If you'd like to know how easy it can be to ruin an excellent work, you can cry yourself to sleep thinking of all the squandered potential in Dawn of the New World. But if you can bring yourself to ignore it, this is still a fine reissue of a great game.

As part of the Guild portmanteau it's a curio that earns its place, an eccentric exercise whose existence you can't help but be grateful for. Torn away from its more substantial partners, though, it never does enough to stand out on its own.

The translators and proofreaders have done an excellent job conveying both meaning and emotion through text. The music is cute, and the art is simple and beautiful. This game is so worth its eShop price.

Threes! is at once nicotine and soul food, magnificent and deadly, a machine for playing. It is flawed and broken and perfect and you must start playing it today.

What is really starting to take its toll on The Walking Dead is the way it burns off goodwill with too many false choices - or worse, moments when players are meant to share guilt in situations we had no real say in.

It's more professionally made and superior to the original campaign in every way, and likely to clock in at around 12-15 hours depending on difficulty settings: enough to tell its story, but not enough to outstay its welcome.

A finicky combat system, a lack of challenge and few reasons to remain in South Park once the story is done - these minor disappointments hold The Stick of Truth back from greatness, but they don't detract from the sheer audacious hilarity it delivers. In gameplay terms it may be soon forgotten, but there's unlikely to be a funnier - or filthier - game any time soon.

A little more faith in the player's ability to cope with deeper strategy and Heroes of Dragon Age would be a genuinely good game. Conversely, it would only take a few more turns of the micro-transaction screw for it to be intolerable. Strange as it sounds, this somewhat awkward middle ground actually represents huge progress for EA's freemium ambitions.

I liked playing Banished. It was complex, but never fiddly, difficult, but rarely cruel, though it would benefit from a little more transparency. But as soon as I had a handle on it, as soon as I'd started to see through some of the fog of its complexity, I wanted to grasp for something bigger, something greater. Banished is satisfying, but never spectacular. That's not quite enough for me.

It never hits the heights of Battlefield in its pomp, Call of Duty at its slickest or Titanfall in its explosive beta, but at its best Garden Warfare stirs the same emotions; the panic, the triumph, the tension and the elation.

The first Lords of Shadow was a sweet surprise. The follow-up is a hostage to a story it tells badly, and a prisoner within a dull urban maze that refuses to become a characterful exploratory playground. To live on but to be diminished - that's the fate of the vampire in Castlevania's lore. Sadly, it's a bit of an epitaph for this well-meaning but bloated game as a whole.

It's a game that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Undeniably, Thief suffers greatly by comparison to Dishonored - its more coherent, more thoughtfully and successfully designed cousin, in whose shadow Garrett and his game now cringe.

It's not being corny and schlocky on purpose, which means that for all its faults Rambo honestly taps into the spirit of 1980s action cinema more deeply than you might expect - not in spite of its rough edges, but because of them.

At its best, Tengami is something you want to freeze-frame and hang on the wall. For a video game, that shouldn't be taken as a compliment.

Though a few tweaks short of masterful, it's a pleasure to find Ys in such good standing - proof of Falcom's ability to transpose 25 years of blueprint into an up-to-date, three-dimensional trapping.

EDF 2025 is a shorthand for every game. Just shooting GIANT INSECTS, whilst someone shouts SHOOT THE GIANT INSECTS from your TV.

It's a competent, workable game that draws inspiration from the right places, but which is rarely anything more than a cover version of the greats.

The likelihood, then, is that people who played DKC Returns will find Tropical Freeze a little uninspiring. It's a superior game - it looks nicer, it's easier to control on the GamePad than it was on the Wiimote, and there's slightly more to do - but like a lot of Nintendo's recent sequels, that doesn't feel like quite enough.

World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition is limited in features right now, but is rich in potential. It's not a well-oiled machine yet, but it's still fun to take for a spin. Given that it costs absolutely nothing to climb aboard, it's hard not to recommend.

A beautifully crafted addendum to The Last of Us, a game that already stood tall above many of its peers. While it could have benefited from yet more exploration, its impeccable level design utilises its environments to take Ellie and Riley - wonderfully portrayed by Ashley Johnson and Yaani King - on a trip that is not easily forgotten, underpinned by sparing use of Gustavo Santaolalla's beautiful score.

The polished frankness is one thing, but a neat system that allows you to gradually best your score level by level breaks down the action into sizzling, digestible chunks makes the perfect concession to portable play and less time-rich players.

That's not to say it's not without its own unique pleasures, but while I'm curious to see what happens next, it so far lacks the edge-of-the-seat impatience that The Walking Dead conjured up at the end of each episode.

From its dazzling battle system to its overarching temporal puzzle, this is the best of the set - even if it's dragged down by an exhaustingly impenetrable plot that its creators will no doubt be pleased to be done with.

This game made me laugh - not gently or under duress of slow realisation, but in staccato outbursts which alarmed and unsettled passers-by.

What we have here is the shell of Bullfrog's pioneering strategy game, hollowed out and filled up with what is essentially a beat-for-beat clone of Clash of Clans. Every function, every mechanism, every online feature has been tried and tested already by Supercell's money machine and EA is following behind, drooling like a Pavlovian dog. That's what stings the most: not that Dungeon Keeper has gone free-to-play, but that it's done so in such soulless fashion.

Ironically, what makes Surge Deluxe so instantly sensational is perhaps also what holds it back from being one of the greats. That riot of colour and sound, that constant positive reinforcement, can make it feel a little too eager to please. And yet each play session offers a very tangible surge, a rush of dopamine that will take some time to wear off.

It's a shame Octodad leans so heavily on traditional gameplay tropes like boss fights and stealth sections in its second half, especially when the opening sections suggest something quirkier and more inventive - but taken as a whole, it's still a minor triumph.

As there's no real burden of expectation on its shoulders, it's hard to imagine anyone getting angry with Fable Anniversary, and yet it's equally hard to shake a feeling of disappointment. It's the original, rather than this update, that's the problem. Fable's fundamentals already had a major overhaul in 2, and while a return to those ideas in rawer form provides an insight into the evolution of game mechanics, it also serves as a stark reminder of its age.