Fans of the character will be pleased with how well his off-the-wall mannerisms have been realised in game form, and there's enough inspired wackiness to make your first play-through worthwhile, but the same lack of nuance and depth that makes Deadpool such enjoyable company also means that his game is a joke not worth hearing twice.

Does it work? Not entirely. But it is, unsurprisingly, just the kind of trick one of those special long-running TV shows might try to pull now and then - a bit of heavy-handed schmaltz to break up the glib anarchy, a lunge at tonal variation to bring depth to some increasingly harshly delineated cast members.

The thing I particularly admire about Dungelot is the interface - uncovering tiles as a means of playing a roguelike isn't new, but tapping tiles is a good way to play one on a touchscreen.

It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination: the level design is still a cut above so many of Nintendo's peers. But by the series' consistently high standards, it qualifies as a disappointment.

It's hard. In fact, it's so hard it makes Rainbow Road look like Mario Circuit. It makes Master Level 3 on Super Monkey Ball look like a walk in the park. Super Hexagon? A pussycat by comparison.

There's fun to be had, but this isn't the reliable source of brilliant design that it should be. If you expected breezy old Wario to make sense of the Wii U in some fundamental manner, you're going to be disappointed by a game that occasionally seems quietly defeated by its host platform.

The most absurd thing about this game - where all the scenery explodes, where one of the characters is big and green, where you can hurl cars at people - is that it thinks it deserves either your time or your money.

Look beyond the tattered edges, though, and there's enough to ensure that the monopoly on two-wheel racing Milestone now enjoys doesn't mean this wins out by default. MotoGP 13's a lean, scrappy racer that's not just the best motorbike game around at the moment - it's one of the best pure motorsport experiences on console for years.

If Deep Dungeons of Doom ultimately feels a tiny bit hollow, this may in part be due to its dazzling presentation.

State of Decay is unrefined but never anything less than interesting. And in video games, interesting has never been at such a premium.

This is serious sci-fi, concerned not so much with aliens and gadgetry, but the effects these things have on the soul.

It almost feels like an entirely new game - as a puzzler's secondary mode always should. Really, though, the small team at Wanderlands is offering more than enough to keep you busy with just one way to play, let alone three.

The Last of Us is a deeply impressive demonstration of how it can and should be done. It starts out safe but ends brave; it has heart and grit, and it hangs together beautifully. And it's a real video game, too. An elegy for a dying world, The Last of Us is also a beacon of hope for its genre.

Playing it my way has lead me to the kind of self-reflection that a man in his 30s can't always afford. Why do I care what this leopard thinks of me? Why am I losing sleep over the construction of a virtual bench?

A game that a small number of people will rightly love and cherish, but overall it's an uneven experience - one that feels like it knows what it wants to be, but has resigned itself to existing in a world where it can't quite get away with it.

Just mucking around in these little sandboxes is a blast - and in that sense, it's the best sort of game, where play is its own reward. More snack than feast, it would be nice if there was slightly more of it to enjoy, but Gunpoint comes highly recommended all the same.

What scuppers Leviathan is nothing more than a slightly slapdash release - and greed.

For the most part it's just OK, the sort of game you'll add to your LoveFilm rental list, forget about until it turns up, then forget again as soon as the disc is back in the postbox.

A strange backwards step, one that manages to retain some of what made the original great while getting lost in its own peculiar sense of drama and never adding enough worthwhile of its own. What should have been the return of a racing great instead feels like another curious offshoot, leaving Dirt now clearly Codemasters' premier brand.

Something like Amnesia: The Dark Descent's horrible, instinct-suppressing requirement to run away, hide and not even look at your tormentor could have worked well here, giving The Starship Damrey that dash of genuine threat necessary to maintain the tension conjured by its early scenes, without burdening the game with unnecessary combat.

Eve Online is now 10 years old. Dust 514 may also have a decade of evolution ahead of it, so I hope this is far from the last word on what has started out as a distinctly average and rather buggy shooter. It could well be a game with a bright future, but right now it's saddled with a very dull debut.

Despite its successes and mild inventions, Gunslinger can't quite manage to struggle free of the general sense of ennui surrounding the corridor shooter in 2013.

This HD edition builds subtly on the 3DS foundations, but thankfully doesn't crush them under the needless AAA junk that has dragged the series so far off course. That leaves a game that is just rough enough around the edges to win over fans who still pine for the series' heyday, and suggests the saga might yet come back to life.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a game about falling off things, goring yourself on things, squashing yourself under things and occasionally being eaten by things. So it was in 2010, and so it is now. There are worse ways to spend a weekend.

The Football Playbook is unlikely to live long in the memory: it may be a reasonable proof of concept, but it's a long way from the beautiful game.

Minis on the Move is a thoughtfully constructed puzzle game, built around an appealingly simple premise that then gets reexamined and evolved in multiple ingenious ways. More than that, it shows Nintendo adapting to changes in the online and mobile market that suggest the best is yet to come.

Metro: Last Light is not a bad game, but nor is it a good one in quite the same sense as its predecessor. Metro 2033 was flawed but trying to do its own thing. If anything, Last Light feels like a regression. Similarities abound, but this is a more conservative FPS, one looking at the competition rather than itself, and one with some terrible missteps. So go in with low expectations, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Despite these inventions, the abiding sense is of a lack of variety and a game that fails to fully express its best ideas.