Forza Horizon is built on the best parts of the Motorsport games but delivers a strikingly different experience to them, and in many ways a better one. It has its own personality. It exchanges infinite laps and bottomless grind for an actual structure and a sense of adventure, while mastering its roads requires less practiced skill than it does courage and intuition.

It's unique, unlikely and uneven, but also the kind of unsafe game that is rarely created in mainstream circles these days. For that reason, despite the simplicity, the linearity, the dearth of meaningful systems, it is also curiously fascinating.

Angry Birds Trilogy certainly benefits from the more extravagant presentation options that a TV allows, and in bringing Rovio's juggernaut to consoles it has a basic "does what it says on the box" appeal - but there's clearly a lot more that could have been done beyond bluntly porting the levels across.

If you're someone like me who returns to Trials at intervals, then Origin of Pain is a great opportunity to catch up on months of fantastic user-generated content, explore the possibilities of an interesting new bike, and savour another few dozen challenging and imaginative courses from the team that really put trials riding on the gaming map.

A game filled with wonderful new ideas in the margins, but dependable, predictable gameplay in the middle. A game that honours the past but never seeks to stray too far from it. A game that elicits absolute unguarded delight and devotion from its young fans, even as they dream of what might be possible in the future.

Black and White 2 offers a compelling record of all that's great from 16 years of catching, collecting, collating and coaxing pocket monsters into ever more exciting forms, bit by wonderful bit.

Play Liberation Maiden because you're after an acceptable arcade shooter, in other words; approach it expecting another wonky blast of Suda51 charm and, President Mech aside, you're going to be a little disappointed.

Re-imagining? Remake? Whatever it is, XCOM brings back and revitalises a classic...This game is a winner.

This is a muscular and confident game, one with the utmost faith in its own fiction and a dedication to gameplay satisfaction at a microscopic level, paid off in dozens of situations that feel completely random and organic, even when they've clearly been planted there for you to find. Tighter control and a more generous approach to replay value would elevate Dishonored to true classic status, but it stands as one of the year's best all the same.

Get reacquainted and it's easy to convince yourself that perhaps NiGHTS is Sonic Team's real masterpiece.

For all its stumbles - and there are an awkward handful - Mists of Pandaria nevertheless represents a WOW participating in the massively multiplayer genre rather than revelling in the cult of its own personality.

War of the Roses is modest and pared-down, then - but it offers a challenging, chaotic and sometimes comic take on multiplayer. It's an innovative game and I'd like to see it succeed, I'd like to see it grow and, quite honestly, I'd like to see it turn into an eSport.

All the effort in the world won't make up for a lack of vision. This game is blind to imagination and focus.

If you enjoy impish cartoon worlds that mask their pristine internal consistency under a measured low brow, and you can put up with falling in a pit occasionally and having to go back to a checkpoint, then Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Dead Rabbit is probably exactly the game about Hell that you've always wanted.

Whether you'll want to buy Dead or Alive 5 on day one depends on a number of things. If you're looking for a wealth of new and inventive content in addition to some truly ground-breaking mechanics, then this really isn't the next big thing. But if you have any love for the genre and want to lose yourself in a highly methodical 3D fighting game that tests your adaptive reasoning at about three or four potentially game-changing decisions per second - well, then Dead or Alive 5 is very easy to like.

Tokyo Jungle is a celebration of classic games, with their ridiculous plots, repetitive tasks, excessive violence and all. It pulls off the impressive and nigh-on impossible trick of being an original homage. Also it lets you set a giraffe on a bear.

If the first Torchlight capitalised on the continued absence of Diablo 3, the second feels like a genuine alternative to it. It's a colourful, heartfelt and well-judged spin on one of the most reliably engrossing genres knocking around. Pick a class, choose a pet and set a course for Plunder Cove.

If they can keep updating FTL with new scenarios, new spaceships and new stories with the same intelligence and restraint, we could well be seeing the birth of a future classic.

In defiance of the expectation that this out-sourced handheld update would be a second rate knock-off, the game builds on the past, rather than merely riffing on it.

FIFA 13 is also the most broadly appealing game EA Canada has ever produced in other ways. It's absolutely rammed with different ways into it, and it takes unprecedented advantage of its intimacy with the people who run the big leagues and own all the broadcast rights.

Wake up, everyone! With PES 2013, Konami has finally pulled off the excellent game it's been threatening to release for the last couple of years. On the scale of dramatic football comebacks it's not quite up there with That Night in Barcelona (© Clive Tyldesley) or The Miracle of Istanbul, but it surely comes close.

It's not the levelling, it's the taking part that counts. That's what makes Guild Wars 2 great. Almost every aspect of its design serves the individual player and whole community equally, and there's a breezy willingness to put the content ahead of the grind throughout. It's a little lightweight, perhaps; its fantasy world is more picturesque than truly enveloping, and its social and gameplay hooks offer instant gratification over ties that bind. But it's still the most coherent, seamless, social and fun MMO in a long time - and the only one that can call itself truly modern.

Borderlands 2 is still a hillbilly moonshiner sort of game, then, but it's the hillbilly at his canny, tinkering, big-dreaming best. It's the hillbilly at the peak of his powers. It's the hillbilly made majestic.

It's another small step forward for the series, but that's not quite enough to dispel the suspicion that Codemasters' F1 team doesn't have the resources to create iterations compelling or different enough to justify the annual churn. F1 2012 is a good game, but it's some way off from being the classic it could be.

As a small-scale project and a £3 game, Gateways is a tiny, tidy success. But as an experiment in aperture science, it might need a little more time in the test chamber.

A game clearly put together with care and passion, built around a core of delightful feedback and quite simply fun at a very deep and instinctive level. It still feels great. There's just a sense that there remains a bolder and more ambitious, game lurking just under the surface and only occasionally showing itself.

Jet Set Radio's still capable of making people say, "What the hell is that?"

It plays it a little safe in places and lacks a truly killer single-player mode, but by broadening the versatility of the tag system while dramatically improving the online functionality, Namco has crafted a new teamwork seminar that builds upon the original in almost all the areas that matter.