Suffice to say, feeble half-baked offerings like this are a step in the wrong direction. Hopefully Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening will do a much better job next month.

There's little doubt that anyone who fell in love with the first game's slender charms will be enthused by the prospect of more of the same delivered with a higher degree of HD polish. With its A-list production still held back by B-list ambition, though, there's ultimately not enough of substance to lure players away from the multitude of other co-op gaming experiences for more than a few days.

Painfully thin.

If you're on a budget, or just don't have access to a DS, then this is a fine way to sample its abundant charms, provided you don't expect anything special in the presentation department.

The sheer unabashed evil that Eko Software has managed to cram into a seemingly cute puzzler is something to behold.

The story is compelling and well told, and there's certainly enough flow to put it in the category of "just ten more minutes" games - but you'll need a lot of patience to get the most out of Ego Draconis.

It's not a terrible game, just an utterly unoriginal and instantly forgettable one.

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.

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.

A game that exemplifies so much of what commentators claim has died in the Japanese game industry. A blast of creative brilliance, both technically accomplished, strategically deep and infused with rare imagination, Bayonetta represents the pinnacle of its chosen niche. [JPN Import]

The story is compelling and well told, and there's certainly enough flow to put it in the category of "just ten more minutes" games - but you'll need a lot of patience to get the most out of Ego Draconis.

More developed than a throwaway Flash game, yet less self-conscious and showy than a WiiWare or Xbox Live Arcade effort, it's a product that ignores the spectacle and bluster of gaming in order to more clearly celebrate the raw elegance of good design.

Borderlands' latest DLC has shown me the combat rhythm I've naturally settled into: the regular back and forth between whittling away at enemies with SMGs before disappearing in a puff of magic, to either slink off and let my shield charge up again, or pop up behind an unfortunate bruiser in order to blast chunks out of their neck with a shotgun.

Don't buy this expecting an epic RPG, and consider keeping someone under the age of 12 at hand to help you justify the twee nature of the game as a whole. But there's something here which is notably absent in any number of lushly produced and scintillatingly scripted games: a real sense of fun and discovery.

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.

On a console that's hardly lacking in excellent on-rails shooters - Darkside Chronicles and the soon-to-be-released Sin and Punishment 2 among them - and interesting, lovely-looking downloadable games, 530 Eco Shooter has no place.

On the face of it, Alien Breed Evolution offers everything that fans of the 16-bit incarnations could wish for, with strong production values and focused design contributing to a sympathetic update that stays true to the source material. But sadly, a flawed approach to co-op play and an inherent lack of variety ultimately count against it.

I did not get nearly as far into this game as I would want to for a review. I simply couldn't. I tried for long enough. Yet I am completely unwilling to say this a bad thing - I'm certain this is a brilliant thing for the right person. Which is why I hope I've brought you to a place where you can make that decision for yourself.

PixelJunk Shooter is a taut, well-made and original game that's been lavished with good design and slick coding. It won't detain you long - and without giving too much away, the post-credits kill-screen suggests a DLC expansion is highly likely, as does PixelJunk's past history. But for every minute of those few hours, it's an unpredictable, fluidly entertaining blast.

Not half as bad as the limp first few hours suggest. It's perhaps not the greatest company epitaph in the world but, as Devlin might say, while throwing himself out of a speeding car, knocking back a slug o' the good stuff and mashing a Nazi's head in with one punch: "It coulda been a lot worse."

Not half as bad as the limp first few hours suggest. It's perhaps not the greatest company epitaph in the world but, as Devlin might say, while throwing himself out of a speeding car, knocking back a slug o' the good stuff and mashing a Nazi's head in with one punch: "It coulda been a lot worse."

Packed with inventive ideas and one engaging sequence after another, it's a spirited, poignant and unsettling game that not only delivers a long-overduereturn to form, but reinvigorates horror adventures in the process.

Vintage Nintendo. Maybe a bit too vintage - Spirit Tracks is, like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a straight rehash, a derivative sequel of the kind the company used not to make, and based on a decades-old template. You could easily mark it down for that. But that would belie the fact that it's also a tighter and more rounded game, crafted with more care, than not just Phantom Hourglass but most modern games for grown-up consoles.

Slick but rather empty.

It's the same game you've already played in its more advanced form, making this more of an academic exercise in gaming genealogy.

Game development has evolved to the point where it's pretty rare that a PS3 or Xbox 360 release is actually anything worse than mediocre, but Rogue Warrior is easily the worst game I've played on either platform for a long, long time. You could call it cheap, exploitative trash, but it's not actually that cheap, and the exploitation elements are probably the best thing it's got going for it. Trash though? Absolutely.

Pandora could well lend itself to a great film, and would lend itself fabulously well to a good third-person action game. Unfortunately, despite providing two third-person action games here for the price of one, both of them are dull and forgettable.

Mirkwood is a great expansion, but compared to Moria, its quest and instance content is fairly limited. This is because the expansion was also introducing the Skirmish system, an entire new area of the game.