Thematically, too, Persona 4 has real impact. Ostensibly, this is a game about being a teenager living in extraordinary circumstances - but beneath the murder-mystery premise, it's easier to relate to than that. It's a game about negotiating the murky waters of adolescence, rolling with the hurtful buffeting of pubescent relationships, grappling with self-image, peer pressure and modern life's demand that we all grow up quicker than our parents did.

Taking a "glass half full" approach, you could say that this rather unwieldy spread of mini-games and challenges offers something for everyone, regardless of your style of play. Alternatively, you could bemoan the way that the game's strongest elements are the ones reduced to a couple of trials, and that these are the best ones with the most replay value.

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.

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.

The assured art direction results in one of the most striking and distinguished-looking games of the year, but this keenness of creativity isn't matched by a breadth or ambition of ideas elsewhere.

At its best SBD's blend of twitch-platforming and stealth puzzles produces little rat-runs with a nigh-on perfect balance of action and tension. Such quality isn't quite sustained across the whole, but this is still within touching distance of greatness, and certainly much classier than Tactical Espionage Arsehole suggests.

A fairly limited package that quickly runs out of ideas.

With discoveries around every corner, Dragonborn just gave Skyrim fans the perfect excuse to lose themselves in the wild for another winter.

At its core, this game is also a decent platformer, but the silly drawing gimmick and incessant backtracking spoil the fun.

The best way to view the Enhanced Edition is as a particular flavour of this game - one which may or may not appeal to your personal taste. I certainly can't claim that this is the definitive version of Baldur's Gate and I have to judge this game I love with that in mind. It's not better - it's just different.

Taken on it own, Scribblenauts Unlimited is dull, simplistic, and devoid of challenge. What begins as an unbridled experiment in omnipotence swiftly devolves into a lackadaisical chore. It's still rife with warmth, humour and creativity, and the Wii U's TV support transforms the solitary snickering of previous Scribblenauts into a party game that's especially well suited to the young or inebriated.

As a mix of shooter and MMO, PlanetSide 2 is nothing short of a triumph: not quite the best of both worlds, but certainly the best attempt anyone has ever made to fuse them together. Alone, it's worth checking out just to witness its epic scale for yourself - and with the right friends by your side, PlanetSide 2 is an unforgettable experience.

Only two of the four maps feel truly essential, the new game mode is more a frantic doodle than a fleshed-out idea, while the new weapon and vehicles are of negligible use beyond the shattered confines of Aftermath's dusty arenas.

BioWare has had a year to get Omega right. It didn't.

This is not a pompous blockbuster, nor a long-term proposition. This is about men hitting each other with swords, and the hitting part works great. Chivalry is a simple pleasure, and a funny game indeed.

The game always looks good, and it amuses sporadically, but there's no heart - and following on from the similarly scattershot All 4 One, it sets a worrying precedent. Ratchet and Clank are in danger of losing their way. Insomniac needs to regain confidence in its still-popular series and play to its strengths rather than chasing trends for the sake of change.

Its central mechanic is truly empty and truly compulsive, and yet the barest, most devastatingly mindless circuit of its interactions is redeemed by the wonderful art and the sly imagination on display.

Nano Assault Neo is my least favourite kind of game; the kind that follows in others' footsteps with little to call its own. It's not a bad game in the conventional sense - it's not tedious or broken - and it's even moderately amusing, but it's not especially refined and I'm not sure why it exists beyond trying to score a quick buck during a deserted launch window.

Lean, crafted, memorable, enriching and funny, the Campaign of Carnage is yet more evidence that nobody does post-release game expansion better than the Borderlands team. Essential.

Fascinating and frustrating by turn, there's just enough to make you cling to the hope that one day the development team will actually find him. For now, I'd love the big, glossy, elephant folio art book of the Epic Mickey series, but I can probably do without the games themselves.

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.

Charming and delightful, faithful to the source yet cheekily irreverent, and packed with features that feed into each other in satisfying ways, The Lord of the Rings marks yet another highpoint in the Lego series.

An enjoyable, workable clone then - and a surprisingly un-cynical one - but lacking the raw ingredients to truly replicate Nintendo's success in this niche.

Natural Selection 2 is a fresh and wonderfully unique multiplayer game which simultaneously struggles with that very mantle. Because it's unfamiliar, players aren't able to just slip into it, and there is a significant knowledge gap between a new player and an old.

Absolution is a slick, responsive and mechanically confident game - and on occasions it's one of the most satisfying stealth games in a year that already includes Dishonored - but a range of compromises to Hitman tradition mean it's still going to rub some people up the wrong way.

No timid attempt at carving off a slice of the bloated zombie market, ZombiU takes a new path - one that cuts a swathe through the horde. If it's not quite perfect then that's no terrible criticism, and whatever else, it is one hell of a launch title.

All-Stars Racing Transformed is, by its nature, a cheery beast, but that's not to say it doesn't have teeth: some of the challenges kick back on even the middle tier of the three initially available difficulty levels, and an unlockable fourth level provides the kind of nasty yet rewarding challenges that some of the best arcade racers are loved for.

But Declassified also exposes failings of Call of Duty's form and fashion. The game is a cliché, its thrills limited, its time-stretching ploys clear. It's infused with the character of Call of Duty, but stripped of the spectacle it reveals the underlying game to be wholly plain and an uninteresting use of your time.