The design team has crafted a playful, ingenious, and admirably economical experience composed of dozens of satisfying moments. It's a game about tidying up, finding order, and making a pocket-sized universe behave the way you want it to.

Sticker Star has two sides. One is a world that's a simple, vibrant joy to be in. The other is a set of systems so pared back that they waver between easy and tedious, matched up to a badly signposted set of puzzles. There's just enough adventure and charm to mitigate the latter, but that's the shame of it; Sticker Star squeaks a pass when it could, and should, be spectacular

Sadly, torn between a character license it can't fully use and an experimental format of vague structure and uncertain purpose, Wonderbook's magic spell grows weaker over time, rather than building to a fantastical crescendo.

The 2nd Runner also helps make up for a regrettable lack of extras in this set with the EX modes and additional content created for its special edition release.

It's a straightforward game, then. The capacity for expression and technique is limited to the exacting rhythms of blocking.

With more room for Chuckle Brothers impersonators than Nolan North when it comes to the voice work, When Vikings Attack is weird and personable and surprisingly hard to dislike. Cushty!

It will make you feel comfortable holding and playing a real guitar, and empowered to go further in spite of its apparent animosity towards you. The less you treat Rocksmith like a game, the more fun you'll have with it.

There are glimpses of a game worth loving tucked away in the folds of LittleBigPlanet Karting's chunky lop-sided weave, but it too often goes out of its way to bury those simple joys under fussy distractions and needless obstructions.

It isn't as good at the core Assassin's Creed loop of picking an icon on the map and then getting diverted by entertaining side content on the way there, but where it does make a play for your attention it generally does so by asking you to, you know, be an assassin, creeping up on people and taking them down without them or anyone else noticing. That's fun.

This is still a fantastic idea, realised with charm and passion - and with the reality of the gameplay now much closer to the fantasy being sold, it's an easy recommendation for parents warily eyeing those Christmas lists.

you get less than two hours of gameplay consisting of a few repetitive fights, and all you get to show for it is a new hat. Hardly worth getting out of bed for, let alone rising from the grave.

A curious game: an improbably boisterous departure for a series that has slipped into conservative compromise in recent years.

Halo 4 is authentic, and assures 343's role is more than a mere tribute act. Their delicate yet sprawling work may be more continuation than true expansion - and perhaps the true test comes in the next step - but for now, Halo returns with a bang, not a whimper.

It's a classic game and an essential part of any collection, especially in this flawless, gorgeous reissue.

Eight years in purgatory hasn't really been long enough to justify the move into down into the rosy red-tinted fires of Hell & Damnation. Sorry, Lucifer.

Its sense of character may be not be as forceful as Criterion's other games - but the sense of competition that informs it, the joy of discovery and the plain pleasure of driving haven't been dimmed in the slightest. This isn't quite paradise, but it comes very close.

The biggest and richest Assassin's Creed game to date - maybe not the best, but a place where, for want of a better expression, everything is permitted.

It's a tightly wound adventure well worth setting aside time for, backed up by a multiplayer angle that will have greater staying power.

Football Manager offers the most detailed and in-depth management experience ever made, as it does every year.

There's been a backlash brewing for some time against the bombastic direction military shooters have taken, but it would be wrong to assume that Medal of Honor: Warfighter is simply the game unlucky enough to bear its brunt. The truth is far simpler and more depressing: it's just not that good.

It only works as a whole, and it doesn't hit you like a flavour; it builds up in your system like an intravenous solution. If you took away the masks, or the blinking colours, or knocking over guys with doors, or the stuff about answerphone messages, or the DeLorean, or the wobble on the screen, or the super-fast movement, or walking back through what you've just done, you probably wouldn't understand why it stopped working, but it would definitely stop working.

It's probably quite fitting that anyone who wants to recreate Monkey Ball's past in this way will be left a little disappointed. Super Monkey Ball Banana Splitz sees Marvelous AQL and Sega attempting much the same trick and earning much the same result. This does enough to stop the rot, but it can never quite turn back the clock.

Scrappy design and presentation mean that it's hard to give Zombie Driver a more enthusiastic thumbs up - but as a particularly goofy example of the sort of guilty gaming pleasure that rarely gets a look-in amongst the autumn blockbusters, it's impossible to dislike.

Despite the shift in dimensions, this is a pretty standard Layton adventure. Luckily, since Layton adventures tend to be one of the more dependable highlights of the gaming calendar, that remains a ringing endorsement.

From this point it's clear that in terms of being a shooter, 007 Legends is dismal - but in terms of being an actual James Bond game, it's a genuine insult.

It's a game that can startle you, for sure, but one that more often bores, the gunplay a low thrumming drone rather than a high-pitched screech of rage.

This is a vast, generous offering: a true expansion from a developer that obviously cares deeply about its creation, rather than a corporate cash-grab mandated by the boardroom. More please.

And away from the core experience, WRC 3 is lacking, if not a little regressive. The involved if slightly flabby career experience of previous games, which had you recruiting a team as you worked up through the ranks, has been replaced with a character-driven affair that apes Codemasters' more recent efforts while getting it horribly, horribly wrong.