If the point is make your mundane life seem exciting by comparison, then I guess it's job done, but hardcore adventurers may find these sections taxing for all the wrong reasons.

If Alien Hallway bothered to adopt the 'lanes' system of PvZ, it might have worked, but instead this headlong battle quickly descends into a repetitive brawl of little consequence.

Even on the most basic level it fails to drag itself out of the mire, with haphazard handling and regrettable collision detection conspiring to ensure that any enjoyment you eke out of it will be entirely coincidental.

It's a beautiful piece of design and one that puts PomPom right up there with Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman at the very forefront of the genre... whatever genre this actually is, of course.

If you have the free code then there's no reason not to give Bloodbath Arena a try, even if all it really adds is a place to quickly grind your way up a few levels. As a paid download, however, it's uninspired stuff.

As with so many gaming oddities, Cell is haunted by the ghost of the game it could have been. Though, unlike so many of them, Cell barely ever lets you get bored. The screen's always bursting with poison voxels, the world s always a little bit of a mystery.

Spectacularly miserable licensed fare - a tie-in game that recalls the bad old days when a movie title was leased out to some mom-and-pop developer in the middle of Siberia and put together with the help of a broken woollen loom and old chopsticks.

Out There Somewhere isn't a normal game, though: it's a platformer with a devious twist and a truly shocking difficulty curve. It's a platformer with a very late level, for example, that contains absolutely no platforms at all - just empty space and a doorway right near the ceiling. With this weird, atmospheric brainteasing oddity, the Brazilian micro-team Studio MiniBoss has put itself firmly on the indie game map. This is challenging stuff, but it's wonderfully creative with it, and I'm not sure I can recommend it enough.

you get less than two hours of gameplay consisting of a few repetitive fights, and all you get to show for it is a new hat. Hardly worth getting out of bed for, let alone rising from the grave.

Reliable and workmanlike, the Crimson Map Pack gets the job done, but it'll take something more dramatic to keep players on the hook into 2013 and beyond.

The basic mechanics are tedious, and they don't even work properly. To get much value out of this you'd have to be a serious Austen buff, or a really hardcore fan of finding stuff hidden behind other stuff.

If you still pine for rigidly contained maps like Battle Creek, Turf or even the relatively recent Guardian, then the Majestic Map Pack lives up to its name.

Olo is small but perfectly-formed, a game of depth with simple rules and the classiest presentation.

A chilled-out and peaceful challenge, quite unlike anything else around, Finger Hoola is just lovely.

Two and a bit out of three isn't a batting average to be ashamed of, though, and since Castle comes packaged with the usual array of playlist polishes to keep the game fresh, there's absolutely no reason for anyone still loving Halo 4's multiplayer not to embrace it. After all, it's a long wait for Halo 5.

Vector is a joy to behold on the iPhone, but an absolute dream on a Retina-screened iPad.

The Football Playbook is unlikely to live long in the memory: it may be a reasonable proof of concept, but it's a long way from the beautiful game.

rRootage Online is why Kenta Cho releases his games in the way he does; it's now got a chance to hit a new audience, and be enjoyed by many more people, in what feels like the definitive version. If you've got any interest in shooters, don't let him down.

This is pared-back game creation at its most sharp-edged: a sewing needle through the tear duct, a razor blade lodged in your brain.

All of which puts GoatUp 2 right up there with Gridrunner as Llamasoft's best work on iOS. It may have one foot in the past, but even with all that methane this is a daisy-fresh delight, as sprightly and joyous as anything on the App Store. In other words, a taste very much worth acquiring.

As usual, Love's eye for a scandalous and knowing wink at gender relations forms an enjoyable, coherent journey through well-rounded characters' lives. If Hate Plus has a downside, it's that you will have to put aside time to read things for three days. But the upside is that you get to read Christine Love's stories for three days, have your cake, and eat it as well.

Coolson's Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet is a beautifully crafted, fun to play game. It's perfect for anyone who enjoys wordplay, has fastidious organisational tendencies or was disappointed to discover that high-paying jobs in publishing do not magically apparate after three years spent reading one Thomas Hardy novel and watching Loose Women.

As it stands now, it's a fun time-waster for retro game and horror fans. With a little more balance and polish, however, it could be something quite special.

It's hard to shake the feeling that China Rising is Battlefield 4 by numbers - maps for the sake of maps. That's enough for most. That is, if they can get the bloody game to work.

Second Assault marks another successful map pack for DICE, although one not nearly as sharp as Battlefield 3's marvellous End Game sign-off. Two excellent maps, one decent effort in Metro, and the perfunctory but underwhelming Operation Firestorm are enough to freshen up the rotation, while the new weapons might sate those who've already (somehow) exhausted the 'vanilla' game's already sizeable arsenal.

From the cartoon sketchiness of the art to the breezy gallicisms that litter the text, there's a wonderful sense that, for all its elegance, the core of Poof vs. the Cursed Kitty came together in a mad rush. And although it's a pretty simple affair at heart, it will drink in your free time with surprising ease.

It's unadorned, then, but the game's so wonderfully unselfconscious in its aims that it creates the perfect atmosphere in which to enjoy its simple charms.

This is DLC that sticks to what has worked in the past while taking tentative steps towards a different formula in which Call of Duty is many games under one banner. Action movie, slasher horror, sci-fi conspiracy - they're all in here, and often competing with each other.