One of the better sandbox games in existence. [Jan 2008, p.70]

Slow but satisfying sequel. [Jan 2009, p.78]

We've seen wide open singleplayer FPS games before, but they've never had this pace or this lust for physical player freedom where every building and every rooftop has been designed to work like a bullet playground. [Oct 2007, p.68]

The best war sim around. [July 2014, p.86]

Carbon manages to look uniformly bland. [Christmas 2006, p.82]

While it's an MMO, it managed to make me forget it was, and I started treating it just as a wonderful place to explore, full of monsters to shoot, friends to defend and stuff to pick up. In other words, a world. Which was always the idea of this genre, but I'd lost the ability to see it in a fog of numbers and impeccably managed levelling curves.

Mount & Blade's new multiplayer is a brutal blast. It's a shame the solo side didn't get more attention, though. [June 2010, p.98]

It's not a great leap forward, but growing bananas and rigging elections remains remarkably entertaining. [Oct 2011, p.84]

Make the effort, see past the spartan maps, the sparse sound, and teh square counters, and you're rewarded with one of the most believable battle simulations ever created. [Sept 2006, p.100]

CTF steals the show. [June 2013, p.97]

While it's a competent shell of a game, the only scrap of ingenuity is in the way each character picks any two of eight skill trees, and even that's been pipped at the post by "Guild Wars." [Aug 2006, p.84]

Builds on the classic rules while keeping their timeless charm.

If you know what it expects of you, there's a thrill to some of Generations' showier moments. If not, prepare to hit a series of brick walls at high speed. [Feb 2012, p.93]

In ten hours of criminality, 2K Czech have made the perfect elegy to the mafia movie. Could have been more of a game, though.

A brilliantly in-depth and vast war simulator that rewards your patience. [July 2009, p.69]

A parody that's funny throughout. [Jan 2011, p.94]

The perfect warm-up for a long, hot summer of football. [July 2006, p.72]

It's Product Football. And in that order. Maybe next year, eh? [Christmas 2008, p.70]

Broader multiplayer, daft campaign. [May 2008, p.76]

The old soldier shows his gregarious side. This is gruelling but great WWII action, spanning every theatre.

Short, sweet, and entirely too touching for a platform game about bouncy squared narrated by Danny Wallace. [Oct 2012, p.96]

I really wanted to like Universe at War far more than I did. It never goes quite far enough, nor delivers the money shot. [Feb 2008, p.68]

This voyage is shaping up very well indeed. [Nov 2009, p.91]

Deep, logical and ambitious, Hearts of Iron 3 is a daunting prospect. Be prepared to lose entire weekends to it. [Oct 2009, p.88]

A brilliant redesign of Supreme Commander's robot armies, ironically limited by a lack of artificial intelligence. [Apr 2010, p.90]

An excellent piece of fan-service, but the actual game part doesn't stand up to much dispassionate scrutiny. And now, if you're not a Penny Arcade fan, you can't criticize it for that. It's not for you. [June 2008, p.74]

The interface is mostly excellent, but it doesn't properly tell you why a train can't reach a station. That can drive any player to distraction. [Dec 2006, p.88]

Nice looking, moderately rewarding. [July 2006, p.78]

It has to be that AI again. It just feels too rigid, too tediously functional to capture the sheer fluid exuberance of football. [Dec 2007, p.78]

Has all the ingredients for sim greatness, except a strong singleplayer campaign and a robust number of planes. [Jan 2010, p.108]

An astounding world, and a flagship for the imagination and capability of independent game developers. [Christmas 2009, p.94]

The campaign is nothing special, but you get more than your money's worth in the Conquest multiplayer mode. [July 2011, p.96]

Clever puzzle concepts fail to coalesce into anything scintillating, undermined by inconsistent physics and a rather witless world. [Sept 2012, p.100]

For a weekend's light point-and-clicking, you can definitely do worse. [Jan 2011, p.97]

An artful but mild shooter. [Aug 2008, p.78]

Immersive, absorbing, annoying, and very long – if you're after getting a tan from your monitor, get in there.

A by-the-book roleplaying jaunt in fantasy-land. There's enough to do in Risen, but never enough to thrill. [Dec 2009, p.118]

An above-average movie adaptation. [July 2009, p.78]

If the imaginative approach of the Hong Kong levels could have reached Chicago. I'd be hoarse from cheering. As it is, I'm smiling with nostalgia for those days of four hours ago. [Oct 2007, p.80]

More an interactive fairytale than a game, this Sims spinoff tells a good yarn but feels limited.

Brilliant, unthinking and unfair in equal measure. [Jan 2010, p.110]

A cheap and filling snack of carnage. [Apr 2007, p.80]

The ghosts are fun and have plenty to say, even if the humour regularly falls short. [June 2012, p.105]

The co-op is a nice topping on a delicious slice of retro action – but you might still feel hungry afterwards.

A confused mess of promising but inconsistent mechanics. Hilarious, maddening, stupid and occasionally fun. [Sept 2010, p.79]

Battlestations: Midway lacks this depth. There's masses of stuff to do, there's just not enough places to actually do it in, which is something of a shame.

If Flatout 2 was (just) music, it'd be a second album of commercial punk rock. [Sept 2006, p.92]

Where a game like "SWAT4" manages to be fun, GRAW2 just feels a little bit too much like hard work. The fireworks don't crackle with the kind of spectacle we're paying for, and there just isn't enough juicy meat on the tactical bones for us to regard this as a feast. [Aug 2007, p.74]

A fairly arcane design and an unfriendly community make for difficult entry barriers. [July 2010, p.98]

It does everything you'd want from a pet-focused expansion pack. Nothing more, nothing less. [Dec 2006, p.115]

There's a brilliant tension between risk and reward. [July 2010, p.105]

Even more annoyingly, it requires Windows Vista, although there's no real justification for this: it's Direct X 9 and could happily run on XP. [May 2007, p.72]

Despite the obvious flaws, the many subtler achievements make this compelling. You'll find better shooting elsewhere, but if you fancy getting more than bullet holes for once, this is for you. [May 2006, p.84]

Still too dour for most. [May 2012, p.110]

Slightly less interesting than the first game, and still has a few rough edges and poorly conceived challenges. [Aug 2006, p.91]

A genuinely beautiful place crawling with magnificent beasts, host to interminable hours of mindless, soulless grind. [Dec 2009, p.110]

It's so fundamentally flawed that most gamers are going to simply bounce right off it. [Mar 2008, p.72]

They've made it feel like a franchise they'll dutifully milk, rather than a game they'll love to keep making. [Dec 2008, p.76]

An attractive and powerful sim that spoils itself by trying too hard to be a straightforward infantry shooter. [Dec 2009, p.98]

Endearing, yet thin. [Dec 2008, p.86]

No arguments, this is one of the most beautiful game worlds created. [July 2013, p.85]

Multiplayer is a fun aside, but be prepared for your PC to struggle with the choking throng of units on screen. [Aug 2006, p.92]

A beautiful alternative to the standard MMO, but unlikely to draw you away from more structured questing for long. [May 2012, p.88]

A cute, quirky anime dungeon crawl that will cheerfully kick your arse until your nose starts bleeding. [Sept 2012, p.84]

Fodder for EQ lovers but suffers from a lack of variety. [June 2006, p.82]

We still believe in this, and with further tweaks it could yet become a fine murder romp. [Jan 2007, p.104]

City Life provides a valuable municipal service by being far more accessible while still providing a decent challenge. [June 2006, p.95]

This is actually technically inferior to the console versions, and it badly hurts the experience. Just because it works on the PC doesn't make it a PC game - ask for your fiver back, Capcom. [Apr 2007, p.84]

When blowing things up, more is generally merrier. Second Encounter offers way, way more. [July 2010, p.96]

Brings a whole new meaning to the words "resource management." [Apr 2011, p.85]

A bit too familiar, but fun while it lasts. [May 2009, p.72]

A fantastically imaginative gameworld of gods, dinosaurs and giants, beautiful but messy and poorly explained.

Delightfully drawn and packed with both personality and innovative game ideas, but more tiny than big. [Sept 2012, p.86]

A mean pricing system and lack of strategic control hamstring an otherwise promising management sim. [Christmas 2010, p.88]

A lazy, uninspired update. [Christmas 2006, p.84]

Button-mashing combat and new powers aren't particularly inspiring, but the large-scale level puzzles are rock solid. [Aug 2010, p.96]

Stalker: Clear Sky remains a remarkable misstep by the Ukrainian developers, and one that does not reflect well on their original game, or their independence from original publishers, THQ. We can only hope that their next effort will be more controlled.

If you're anything like me, its deeply tragic moments will make you weep real tears. [June 2006, p.70]

You get what you pay for, which in this case isn't anything new. [Sept 2006, p.101]

It lacks the stylistic nuances and gratifying climax scenes that really made FEAR work, and much of the level design is perfunctory at best. [Dec 2006, p.66]

A sturdy sense of humour, and canny logic to its proceedings, raise Evil Genius above a noisy crowd. [Apr 2006, p.95]

It's by far the closest the series has got to nailing the spirit of the original animations. [Oct 2009, p.84]

An ambitious and beautiful RPG that falls just short of greatness, thwarted by a stunted finale and imbalances.

An acceptable, lighthearted RPG that's often too simple, too staid and too black and white to be much fun.

Inventive, smart and adorable, but it plays oh so slowly. [May 2009, p.71]

I'm wildly outnumbered. [Sept 2010, p.93]

Huge, bold, but not particularly savage. [Apr 2008, p.68]

SiN is actually something of a guilty pleasure. It's over far too quickly and feels rather unsophisticated, but I enjoyed it anyway, a bit like I enjoy...eating hotdog. [June 2006, p.62]

For all its worthiness it's fairly dry in terms of action. [July 2007, p.90]

War for Cybertron is a respectable action game with a generous coating of awesome robots who turn into cars. [Sept 2010, p.92]

A flawed but irresistible MMORTSCCG. [Apr 2009, p.74]

A platforming evolution that turns the genre upside down. Has its own intriguing and original art style, too. [June 2009, p.98]

The puzzles are excellent. [Sept 2010, p.105]

You will laugh. [July 2011, p.99]

The appealing characters and occasionally entertaining puzzles can only take it so far. [July 2011, p.99]

Endearingly cheery, but slightly shallow stealth-action dosed up with black humour, and a few fresh gimmicks. [June 2012, p.88]

Still a solid sports sim, but more features means less fun. [Nov 2007, p.78]

It's a game that has a Nazi in a gyrocopter as one of your enemies: that's all I really need to say. [Nov 2006, p.82]