Hell's Highway represents little more than a solid evolution of the original, as opposed to being a game which takes strategic World War II gaming to dizzy new heights. With an engaging but ultimately repetitive play mechanic at its core, it's a game which deserves a decent amount of respect, but whose charms wane rather than grow as the game progresses.

Smackdown vs RAW is the wrestling "FIFA" - drowning in customisable settings, but the gameplay isn't always completely there. However, like "FIFA," SvsR has made some admirable steps this year.

It's deep and complete in a great many of the right ways. It's just that it'd benefit enormously from having options to be friendlier. But once you're in you're in, and beneath that fusty layer of endless menus and cold numbers there's a strategy game of near-unparalleled flexibility.

An enjoyable, polished, satisfying game. It may only be a few hours long, but it's worth a tenner. It's perfect for those afternoons when all you want to do is close the curtains and collect rainbow gems while listening to some nice music. Just don't expect to remember the experience in 23 years. Or indeed next Tuesday.

But however good a game this may be, it's still left falling off the shoulders of a true giant, and even without online play and custom soundtrack options "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004" still hits the clubhouse well ahead of its rival.

It's an adventure for kids, but it's also a museum, a diorama, and a weird kind of historical document - and that's a combination that only video games could have given us.

This is really a release made for, and by, Castlevania fans. If you don't think much of the series, this isn't going to change your mind.

The beloved and well-balanced gameplay has been approached with care and reverence, but changes and tweaks have been made to keep everything in line with modern expectations.

The Lost in Blue series is still the most compelling and realistically punishing take on the excitement and hardships of survival on a desert island that videogames have to offer, even if it still has much room to improve.

Worse for the game's long term prospects, the ability to toss yourself round corners and into awkward spaces is too difficult to master, because even with the ability to change camera rotation speed, precision is difficult to attain.

Feels like an uninspired, by-the-numbers sci-fi B-movie of a game with high production values. It's 'fun', for the nine, ten hours it lasts, but only in the same brainless sense that allows us to enjoy dumb popcorn action movies.

Poorly upscaled visuals and a price wholly out-of-step with what you'd expect.

It's not that A Crack in Time is all fur coat and no knickers. The problem is, it's all fur coat and the same knickers it's been wearing for seven years. Time for a change.

The combat in Phantom Crash is mostly excellent.

The incredible intensity and vividness of Wings of Prey's dogfights is built on the authority of its flight models, the verisimilitude of it graphics and the quality of its bandit AI (excellent, apart from the odd sleepy moment) but there are other smaller factors at work too.

For more than five years, the PSP version has provided the closest approximation of the stripped-down FM experience that many of us naturally gravitate towards, and this year's edition continues to stick doggedly to those sensibilities.

As with many reconstituted products, NES Remix is immediately delicious, but inspires an obsession that it can't sustain for long.

It's rough around the edges, and amuses only for a short but sweet time, which may lead some to look askance at the price tag. Yet there are plenty of games which cost more and entertain far less, so while Goat Simulator is a joke, it's at least one in which the player is a willing participant. No kidding.

You want to love it, but it just keeps letting you down, and in the end that's the impression that sticks to the wall and stays there.

Xenonauts knows exactly who its audience is, exactly what it's aiming for and, while it may never achieve a wider appeal, it will capture that audience in a very familiar act of alien abduction.

What's really missing here? A bit of inventiveness, we think.

The only shame is that, when you finally manage to master the game with a single credit (and we're getting close), the only person around to show off in front of is probably a bewildered friend who's just popped round for a friendly game of Pro Evo.

This is still an explosive, exhilarating and sometimes rather exhausting game in which the heroes have sharp hands and bottomless appetites for innocent bystanders and the villains expire in floods of gore and take whole city blocks with them as they go. By this point, Prototype doesn't feel like a sandbox series in its own right so much as the mad, babbling id of the entire open-world genre - with all the inconsistencies and extravagances that implies.

It's a game fundamentally incapable of not running you down now and then, but the clarity of control and aspiration give wry subtext to its rightful claim to "high definition".

There's no doubt of the passion and heart that went into the creation of Sword & Sworcery. The artistry is extraordinary. The resulting art is not, not quite. Artistry is important, and I admire it to the fullest extent. In considerations of art, though, I want something more profound. Love, perhaps.

The game is beautifully minimal and has the kind of difficulty curve that makes the best of such games so compelling.

Generally a decent, well-thought out and enjoyable conversion.

It's not really simulating football; it's emulating football spectacle, and with the addition of Challenge mode and a clever reward structure on top of an accessible and plainly enjoyable arcade experience it does that effectively enough to be a worthy purchase for footy lovers who want to, as the yanks would have it, punch a hole in the score bag.