What sums Katamari Damacy's appeal up for me is the sense of unbridled joy bursting from every pore. It's the happiest game I've ever played, and the happiness is infectious. [JPN Import]

It's absolutely no exaggeration to say that this is far and away the best game for anyone who hasn't played an MMOG before to cut their teeth on. Even more than the familiar universe, the excellent interface and gameplay design Turbine have crafted turn this into an experience which those who have previously avoided the lure of MMOs will find tough to resist.

While this particular GTA game wouldn't inspire me to sit in my bedroom at night trying to make animated squish graphics to put on the top of my website, it's still happily one of the best games on the PSP, and well worth looking into if you still haven't hit your GTA ceiling.

It's charm which cements Dawn of War in the affections. In fact, it charms so casually that the contrary parts of the gaming world will just lazily dismiss it as a bimbo. It really isn't. Charm lures us in, but there's enough happening upstairs to keep it firmly in our affections.

As a full-priced offering, though, the goal posts have moved, and it's hard not to feel a little short changed by the short-lived single player campaign and how similar the whole thing feels. In many ways, GRAW 2 is the classic quick-fire sequel - short on new ideas, but big on polishing what we know and love. But these days, isn't that what people want?

Mutant Blobs Attack is exactly the sort of game Vita needs lots of if is to survive and thrive as a platform. It's got the pick-up-and-play moreishness of the best of iOS with a level of complexity only possible on bespoke gaming hardware.

You can't escape the feeling that Rockstar just isn't as good at a pure third-person shooter as it is with the open worlds of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, and in this linear context it's much harder to put up with its usual missteps in mechanics and difficulty.

Punishingly difficult but ultimately rewarding, games of Skate's caliber are a rare breed and as far as first attempts go, it's been years since we saw one this accomplished. Just... sick, man.

Mythic has dutifully done everything it needs to to compete with Blizzard's jack of all trades and master of most. Crafting is weak, and dungeons - the small, instanced experiences that really cement the group dynamics in an MMO - are frustratingly rare, but aside from that WAR does it all, and does it well.

Perhaps Resident Evil 7's most intriguing quality is how it plays around with the idea of retracing your steps.

If more of the same is what you're after, you can't really argue with what Bethesda's served up for its hardcore fans.

An Advance Wars game that we had just as much, if not more fun playing than ever, but one that proves a bit too grimy and unfriendly for our bright and bouncy taste. Fortunately though, Dark Conflict remains hospitable in most of the areas that really matter to its fans and the people finally tempted to give it a go, and the result is probably the better of the two DS versions.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is ground zero for battle royale games in the way that World of Warcraft was ground zero for MMOs or League of Legends was for MOBAs - not the first, but the one that made it. [Recommended]

With production values that smell of money and brow-furrowing challenges, Frisbee Forever is an essential download.

All in all, it's a new, friendly context for multiplayer racing that's in total harmony with the solo game's adventurous, celebratory tone. In the original Horizon, as terrific as it was, the festival theme felt like a marketing hook first and a clever game structure second. In Forza Horizon 2, it's more like a philosophy, an outlook, a mood that has seeped right through to the core of the game and infused the whole thing with a pure, escapist joy.

As much as I know I will play it all year, though, I would like to feel a greater sense of progression next time. Hopefully EA Sports will find the next-generation consoles inspiring.

As with most adventure games, it's startlingly linear, but don't you dare let that rob you of the experience; this is a game that should be bought, played and cherished.

Battlefield is about the players, and giving them spaces that inspire such moments. End Game celebrates that, and in doing so celebrates everything that makes Battlefield distinctive from its rivals.

Tiny Thief isn't particularly difficult, but its bite-sized challenges are a perfect fit for a quick session on the move and provide just enough mental exercise to blow the cobwebs away on the journey to work.

Much like the genetic modifications that it champions, XCOM: Enemy Within is an experience that gets under your skin.

Years pass as tales are written in this dazzling game of tactics and narrative, choices and memories. [Eurogamer Essential]

A new spin on the series sees Next Level Games serve up character and charm in abundance. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Shatter is an engrossing, smart, beautifully conceived and executed arcade game, but it doesn't quite have the score-racking purity of purpose that makes a Geometry Wars, Pac-Man CE or Out Run Online Arcade so endlessly compelling. Once you've beaten it, which won't take long, you'll move on - but it's a blissful spell while it lasts, an absolute steal at £4.79.

It's gorgeous, as close to a playable cartoon as anything since Zelda: The Wind Waker. That's a big name to drop, but if Luigi's return doesn't quite put him in that class, it puts him in the running among Nintendo's finest.

DJ Hero 2 is the freshest thing in rhythm gaming right now, a lifeline for people bored of guitars and drums and genre veterans craving the purer, simpler rhythm-action kick of a pre-Guitar Hero world.

A huge improvement over the original, and a captivating journey from beginning to end.

A sumptuous, generous and absolutely gorgeous RPG that isn't quite the measure of Dragon Quest's illustrious past.

Although very different from the Japanese veteran's usual ferocious output, Mushihimesama soon grows into the kind of exacting, gleefully sadistic experience you expect from this lot.

I can't say what their future holds as I'm not much of an economist (nor am I really a magpie). But I can say I've had many, many hours of fun in a game that still has much more to show me and which all of us, right now, can play for nothing at all. We're being spoiled.

Returnal gets halfway to doing it. It is full of real, bona fide video game magic, but with each death it becomes less special, more mundane, and this is why it feels so difficult to pick up the controller again, why Returnal feels like it doesn't want to be played. But the magic it does have is transcendent. And so I do still want to play it - whether Returnal likes it or not. [Eurogamer Recommended]

EA should take a page out of FIFA's book here: focus on the game. Every iteration - pre-alpha onwards - sit down and play a full game, 15-minute quarters. If it feels 'right', then you're on the right path.

There's a slickness to the combat, an intelligence to the map design, and a sense of atmosphere worth exploring, all wrapped up in a fast, fun, progressive experience that drip-feeds you goodies as you go.

As effortlessly charming as the beautiful art style is, Bumpy Road veers perilously closely to being style over substance.

Quality of life tweaks and vast depth can't overcome Football Manager 2019's uncharacteristically clumsy, all-consuming training rework.

It's a straightforward sequel with a few more bells and whistles than before, and it lowers the bar of entry somewhat compared to the GameCube original.

I can't see anyone who enjoyed Oblivion enough to get through the main quest <I>not</I> buying this. There's lashings of new fighting and exploring, and it's more gorgeous than ever before.

Honestly, it's a dilemma. Technical issues are often passing, but what lingers is the lack of readiness, in the wider sense. The lack of requisite care. The story is a marvel, as is the sheer, red mist hostility of the world that houses it. The promised depth of systems are there, but mishandled. The maturity - and recall CD Projekt describing Cyberpunk, on announcement, as "a mature RPG for a mature audience" - is often not. Maturity in the immature sense, maybe: the teenage idea of it, that 'maturity' equals Rated M and can be found in nakedness, coarseness, blood and guts, when in actuality it's closer to something like the forced perspective gained from time. My lingering impression of Cyberpunk 2077 is of a game that's shouting over itself, relentlessly at odds with its own creative voice. Amidst it all, the nuance that does exist in Cyberpunk 2077, the intense, intoxicating humanity at its heart, is so nearly engulfed by all the noise. But I think I can still hear it, just about. [Eurogamer Recommended]

In essence, you have to play it less and less, and it will feel better every time. It's all about going out of your way not to go out of your way.

Like most things in life, personality goes a long way, and Hard Lines has it in spades. And probably buckets as well.

Quarrel is a victory for good ideas and also for clever implementation. I suspect that the game's still waiting for multiplayer in order to really show us what it can do but, until that arrives, this is a smart addition to iOS in its own right.

Two designs collide gloriously in a Zelda variation that rivals the greatness of the core games themselves. [Eurogamer Essential]

Radiant Historia might lack the breadth and polish of Dragon Quest IX or the contemporary chutzpah of The World Ends With You, but in its own way, it's every bit as memorable and fully deserves its place alongside them at the top table of DS role-players.

WayForward frequently sends you from one corner of the map to the other on simple fetch quests and back again, and with enemies respawning every time you pass from one area to the next, finding new secrets is much more of a chore than it should be.

I just didn't feel the same magic, the same excitement that flowed from "Sorrow."

A bold, stand-out, knockout of a card game that drips with imagination and menace. [Eurogamer Essential]

At its best, Conviction is played as a high-stakes puzzle game, taut and thrilling when everything is going your way. But when cover is broken, the floodlights go up to reveal a mediocre shooter. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Splinter Cell: Conviction appears brightest in the dark.

Well, this turns out to be brilliant fun, tactical and knockabout, exactly as you'd expect if you combined Mario and XCOM. The roster of characters is colourful and quirky, encouraging experimentation, and alongside equipping items and sparks, each character has a handful of skill trees to plug points into as they level. (Characters also auto-level off the battlefield.) Throw in bosses, inventive victory conditions, deep cuts from Mario universe and clever battlefield design and you've got something pretty special. [Eurogamer Recommended]

The Talos Principle is a game of challenges and conundrums and philosophical wonderings, filled with logic puzzles and cerebral mysteries.

PGR4 wrings the best yet out of an already scintillating arcade racing game. As a swansong for Activision-bound Bizarre Creations, it's more than we could have wished for, and a daunting prospect for whichever developer Microsoft asks to follow it.

It all adds up to an underwhelming return. MercurySteam now has the curious distinction of being the one developer to have worked on both Metroid and Castlevania on the 3DS and fallen wide of the mark on both. This isn't quite the disappointment that was Mirrors of Fate, and there's a hard-edged gem to be found in what was always going to be a troubled exercise. Samus Returns is ultimately a noble remake that fixes so many of the original's problems, but it doesn't do so without introducing a handful of its own.

This is a joyous fairy-tale that, like the best fairy tales, transcends the fashions of the day. [Recommended]

Unless you're a seriously hardcore Midnight Club fan, the Remix isn't really worth buying if you've already got MC3.

Time in the cooler has allowed our favorite frozen sport (sorry, curling) some time to roll out genuine improvements. The enhanced AI isn't quite a cure-all for 07's passive defences, but it does bring a satisfying, sim-like feel to the franchise for the first time in years.

It's a world where pretty fantasy archetypes clothe heartfelt domestic drama, and where outlandish cartoon creations sit at the heart of an engrossing game, infusing it with their exotic charm. Ni no Kuni wears its Studio Ghibli inheritance as lightly as Oliver does his little red magician's cloak, transporting us from one universe to another with the wave of a wand.

inXile's old-school RPG is the Fallout game we've been craving. [Eurogamer Recommended]

There's a quiet confidence to Grimrock 2 that is utterly beguiling. Bigger, bolder and utterly sure of itself and its intended audience, Almost Human may be looking to the past for inspiration, but it's created one of the best pure role-playing games of the year.

Despite sharing the exact same innards as Guitar Hero II, Legends of Rock is, in every conceivable way, a better product than its predecessors. It's better presented, better put together, more professional, more complete.

Beyond the HD refresh, you can play all three games in 3D if you've got the right kind of telly; it's a decent stab at giving the games extra depth without going overboard, although you can't turn on the 3D until the game gets started, which is a bit clunky.

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.

In short, Daxter is a highly polished game that, for once, really does set a new standard in terms of what we can expect from future PSP titles.

Its not-so-fatal flaw is that in offering so much, both in terms of player choice and in going for peak-BioWare in every aspect of the game, those individual moments, characters, activities and plot beats often don't benefit from the focus and importance needed to unlock their full potential. Still, that's hardly a crime, and one more than made up for by the many high points

At my most charitable I felt like I was playing an experimental mod of a game I really love. All the time you're thinking 'well done chaps, nice work', but at the same time wanting to get back to the game you love.

Enigmatic and unapologetic even in the face of its most absurd ideas, this is sometimes messy, sometimes boring, but always astounding. [Eurogamer Essential]

Thanks to playful puzzles and an imaginative reinvention of Hyrule's historic iconography, Echoes of Wisdom emerges as a bold and creative new chapter in Zelda's legend.

It's far from a revolution – much of the framework will be familiar to Fight Night fans – but as the best-looking and most technically accomplished game the series has yet produced, this evolution exceeds our expectations, without totally blowing us away.

Judged against any reasonable criteria, Modern Warfare 3's first serving of extras is an unmistakable success. Fun and challenging Spec Ops missions, plus excellent maps that have been precision-engineered to complement the COD play style, all add up to an essential download.

Consider this the last gasp of the old multiplayer model then. It's a fine swansong, especially when played on the most powerful platforms, and in particular if you treat the campaign as a free bonus feature. It's hard not to wonder just what DICE will be able to do when it no longer has to hobble its designs to suit ageing hardware, though.

A conventional, easygoing scifi RPG with slightly wasted satirical elements that fades very quickly from the mind.

It feels like an undecided halfway house between two genres - both of which the PC excels at - and it's incapable of deciding which one it wants to be.

It's hard to see Super Street Fighter IV on 3DS becoming a serious alternative for high-level players, but no-one really expected it to. That Capcom gets so close is a tremendous achievement, and while let down on occasion by the awkwardness of the control layout, the game makes up for this through its innovation, depth, style and the endless joy of a fireball in the chops.

Focused excellence.

Whatever anyone tells you, you're never too old to enjoy Pokémon. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot, a liar or possibly both. No, the immense depth, inescapable charms and boundless personalisation found here is enough to put most other commercial releases to shame, with the new battle mechanics making Diamond and Pearl even more covertly complex than the series has previously been.

Trails From Zero might be late to the scene but even now, Nihon Falcom's JRPG remains one of the best Trails games yet. [Eurogamer Recommended]

There are few download games that offer this kind of value for money, and few that are as clever or effortlessly exciting. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light might be a move away from the Tomb Raider name, but it's a tremendous homage to its spirit.

Despite the Good Cop trappings, this really is one of the most macho games I've recently played; all guns, tactics and difficulty.

Possibly the most refreshing element of Midnight Club II is the CPU AI.

If you're someone like me who returns to Trials at intervals, then Origin of Pain is a great opportunity to catch up on months of fantastic user-generated content, explore the possibilities of an interesting new bike, and savour another few dozen challenging and imaginative courses from the team that really put trials riding on the gaming map.

By giving players a real incentive to be the stealthy super-spy, it's opening the game up to being what it should have been. And by wrapping it in a memorable narrative and giving Sam Fisher the ability to be evil, you actually start to care not only about your actions, but the characters in the game too.

The core conceit adds new capacity for strategy; it's a genuine and interesting invention. And despite the now completely lifeless use of mystical crystals as a plot device, as the game progresses, scriptwriter Nataka Hayashi begins to subvert the clichés in unexpected ways. What's easy to dismiss as by-the-numbers plotting will delight and surprise you in time.

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor remains fundamentally really fun. Cal's platforming skills expand even more, and Jedi: Survivor's set pieces have become even more elaborate. There's a whiff of Force Unleashed at times, with the angsty but wonderfully over the top sense of action and melodrama. It is always enjoyable to ping yourself around runnable walls and ziplines and now grapple hooks (I know) like a human pinball. It is much more desirable that Star Wars games have a little goofiness, from genuinely funny companions like Greeze to the sheer amount of Jedi Suspension of Disbelief you have to harness throughout, than it is that they become too self-serious or stoic. UItimately this is the almost impossible tradeoff Respawn has with Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. Its lack of focus is what holds it back - and also what makes it such a blast.

In summary, I'd say there's good news and bad news with Starfield on PC. The quality of the game is clear and unlike, say, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, we're not seeing disruptive problems that ruin the experience. However, there's clearly work to do. The options menu isn't descriptive enough or helps the user in any way in tailoring the game to their hardware. Basic features like field of view control, HDR, gamma and contrast controls need to be added, as well as official DLSS and XeSS support...Tackling the disproportionately poor Nvidia and Intel performance also needs to addressed, while there's the sense that the game isn't properly tuned for the major CPU architectures used in today's PCs. Optimised settings clearly yields large performance dividends though, suggesting some degree of scalability, while the DLSS mod is a must for RTX users and can help both performance and image quality for Nvidia owners - but let's hope to see some genuine improvements from Bethesda in Starfield's first major update. [Digital Foundry]

Cars, boats, guns, stealth, traps, super-strength, scent-vision - it's crowded, but its density is actually our delight, because while it may not play as strategically or controllably as something like "Halo," or as evocatively and inventively as something like "Half-Life 2," it's still atmospheric, involving, and empowering.

It doesn't, however, fulfill the task of being absurdly entertaining. The failings in the campaign mean that for all its incredible fireworks and visual splendour, its not interesting enough.

As crisp and vibrant as the game looks, there's little to elevate this above far cheaper and more interesting games designed around the controls - rather than shoehorned into them.

A highly polished, mostly highly enjoyable hackandslash romp with only occasional lapses into tedious gaming by numbers same-old-same-old object hunting and respawning enemy laziness.

Weaving Terry Pratchett, Terry Gilliam and more, Esoteric Ebb is a comedic D&D adventure where a waylaid Cleric is tasked with solving a crime, days before the world's first election.

What a game. A tangle of motives, rendered all the more thrilling by memorable characters, some of which slyly subvert stereotypes, by moments of whimsy, by static art that has a particular flair for eyes, and for the way that eyes can reveal the interior life of a person. And that setting! One night, and one grey, drained-away day in Tokyo, the buildings sheer walls of bleached concrete, the sky latticed by power lines, telephone lines, by the webs of all that information zinging about. [Eurogamer Recommended]

It's extraordinarily well crafted and polished, as most Square Enix games are, and should deliver a good forty hours of entertainment for your money. Once you get past the kitsch trappings of the game, there's a surprising amount of intelligence underlying it all.

After years in the wilderness, RTS is pretty cool again right now, and something as cheerfully straightforward as this is just what's needed to stop the big braininess of "Company of Heroes" and "Supreme Commander" leading to another plunge into an inaccessibility that turns more casual players off the whole genre.

EA should take a page out of FIFA's book here: focus on the game. Every iteration - pre-alpha onwards - sit down and play a full game, 15-minute quarters. If it feels 'right', then you're on the right path.

As a follow-up to one of the most innovative and accomplished 2D fighters in recent years, Continuum Shift is a worthy successor which refines the BlazBlue formula.

It only works as a whole, and it doesn't hit you like a flavour; it builds up in your system like an intravenous solution. If you took away the masks, or the blinking colours, or knocking over guys with doors, or the stuff about answerphone messages, or the DeLorean, or the wobble on the screen, or the super-fast movement, or walking back through what you've just done, you probably wouldn't understand why it stopped working, but it would definitely stop working.

The game, as a whole, does not just play to the most talented and devoted. Difficulty can now be adjusted when you fail a song, even if it's the middle song in a set-list. Faced with one of Guitar Hero's notorious difficulty spikes, of which there are a few here, the option to try again at a human level is very welcome.

If you can overlook the niggles with the island's economy, Tropico is one of the best city building sims of recent years and certainly the most amusing.

If you're planning on playing the single-player much, it's an abomination, and you shouldn't touch it with a bargepole; and on Xbox Live, it's simply so flawed as to be unplayable in anything other than a basic 1v1 lobby, which arguably makes it into a pretty poor investment unless you have a friends list teeming with people who want to play.

As a starting point for a successful brand, though, Black Rock has totally nailed it, and this represents a hugely promising effort. Stomach churning insanity doesn't get any better right now.

Ostensibly the same again, then, LocoRoco 2 nevertheless pulls its charm tight and burrows deeper into the mechanics, level layouts and set-pieces, presenting more elaborate rewards in visuals and gameplay, and doing a better job of sharing them with you so that you don't always feel as though you're searching for cuddly needles in a Teletubbies haystack. It comes across as a refined, more elaborately constructed sequel that remembers why it was good in the first place.

Moria is an evolutionary expansion in which Turbine has honed what it does best: storytelling, an enjoyable, constantly changing levelling curve, and atmosphere in big, rocky buckets.