Baby Steps walks a fine line between frustration and accomplishment to provide a walking simulator and climbing experience quite unlike anything else.

With 60 wry and crafty levels awaiting, his quizzical eyebrow would have been working overtime. Instead, we're happy to settle for the grunting anonymity of Hamilton and invent a few one-liners of our own to fill in the blanks.

Any time Risk of Rain loses its sheen, you can always start again, with a new character.

Tales of Graces f never fully abandons the slight clunkiness of its first few hours, but players who bow out early because of its linear design and apparently limited scope will be missing out on what may well be one of the last great traditional Japanese role-playing games. It may have taken three years for it to reach European shores, but it's well worth the wait.

A mixed success. In terms of its childlike spectacle, Klonoa is quite brilliant, offering a number of memorable set-pieces and an unforgettable, wistful ambience throughout. But its challenges, while obvious, are often fiddly to overcome, and the sense of deep achievement that comes from completing one of Super Mario's tasks is here replaced by mere relief that it's over.

The length of the game might seem a little short for some of the more dedicated RTS players out there, but then remember that "Homeworld" only had 17 missions!

It's never as tense as its console sibling, and it suffers from a few frustrating flaws, but the core sneak 'em up gameplay - evading enemies and cameras, silencing alarms, collecting data and using your spy tools - is well represented.

But perhaps the over-riding criticism of Brute Force is that it should have been an FPS. It seems like Digital Anvil designed it in the third person for the sake of it, without acknowledging that it completely screws up the opportunity to play it split screen, thanks to inherent third person viewpoint issues.

Despite (or possibly thanks to) its barren, shamelessly derivative mechanics, you can't help buy into its casual nonsense.

A World of Keflings feels more like an enhanced remake rather than a true sequel, and anyone who played through the original will quickly get déjà vu from the identical journey from basic houses up to an ornate game-winning castle.

Effective, brutal and full of hard-as nails military posture, it's a decent expansion pack to one of the best games of the year.

Just as distinctively great as it always was.

It's a substantial undertaking, too, with breadth as well as depth, and with a control system that demonstrates the Wiimote's capabilities more fully than its direct competitors.

The Nintendo DS masterpiece is squeezed onto a single screen, with the improvements just about outweighing the compromises. [Eurogamer Recommended]

As Dusk Falls represents a bold new future for interactive movie games - a future where games can do away with the supernatural spectacle and thrillery whodunnits to rely on human drama to entertain us instead. And OK, this does occasionally veer into soap opera, but at other times it's gentle and deep and dark, even profound. It shows how well games can handle stories and themes like these when done with care and understanding, and how well it can pull us into the lives of others and invest us in the decisions they have to make. And that's what really stays with me about the game: stories - human stories. They are the troubled, awkward and beautiful stories I can see in the world around me, that I can relate to myself. This is a game that reflects, in many ways, our own lives. Silly as it sometimes can be, As Dusk Falls feels real, and I can't think of a higher compliment to give it. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Despite a number of difficult to spot and ultimately underwhelming "improvements", the Cube and PS2 versions of Dead to Rights remain generally engaging, with an uneven sprinkling of genius.

It's odd and slightly throwaway, much like Attack of the Friday Monsters itself, yet it also captures the inquisitive naivety of childhood, and of a world where young imaginations blossom to fill the long hours of hot summer afternoons.

Peggle 2 is still a wonderful game, but to a super-fan there are too many things that feel miscalibrated. In a way, that's more damaging than the suggestion PopCap isn't sure what else to do with Peggle: it suggests PopCap needs to rediscover itself.

There's plenty of multiplayer fun in this game of benign wrecking balls. [Eurogamer Recommended]

What lies beneath its rather unspectacular veneer is a really well designed game that approaches the conflict from a different angle and provides a solid platform for a hugely entertaining game.

Northern Strike is a polished offering, a lot more than the token handful of stuff draped around the glinting trophy of new unlocks it could have been.

Whether it works or not, you'll have fun playing it; lots of fun; and that, more than anything, is why you should buy it.

It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination: the level design is still a cut above so many of Nintendo's peers. But by the series' consistently high standards, it qualifies as a disappointment.

Fans of smart sci-fi and bold game design should jump aboard now.

Some standard Nintendo limitations get in the way, but this is still an invaluable education in some of the fundamentals of game creation. [Eurogamer Recommended]

This is a deep, engaging, beautiful game, a welcome alternative to DOTA and League of Legends for the console crowd.

In many ways this game is superior to "Morrowind"; although it doesn't have the initial appeal offered by that title's graphical splendour, it has a lot more depth and far less time is spent walking from place to place aimlessly.

It's in the multiplayer that Ring of Fates excels, and we have no problem with recommending it thoroughly to anyone who fancies some co-op action RPG fun with their friends.