Difficulty is introduced by sheer numbers and, for players who aren't grabbed by the core mechanics, the game will soon become tiresome. But the combination of sumptuous 2D art style, interesting structure, enjoyable storyline and ever more unmanageable fights to tackle, for those who are, GrimGrimoire will be one of the most interesting games to come out of Japan in some time.

Valkyria Chronicles II remains exciting, its hotchpotch design ideas maturing for this sequel despite the focus on a younger cast and more immature surrounding story.

A pleasantly weird update, then. It offers warm familiarity, with a safe selection of modes and a reassuringly lovely pile of new skins, alongside tiny, precision bursts of innovation like the shuffle block. It's another incremental improvement - but, if you ask me, this has always been a game that Sony's handheld needs if it's to feel complete. Lumines will be wedged in the Vita's card slot for months to come.

It's a game that boasts an indisputable wider significance - but today, it's worthwhile primarily because it's a joyfully innocent fable, albeit one whose impact lies in the telling more than in the tale.

For anyone who wants a mech "simulator" this is by far the best offering out there and has much to recommend it over its predecessors.

A tough but lovely recreation of two of the greatest orthodox shoot-'em-ups ever made.

For the hardcore fighter, it's without doubt an essential purchase, in that it's a test of true skill and grit, has oceanic depth and subtlety, and rewards patience and persistence.

It's possible you'll tire of Drill Dozer's slightly repetitive drill cycle, and there's less room for exploration and investigation than you'll find in something like Super Mario World, but given it's 15 years and about 48 million 2D platform games later, it's nice to find a developer who can still offer a fresh line of questioning - and a nice suit to wear while doing it.

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.

Trails into Reverie is a fine epilogue for Crossbell and Cold Steel arcs, offering necessary closure and clear hints about the series' future.

From the fully-featured multiplayer to a host of carefully crafted single player modes, Worms hasn't been this fresh in years.

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

Food and family converge in this beautiful slice-of-life tale.

An entertaining side dish that easily justifies its asking price.

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.

As for those of you who cherished the original game? This is the best pair of rose-tinted spectacles money can buy, and a good alternative to the anti-climax of seeing how a once-cherished favourite has aged.

This is still unpretentious fun, but now it's also a surprisingly deep and characterful little sports game, and a welcome stopgap between FIFA 12 and 13.

With its high-chaos, high-comedy firefights, Helldivers 2 is a riot to play with friends – although its launch has been hampered by persistent matchmaking and progression problems.

Even though it's lazy journalism of the worst kind, it's also a pretty accurate summation of Unlimited's appeal - a game where the journey is just as enjoyable as the destination.

There's a sense throughout of a development team in love with their work: a team that's gleefully committed to over-delivering. Why else would Vigil opt for two dungeons where one would have been enough for most developers, or throw in boss after boss after gigantic boss when others might have tied things up with a simple cut-scene and the odd quick-time event?

Broken down into its base mechanics, Spirits probably doesn't sound especially exciting, but in practice, its charming hand-drawn aesthetic and calming pace make it a perfect game to unwind to on a lazy Sunday.

A raucous, absurd spin-off that manages to still feel like a first-rate Yakuza game despite the leftfield setting and delightfully unhinged plot.

There are such a lot of shooters these days, and so many tend to blur into each other if you're not careful. This one won't, however - and that's quite an achievement.

What's immediately apparent is that it's been balanced incredibly carefully.

It's robust, but it lacks some creative effort on Nintendo's part. Newcomers will love it, while series stalwarts will find its novelties welcome, if largely inconsequential. But it's nevertheless one of the stronger entries in the series, balancing the orthodox precision of the original with the playful silliness of the more recent iterations more successfully than ever.

For all the game's lighthearted sleuthing and slinking, it does not shy away from dreadful subject matter, concerning itself, to a large degree, with the Church's often monstrous real-world legacy. The most affecting story is that which occurs through the bodies and minds of its uniformly endearing characters. As they are beaten and maimed by fearsome monks and brutish henchmen, a slow accretion of hardship takes place. It is not the enjoyably flexible stealth action, nor the undercooked mystery, or even the lavish monastery that lingers in the mind, but their human suffering. Foregrounding this emotion is reason enough to tell such a story again.

A tough one to score then, but still unquestionably excellent.

The whole is deep, compelling, personal and capable of so much incidental humour and charm.