You've already played the best bit. [Sept 2013, p.102]

Ready, Deadie, Gone. And don't come back. [Sept 2013, p.93]

And there's no sign of GLaDOS either. Boo! [Sept 2013, p.93]

Gently frustrating but well put together. [Sept 2013, p.93]

The best D&D experience on console. [Sept 2013, p.91]

Lock it to a railing and leave it there. [Sept 2013, p.91]

Excellent tutorial for beginners. [Sept 2013, p.89]

A startling glimpse into true hell. [Sept 2013, p.86]

As an exercise in carrying triple-A bloat gracefully, however, it's among Ubisoft's finest efforts. Fisher might look like the world's grumpiest, most grizzled ninja, but he's proving quite the crowd-pleaser.

It's possible someone who doesn't buy into the Saints Row universe with such enthusiasm will find Saints Row IV exhausting and boring. Might we suggest those people attend a local museum, where the paintings of flowers might be more to their taste. If violent psychopathy is the price we have to pay for a world of awesome harmony, sign us up.

It's just too easy to forgive Payday 2 for looking shonky though. This game isn't about appearances; it's about the tension and excitement and thrill found in the heat of a moment. It's about hard work and co-operation and a well-placed bullet coming together to pull off the perfect crime. If you've got a tight team of four bank-busting buddies ready and raring to go, and you can overlook some below-average scenery, you're in for a hell of a time. Mask up.

It's a faithful remake, but it dredges up a lot of what was wrong with the original game, and the fun lasts barely as long as it'll take you to hum the theme tune.

It's depressing to see a developer that applied so intense a spotlight to existing practices and archetypes resort to so generic an expansion.

Like an everlasting gobstopper, you can buy Cloudberry for peanuts and certainly get your money's worth in terms of quantity. But play it just long enough, and it quickly loses its flavour.

Good, but doomed by indifference. [Aug 2013, p.103]

A fine tweak on an established theme. [Aug 2013, p.91]

Surprise attack from some chopsy 'copters. [Aug 2013, p.91]

Spills more brains than it actually has. [Aug 2013, p.89]

Sadly, the one time we really enjoyed ourselves was watching a bullet sink into a camel's buttock. [Aug 2013, p.87]

Colourful but uninspired. [Aug 2013, p.87]

There's only one number that reflects this perfectly average experience.

With around 50 levels to chew on, the game is substantial but no banquet, and the later levels don't really build on their predecessors in any mind-blowing ways. It's a welcome break from the frenzy elsewhere on Xbox Live, but it never threatens to become a fixture.

It'd suit the adversarial nature of this review if I came out of DW8 feeling as stubbornly indifferent as I have the last few games. But annoyingly, this is the first time Dynasty Warriors has made me want to play on.

Most free to play games are engineered for compulsive play, but Spartacus Legends is about as addictive as swallowing sand. Thumbs down.

All that said, Scourge is cheap, and if you're looking for a no-frills co-op shooter to keep you and three friends mildly entertained, you could do worse.

DARK is frustrating, because that initial feeling of being a zippy blur of a vampire in a world of neon-lit night never leaves you. It's just swamped in frustrating design decisions, a script that lurches from passable to laughable, weak enemy AI, and a vortex of a lead character who's impossible to like or hate.

400 Days is by no means an essential purchase - it unfolds so quickly that you don't have that much needed time to mull everything over. But for 400MP, it's a perfectly decent-sized bite that should whet your appetite for Season Two, adding welcome layers of intrigue and complexity to an already exceptional series.

Grimly coining it in, this feels wretched. [July 2013, p.79]

About as good as non-human poker gets. [July 2013, p.79]

Gloriously shallow co-op shooting. [July 2013, p.79]

Despite some slight technical let downs, and a few underwhelming aesthetics, Brothers is a rather beautiful tale of love and loss, of fables and fairy tales, and of family most of all. [July 2013, p.78]

Ultimately, in being unashamed, obnoxious, immature and insane, Deadpool is Deadpool alright - for better and for worse.

It all works together to make this the funniest and most thoughtful expansion of the Season Pass. Whether you've got the energy to go back and blow the cobwebs off your old gun hoard is up to you. We'd definitely recommend it.

The on-track action can be exhilarating, but the career is too functional to impress. MotoGP 13 goes just as far as it has to, but never becomes truly essential.

A matter of surviving endless similar rooms, and repetitive mini-bosses with too much health.

It's by no means perfect, but Undead Labs has won itself a high level of forgiveness, with an atmospheric world that's as compelling as it is flawed.

Because Remember Me has moments of novel brilliance. The Memory Remix segments aren't particularly challenging, or even puzzles in the real sense. They're more a fun way of tinkering with things, and seeing what happens. They do work perfectly well as a narrative device, and a change in pace. The combat system, which might appear strategically moribund to anyone with long experience of gaming, develops constantly throughout the game, which helps prevent you from becoming bored.

It's warm, frequently funny, and stylish. It's extremely good value at 800MP. It's just hard enough to keep you biting. And most of all, it's just bloody great.

A gimmicky but fun mix of fan service. [June 2013, p.103]

There's no actual reason for this. [June 2013, p.91]

Vibrant and vivacious violence. [June 2013, p.91]

That Grid 2 remains so enjoyable despite its reserved approach is to the credit of its formula. It's slick, sexy and hugely accomplished, but without any revolutionary additions or changes that elevate it above what the series did before.

If all you want is to gun down wave after wave of enemies set to the pleasant Southern drawl of its narrator, hang up your spurs and have at it. If however, you demand a little innovation with your arcade shooters, then much like Silas himself, tales of Gunslinger's greatness may be greatly exaggerated.

Way of the Dogg is a squandered opportunity to fill a genre gap in the Arcade. It's a quick hour's job to mop up 300G, though. So there's always that.

Deficits notwithstanding, this is a superb port of what may be the best survival-horror game on Xbox since Dead Space first lurched onto the scene.

Metro: Last Light is one big dose of more-of-the-same. It has the same mid-2000's flavour, and pulls it off once again by offering a varied set of locations and missions. It has no aspirations above being a linear FPS, and if you're OK with that, it's a treat. If you find your arse being handed to you, though - consider sticking to the darkness.

That Ubisoft saw fit to make a shooter for laughs is enormously commendable, and a step that we hope others will follow. But its commitment to dumbing down means that this is a pure-bred B-game rather than all-star A-lister.

The unkindest cut of all is that you only rarely get to actually command the Enterprise, and when you do, the implementation would disgrace the average Call of Duty turret sequence.

Monaco is a stylish and considered game that's all the more remarkable for being the work of just one man. It's absolutely worth your money.

Decent idea, but far too fussy to be fun. [May 2013, p.85]

Let's hope this failed attempt doesn't deter other people from trying. [May 2013, p.85]

Let's just say there are no huge surprises, but it's extremely well executed. The narrative has always been the strength of ACIII, and the DLC campaign is no exception.

Transferable save games, unlimited fast travel access and 100,000 rift crystals to spend might help swing the deal. For those on the fence however, the full game with hours of new content should be all you need to hop off. We wouldn't be surprised if this is the best budget release all year.

It's so much easier to forgive glitches, outdated visuals and flick-book framerate when you've got a friend laughing at them too, but this doesn't mean we should forgive them. Should Riptide wash up on your shore, you'd best throw in back in.

If there's anything that vanilla Dishonored could have offered more of, it's Dunwall. With two new locations - a stinking whale slaughterhouse, and an area called the legal district - you get some excellent new places to see, so it's disappointing to retread ground in the final mission.

A lack of decent advanced tutorials keeps the bats firmly separated from the boys and the likelihood of extensive replay fairly slim. But for fans of the DCU, it's show-stopping fun. It's the game we deserve, if not the one we need right now.

So much content has been wrung out of this game that there's even a reward for the number of miles you bail out of jumps. That's right: you get rewarded for not being very good. Basically, if you don't enjoy this game you're probably dead from the waist down.

Between getting stuck on invisible walls, being forced to watch awkward cut-scene transitions, and having to repeatedly restart at a checkpoint due to a horribly executed platform sequence I can honestly say I didn't enjoy a second of it. Everything about it feels cheap and hastily thrown together.

With a bit of fine-tuning, Powerslide could be a championship contender. As it stands, it's still a few tweaks away from being truly race-ready.

Castle is another opportunity to celebrate how well Halo does vehicles without ruining things for pedestrians, then.

As with much of the game the enhancements outweigh the frustrations, and while it's by no means a revolution of the franchise, the improvements in PGA Tour 2014 warrant fans giving it some course time.

The world of Defiance is singularly, spectacularly ugly. We appreciate that Earth's been terraformed beyond recognition - but who set the terraformers to "blurry; terrible water effects; mostly brown"?

The sole selling point of Devil's Cartel is the fact that you can blaze through it in a haze of blood and brick dust in the company of somebody else. It's never bad enough to truly offend, but it's never good enough to justify its status as a full-price game.

Generous almost to excess, Battleblock Theater is one of Xbox Live Arcade's masterworks, and a reminder that genuine, bona fide imagination is possible even in the twilight of a console generation.

The longer you spend in Terraria, the more you discover that the Minecraft comparison, while obvious, isn't fair to either. Compared to Mojang's all-conquering virtual Lego set that encourages creativity, Terraria is more of a "game" with definitive goals, rules and progression that deserves to stand on its own merits.

Once you've stabbed one, run past one, and been killed by one, you've played enough. And that two minute process is not worth any amount of money.

This is a pretty, inventive platformer that demonstrates both a clear affection for the original and a willingness to try something new. It might not come close to unseating the genre's best, but if you're up for a challenge, then this is a minor gem.

The combat is gripping, taking a successful formula and bulking it out in ways that make it more demanding, tactical and entertaining...You're expecting a 'but', and we've got one. The only place where Infinite falls any distance short of brilliance is in its own audacious plot.

Existing fans feel free - newcomers, beware. [Apr 2013, p.89]

Not as special as it thinks it is. [Apr 2013, p.89]

A monotonous one-note brawler. [Apr 2013, p.87]

A masterclass in bad design. [Apr 2013, p.85]

Beware the caustic pink mist of nostalgia. [Apr 2013, p.81]

It's still the ever-compelling plot that reigns supreme, and whilst they're not giving anything away until the final episode there's definitely enough going on here to ensure a thoroughly enjoyable romp.

An appealing-enough concept mired by shoddy execution. Unabashed scope junkies may find something to amuse them here, however, providing you put a bullet through your better judgement.

Both its strengths and its weaknesses are the result of a vision of how the experience of slaughtering tunnel-loving bogeymen should be, and while the results aren't as spectacular or generous as we're used to, they put up a damn good fight.

Resurrection makes a compelling case for a proper sequel.

How many more filthy, blood-spattered mess halls, garages and control rooms must we trudge through, in search of loot drops and audio diaries? How many more vents and sinkholes must we wearily inventory on entering an area, in readiness for the moment when the soundtrack jack-knifes and the undead pop into view? Awakened doesn't have answers for these questions.

Temporary frustrations aside, Runner2 is a simple, lovely jog to the right that slowly builds into a manageably hectic rightward run. The easy difficulty might speed your passage through the world, but it's less fun. So don't rob yourself of a new and entirely needless motor skill. Put it on Rather Hard, and stick at it until the skills lodge in your fingers. It's worth it.

Stick with it and you may find yourself disappointed by the uneven challenge factor and scanty online features, but these are obscured by all the brightly-coloured nonsense and if you get far enough in to notice then you're probably enough of a fan not to care.

Citadel feels fresh compared to the tired 'haunted house' missions of recent DLC packs, and deserves to be filed alongside Kasumi's Stolen Memory and Lair of the Shadow Broker as one of the best expansions to the Mass Effect universe, as well as a fitting full stop for the trilogy.

My thoughts on Vergil's Downfall in a nutshell? Played it. Liked it. Now, I just resent the extra step it puts in the menu system between me and Danté Must Die.

Classic IQ test with an animated overhaul. [March 2013, p.89]

Ballsy cartoon guts and supersploding stupidity. [March 2013, p.89]

Far from being a knockout. [March 2013, p.87]

Only for the youngest and least discerning. [March 2013, p.87]

Generic aerial warfare that fails to take off. [March 2013, p.87]

A great classic with a few flaws. [March 2013, p.85]

Sonic works hard, but looked better in the '90s. [March 2013, p.85]

A vision of retro loveliness. [March 2013, p.85]

Landfall holds up particularly well when you're contesting objectives, as the layout is relatively easy to read and form strategies around, without feeling unbalanced.

An excellent game that, while paying tribute to Lara Croft's heritage, certainly feels like a new beginning - mechanically as well as thematically. It's visually dazzling, narratively affecting, dangerously near best-in-class when it comes to solid shooting, vertiginous platforming and ballsy set plays... and bodes fantastically for any future instalments.

Crysis 3 might be a victim of this love-blindness. You'll never be bored during the campaign, and certainly not during the excellent multiplayer. But Crysis 3 feels like a retread of entertaining ground, with a frustrating glimpse of how good it could actually be.

It's the story that shines here. All pretense of historical accuracy has been thrown out of the window, and it's the most absurd Assassin's Creed plot yet - which is saying something.

There's a great game in Revengeance, buried under the rubble of a previous franchise collapse. With a little less zatsu and a little more dan, Platinum Games could be on to something.

Colonial Marines can't trade on nostalgia alone... It needed to offer intense combat against an unstoppable force, deft storytelling that matched the cinematic flair of the films, and some new ideas that could have rejuvenated an overexposed franchise. It needed, in short, to be a better game.

Most of the things fans loved about the original are here, and the new features are cleverly mixed with the existing ones, but in terms of the structure, Visceral is treading water. Dead Space isn't dead by any means, but the spark isn't quite there.

The paper-thin strategy, piss-weak story, and miserable appearance are compounded by an insulting lack of polish.