Big guns, big explosions, big waves of enemies, and full co-op support. A bit like a side-scrolling Serious Sam, then, only with more guns and more fishnets.

I wanted a great deal to love this game. X-Com, after all, owned me. UFOA throws few surprises your way, resulting in monotony...The game is good, but with a little more depth and clarity it could have achieved greatness.

Simply a solid, family game that brings yet another TV show to the shiny black box. If you’re a fan then this game is definitely worth adding to your video collection.

A faithful and enjoyable update of an overlooked FPS classic. It won't set the world alight, but Rise of the Triad deserves the attention of anyone who fondly remembers the FPS games of yesteryear or resents the slow hand-holding and cover-taking of recent corridor shooters.

SOCOM: Special Forces was obviously designed to be a more accessible experience than its predcessors, but I suspect this will prove to be a mistake. Long-standing SOCOM fans are likely to protest against the changes to the mechanics, while those new to the series are going to wonder what all the fuss was about.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China is a wonderful setting for a competent, but fairly unimaginative, 2.5D stealth title. Hopefully this won’t be Shao Jun’s final appearance.

Visually and aurally stunning, and delightfully clever in places, but marred by repetition and frustration.

Wreckateer offers some chaotic catharsis, but it's got too many problems to be easily recommendable.

Cloudberry Kingdom is a very varied, very clever, and very, very hard platformer. It never quite hits the heights its competition does, but then, it's really trying to be a very different game.

ALTAR Interactive has done an admirable job of improving upon UFO: Aftermath and delivering a very deep, fun game. The learning curve is steep, but gamers who like obsessing over details will find rich, rewarding gameplay.

To be blunt, TS2012 is a hard game to score. It's a fearsomely niche title (and I play Paradox strategy games for heaven's sake) with a fanbase who'll be judging it by a completely different set of criteria. To them, the interest may be in how accurately the Horseshoe Curve is represented or the potential for inclusion of their favourite engine. My job is to critique it as a game.

Cheap and fairly entertaining, but Primal Carnage needs to solve some rather large problems before it lives up to its sizeable potential.

Not even an army of laser totting, one eyed martians can save X-Files Resist Or Serve from being confined to gaming mediocrity.

It falls short, sadly. What was a wow in the early 90s is merely pedestrian today.

Resident Evil 6′s main achievement is that it makes me worried about the future of the franchise. I was looking forward to Resident Evil 6, I'm not looking forward to Resident Evil 7.

While more serious in tone than say, Mario Golf, TS isn’t quite a simulation (really, do you normally play golf with a stylus?), but True Swing's interesting controls bring gamers closer to the greens than any other handheld golf title.

Like the redacted CIA documents featured so heavily in the game’s marketing, The Bureau comes across as disjointed, baffling and inconsistent. But moments of clarity may well keep you interested in what lies beneath that faltering surface.

KickBeat isn't going to revolutionise the rhythm-action genre, but it nonetheless provides another perfectly solid, perfectly enjoyable opportunity to get into the flow of your music and have some rhythmic fun.

In a year awash with excellent PC strategy titles, Rise of Venice is stranded on the shores of disappointment. But at least the trade skills it imparts may enable you to swap it for a better game.

There may be no backstory but there's plenty of combat. A solid wave-based space shooter for a bargain price.

Starts out fun but soon becomes a tedious exercise as one 'extreme' jump, boost or corner leads blandly into the next; the lack of variety quickly muting the initial pleasure.

While Honest Hearts didn't quite grab me like Dead Money did, it's another satisfying few hours in a fresh Fallout location. Once you get over Joshua Graham being an actual person rather than a myth, his character is expansive and refreshing (it's rare that to find a religious NPC this nuanced in RPGs), and the hiking trails of Zion make for decent exploration. It definitely favours players who will stray off the guided track though, as those who focus exclusively on the main quests will miss out on some of the add-on's hidden narrative treasures.

An engaging, if niche, trading sim. Hampered by some obtuse user interface choices and unwieldy combat sections.

King Arthur II is less ambitious but more refined than the glorious, sprawling reach of the original. Where that game threw everything into development and didn't seem to care what stuck, King Arthur II has opted to remove (rather than improve) the parts which didn't quite function correctly.

But enthusiasm alone can't cure fatal problems with the flat, tedious gameplay; and while almost everything about Serious Sam Double D sounds and looks fun, it is barely any fun to play at all.

There are flashes of comic genius in Whiplash, but equally as many missed opportunities. While this game is good, it narrowly misses the mark.

May not be the most cutting edge looking shooter around, the PC version could have looked a lot nicer, but it does offer a challenge even if it's a little on the short side compared to other similar titles.

It may have dumbed down the puzzles a bit, but what’s there is a solid lump of gameplay.