While Shadowgrounds: Survivor arguably does nothing we have not seen before, its clean, solid presentation and hectic, engrossing gameplay make it worthy of praise. You get a lot of game for pocket change, and that it’s a great shooter makes it worth every penny.

It's great to play a shooter that contains more than just planes, tanks, and machine guns. The fireworks theme gives the game an excuse to take you around the world, celebrating local cultures with glittery explosions, while still granting you the rare opportunity to blast a hole in a flying squid.

Improves many of the niggling flaws of the original while updating the maps and graphics along the way, leading to a genuinely fun and at times, addictive game. Unfortunately, the disconnect ranking issue still need some ironing.

If ESPN wants to compete with an EA Franchise that has made some serious leaps and bounds this year, they’re going to have to buckle down in the off-season, tighten up their offense and maybe learn some new plays on defense.

Though it sticks very closely to the franchise's formula and has a few flaws, the excellent story, great presentation and varied gameplay make this 'final' episode a good one.

An exceptional blend of gaming styles filled with enough irreverent humor to please old and young alike. It could stand to be harder and less linear, but in the end this marks another winner for the mustachioed mascot.

The sheer amount of content alone in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade is worthy of respect. This is the kind of rampant generosity that we love, and it’s worth going to war with robot zombies over.

Maybe it's because I'm a girl and this kind of thing could get messy and cold, but I don't remember ever having had so much fun just by taking a Wii in the snow.

At about one-fifth of the price and length of a full-scale platformer, it's pretty, polished and fun. LostWinds is one of the most recommendable downloadable games from WiiWare.

The classic action/adventure combat, now augmented with time travel and more ways to dish out punishment, will please fans hoping for a good ending. There are still some lingering issues, but this old warhorse remains in top form.

The only “problems” with this game are that it's quite short (it's more like Portal-short in that it doesn't need to be any longer than it is) and that, like every remake and re-imagining, it doesn't bringing anything extraordinarily new to the table.

While I disagree that the future of RPGs entails such a separation between movie and game elements, the two still propel one another in the best interests of the story.

It's got great lightsaber battles and enough Star Wars action to satisfy even the biggest George Lucas junkie.

Voluptuous in every sense of the word. With the best graphics money can buy and a robust online ring, it's a great choice for your new 360. That said, it still doesn't really bring any new tricks to the fight.

A very solid game. What it isn't is a very innovative game. It does everything it has to and does it well, but it doesn't do anything new.

Lords of Shadow is one of the best games I've played all year, but its technical faults hamper the experience.

And while the gameplay and puzzles are streamlined, the unlockable content massive, and the flying modes excellent, the best part about the game is its snarky humor and feel-good satire.

The disconnect between the mystery story and the puzzle gameplay is not a damning curse for the Professor Layton series, this game included.

Lords of Shadow is one of the best games I've played all year, but its technical faults hamper the experience.

Like a racer from Stepford, Forza Motorsport 3 is clean, well-manicured, friendly, does everything you want it to, and yet it all seems a bit… eerily familiar. Beneath the handful of smart accessibility improvements and slick menus, it’s still the same game as Forza 2. That’s not a bad thing since the series is among the best; it’s just not anything new.

It suffers from several obvious shortcomings, but accomplishes what only a week ago seemed impossible by providing console gamers with the full Battlefield experience.

Case Zero is an effective tie-in that enticed me to pay attention to a game I had little to no anticipation for, and introduced elements I want to explore further once Dead Rising 2 lands.

You could play this game for years before you really started to feel like you might have seen everything it had to offer. If you can just get past the rough beginning, the difficulty, and the steep learning curve, Eve Online is the biggest game you could possibly hope to play.

The addictive gameplay, well-rendered graphics (even on an aged system), easy control scheme, innovative cooperative features and tons of replay value make for a winner.

Its unwavering adherence to tactical gameplay will exclude a number of quick twitch gamers, but for those with a little patience, this is a solid, engrossing port.

This stylish adventure is just what we hoped it would be - a deranged, oddball jaunt through a fun, bizarre world - proving that a creative mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste.

As a singleplayer experience, Bad Company 2 is mostly forgettable, which is a disappointment considering how entertaining the first game’s campaign was. Thankfully the multiplayer features are so polished and well designed that BC2’s shortcomings won’t matter in the slightest.

The humor is excellently well-written, and the setup to Chapter Three is more than enough to make up for the stale beginning of the Tales of Monkey Island series. If you haven't taken the plunge into the new Monkey Island, now is a good time to do it.