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]