A game that never rests on its laurels and offers ample replay value, Mark of the Ninja is a much-needed shot in the arm for Live Arcade's lacklustre summer offering.

For Battlefield fans, this is an essential expansion.

Despite the rugged, rough-hewn aesthetic of Skyrim, Hearthfire ultimately offers all the character and personality of an Ikea cupboard.

Out There Somewhere isn't a normal game, though: it's a platformer with a devious twist and a truly shocking difficulty curve. It's a platformer with a very late level, for example, that contains absolutely no platforms at all - just empty space and a doorway right near the ceiling. With this weird, atmospheric brainteasing oddity, the Brazilian micro-team Studio MiniBoss has put itself firmly on the indie game map. This is challenging stuff, but it's wonderfully creative with it, and I'm not sure I can recommend it enough.

Tales of Graces f never fully abandons the slight clunkiness of its first few hours, but players who bow out early because of its linear design and apparently limited scope will be missing out on what may well be one of the last great traditional Japanese role-playing games. It may have taken three years for it to reach European shores, but it's well worth the wait.

A genuinely interesting fighting game that was released at a time when accessibility played second fiddle to mechanical depth and combos that demanded a high level of execution. The HD subtitle doesn't add up to a lot in this case, but that shouldn't detract from a 2D fighter that's as much lost treasure as it is bizarre curio.

It doesn't have the best execution and it probably costs too much, but there ought to be room in everyone's life for at least one slapstick physics puzzler, and if you're in the right mood then perhaps Rigonauts can be your Bridge Builder.

Yes, there are a lot of improvements here, and yes, the game is heaps of fun to play, but the core experience doesn't feel incredibly different from last year's iteration. In comparison to the gameplay changes that are made between each update of FIFA, Madden feels like its wheels are stuck in the mud.

Leviathan is a rich adventure for those who are willing to reopen the door on Commander Shepard's story, and a worthwhile chapter of lore within the Mass Effect canon. But for those who have already moved on it is perhaps reassuring that, at the end of it all, those goalposts lie largely unmoved.

There's plenty to like here, and Blitz is an undeniably enjoyable arcade game in short bursts. But it feels like an awkward offshoot for the Rock Band name, a little desperate in its push to get people downloading more songs, and an altogether lightweight experience that is unlikely to reverse the decline of the music genre.

There are some few entertainment experiences that rise above mere amusement, and the world of Lordran is one of them: an endless feast to be chewed over and digested, each morsel swallowed with lip-smacking relish before returning eagerly for the next.

It's exactly what meets the eye - which is to say a good-hearted festival of a game about talking robots shooting and smashing each other, shouting itself raw-throated in joy at the toys it gets to play with, but no more than that.

A memorable gem from a master miniaturist who can teach the big boys a thing or two about how to tell a story in this medium. If we're ever going to get away from measuring our gaming by the yard, this would be a great place to start.

It's rare that you come across a game that dares to blend two such disparate genres, let alone one that does so expertly.

The core of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a reminder that quality can be permanent rather than fleeting, and the new additions give us new reasons to take interest and - hopefully - another way in for people who are ready for something different.

Its designers have crafted a decent team shooter that, though small and imperfect, offers an alluring, dramatic kernel amid its see-sawing action beats. But the way it's been carved up and served doesn't inspire much appetite.

Dust does many things well, but it doesn't do anything brilliantly. The combat's decent, the structure invites the revisiting of old areas, and the narrative stays interesting. Taken together, these things are enough to keep you plugging away till the end.

Sounds Shapes is not a brilliant game, but it is a bold, often beautiful experiment that stands and sounds apart. And in one of the driest, dreariest periods for console gaming in memory, that's music to my ears.

It's the ugly subject matter that's challenging, and the way in which the game invites you to walk through the contours of distress. And yet there is something redemptive at its heart.

There's a sense throughout of a development team in love with their work: a team that's gleefully committed to over-delivering. Why else would Vigil opt for two dungeons where one would have been enough for most developers, or throw in boss after boss after gigantic boss when others might have tied things up with a simple cut-scene and the odd quick-time event?

Sleeping Dogs certainly doesn't deserve to take all the blame for this situation, and Rockstar has some serious game-raising of its own to do with GTA5. But when a game is so clearly intent on being a follower of trends rather than setting them, it's hard to feel much passion for Sleeping Dogs' vanilla retread of established ideas. When compared to his open-world peers, Wei Shen's stoic promise to do "what I always do" ultimately feels more like an apology for low ambition than a rallying cry.

This is a high-quality game by anyone's standards, but that doesn't change the fact that I spent a good deal of my time playing it feeling blasphemously bored.

It's a solid, enjoyable shooter, but one that ultimately fails to leverage its strange control decisions into a truly unique experience. It should be different yet, for all its bold ideas about movement, it ends up feeling strangely generic over the long haul.

This isn't a great game, it's not even a good game, but it is the closest thing we've got to a cops-and-robbers MMO - which is, I suspect, one of the all-time great video game concepts. One day, somebody's going to do it right, and they're going to become very rich indeed.

The saddest thing about Sakura Samurai is that the foundation is there for a much better game.

Archaic and lethargic, The Expendables 2 seems far more likely to break a hip than a sweat.

So Deadlight can lay claim to being as smart and atmospheric as previous 2D XBLA hits such as Limbo or Shadow Complex. There's one problem, though: Deadlight is an incredibly slight experience. A single play-through comes in at under two hours, and that running time's been bloated by an uncomfortable number of trial-and-error moments.

It's in the myriad ways you can decimate your attackers that the game's appeal lies, and the improvements made here have only made that pleasure more intense. While Orcs Must Die 2 still has balancing issues, they're more than outweighed by the sheer pleasure of the minute-by-minute gameplay, where calculated carnage is its own reward.