Epilogue doesn't even have the grace to live up to its literary title. There's no closure here, just a finite story extended by transparent and clumsy means. The conclusion, when it comes, so blatantly leaves you hanging for Prince of Persia 2 that you wonder why the game itself couldn't have ended this way.

A short game painfully elongated by mindless repetition, there maybe a half-decent melee game somewhere in the midst of all this movie propaganda, but you'll need super-patience to find it.

As a developer that always seemed most interested in plain craftsmanship, it's a suitable capstone. As a return to one of the 360's most popular universe, it's about as good an RTS as a Halo fan could expect. And as a game, Halo Wars is a genuine pleasure.

In some ways, it's the closest we've come to the enormous social novel from the period after that which Empire chronicles: it's a Tolstoy-esque War and Peace of a game. Its problems may be the inevitable problems of trying something with such sheer scope. As such, if you want the breathtaking vision of the game, you have to accept the flaws in the details - for now, at least.

HAWX is a victim of the high standards set by the other titles in the Clancy franchise. Games such as EndWar and Ghost Recon manage to strike a balance between being fun to play, while offering real challenge and depth of gameplay. This game doesn't, and as a result it's hard to recommend it as a must-buy.

Sonic's stuck in a rut, then: he can run as fast as he likes, but no matter the fancy new tricks he learns, he just can't seem to keep up any more.

It's sociable rather than solitary, and there's not a single nasty or brutish thing about it. The good selections of courses and events mean it's not too short, and it's an ideal alternative to real winter sports if you're poor. But most importantly, it's not rubbish.

It's destined to remain a niche product in Europe, even if, for those who do fall for it, its depths as a handheld multiplayer RPG ensure it may never be forgotten.

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.

Eat Lead is far from a compelling parody, taking weak, ambiguous pot shots at other games. Even though these attacks are often hard to trace to their intended target, it's fair to say that Eat Lead isn't worthy to mock them, because whatever else it's trying to be this is a howling misfire of a cover shooter, neither funny or enjoyable, and guilty of worse crimes than the ones it's attempting to mock.

While this is never amazing, it's a competent, enjoyable third-person cover shooter with a sense of humour.

The best science-fiction pays equal attention to the direction of its fiction as to its detail but Star Ocean: The Last Hope succeeds only in the latter area, and even there, only in part.

As a standalone experience, it's shambling but lovable: two parts quirkiness to one part tedium. Compare it to the original, however, and it's hard to escape the fact that a once-brilliant game has been put through a mangler. Somewhere along the way, Capcom's zombie apocalypse has been bludgeoned into a zombie compromise, and, unless you really like poodles, the Wii offering can't really be said to add anything that the 360 version was lacking.

Up against World at War, Killzone 2 and Halo 3, it's a complete joke. The worst FPS I've played since Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.

It's perhaps unsurprising, given the matinee idol lineage of the series, that Lara Croft's set-piece adventures work so well carved into chunks, yet - even if it's not as long as you fancied, and there's a bit too much shooting - it's still a pleasure to spend a few more hours with one of gaming's most graceful legends.

As far as reasonable-budget party-based RPGs go, it's detailed enough to fill the months until we see whether Dragon Age is going to live up to BioWare's legacy.

By some combination of cunning and magic, it makes you a child again. It helps you rediscover the bottomless fascination and joy you had in discovering the properties of string, or sand, or animals, or Newtonian physics for the very first time. It makes you free to play, and happy to make your own entertainment, for hours on end.

It doesn't, however, fulfill the task of being absurdly entertaining. The failings in the campaign mean that for all its incredible fireworks and visual splendour, its not interesting enough.

Race Pro is a great driving experience, striking a rare balance between the immediate enjoyment of an arcade racer and the deeper, more nuanced long-term satisfaction of a hardcore sim.

This is, in almost every way that matters, the perfect Street Fighter.

Instead, it's approaching the kind of package most developers would have few qualms about boxing up and selling to you full-price as an entirely new game.

This collect-'em-all compulsion will see a certain type of gamer through, as will the charm and comedy of the Nippon Ichi fanboy. But for many gamers the infuriating platforming and a combat system that rewards pattern-learning and slow progression over fast, reaction-based advancement of Nippon Ichi's off-kilter design decisions will be insurmountable obstacles to true enjoyment.

It's a game that boasts an indisputable wider significance - but today, it's worthwhile primarily because it's a joyfully innocent fable, albeit one whose impact lies in the telling more than in the tale.

Shadow Dragon will live long in a lot of DS slots - and probably even long enough to show the US gamers who's boss for a while in 2048 or whenever it comes out over there. Sorry guys.

It is, simply, a game where you want to see what happens next, because whatever does happen next will be delicate, beautiful and pleasurable, and never so hurried as to overburden the spectacle and sense of immersion.

If you've never played a first-person shooter before, you'll probably be in love - this is as archetypal a corridor-shooter as has ever been made, and there's a reason why it works. But for anyone who's been running down corridors with shotguns for most of their adult life, this is so uninspired that you worry for the spark of Monolith's soul. You guys made "No One Lives Forever," remember? You're smart. You're better than this.

Ostensibly the same again, then, LocoRoco 2 nevertheless pulls its charm tight and burrows deeper into the mechanics, level layouts and set-pieces, presenting more elaborate rewards in visuals and gameplay, and doing a better job of sharing them with you so that you don't always feel as though you're searching for cuddly needles in a Teletubbies haystack. It comes across as a refined, more elaborately constructed sequel that remembers why it was good in the first place.

For many of us trying to recapture those childhood feelings of awe and wonder, Retro Game Challenge gets to the very heart of why we still play videogames and for that is to be applauded.