It is, very much, a game of two halves. The production values are low – like kicking a three-legged kitten low – but the combat system is a crazy, unique joy. If someone, er, liberally 'borrowed' it in a title with a triple-A budget we could be looking at something really special.

Silent Hill fans will appreciate the atmosphere, but it's bogged down in old-fashioned gameplay that just doesn't cut it. Sadly, we grew up. Equally sadly, Silent Hill never did.

This is a fantastic alternative to the main series – offering up all the thrills of your Monday-night work league, without the worry about talk of P45s after 'accidentally' shouldering your boss into a wall.

It's hard to look past the massively fugly engine. While the copious cut-scenes are pleasing to the eyes, the in-game visuals look like a glorified, smudgy PS2 game. And yet for all its flaws, Dead Souls still lets you battle women in bloody cocktail dresses and wannabe Lickers with a sympathetic loan shark. It's this ludicrously bizarre charm that makes Dead Souls more than the sum of its reanimated parts.

This tries to be the History Channel when it might have been better off as the Memphis Belle, and despite some impressive physics and detail, it's that dull staging that cooks this bird.

Despite feeling the need to shower regularly during much of Twisted Metal, though, this should still be considered a successful return. A super violent serving of chunkily satisfying motor carnage, it offers a unique P53 joyride. Just tone down the Ronald McDonald homicide next time, eh?

Not a lot of games – almost no games, in fact – manage to establish the kind of white-hot emotional connection between player, cast and setting that Mass Effect 3 somehow conjures. That's the reason this story of Earth, the galaxy and Shepard's last stand is so harrowing, and why people will be talking about it for years to come.

Tekken fans will wait for Namco's own Tekken X Street Fighter to really sink their teeth into, but for the SF devout and series agnostic fighting fans, SFKT offers finely tuned and emergent action and a positively regal rumble of the genre's celebrated a-listers.

If you own Sony's handheld but haven't bought this yet, then quite simply you're doing Vita wrong.

It's one of the few games you'll genuinely reflect on after completion, and an object lesson in how less can be more when it comes to crafting narrative and eliciting investment. This is a game about which I would change nothing, and I can't remember having said that too many times before.

The difficulty curve is satisfying. [March 2012, p.115]

Clever and beautiful in places, Puddle's just too wet behind the ears to know when its players need a break. [March 2012, p.107]

It's mainly gore-splattered fun. [March 2012, p.103]

It's still worth going back to see where [Little Spiky's] come from. [March 2012, p.103]

Gallivanting through online co-op is an absolute hoot of the simplest and most addictive order. [March 2012, p.103]

The best tennis game on PS3. [March 2012, p.101]

Quite the bizarre experience. [March 2012, p.96]

This kiddie platformer couldn't be more by-the-numbers if it was presented in binary. [March 2012, p.95]

It does get repetitive after a while, but there's funny dialogue, simple yet effective mechanics, and 'copter unlocks to keep you hooked. [March 2012, p.95]

Stuttery. [March 2012, p.95]

Whether it's playing Buckaroo on your board for 15 seconds straight or hearing the game manually mix your custom soundtrack during an über-trick – bloody surreal when you're listening to Bankrobber by The Clash – there's nothing else quite like this on PS3. After years of waiting to get royally piste up, SSX's blizzardy brilliance remains as intoxicating as ever.

It's the best kind of 7/10. The gunplay is raucous, but never revolutionary. The relationships make you laugh, if not cry. Binary Domain is unpolished in all the right places – the rough edges make it a unique metal snowflake in a production line of identical, shiny shooters. Fill that Mass Effect gap with a game that loves you.

The impact of the visuals on Vita are impressive enough, but together with a solid control set and at least an attempt to include new features make this easy to recommend.

Taking a similar approach to Heavy Rain's storytelling-with-a-controller, Asura's Wrath is a brave, unique and beautiful interactive animation that's simply a bit light on gameplay. Unlike Quantic Dream's game, your mistakes have little consequence and you're not offered decisions about Asura's destiny. If you were, he could have ascended even higher.

As a means of getting both your head and hands around Vita and its multitude of interfaces, there's nothing better. Forget the pre-loaded Welcome Park – within a few minutes of loading Frobisher Says, you feel at home stabbing, smudging and shaking away at the handheld.

For a first-season effort, FIFA Football is a seriously impressive achievement.

It's an overly complicated system that screams of an attempt to be modern and forward-looking, but will actually end up with a bunch of pissed-off purchasers feeling like they've paid nearly 20 pounds for a trial version. Which, to be perfectly honest, is pretty much all this is.

A satisfying difficulty curve seals the deal and makes Rayman Origins one of the strongest titles in an already muscular line up. Not bad for a character without any arms.