Setting my disappointment over its distance from the original Prince of Persia design aside, The Sands of Time on the Game Boy Advance is a rather accomplished and quite extensive platform-puzzler, with some fabulous level design and genuinely considered presentation.

While it doesn't dazzle, this game does offer something for everyone. For salty MOBA fans, here's the genre you love in a new, bantamweight shape. For anyone new to the genre, here's an easy chance to see what the fuss is about.

A survival strategy game that might be too uncompromising.

A squirming body horror labyrinth whose mix of ability-gating and backtracking slightly cramps its matchless creature design. [Eurogamer Recommended]

In short, this is the game SEGA should have made 15 years ago. It's just a shame that to be this good took ages.

A sublime blend of Metroidvania and Lovecraft with beautiful hand-drawn art, tarnished a little by the element of repetition. [Recommended]

Another triumph of fast-paced puzzle gameplay from Q - and is a solid enough update of the freeware original to make it interesting even to those who played the PC version to death.

Beautiful difficulty options open out a game of beautiful difficulty. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Puzzle games often sound complicated when you try to explain them to people in text, but Spin Six quickly becomes one of the ones that gets under your skin.

During hectic moments, the friction of the screen tends to work against you, while the tilt controls are simply too sensitive to be usable.

It's hardly lacking in content either, despite the impulse price, with 60 levels as well as Wi-Fi multiplayer, a track editor for the creatively minded and a soothing massage thrown in free of charge when you're done.

Since I finished Caravan SandWitch a few days back, more than anything I've been eager to go back to it. This gently playful world may actually be at its best when you're doing not much of anything. Take the van for a coast over the dunes. Pick through a robot graveyard that always looked interesting. Open out the last areas of the map that you've already cleared by unjamming radar signals and already picked free of most in-game doodads. There's a sense of adventure here that runs so deep it must emerge from the land itself.

Maybe if the developers had taken a risk and gone for more polish in the combo system and great level design instead of loads of game modes this could have been something really interesting.

But the swell of Alan Silvestri's score with the firing up of time circuits and the rev of the DeLorean's engine caught me unawares and genuinely made me feel like I was seven again: seven and filled with dreams that I too could listen to Huey Lewis and the News tapes on my Walkman and tit around on a skateboard. An authentic tribute.

As a story, then, The Wolf Among Us is coming together nicely. As a game, it still feels remote, a little snagged on the same repetitive systems. With The Walking Dead, Telltale showed us a new way to experience stories via a joypad. As it takes on more and more projects, it really needs to show that its new formula is as flexible as it is formidable.

The portability, extra modes and various refinements of the DS version make for a much more satisfying game than the Flash effort we're continually referencing, but the DS is already home to a good few equally satisfying puzzlers (including "Mr. Driller" and "Polarium") and we'd seriously suggest looking to them before haggling for a copy of Zoo Keeper.

It's difficult to overly criticise Calling All Cars! because it's cheap, looks and feels good (native 1080p at mostly 60fps does make a difference) and in multiplayer mode you definitely get a decent return from the impulse purchase price tag. It's just hard to avoid the sensation that some select gameplay tweaks, a couple of extra maps and a wider range of weapons could've made Calling All Cars! a minor classic as opposed to a promising but ultimately disposable game best sampled in small doses.

It's hard not to find at least some love for a game which thinks (for example) it's a good idea to put a crocodile in a Croatian jersey, hide it in a level and provide a CROcodile secret bonus.

This is still an explosive, exhilarating and sometimes rather exhausting game in which the heroes have sharp hands and bottomless appetites for innocent bystanders and the villains expire in floods of gore and take whole city blocks with them as they go. By this point, Prototype doesn't feel like a sandbox series in its own right so much as the mad, babbling id of the entire open-world genre - with all the inconsistencies and extravagances that implies.

While the game is not perfect (the saucer is still too slow), Pandemic has made a game that's a lot more fun than the original. Crypto's return to plague sixties Earth is filled with amusing NPCs, psychic powers, anal probing, adult humour, and the chance to play on the other side for once.

Though it does have a distressingly small number of modes, the core adventure mode can be as fun in quick bursts as "Zoo Keeper" or "Meteos," and the multiplayer features are fantastic, even if they'll sadly rarely be used.

The overriding feeling is that Head On belongs on more powerful consoles. Without the added bells and whistles, its core racing mechanics and their shortcomings are bare, obvious, and will struggle in a genre that is stacked to the rafters on PSP.

It certainly does little to advance the theory that videogames are responsible enough to tell stories within sensitive contexts - it's compelling and enjoyable to play on a visceral level, but it's a shame it lacks the creative bravery to match the courage of the heroes it so reveres.

Patapon 3 is, in many ways, a typical third instalment: bigger, prettier, more difficult, and much more complicated. But that often works against it rather than in its favour, diluting that brilliant and unique rhythm-action strategy gameplay.

One of the better examples of a DS companion to an established game series - not much threat to Mario Kart in pure playability stakes, but home to surprising depth and fun all the same, providing you can look past the fact it's designed for people to play when they're not the one talking on Jeremy Kyle.

A refreshing return to the past, and for that reason it's slightly too generic to recommend strongly. It's only ever just pretty enough, and there's seldom anything really breathtaking.

We'd happily slap a glowing score on the online bit, but the single-player offering is burdened by so many problems that you'd be generous to claim it's slightly above average.

Game Republic's effort lacks polish and elegance, but, thanks to charm and the in-built strength of its setup, it is an experience worth partnering with.