One of the most technically accomplished games around, Just Cause 2 succeeds in delivering both the best-looking and most pleasant open world to explore and some of the most thrilling and diverse ways of moving through it. Its thrills are intense and, for the first few hours, come fast and dizzying, dulling only when you start to see the dry order that lies behind the chaos.

It is, simply, just about the best version of just about the best logic puzzle out there. [JPN Import]

The structure itself is brilliant, but within it is nothing more than the padding of a relentless succession of ultimately quite simple challenges that you soon tire of.

One of the game's greatest strengths though is quite simply the Pacific Theatre setting - there is next to no competition here, and the game does a lot to teach you how it feels to turn in for that critical run at the enemy carrier.

Much-improved this time around, the only things I can hold against it are the car's questionable propensity to stick to the track even when you steer it markedly off-course, and the rather sizeable learning curve for newcomers.

We haven't played a more atmospheric single or multiplayer tactical action game since "SWAT3," and despite its shortcomings there is still nothing that comes close to rivalling it for sheer breathe-down-your neck tension.

Like the Opera browser, 42 All-Time Classics is a software package, and a brilliant one, the perfect match for its format and the perfect Christmas present for a Mum who's finally bored of Brain Training. More than that, it's so adaptable, so sociable, so easy to enjoy in any situation (over lunch, between train stops, with your least favourite uncle) that it's nothing less than an essential component of any DS library.

The audio doesn’t live up to the visuals. Digitised audio has been a standard fixture of SF titles for years, but the infamous “Hadoken!” and “Shoryuken!” are both scratchily rendered for SFA3, and the music isn’t much better.

Like most puzzle games, it's all in the gameplay, and Puzzle Fighter's model is more imaginative and works a lot better than most of the others we've seen lately.

It all adds up to the strongest expansion in the relaunched series, across both Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

First-person shooter design has reached an evolutionary ceiling and desperately needs some mutant DNA to push it onwards and upwards. Resistance 3 could have provided that genetic jolt; but Insomniac has chosen to look back to how we used to play rather than grapple with how we could play in the future. As understandable as it is, that cautious approach results in a game that is extremely enjoyable, but never as imaginative as you want it to be.

It's in the myriad ways you can decimate your attackers that the game's appeal lies, and the improvements made here have only made that pleasure more intense. While Orcs Must Die 2 still has balancing issues, they're more than outweighed by the sheer pleasure of the minute-by-minute gameplay, where calculated carnage is its own reward.

Octopath Traveler is the kind of game that gets hand-waved aside as being for "the old school", but that's to overlook its charismatic innovations in battle and the curious, detached, even austere construction of its narrative. [Recommended]

As a result of all this, despite its often glacial pace, Triangle Strategy is a dramatic, often engrossing tale of medieval conflict - and one that can sit proudly next to the games that inspired it. [Eurogamer Recommended]

This compilation captures Ratchet & Clank at their innovative, genre-bending best. Great games at a great price make for a compelling if disappointingly businesslike package. If you have any fondness for the platforming genre, you owe it to yourself to sample this greatest hits compilation from arguably the last worthy faces to grace the genre.

If anything, Land-A Panda could have probably benefitted from cranking up the evil earlier on. For the first 20-odd levels, it's all a bit of a foregone conclusion.

The iOS is hardly short of inventive platformers, but this one certainly ranks as one of the freshest and most engaging to emerge for some time.

IT'S LESS THAN AN HOUR LONG.

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.

This narrative-driven dice game from Cosmo D is packed full of his signature visual and musical motifs, and loosely picks up your pizzaiolo/secret agent journey from 2020's Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1. [Eurogamer Recommended]

It has the de rigueur iOS mission structure - complete x number of objectives to increase your crab rank - and power-ups to spend your in-game coins on, but the joy of Crabitron is in just grabbing a claw or two and making a big old mess.

Instantly captivating and perpetually playful, this whimsical romp across a world of paper lanterns is utterly enchanting.

The impenetrable story makes it a no-go for younger gamers who might be more willing to forgive its adolescent excesses. But for the twenty-six, twenty-eight, thirty-year-olds who it's aimed at, the game has little to offer beyond polished sentimentality.

With well-considered new features, glorious artwork and fantastic music, it demonstrates Funcom's design and art teams firing on all cylinders, building on the work done by the technical team in bringing the game up to scratch over the past two years.

Its purity of concept could be taken as wilful obscurity, original to a fault, but Starseed Pilgrim also has a system worth mastering, and a mystery worth pursuing.

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.

Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes. But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there's nothing to bind it together.

iOS has got the version of Clash of Heroes that it deserves, rather than the one that it's capable of.