For all its faithfulness, though, it's not quite a full God of War game. It relies on short, sharp, repetitive combat encounters over and above exploration and puzzles, and there are far fewer enemies to fight or massive, screen-filling bosses to worry about. It feels lightweight next to the originals.

In a genuinely striking move, The Burning Crusade simultaneously gives World of Warcraft veterans the swathes of new content they've been crying out for, and makes the end-game experience vastly more open to casual players or new players.

A melancholy masterpiece is reborn in this faithful and breathtakingly beautiful remake.

An engrossing and highly entertaining adventure game with characters that you can care about, an involving storyline to keep you hooked, and settings and characters that are both beautiful and bizarre.

Killzone 2 is a taut and muscular game, a shooter that gives back more than you put in, provided you have the intestinal fortitude. It may take its time revealing its true depths and pleasures, but the journey is well worth taking. Between Killzone 2's unforgiving grit and Resistance 2's alien-bursting excess, the PS3 finally has both ends of the shooter spectrum covered in grand style.

Reach captures what you love about Halo, refining it on the multiplayer side and preserving the fluid, dynamic, ever-surprising campaign action that makes most rivals look like clumsy shooting galleries.

Where it doesn't quite hit the mark for me is in the action stakes. Although it underpins the game with all sorts of excellent ideas that ought to make it a deeper, more intelligent and immersive experience, the simple truth is that the minute-to-minute combat simply isn't as intense and involving as you'd expect from a game in 2007.

Although at times little more than a culmination of spy films and stereotypes over the last forty years, No One Lives Forever is an adventure and a half for the single player, and well worth investigating if you’re sick of world-threatening plots and Quake-engine oddities.

The series' steely heart has softened, revealing a game that's as exhaustive as it is exhilarating and that's now been infused with a little extra passion. Forza has always been a series to admire, but now it's a little easier to fall in love with it too.

Fantastic from start to finish, Split Fiction is one of the most inventive and joyful co-op games to date, and a testament to the power of human imagination.

On a server packed full of humans, with a decent commander and motivated, organised squads it plays like an absolute dream. So hurrah for that.

Far from being mere exercises in nostalgia, these hugely entertaining HD versions underline exactly why we all got so excited about them in the first place, and suggests that while God of War III faces off against a lot of big names in 2010, the greatest threats to its dominance lie in its own past.

This is not a game to play casually - it requires a major investment of time and effort to get anywhere. But if you're willing to give it the commitment it needs, it can soon develop into a rewarding relationship.

In its multiplayer, all you could have reasonably asked for; in its visuals, new heights reached, while cracks of old age are papered over; in its story, a fitting conclusion; and in its campaign, though short of the consistent brilliance of its predecessor, a mostly rousing and memorable spectacle.

The single player campaign is, if anything, too long, and focuses more on continuous combat than actual role-playing. The lack of any support for parties in the single player mode is also disappointing, and makes the game far less involving than it should be.

A bloody good game... If you like first person shooters and have a sense of humour, the only other thing to stop you playing this game is the central role of a pink-suited woman. Are you man enough?

In its desperation to infuse this setting with "maturity" - be it of the sober, political kind, or the game's painfully clumsy gore and sex - BioWare has forgotten the key ingredient of any fantasy: the fantastical. Without it, you're still left with a competent, often compelling, impressively detailed and immense RPG, but it's one that casts no spell.

A verbose and rich psychological roleplaying game that doesn't offer enough choice in the role you play.

It's often been said that A Link to the Past is a game set inside a puzzle. That means A Link Between Worlds is buried at least two layers deep, as it's a game set within A Link to the Past. But that's both the pleasure and the pain of Zelda, isn't it?

Capcom finds the perfect middle ground between old and new in this sterling remake. [Eurogamer Recommended]

A brilliant core mechanic and clever design twists make Bananza a delightfully sticky 3D platform adventure topped off with a sweet central character relationship.

A legendary game gets a legendary sequel. [Eurogamer Essential]

Far Cry 3 is all the best things about open-world gaming. It's a glorious anecdote factory, where you manufacture brilliant new memories every time you wake up in a safehouse and head out into the jungle. It's an astonishing technical achievement, as comfortable revealing incredible landscapes over the brow of a hill as it is when the setting sun winks at you through a canopy, or when the heavens open as you stalk wildlife through the trees and long grass. And it always lets you play, but it also controls the tempo - sometimes a little heavy-handedly, but always with good intentions.

Densely imagined and as complex as you fancy, this roguelike RPG is brilliant.

Dark Souls 2 probably isn't quite the same masterpiece Dark Souls is, but then neither is anything else, and the fact it comes so close is remarkable.

Where I fell out with CoD was the fact that however many cool things I could think of, it was all too easy to peel away the layers of glitz and gloss and come up with frustratingly long list of inconsistencies, flaws and slightly irksome design decisions that remind you that there's plenty of work to be done before the definitive World War II shooter gets made.

The beauty of Mario Kart DS is that it's really, genuinely practical to play with other people, wirelessly or online.

Explore a bright vision of subterranean nature in this astonishingly rich Metroidvania.