With obvious debts to such indie hits as Braid, Limbo and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, The Bridge ultimately feels like a truncated compilation of iconic motifs rather than a fully-fledged experience in its own right.

There's a good game somewhere within Real Racing 3 - and there are plenty of free-to-play games that prove this model can work successfully while respecting the player. Firemonkeys, and perhaps more pertinently EA, have got that balance horribly, horribly wrong, to an extent where the business model becomes the game - with gut-wrenching results.

If there's a problem with the whole set-up, it's that the mysterious business of creating truly punchy feedback has eluded the developers. The feel of a rebound's not bad by any means, but the sense of genuine connection that could have rendered this an instant classic is missing, and the game can occasionally feel a little sleepy as a result.

If you still pine for rigidly contained maps like Battle Creek, Turf or even the relatively recent Guardian, then the Majestic Map Pack lives up to its name.

Beneath the noise there is an engaging story clamouring to be heard, and there are moments of true beauty, serenity and pathos fighting for attention. The game does get better as it goes on, and despite the distractions the last few hours are a pleasure to play. At the centre of it all is a brilliant character, still iconic but more human and believable than she's ever been before.

Elegant and artful, Year Walk is an unmissable piece of work - and one that is surprisingly hard to disentangle yourself from once it's done. You can close the app and put down the phone, but the forest may spread beyond its glassy confines, its spindly, silver-skinned trees taking root in your own home, your own dreams.

There's no passion or care in Urban Trial Freestyle's construction, no sense of playfulness of fun. It's a game that does the bare minimum required to look like another game, and once the resemblance is close enough, it leaves it at that, with all the rough edges still on display.

If Assassin's Creed 3 saw the series gracefully soar back into full flight, Tyranny is where it lets you strap on a jet-pack for the next adventure.

That true panoramic freedom is still missing in action, the campaign's rather undernourished as it rushes you into the final act and the fiction feels increasingly forgettable. There are charms here, though, if you boot up the tactical display and stick to the shadows. There's the silent kill in glorious surroundings; there's the swish of an arrow, the creak of a bow.

If Revengeance didn't have camera issues this would be the easiest 10 I've ever given. As things stand it's still brilliant, staking out new territory in the genre and adapting certain Metal Gear characteristics so well that it makes the competition look outrageously bad. This is simply the ultimate one-man show, worth its ticket price many times over, an experience that improves exponentially as it gets faster and as you get better.

This is a bombastic, flippant, amusingly grotesque game that compensates for a lack of wit with hyperactive energy and overstatement.

With no meaningful play mechanics and no structure beyond the one dictated by the storefront, Ghostbusters is little more than a Pavlovian machine designed to suck money out of your account a few pence at a time. There's a world of difference between a game that uses micro-payments and a micro-payment model that is simply delivered in the guise of a game. If Ghostbusters has any value at all, it's as an illustration of this important point.

This is multitasking under galactic pressure, making you constantly shout instructions while trying to work out if the Lustruous Prismneck someone else is bellowing about is on the dashboard. If this sounds like chaos, that's about right, and fantastic chaos it is. This is about working together and ribbing your chums after it's all fallen apart - because in Spaceteam, everyone hears you scream.

The basic mechanics are tedious, and they don't even work properly. To get much value out of this you'd have to be a serious Austen buff, or a really hardcore fan of finding stuff hidden behind other stuff.

Pixel People is an addictive proposition, one that many players will happily play - but few will be especially happy while doing so. Its pay-offs are irregular and require no skill, simply perseverance in clicking through the splicing options.

Even if it were polished to an acceptable, 2013-standard AAA shine, Colonial Marines would still only be a generic effort coasting on borrowed iconography. Weighed down by so many grindingly obvious mechanical issues, it never even gets off the ground. For a game all about exterminating bugs, it's a fatal irony.

In the end, though, it left me cold. Antichamber's frosty and self-satisfied air is preferable to the chummy japery of Kim Swift's Quantum Conundrum, for sure - but both games have made a similar mistake in hiving off half of Portal's personality and expecting it to stand on its own.

Eckert's game is too exasperating for a recommendation, but it's an interesting failure nonetheless. One of the best-looking and most chic indie titles of the past 18 months, it's evidence of a keen artistic talent - albeit one that needs pairing with more scrupulous game design in order to fully blossom.

It's infuriating that the adventure feels so rough around the edges, then, but a range of annoyances are not quite enough to detract from the madcap brilliance at the core of the whole thing.

In many respects, then, Thieves in Time is a fitting successor to the PS2 titles: Sly Cooper games were always solid genre pieces first and foremost, where likable characters and decent mechanics masked a journeyman feel to some of the content, and the same is true here. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has moved on considerably in the intervening years, and so what starts off as a welcome regression quickly loses its verve.

Dead Space 3 is a contradiction. Gorgeous but scruffy; tightly packed yet stretched too thin; often frustrating, frequently thrilling and bursting at the seams with stuff, not all of which fits comfortably inside the boundaries the series has set for itself. It's certainly not a great game, except perhaps as a poster child for the kitchen-sink development mentality of a console generation in its twilight months.

How substantial it will be to you depends on how susceptible you are to its picturesque, vaguely pagan charm.

Chasing scores is always an exercise in masochism, and in giving you potentially infinite second chances, Time Surfer risked taking away the sense of achievement. Instead, it adds a whole other dimension.

A great card battling game, and only a few niggly details hold it back from being even better: the lousy locked decks, the half-baked multiplayer tournaments, the quick and dirty iPad port. Nevertheless, it offers something fresh and creates battles that feel like two massed armies clashing across their ranks.

This may not be the most exciting celebration of 47's career that Square Enix could have mustered, but it is one last chance to experience the single best real-world assassin game around - and a chance well worth taking advantage of, if its dark magic has somehow managed to elude you until now.

Oh, Haemimont. You've broken my heart...Omerta: City of Gangsters is patchy and clunky, but it's also dull and frustrating.

Call of Duty devotees will certainly get their play value out of this lucky-dip selection, but it's still slightly disappointing that there's not a more consistent vision for Black Ops 2's long-term future on display. Revolution? Not quite.

Fast, compact and yet consistently thoughtful, there's nothing else quite like Skulls of the Shogun - and, for me, it earns its place amongst the genre's greats.