It's worrying when the nicest thing you can say about a game is that the early sections manage to be boring in an interesting way, but it's true for Lost Planet 3. It's a game that manages to make third-person shooting feel like work - and one that makes work feel like something that more games should explore.

SteamWorld Dig is the best kind of surprise, then: a game with substance, challenge and no little charm that seems to have come out of nowhere.

The platform game has been around for so long that it's easy to assume that the genre has run out of surprises. A showcase for the game designer's art and one of the greatest platform games of this - or any - year, Rayman Legends disproves that in glorious style.

While Infinity is adequate in basic gameplay terms, and will certainly amuse Disney-fixated youngsters for a while, it falls short of the games whose ideas it borrows.

Everything in Dragon Commander (aside from these bosoms) is slightly underdeveloped. Still, what Larian has created is a coherent and idiosyncratic game that's remarkably enjoyable if you're a strategy fan who wants something less po-faced than the Total War series.

Time may not have been particularly kind to Flashback, but 20 years on, it hasn't been forgotten. It's unlikely we'll be able to say the same for this remake in 20 days.

Given its fractured development and lumpen structure, the fact that The Bureau is actually pretty good is arguably victory enough. It's certainly the "contemporary" game 2K wanted - but it's never as inventive or memorable as the strategy game that inspired it.

Dropchord demonstrates Double Fine's expanding range and competency as the studio begins to diversify. This may be a palette-cleansing effort for the studio's staff, but in Dropchord's case that sense of creative liberation works in our favour.

This is a love letter to childhood innocence, to that age where truth and justice and awesome costumes seem almost real, as well as the coolest things in the world. In that light, picking at it seems churlish, because The Wonderful 101 doesn't make you feel like a hero; it makes you feel like hundreds.

Citadels is a sorry mess that should be avoided. Perhaps the developers will fix at least the basic functions in a few months but there is nothing here that raises any hope that it will even match its competitors then.

In keeping with its horticultural theme, Plants vs. Zombies 2 has deep roots and many branches, and it bears fruit in a game that feels at once familiar and refreshing.

As a statement of intent, Gone Home is laudable; as a technical exercise in game narrative, it's compromised, but it definitely has its strengths and is worthy of study. But you can't escape the sense that Gaynor, Zimonja and Nordhagen started on this project with grand designs for games as a storytelling medium, yet without a story they desperately wanted to tell.

When the game clicks, which it does often enough across its many modes and missions, it overcomes the inadequacy of its storytelling and reminds you why Splinter Cell was so appealing in the first place.

Saints Row 4 may lack refinement - nothing thwarts a superhero quite so frequently as an overhanging roof or your homies standing in a doorway - but it compensates with sheer exuberance. It's a heartfelt love letter to the superhero genre and to a medium that makes such madness possible.

Larger and more intricate than The Knife of Dunwall, The Brigmore Witches emerges as one of the finest examples of how to not only expand a blockbuster video game, but also of how to enrich and deepen one.

It's still a long way from being the slick, sophisticated crime thriller it wants to be but, with a little forgiveness from the player, this rough diamond manages to shine.

For its target audience - those late 20s, early 30s gamers who remember blowing on the NES cart's connectors when it wouldn't load - the impact of WayForward's high-purity dose of old-fashioned platforming has been diluted by the new wrapping. Even those new backgrounds, as lovely as they are, pull the eye away from the parts of the level that have actually been recreated. For the Pixar generation, meanwhile, there's just a quaint, old-school platformer here, starring a character of whom they've never heard.

There aren't enough two-player tablet action games knocking around; this one is clever and even-handed and, like its courtly leads, unlikely to outstay its welcome.

With its oppressive 16-bit visuals and stomping Eastern Bloc soundtrack - all ominous parps, sinister trills and garbled Tannoy announcements - Papers, Please feels a lot like an interactive anxiety attack. It's hard to call such a nerve-shredding experience "fun", but it is absorbing, brilliantly written and causes you to question your every instinct and reaction - both in the game and in real life.

I think I could play Spelunky forever, and now that it has come home to PC, assuring its permanence, I believe I will.

After plugging away at The Drowning for a few days and pumping money into its ravenous maw, it becomes clear that this is a transaction machine first, a headline-grabbing control scheme second and an actual game a distant third.

The game as a whole is lacking in substance and rough around the edges, but Brothers' fantastic ending makes it a triumph all the same.

Anyone expecting the same level of teen drama offered by the Persona series may find the characters a little flat, but if you embrace the depths of the fusion system, there's nothing quite like building a squad of demons that can unleash hell in perfect harmony.

Humans Must Answer comes from a place of honest passion and enthusiasm for the shmup, but feels torn between recreating the feeling of hammering coins into a cabinet in 1987 and doing things differently just for the sake of being different. The two never find an equilibrium, leaving the game's best ideas underdeveloped and its mistakes awkwardly exposed.

A decent enough result after 20 years in the wilderness.

In essence, you have to play it less and less, and it will feel better every time. It's all about going out of your way not to go out of your way.

It may lack the roundness and heft of Frozen Synapse or X-Com: Enemy Unknown (both heavyweight strategy games that launched on iOS this year) but it also has an appeal that's distinct from these titles: the thrill of arranging a trap and then watching from the sidelines as its various components trigger.

Going hardcore again feels like a narrow interpretation of what made this part of the game good.