Despite the flaws and interruptions of the story and presentation, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a superior title.

Beautiful, well written, but aggravating. That’s The Banner Saga in a nutshell.

Zombie Tycoon II has a neat premise. Who doesn't want to control a rampaging horde of the undead? It's a shame then, that it doesn't really do anything worthwhile with the concept.

It was perhaps too much to ask of Telltale that they blow our minds in the very first episode, but I still feel a little let-down with how “setty-uppy” All That Remains felt, with a mostly predictable storyline and few really significant or interesting choices to make.

As such, Tank Operations cannot be recommended over other modern strategy titles of varying scales, or even retro titles – such as the previously mentioned Panzer General series – which are easily available through the likes of Good Old Games.

Both Terraria and Minecraft handle the basic mechanics of crafting and resource gathering better, and aside from an intriguing and visually enticing setting, there's nothing here that really makes Darkout stand out.

These points aside, the first episode of Broken Sword 5 is a lot of fun and a welcome return to form for the series.

The increase in class variety is welcome and each combatant has a certain novelty value, but Deadliest Warrior perhaps doesn't bring enough to the table to fully elevate itself above Medieval Warfare.

For less than a fiver, it’s a bargain, if for nothing else but to experience the bizarre feeling of absolute frustration and absolute relaxation in tandem, courtesy of well-structured, taxing level design and Cody Cook’s beautiful soundtrack.

Not a particularly amazing release, all things considered, but at least it doesn’t make the game worse.

Even though there are a lot of improvements shoved into the patch, which is free, if you’re a CK2 fan then this will add subtle new dimensions to your typical game that you’ll appreciate.

Those who fully appreciate the fast-paced, arcade action may not be fully appreciative of the attention to detail paid to the planes on show. Likewise, those who fully appreciate the attention to detail, may be disappointed to not be given a deeper flight simulation with which to fly their historical birds.

X: Rebirth will get better over time, and anyone who’s open-minded enough to look past the ‘X’ branding and see the ‘game’, may even find many hours of entertainment.

If you’re into in-depth management of a park then Adventure Park may be for you, but for everyone else the design problems, unattractive menus, misplaced priorities, and numerous other flaws adds up to a tedious experience. Worst of all though, Adventure Park is bland, lifeless and lacking in both character and imagination.

Overall, Battle Worlds: Kronos is a really robust strategy game.

Definitely worth a play if you like the idea of a Star Trek/Facebook parody game, but don’t expect any longevity from it.

Unfortunately for Blood Knights, taking established systems and watering them down just leaves you with a diluted mix that tastes nothing like what it's trying to imitate.

As a series of systems then, Final Exam is actually a whole bunch of fun, but it fails to harness those into a coherent whole and inject enough variation to keep things fresh.

If you want to replay Baldur’s Gate II or are an RPG fan who hasn’t played it this is definitely the version to get, but unless you’re desperate to get it now I suggest waiting until a Steam sale.

The game looks absolutely beautiful, is jam packed with things to do, and as ever, the combat is a joy to fiddle with.

Journey of a Roach attempts some nice ideas and is pretty cute, but altogether isn’t a particular good or enjoyable adventure.

Enjoyable but highly flawed.

Deadfall Adventures certainly has some problems but if you’re an Indiana Jones fan you really should be getting it.

It successfully combines all the best elements from Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite into a satisfying package, and it should be pointed out that level-wise nothing has been reused from either game (unlike the superb Minerva’s Den, which was great but didn’t have much new).

There's some really good ideas in Master Reboot, maybe Wales Interactive have been a bit too ambitious with the project versus the size of their team, but it never quite fulfils those ideas.

As cynical as it might be to release a quick follow-up to a third-person shooter in one of the most populated thematic genres of the last generation then, Sniper Elite Nazi Zombie Army 2 is nonetheless another diverting exercise in brainless co-op action.

Enemy Within makes for an incredible, and fresh, journey as you fight to save the world one more time, and it’s definitely worth picking up eventually. We would totally understand though, if you wanted to wait for a steam sale or something.

Enjoyable, inventive, and great delivery by developers Modern Dream, Typing of the Dead is a curio but one that definitely requires a few moments of attention. If you like typing really quick, zombies, and wisecracking: look no further.

Dream Chamber is full of great ideas that just don't pan out that well. The slightly stilted dialogue in some places doesn't help.

It's an old school platformer, in a macabre horror world populated with tricks, traps and freakish foes. The difficulty of the game veers between perfectly pitched and pretty damn frustrating, marring the experience somewhat for those of us lacking the heightened reflexes of a supernatural monstrosity. Despite that, it's a finely crafted package worth experiencing for fans of the genre and those craving a challenge.

If you want to be scared out of your mind for an hour or so, feel free to get Slender: The Arrival. If you consider that the only prerequisite for a horror game, it gets top marks. Trouble is video games have to have more than that, and this is where The Arrival falls down.

Competent to the last, Alien Rage Unlimited will tick the boxes for anyone wanting to indulge in warfare, whilst perhaps parting ways from any sort of thought process for an hour or two.

Putting it all together, Steam Marines may be a tasty little challenge for some, but it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Perhaps it’ll be a nice addition to a rogue fan’s collection, and maybe a few indie diehards would like to pick it up to see what it’s all about.

What we're left with is a quirky combination of tones and systems that never really mesh together to create an engaging whole. The game feels like with a bit more depth, length and ambition it could've given us a pretty unique experience.

It's not quite deep enough, and the difficulty curve ramps up to an insane degree pretty quickly.

If you’re a Batman fan you should already have Batman: Arkham Origins, but anyone else might want to hold off a couple of weeks for some patches to come through.

This is an excellent combination of concept and design, but needed more, more, more. The core game itself utilises a fine engine with which to play with, but the actual core of the experience feels somewhat lacking in substance. A real shame that detracts from an outstanding piece of game design.

Sports Interactive has taken a long look at their primary tactical setup and made changes to make it more relatable to their audience and also more analogous to the influence that real-life managers are able to exert. As long as they keep pulling tricks like this, Football Manager is a series that will remain evergreen.

Nevertheless, if you’re able to look beyond the simplistic graphics to the fantastic game underneath then this one is a real treasure.

Maybe hardcore Dark Eye fans will appreciate the lore and its place in the universe, but on its own it’s not a fantastic story, and it’s not a well-designed game either.

Enjoyable? Certainly. Inventive? Never. Defense Technica is a game so humdrum and so by the numbers that it is a struggle to say anything much about. The game exists within its own genre, and that seemingly says enough. Serviceable to a fault, but where the developer's expected to find their own niche, nobody will ever know.

Granted, it’s a HD remake of a 2002 game, and when the new wave of space sim games come – X: Rebirth being the first in November – it’s going to get completely overshadowed, but it’s a great way to pass the time till then.

With just one episode to go off of I’m still prepared to bet that unless Telltale screw up massively I’m going to end up thinking The Wolf Among Us is better than Game Of The Year contender/winner The Walking Dead in a few months’ time.

As enjoyable as Monster Truck Destruction undoubtedly is at times, it’s not been fully-baked in the transition to the PC and the price point won’t reflect its nature without some heavy patching. If you can find it cheap in a Steam sale this Christmas then it’s certainly worthy of a chunk of change to take a look, but for the moment, pick up your phone and give it a try before even thinking about hitting that purchase button.

The story tries to be too dramatic in parts, with a few out-of-place dark moments and a slightly unsatisfying ending that seems entirely written to tell me off for saying that Rufus was a selfish unlikeable dick (you’ll see).

All in all, Agarest Generations of War is pretty bland, generic, and average. Factoring in pure gameplay, there are plenty of better JRPG to sample, and, hopefully, a brighter future for the genre above and beyond what this PC port would illuminate.

But outside of the scares, Haunted Memories may strike the more fearless among you as a pretty basic experience. Find a key at location A, to unlock a door at location B, which yields a creepy note to give you the tiniest amount of context for what it is you are experiencing. There is a sense of mystery to be uncovered, a myth explained – but you won't find all the answers in the first of six planned episodes.

Gas Guzzlers Extreme is still worth the plunge if you’re at all intrigued by a return to its simple diet of racing carnage however.

I’m not entirely sure who’d enjoy a game like this. It’s possible we’ll see a few desperate YouTubers record their girlfriend getting scared by some of the earlier moments in the game, but aside from that tiny bit of stimulation and the initial hope that the nonsensical plot will have a logical finish, there’s very little here for anyone other than the most desperate of horror fans.

While I consider myself a veteran of strategic RPGs, frequently I found myself frustrated by Aarklash and annoyed by the lack of depth to many of the systems that support the combat - looting and equipping characters has ever felt so much like a chore, while the puzzles you'll face are an unwelcome obstacle, lacking entirely in originality or ingenuity.

Nevertheless, Shadow Warrior is a highly-polished fun FPS that realises that while being old-school is great there’s no reason why you can’t still be innovative.

There are lots of good ideas here, variations in objectives, AI companions, skill building, and numerous aircrafts to fly, but it all feels so bland, mundane even.

F1 2013 is a dynamic and varied simulation then, and that’s not a compliment that could readily be aimed at too many of its forebears.

Bionic Due is not only a necessary purchase for all true rogue-clone fans, but it’d easily be a pride-worthy addition to the game collection of anyone with even a remote interest in this sort of thing. This game is a great laugh and a good challenge; Arcen Games, hat’s off to you chaps.

It’s definitely a step in the right direction for the series as a whole, but I can’t help but feel Gaming Minds have held out on us a little bit.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then the game itself is a novel every city block and every dusty trail. It’s the million dollar fireworks display at the end of the current generation cycle of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 – handing out free beer and barbeque chicken wings.

However while The Chinese Room have attempted to make their Amnesia a purer horror experience they’ve merely succeeded in removing all the actual gameplay along with the first game’s brilliant sanity meter.

While in many ways superior to Origins I’m giving it the same score because it’s a little bit too similar in places, nevertheless Rayman Legends is one of the best platformers of all time and you should definitely buy it if you want to have a smile on your face.

All in all I believe if you pick up The Bureau I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Unless you still think it’s an investigative ‘50s-set FPS. Or a proper strategy game. Then you might be.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist isn’t absolutely perfect, but there’s bags of quality content here that’ll keep stealth gamers happy on-and-offline.

Everything kind of just plods along and while you will get moments of brilliance, moments of wonder… they’re too easily buried by a startling amount of mediocrity. Total War: Rome 2 is a perfectly adequate/decent game. It should have been a bloody brilliant game.

Lost Planet 3 is competent, but lacks any real soul.

Full Control have done a very faithful recreation of the board game, and with a few tweaks it could have been fairly decent.

Combined with The Knife of Dunwall, The Brigmore Witches and the story of Daud is exactly what Dishonored’s DLC needed to be – a fun side-story with an interesting character that adds to the main story but doesn’t take anything away.

So, Paradox have done it again – learning from the design of Crusader Kings II, Europa Universalis is an excellent starting foundation.

In defence of Crafty Studios, they have been proactive in patching, but Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny seems a long way off of being playable quite yet. Save your nostalgia, start learning the German language, and pray to Cromm that things turn around quickly.

Ducktales Remastered is a nostalgia trip from start to end, frustrating, life-taking warts and all.

The excellent Clan eSport-style multiplayer, Steam Workshop support, Story Mode, and hilarious water system are all reasons to buy Worms: Clan Wars. It can honestly lay claim to being the new definitive Worms game on PC, despite the mangling of the Ninja Rope.

In reality, it means that in a game where quick reactions and responsiveness mean everything, you’re often punished for not pushing the jump button hard enough, simply because you don’t have enough time to do so.

I really don’t want to rag too much on Rise of the Triad given it works so hard – and often succeeds – to just be an even-more-ridiculous modern-looking remake of a classic FPS. In many ways Interceptor have done exactly that, but in others I really wish they’d been more ambitious.

While there are a few flaws in Shadowrun Returns, most notably linearity, the lack of a save function and a slightly under-utilized world, the excellent and consistently fun writing and XCOM-inspired combat make it a worthwhile experience.

The Raven is a gentle, well-crafted mystery, but it just doesn't carry enough interest or intrigue to make you fully invest.

Ultimately, it makes Civilization V a much better game, which is the key thing here.

Face Noir tries its best to be a compelling Raymond Chandler-esque film noir detective adventure and falls flat on its noirish face. The story is boring, characters are either bland or straight-up racist, acting is mediocre, writing is worse, cutscenes are mostly static photos, and the puzzles are a string of “find the important thing the designers have hidden” moments rather than any genuine brain-teasers.

Although notably lacking in enthusiasm for its PC platform, Joe Danger makes an excellent debut on Windows, with enough content to keep you entertained for months.

So many times during this review I quit the game just because I couldn't be bothered to solve a puzzle, only to realise I had to keep playing to give it a fair shot. My opinion would start to sway a bit more positive, then I quit again for the lack of care. Which says everything about Magrunner: Dark Pulse really.

For now though, if you’re considering picking up that second season 400 Days is damn near essential – and if you’re not, then it may well change your mind.

While there is a bit of a learning curve – you're likely to spend your first few games getting instantly killed by cunning unseen enemies – it's worth persevering with. The realistic aspects to the game like bleeding, and quick death by bullet, give it a unique feel among the majority of today's shooters.

Anyway, if you want a hacky-slashy title that mocks videogame and comic conventions and never takes itself seriously then Deadpool is for you.

All in all, Conquistadors is a pretty solid game – the New World is full of wonder and danger, and there’s just enough RPG in the mix to make you feel like a real explorer, dealing with realistic problems.

Neverwinter is a polished, if uninspiring MMO. There's a welcome fluidity to combat, but it doesn't do anything innovative, taking the successes of Star Trek Online and implementing them in a D&D world, as well as borrowing from other post-World of Warcraft action-orientated MMOs. Ultimately, it'll live or die on the lasting success of The Foundry, which promises potentially unlimited creative content that will let you experience stories far beyond the cookie-cutter nature of the ones in the main storyline.

Knights of Pen & Paper +1 has a lot of charm, and a lot of game hours to go with it.

And that’s the reason the first Leisure Suit Larry is beloved enough to get a crowd-funded remake – it’s still very funny to play. Yes some of the mechanics are painful, irritating, or just obtrusive (even by 1987 standards, yet alone 2013), but lose them and you lose the experience.

For Company of Heroes veterans, Company of Heroes 2 feels a little like coming home.

The combat is dull, the graphics are boring, even the heroes – the games' big selling point – are totally underwhelming. Not to mention ridiculously expensive for any extras. It's free to try, but it's not really worth the bandwidth either.

In all honesty, forgoing the campaign mode and jumping straight in a skirmish might be a better proposition.

Much like the adventures of Drake, if you own a PS3, you need to own this game.

With a long campaign, randomly generated side missions and many cards to collect, Prime World Defenders offers fans of the Tower Defence genre a lasting and varied challenge, with new elements being added throughout.

If you’ve never picked up a CKII expansion before, The Old Gods would be the perfect place to start. Saying that, there’s no reason you shouldn’t pick up the other expansions either, but we guess it depends on what you like to play as.

It’s a shame that Focus haven’t done more to ease people wanting to jump in to AirLand Battle who’ve bought the original game, but in all honesty this is worth the money, even if Focus don’t follow the same DLC plan they did before.

As delightful and clever as Reus is, the intensity of the play when you find yourself juggling multiple projects unfortunately lets it down, as it doesn't feel built to support such action.

The Night of the Rabbit, regardless of what it’s called and the few other minor complaints I had, is a triumph. It’s Daedalic once and for all proving that they are indeed capable of producing an adventure that can stand tall with the classics of the genre.

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is now a solid fantasy 4X game with plenty of mechanical depth for those who delight in tweaking parameters, if still lacking that certain spark to elevate it into the top tier of the genre.

Sanctum 2 at the very least improves on every aspect of its clunky predecessor, offering smoother and more enjoyable gameplay and living up to the great promise offered by the premise.

Grid 2 is a racing game that rewards skill without punishing you for the tiniest mistakes, letting you master a simple system with a forgiving attitude. It may stray too close towards the easy side of the scale at times, and it'll be interesting to see how the game works online (which unfortunately wasn't tested in this review), but its career mode is well worth playing and you won't be satisfied until you've mastered every single corner.

What The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing may lack in replayability it makes up for in competence, enthusiasm and easy charm. The moment to moment slaughter, the deceptively deep levelling and abundance of powerful loot mean it's a difficult game to put down.

There are quibbles along the way but Injustice: Gods Among Us is exactly as much fun as it needed to be and I can happily recommend it. And as a final point for fans who don’t know already, the tie-in comic is (whisper it) pretty darn fantastic

As one of those Star Trek fans I certainly did enjoy moments of The Videogame, but I think I would’ve had a lot more fun continuing with Star Trek Online instead. This one won’t live long and prosper, and good thing too.