Omerta will certainly keep you occupied for long periods of time, but only if you’re punishing your attention span. The world itself is quick to drop you into the 1920’s experience, but never amounts to anything more than a lifeless shell. Factor in some embarrassing voice acting, painful writing and a reluctance for Omerta to ever truly let itself go wild with its concepts, and all you’ll left with is a hollow time consuming experience.

The handful of boss fights in Dead Space 3 are particularly forgettable, while the narrative occasionally lacks the courage of its convictions and the end-game reveal is a little too ludicrous to take seriously. However, where the new concepts work, they add to the solid core and are enhanced by Visceral’s excellent pacing and its impeccable audio and visual design work, not to mention what remains the best HUD design in all of video games.

Once the realisation hits that the game not only requires the bear minimum to progress, but subconsciously encourages it, it begins to take much of the fun away.

Broadly speaking, this is the same game we've played before on PS2, but the addition of fresh personae and social links, and the sheer range of activities available at any one time did much to dissipate our expected fatigue.

A thoroughly compelling strategy game. Quirky too, playing to the video game retro-chic and tongue-in-cheek humour that's popular especially among XBLA and digital games today. Despite the slightly overblown frills, there's plenty of depth to Skulls Of The Shogun that will instantly engage any type of strategy gamer.

Though an overall shallow affair, Marvel Avengers: Battle For Earth displays lot more polish, flair and finesse than your average movie tie-in title, but like those Skrull impostors, it can't escape its true, uglier nature for too long.

At once entertaining, frustrating, beautiful and fleeting, The Cave is way better in concept than execution. And as much as it has going for it, some poor design decisions mean that frustration and boredom will quickly get rid of players that would otherwise have lapped this up.

It's impossible not to want more, though. It's delicious. Coming as it does from two creative teams at the top of their respective fields, we expect nothing less. And it's expectations such as these that harm Ni No Kuni most of all – were it not for the near impeccable track records that cut through gloriously in the game's opening hours, the rest of it would shine far brighter than it does when eclipsed by that initial exciting explosion of potential.

Combat is razor-sharp and stuffed with combo potential, just as you'd expect from a Devil May Cry game.

Monolith has done great work in crafting a control scheme that feels completely without compromise and entirely suited to console, and has designed an accessible, familiar and extremely deep MOBA with the just as much panache as the games it imitates.

The final moments are phenomenally powerful. It would be criminal to spoil any of this stirring and heartwrenching story, but this is a heady combination of artful writing and innate knowledge of the power of videogames to draw players into a character. It achieves things that passive artforms cannot. Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman have established themselves as game writers at the height of their powers, and The Walking Dead is unquestionably one of the videogames of the year.

Just as unique and innovative as the original ever was, and now's the time to get involved. There's something special here, you just need to look underneath all the copies of Call Of Duty to find it.

Declassified is a sorry way to end 14 years of coding history at Nihilistic. The kindest thing you can say about it is that it's a reasonably authentic facsimile of the Call Of Duty blueprint, yet it feels like the work of an artist who is painstakingly tracing a masterpiece but lacks the craft to replicate the magical that made the original so attractive in the first place.

Far Cry 3's plot is a bit silly and inconsistent, its AI a bit dumb and predictable, and the world works in a suspiciously similar way to Assassins Creed, but it's great fun. And perhaps even more importantly, these days, when as gamers we're so often left feeling short-changed, it's also overwhelmingly fantastic value for money.

The sheer amount of content on offer is certain to please fans, as well as those who want to smash bricks or solve rudimentary puzzles, and to experience whatever amount of crossover there is between them. Lego LOTR's authenticity is matched only by the amount of content on offer, and is a must for those who love the films or play regularly with younger gamers.

It's a compelling return to form, featuring some of the series' most well crafted, inviting and testing stages, and while much has changed in the six-year interim, you'll be pleased to hear that Agent 47 hasn't.

Mario's Wii U debut will no doubt attract the usual detractors and jaded observers, but there's more to this than rigid routine. It just all depends on what you want from it.

When the game works, it's one of the finest party games on offer, but Nintendo's confusion in what it wants to achieve with the Wii U GamePad results in an erratic compilation short on hits

Fallblox is an intoxicating blend of the familiar and the new, every bit as essential as Pullblox, and a further reminder that Intelligent Systems remains one of the most aptly named developers in the business.

Although it would have been nicer to see Nintendo pick one of two directions rather than offer something that perches on the fence between platforming thrills and RPG depth, Sticker Star is nonetheless a beautiful and eventually engrossing adventure, once it hits its stride.

Nostalgia can be an intoxicating thing, but in the case of this iPad outing it's simply not powerful enough to overcome the boredom borne of run-of-the-mill design. Eternia? More like eternally dull.

Media Molecule's sense of pure creation sits perfectly with the karting genre and we'd even go as far to say that players will find it easier to be both player and creator here than they would in the previous games. Just don't expect to find Mario looking over his shoulder anytime soon.

While Ubisoft's commitment to the struggling Vita format is to be applauded – the console is in dire need of exclusives of this calibre – Assassin's Creed III: Liberation lacks the lavish quality of its big-screen relatives. Hardcore fans will not doubt be more forgiving and will quite rightly warm to the game's feisty heroine, but she deserves a better vehicle than this to showcase her talents.

It's not a horror experience. There are attempts to slap on some kind of Silent Hill-esque story to everything, but it's utterly worthless. Silent Hill: Book Of Memories is a shallow dungeon-crawler, with even the likes of Dungeon Hunter: Alliance providing more fun. It is, in short, a failure; not the sort of thing we want from Silent Hill, nor the sort of thing we want for the Vita.

The question many will ask, ultimately, is how Halo 4 stacks up against its predecessors, and in truth it's hard to answer at this time. It'll take multiple runs through the campaign, hours and hours more multiplayer, and swaths of Spartan Ops mission to truly understand how good Halo 4 is. There's one answer we can say with certainty, though: this is absolutely a Halo game. And that's all that most fans would ever need to hear.

You could argue that the crashes don't match the drama of the chase, the camera angles often failing to relay the complete destruction of your vehicle. The handling might feel a little too forced towards the arcade side of things and perhaps some players will feel that they've played this game already thanks to the many hours they put into Burnout Paradise. But there's no denying that Criterion is the master of its craft, and Most Wanted is its biggest and best effort yet.

It's indicative of Ubisoft's approach, so wary of the player discovering their own enjoyment, or missing key information, that it so fervently handholds through what should be its most spectacular moments. At times this reduces entire chapters to tediously long treks between cut-scenes, a lot of which feel like less than worthwhile narrative additions. It's an odd occurrence of a game giving and taking away in equal measure.

What hurts most about Liberation Maiden, however, is that just when it feels like it's getting interesting, with a stage that's basically one epic, shifting boss battle, it unexpectedly screeches to a halt, reminding you that you've bought what was originally one quarter of a bigger game.