Lee is the best protagonist we've seen in years, and his relationship with the group continues to fascinate. Delicate, thoughtful, and unreservedly brutal - The Walking Dead is one of the most mature gaming experiences that money can buy. This is the most exciting game of 2012, and you won't even find it sitting on shelves. Hop onto Xbox Live and buy it immediately, before we're forced to destroy your head and/or brains.

Optional extras for your home include a garden, livestock, and even a live-in bard if you're suitably masochistic, and if you manage to build in all three available holds you get an Achievement. However, despite being a very nicely made, commendably affordable bit of DLC, Hearthfire is little more than a quirky cosmetic bolt-on that doesn't add anything exciting to the game. It does give a pretty good approximation of the frustration actual homeowners feel during the building process, though.

It's just a shame that such an admirable piece of Mass Effect DLC, the best so far behind Lair of the Shadow Broker, is undermined by the way the trilogy finishes.

Transformers have a great line in banter, and the dialogue is perfect - Saturday morning black and white cartoon morality.

It's a delightfully tricky exercise in plate-spinning, complicated further by the need to keep every instrument up to speed to maximise your score.

A very balanced, very precise game: you can see how it's managed to endure for 12 years. It's also a basic game, and one that offers no reward beyond the inner glow of self-improvement.

A pretty delightful distraction, and at a reasonable 800MP, I'd be a joyless, churlish curmudgeon with a greasy curdled soul not to recommend it.

It's time to stop pedalling this game. [Sept 2012, p.95]

Dust will see you past ten hours easily, and may last you past 15 if you're serious about completing all the fetch quests and finding all the hidden goodies. It doesn't quite have the repertoire to justify the second figure, to my mind, but the 1200 MP outlay shouldn't give you pause. This is a labour of love for a bygone era that will be remembered just as fondly.

There's wonderful art direction, fun combat, a great range of quests and some cute cutscenes. But it's the video game equivalent of a variety show. In offering everything, Darksiders II never once achieves greatness. Which is a shame, because if there is a Darksiders III at some point in the future the odds are it's going to be even broader.

Just enough to justify. [Sept 2012, p.115]

Why punish yourself? [Sept 2012, p.105]

It's Virtua Fighter 5, only tarted up. [Sept 2012, p.105]

Bang goes the potential. [Sept 2012, p.103]

A tragically neutered experience. [Sept 2012, p.103]

A better way to learn how to play. [Sept 2012, p.102]

Sure, the levels are all much of a muchness, and despite the variety of game modes, it can get samey. But the persistent online game - a fight for Dark Matter between Paladins (humans) and Valiants (aliens) - adds long-term appeal, and once you've mastered its quirks, it's an absolute blast in small doses.

A game of rich variety and strong personality that never gets boring over its ten essential hours - many more if you stop to check out the full and entertaining world... It's shorter than GTA IV, for sure, but it's also much sweeter. [Sept 2012, p.82]

The combat isn't fair, the aesthetics are grim, and at times it's uncomfortably racist and sexist. But while it's an anachronistic mess of a game, it's weirdly compulsive regardless.

It's ferociously good fun, however, and the presence of four campaigns from the original Left 4 Dead amply justifies the skeletal 560 MP asking price - less than half what you'd pay for five Modern Warfare 3 maps.

While the game itself is never diffi cult or badly designed, it consistently contrives to point out its restrictions: neither controls nor narrative are ever slick enough that you ever feel immersed.

Sadly, it runs out of ideas by the halfway point (there's no online play), offering little more than increasingly steep medal targets that put you at the mercy of the game's rather inconsistent physics. Worse still, some levels have very rigid solutions, which sit awkwardly next to the knockabout, anything-goes approach of the early game.

Puts the 'limp' in olympic. [Aug 2012, p.109]

Fun and chap but largely inane, this stuff would have served better in the full game. [Aug 2012, p.117]

A high-speed change of pace. [Aug 2012, p.117]

Hardly the feel good hit of the summer. [Aug 2012, p.110]

Losing Kinect doesn't lost the joy of this ride. [Aug 2012, p.107]

There's more content here than you can shake a frog at - a lot for 800 MS points - and with XBLA exclusive game modes such as a weekly resetting challenge mode and the one-life, no restarts 'Iron Frog' campaign this is a rare catch, but it fails to detract from the feeling that this game belongs more on a phone that your 360.