillatingly scripted games: a real sense of fun and discovery.

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.

On a console that's hardly lacking in excellent on-rails shooters - Darkside Chronicles and the soon-to-be-released Sin and Punishment 2 among them - and interesting, lovely-looking downloadable games, 530 Eco Shooter has no place.

On the face of it, Alien Breed Evolution offers everything that fans of the 16-bit incarnations could wish for, with strong production values and focused design contributing to a sympathetic update that stays true to the source material. But sadly, a flawed approach to co-op play and an inherent lack of variety ultimately count against it.

I did not get nearly as far into this game as I would want to for a review. I simply couldn't. I tried for long enough. Yet I am completely unwilling to say this a bad thing - I'm certain this is a brilliant thing for the right person. Which is why I hope I've brought you to a place where you can make that decision for yourself.

PixelJunk Shooter is a taut, well-made and original game that's been lavished with good design and slick coding. It won't detain you long - and without giving too much away, the post-credits kill-screen suggests a DLC expansion is highly likely, as does PixelJunk's past history. But for every minute of those few hours, it's an unpredictable, fluidly entertaining blast.

Not half as bad as the limp first few hours suggest. It's perhaps not the greatest company epitaph in the world but, as Devlin might say, while throwing himself out of a speeding car, knocking back a slug o' the good stuff and mashing a Nazi's head in with one punch: "It coulda been a lot worse."

Not half as bad as the limp first few hours suggest. It's perhaps not the greatest company epitaph in the world but, as Devlin might say, while throwing himself out of a speeding car, knocking back a slug o' the good stuff and mashing a Nazi's head in with one punch: "It coulda been a lot worse."

Packed with inventive ideas and one engaging sequence after another, it's a spirited, poignant and unsettling game that not only delivers a long-overduereturn to form, but reinvigorates horror adventures in the process.

Vintage Nintendo. Maybe a bit too vintage - Spirit Tracks is, like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a straight rehash, a derivative sequel of the kind the company used not to make, and based on a decades-old template. You could easily mark it down for that. But that would belie the fact that it's also a tighter and more rounded game, crafted with more care, than not just Phantom Hourglass but most modern games for grown-up consoles.

Slick but rather empty.

It's the same game you've already played in its more advanced form, making this more of an academic exercise in gaming genealogy.

Game development has evolved to the point where it's pretty rare that a PS3 or Xbox 360 release is actually anything worse than mediocre, but Rogue Warrior is easily the worst game I've played on either platform for a long, long time. You could call it cheap, exploitative trash, but it's not actually that cheap, and the exploitation elements are probably the best thing it's got going for it. Trash though? Absolutely.

Pandora could well lend itself to a great film, and would lend itself fabulously well to a good third-person action game. Unfortunately, despite providing two third-person action games here for the price of one, both of them are dull and forgettable.

Mirkwood is a great expansion, but compared to Moria, its quest and instance content is fairly limited. This is because the expansion was also introducing the Skirmish system, an entire new area of the game.

During the course of writing this, Eurogamer MMO editor Oli Welsh popped up on my MSN to ask me if I thought it was a puzzle, RPG or strategy game. It has enough elements of each that I honestly couldn't say. What I did do was recommend it to him wholeheartedly, because, whatever it is, Clash of Heroes is a very good game indeed.

In many ways, Resident Evil Zero provides a timely reminder of the things we miss about old style survival-horror. The heavy emphasis on puzzles, slower pace and the harrowing boss encounters make it feel more like a true horror adventure, and once you get to grips with its foibles it becomes strangely satisfying and rewarding.

It's just a great pinball game, with intelligent table design that manages to pack in features without losing focus. I cherished the version I had for the homebrew GP32 handheld, so the sight of it resurrected once more for the PSP is a genuine joy.

As a concept, it works. The physics is decent enough, but the game itself never finds the tone or hook that elevates its gameplay model into something truly compelling.

It's a clever twist on an old standard but the cannons prove to be an irritation rather than a true challenge - their fast, ruthless volleys reducing too much of the game to a painstaking crawl, claiming a few pixels of space at a time as you inch towards a vital catapult. Fun, then, but in need of balancing.

It's just about worthwhile as a chance to test yourself against some long-forgotten mechanics, but you can't shake the feeling that Just Add Water is just joining the dots.

If nothing else, it's entirely fitting that a game that's always been brilliantly brainless is now genuinely brain-dead as well. Oh, and I finally got that bloody Mario-themed Achievement. SCORE.

If nothing else, it's entirely fitting that a game that's always been brilliantly brainless is now genuinely brain-dead as well. Oh, and I finally got that bloody Mario-themed Achievement. SCORE.

As it is, for all the added beauty and inherited class, I don't think there's enough freshness or sophistication here for that to happen.

It's complicated, often unhelpful, and engrossing. It's the shy boy your mum told you to make friends with. It's a troubled and stubborn creature, with a funny run.

The inability to upload high-scores is a minor disappointment, but otherwise Bit.Trip Void is an unqualified success, and for 600 Points from the Wii Shop it's well worth investigating.

If you're going to play a King's Bounty game for the first time, make it The Legend - and I'd say that whether or not it was available so cheaply. If you're all done with that and crave more, then Armored Princess will not do you wrong.

Gyromancer has longevity, it's fearsomely addictive, and it's more absorbing the more you play it.

Ubisoft Montreal has never been afraid to try new things, but after a few missteps with games like last year's Prince of Persia, perhaps the bravest thing it could have done with Assassin's Creed II was simply to make a classic open-world adventure, filled to the brim with things you want to do and the narrative motivation to continue doing them. The fact it's done so suggests we really should trust the studio when it says it's taken its lesson, and fills me with hope for the third game in the trilogy. In the meantime, we not only have the Assassin's Creed game we'd hoped for in the first place to play with, but one of the best open-world games of the year.

For fans of twitch-gaming this surely ranks up there with the best that this anachronistic sub-genre has to offer.

It's fun for half an hour, but that's an awfully expensive 30 minutes. Don't buy RIDE unless you want to be taken for one.

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.

There's simply too much that is vaguely explained, and too much aimless wandering looking for the next vital objective, and that can't help but drag down the score for a game that, as last time, comes close to being something genuinely special.

Plenty of people would rather sit on the sofa, thanks, and play a proper videogame with guns, and good for them. But small girls, show-offs and people who are too drunk to care in the first place will have a great time with Just Dance.

SCEE Cambridge has done Media Molecule proud and fans of the original game won't be disappointed. PSP owners who missed out first time around should be sure to give it a go, as LittleBigPlanet is undoubtedly one of the standout titles for Sony's handheld.