Even a minor shift can turn the large and vocal fan base away, and so this isn’t the big sweeping change to rejuvenate the series in the eyes of those who have tired and moved on.

The multiplayer is the life and soul of the game, and lives up to and improves upon what Battlefield 3 had to offer. There’s greater variety of vehicles, maps which push off into new and interesting directions with changeable elements thanks to Levolution...Yet finding a score is tricky. The single player is quite frankly poor.

It has taken the gameplay of the previous games, refined it, and combined it with a huge open world that is packed with enough content to literally last for days. If you have ever wanted a proper pirate game, this is as good as it gets.

It’s a good mixture of okay ideas, achieved through some nice presentation and a stellar idea at its heart, which makes it worthwhile if you’re really interested in that, but perhaps a reboot is required to do it justice.

There’s some great stuff to see here, but it doesn’t really push the franchise off in a new direction. For a new studio’s first attempt in the franchise, I think that’s really what it needed to be, so they can build their own legacy in the future.

SWAP Force is in many ways a surprise. It remedies a raft of the series’ biggest issues whilst adding its own twists.

Atomic Ninjas is a blast when you get a full room going and the variety of skills/weapons on offer will give you a lot of choice when deciding your playstyle. It’s just a shame that, so soon after release, it is difficult to find a four player game.

I would have had more respect for Girl Fight if they had the balls to have done the job properly and had some proper porn as a reward. Instead we get a mediocre fighter wrapped in a non existent story with ridiculous sexist stereotypes that they should have been canned decades ago.

Dragon’s Crown delivers in a number of areas, though not in the ones that matter most. Stunning visuals and nods to the roleplaying genre simply aren’t enough to outweigh the repetitive combat and a so-so narrative.

Pro Foosball has plenty going for it and at times it certainly feels like you are playing a game of real table football. I had a good time with it and think it could be fun with friends.

For most savvy gamers there is a wealth of cheaper, better alternatives currently available via the PlayStation Network.

Beyond is a tale of squandered potential. With acting talent such as Page and Dafoe on board, music from legendary composer Hans Zimmer and visuals that give the PS4 launch line-up a run for their money, it’s such a shame that when it comes down to it, the incompetent story and poor gameplay mechanics leave a lot to be desired.

Worms: Revolution Extreme has made the jump to Vita nicely, but it’s a shame that the opportunity wasn’t taken to polish and improve on what Revolution delivered the first time around. It is, however, a quite comprehensive package of one of the biggest shake-ups to the Worms formula in years.

F1 2013 is a solid outing for the series, taking the successes of the past and building on them incrementally, whilst adding an exciting glimpse of what’s to come with F1 Classics. It might leave me wanting more, but F1 2013 is the best and most comprehensive release so far.

It is survival horror right down to the limited effectiveness of your pistol and the scarcity of resources and manages to be thoroughly unnerving despite its low pixel density. The storyline has you questioning everything – even your own character – throughout and is the thing that will keep you coming back if you can bear the incredible tension the game’s atmosphere creates.

A simply beautiful experience, and a perfect example of the kinds of games which Sony have tried to foster on their platforms over the last few years.

The MASS and TrueBall elements make the on-pitch gameplay feel authentic, while Heart makes games much more tense and interesting. It’s the things off the pitch that let down the game, as the commentary needs work, and the framerate issues need to be resolved.

The genre may have changed a lot over the past decade or so, yet the original Kingdom Hearts still stands as one of its most memorable champions. Sure, a number of its mechanics are a little outdated but considering how well the game has been ported, the wealth of additional features, and bargain price, there’s little, if anything, to complain about.

Blizzard really has put the effort in though, and it shows with an absolutely fantastic port that plays brilliantly, looks good, and will keep you interested for hours on end.

It is engaging, compelling, interesting, clever, funny and packed with things to do and see. It’s a personal story, or several personal stories, set in a magnificent world that ebbs and flows with thousands of people who all seem to be living their own personal stories. It’s a genuine landmark event in the history of videogames.

Puppeteer is, at its heart, a charming adventure, though not without its issues; it may have wasted the potential required with the interchangeable head idea to become something really special, but you will no doubt find yourself joining in with the audience laughing along to the antics on show and warming to the characters, be it hero or villain.

Could be described as more of an investment; with Playsets and additional character being cheaper than movie tie-ins and other action games, in the long run it could be a cost effective solution with an additional second wave of content already planned for the coming months.

Zen Studios have to be given some respect in taking a stale genre and breathing new life into it. KickBeat is a good game and it does provide good entertainment, however the game is crying out for more songs in the Story mode as imported songs don’t feel as well synced as the in game music.

A purely basic simulator game. You plant, you cultivate, you harvest, you sell. That is the process over and over, with repetitive missions cropping unless you turn them off. If you’ve ever wanted to run a farm, then this is for you, but other than that there’s no real need for the game on console.

It may not be anything ground-breaking but I feel the title should be regarded as one of the Vita’s best games yet. With vastly improved visuals, animations and control schemes over the mobile version, Real Boxing on the Vita is surely the best version of the game to get.

While Mercenary might not be the best shooter in the world, in its own field – as a handheld title – it’s almost perfect; there’s no other experience like this on a device as small as this. And, judging the game from that perspective, it’s an experience that will stick with you for a long time, much like GoldenEye, Call of Duty 4 and other revolutionary shooters have managed in the past, and one entirely worthy of its acclaim.

It often feels as though Capcom wanted to emulate other, more successful third person shooters, namely Dead Space. It may have succeeded in that pursuit, though the genre continues to expand and surprise, the goalposts constantly moving.

If the jumping was tightened up a bit, and the difficulty spikes not so big then this could have been one of the best platformers of recent memory.