This is one of the biggest disappointments of the system, and the year.

Forget about tactics: it's about pitting your silly custom character against someone else's silly custom character in a giggling orgy of button-bashing. It's not big or clever or deep, but it is fun if you take it for what it is.

Syndicate is a game struggling to be all things to all people and underselling its strongest points in the process. The story is a perfunctory thing, worth playing once for the robust gunplay, but it fails to make Syndicate stand out from the cyberpunk herd.

The character himself simply feels more at home in this shorter, punchier, less laboured and self-regarding form. Freed from the weight of expectation that accompanies a full retail release in this genre, the experience - while lacking the set-piece spectacle and spookiness of the original - is less forced and more comfortably pitched.

As a full-price package, Tekken 3D is more of a technical accomplishment than a portable innovator. If all you want to do is train while preparing for the next battle, then this is Tekken at its purest. But if you're looking for dynamic game types like the generous spread of Story, Legion and Abyss modes in the 3DS version of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift 2, then you'll be largely disappointed.

It's a strategy game of uncommon substance. The painstaking management and honing of your team, the desperate push-and-pull war for territory, and the gradual incursion towards Arulco's heart of darkness offer a hearty feast for anyone who can make it past the more superficial disappointments.

No series has been so willing to switch gameplay styles with such reckless abandon, and The Jak and Daxter Trilogy represents a shining example of what happens when a capable developer takes a huge risk. There's nothing else quite like it.

It's one of the strongest launch titles, offering taut fun and challenge in a rapid-fire, quick-load manner that's perfectly suited to the handheld. It may not offer a vision of the portable future that Sony's creative dreamers were hoping for, but as a video game, it works small wonders.

Warp is a pleasant enough diversion, but with patchwork design that remixes gameplay ideas and stylistic elements from sources as diverse as Splosion Man, Metal Gear Solid and Portal, it never gels into anything particularly memorable.

As culmination of three years in which we've gone from a scattered lineage of average UFC games to a genuine contender for the best sports fighter available today, Undisputed 3 is, on all counts, a round three technical knockout.

Is it a game? I can't say I know the answer, but I do know that unless you're an IGF judge or a prissy dogmatist who sets out to pedantically define the boundaries of an extremely fluid medium, then you shouldn't really care. All that matters is that Dear Esther is worth your time - and that its two-hour long chill will remain in your bones for a long while after.

This isn't the most charismatic racing series around, perhaps, but Road Trip is a surprisingly enjoyable instalment nonetheless. It's colourful, cheerful and a decent showcase for Sony's brand new hardware.

My daughter played Happy Action Theater for about three hours when we first downloaded it. We had to drag her away. She shows it off to her friends, who are equally enchanted by it. She now asks to play it after school rather than watch TV.

A tiresome waste of a strong license, only the most blinkered fan will derive pleasure from this slog of an experience filled with wrong-headed design decisions intended to pad out a game that cannot sustain expansion.

If Virtua Tennis is Nadal - bright, consistent, unafraid to work up a sweat - and Top Spin has the measured elegance of a Federer, Grand Slam Tennis is every bit the Andy Murray of tennis games: flashes of brilliance, prone to a few too many errors, but shows definite champion potential.

Glossy rather than glorious, decidedly wobbly and very limited.

Gotham City Impostors offers a minimum of substantive content - maps, in particular - and a maximum of unlockables that put unrealistic demands for grinding next to a 'buy now' button. It is possible, apparently, to reach character level 1000 in this. I cannot imagine it. The gadget-enabled shooter at the heart of Gotham City Impostors is fun, smart, and hard to dislike. But it's impossible to recommend.

Mutant Mudds doesn't quite have the brash, devil-may-care attitude of Super Meat Boy or the charming personality of VVVVVV, but its refined obstacle courses are a distillation of what made us fall in love with 2D platformers in the first place.

Ultimately, it's this unique style that makes The Darkness 2 worth your time. After years of chest-beating military domination, the FPS genre is starting to show signs of life in more eccentric ways. Everything old is new again, so by concentrating on character, story and giddy comic-book excess, The Darkness 2 is a more compelling offering in 2012 than it would have been in 2008.

Does all the boring, difficult parts of RPG game design very well, and marries them to exceptionally slick combat and a towering stack of stuff to do. This well-oiled machine keeps you motoring through all the sludgy fantasy cliché and through a sluggish first act. Then - just as the world opens out and the story picks up traction - that motor really starts to sing. That's when a solid, workmanlike game becomes one that's virtually impossible to put down.

Anything that was good about Dead Island has been crudely ripped out, and whatever remains has been served up in such a way that it simply isn't fun, even at the basic "look at me, I'm killing zombies" level.

NeverDead feels like gaming's equivalent of Buckaroo Banzai, or Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of those weird B-movies you used to find lurking in the midnight spaces of an old video store and which you often loved for their unlikely concepts or their wilful obscurity more than their actual quality. NeverDead hasn't been given room to get the most out of its strange ideas, but it's still plucky, warm-hearted and genuinely idiosyncratic.

SoulCalibur has always excelled at offering an accessible style of combat with a level of single-player content that other fighting games have only recently begun to match. These qualities haven't changed - and now, after what seemed like an uncertain return, the historical fighter is staging its best performance since that fateful Christmas of 1999. High five!

For all its mechanical cleverness and forward-thinking design, Final Fantasy 13-2 is also convoluted, complicated and unfriendly to newcomers. In Square-Enix's desperation to discover what its flagship series looks like in the modern world, what should be an interesting curio has been inflated to blockbuster proportions.

Resident Evil: Revelations is gorgeous, huge, and offers the most fully-featured online co-op experience on 3DS. The single-player isn't quite the survival horror comeback Capcom promised but, with its brilliant take on score attack, Raid mode ensures Revelations delivers at least once on its title.

Quarrel is still the horribly compelling single-player game it's always been on mobiles, with an extra dollop of polish and a few new tantalising game modes for the console release - and all for the laughable sum of 400 Microsoft Points.

Those with an addiction to high scores will love the many hours they spend smashing themselves repeatedly against the levels' pitiless design. And those who aren't up for the challenge? Dustforce will just take them to the cleaners.

Scarygirl is cute, workable, but otherwise routine - its style inching ahead of its substance.