That makes handing out our awards every year an excruciating task. Because there are plenty of games that did things well and many games that do them extraordinarily well, but only one that can be said to have done something best. These awards are a tribute to those games—the ones that, in a year of outstanding work, stood above the rest; the games that set the high mark for each category and put the challenge to developers in 2012: top that.

MMO of the Year:

DC Universe Online

The epic showdowns from the comic books and TV shows we grew up with are masterfully recreated in DC Universe Online with often grim intensity—and we’re not forced to be the good guy. Combat is refreshingly deep, the player customization gives incredible freedom (in both looks and play style), and Gotham and Metropolis are filled with secrets to explore and collectible goodies to find. Its costume collection system is the best ever made, and every MMO should steal its two-person Duo dungeons design. Every gamer should have this MMO installed, and play through it at least once—there’s hardly any reason not to, given the game’s generous free-to-play content—and then keep an eye out for content packs that emphasize their favorite characters, including Flash, Green Lantern, and Brainiac (pictured above).

Publisher Sony Online Entertainment
Developer Sony Online Entertainment

Simulation of the Year:

DCS: A-10C Warthog

Meticulously crafted by Moscow-based Eagle Dynamics, this über-accurate study simulation of the USAF’s A-10C Thunderbolt II close air support fighter sets the bar for PC combat flight sims so high it may never be eclipsed. From its fully clickable and stunningly accurate 3D cockpit to its high fidelity avionics and flight modeling, DCS: A-10C Warthog delivers a master class in advanced flight simming. If you want to be a fighter jock—a real fighter jock—it doesn’t get any better than this.

Publisher The Fighter Collection
Developer Eagle Dynamics

Strategy Game of the Year:

Frozen Synapse

Forethought is the key to any great strategy game, and Frozen Synapse delivers a brilliant tool to predict (but never guarantee) what’ll happen—a preview button. It’s around this single mechanic that all the other elements come together so elegantly. Positioning, setting the timing and rules of engagement of units—it’s all intuitive battle-programming, analogous to writing down a musical score and having it played back to you by an arena of rockets, machineguns, and splattered blood.

Publisher Mode 7 Games
Developer Mode 7 Games

Action Game of the Year:

Batman: Arkham City

Outside the confines of Arkham Asylum, Batman has, quite literally, the freedom to soar. After proving that it had the imagination and skill to make administering Batman’s signature rough justice to Gotham City’s worst a thrilling videogame experience, Rocksteady aimed even higher in the wide-open world of Batman: Arkham City. The result is a superhero game that convincingly immerses you not only into the being, but also the psyche of a lethal vigilante who—let’s face it—gets off on terrorizing his prey.

Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive
Developer Rocksteady

Adventure Game of the Year:

Gemini Rue

The lo-fi graphics, the classic adventure game mechanics, the Blade Runner-style combination of hard science fiction and gritty noir—Gemini Rue is steeped in PC gaming nostalgia. But don’t let that fool you: its fusion of a strong, linear narrative with gameplay that doesn’t leave the player on the sidelines is absolutely cutting-edge. Instead of overwrought puzzles and make-work, the game challenges us to navigate a labyrinth of conspiracy and deceit, questioning every character’s motives along the way—including our own.

Publisher Wadjet Eye Games
Developer Joshua Nuernberger

Indie Game of the Year:

Dungeons of Dredmor

We died from kicking a door down. We gained ludicrous XP from performing feats of “Heroic Vandalism.” We foolishly charged into a monster zoo, thinking our Dire Sandwiches could save us. And we paid with our lives. Again and again. But thanks to the creativity and diversity of character traits (rolling a wizard with Flesh-smithing, Fungal Arts, and Necronominco-nomics, to name just a few), Dredmor’s randomized dungeons and perma-deaths are an essential part of the fun, with every grisly demise leading to fresh possibilities and unique stories.

Publisher Gaslamp Games
Developer Gaslamp Games

First-Person Shooter of the Year (Single-player):

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Most games manage to slip in a spectacular set-piece or two into the action: Modern Warfare 3 strings them together like bullets on a bandolier. Completing a mission in the middle of a sun-occluding sandstorm; floating Inception-like in the cabin of an airplane as it comes apart while trading rounds in the air; accidentally blowing up the Eiffel Tower; wrecking enemies with a remote-controlled tank. Everything’s at stake, there’s a clear enemy and a team of men who only speak in catch phrases and military shorthand determined to stop him—it’s a trope-filled template, but the spectacle of Europe and New York under attack in Modern Warfare 3’s campaign is beautifully tuned action-movie indulgence.

Publisher Activision
Developer Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games

First-Person Shooter of the Year (Multiplayer):

Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad

Both sides in Red Orchestra 2—Axis and Ally—have a unique sprinting animation that reflects the way they were trained to run with a rifle. That isn’t realism for realism’s sake—it’s a useful moving silhouette for distinguishing Fedor from Franz at 200m. In these kinds of details, Tripwire wraps its reverence for WWII history around thoughtful FPS design that rewards those players with the most battlefield awareness. Detailed damage modeling means enemy bodies don’t act like bags of hitpoints, but a body of simulated limbs and organs with specific vulnerabilities. Real bullet behavior is the other side of that; seeing a grey-coat run behind a brick wall, then tagging him in the heart (because you’re pretty sure he crouched behind it) honors your skill and intuition as a soldier.

Publisher Tripwire Interactive
Developer Tripwire Interactive

Puzzle Game of the Year (Multiplayer):

Portal 2

Portal 2 wove humor, drama, adventure, and puzzles into a single tightrope and then led us gracefully across it—and such was the combined strength of these threads that we eventually forgot that we were solving puzzles at all. Instead, we were confronting life-or-death challenges; we were meditating on physics and geometry. And that incomparable experience was followed by yet another: brilliant cooperative play that required precision maneuvering, punished every lapse in teamwork, and carefully cultivated moments of insight that made us rocket out of our chairs and yell “Wait, I GOT IT!”

Publisher Valve
Developer Valve

Mod of the Year:

No More Room in Hell

Derived from the classic, shuffling-zombie template of the George Romero movies, No More Room in Hell feels uniquely more like a horror game than an FPS. Every bullet matters, and you can’t hold a flashlight and a weapon at the same time (other than your pistol), so illuminating a zombie with your Maglite while a teammate applies his sledge-hammer is typical of the game’s excruciatingly tense, realistic teamwork.

Requires Source SDK (free)
Developer No More Room in Hell Development Team

Update of the Year:

League of Legends

The category we used to call “Expansion of the Year” got a name-tweak to reflect the continuously evolving nature of many PC games, including shooters, mods, MMOs and multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs). A case in point: With only two exceptions in all of 2011, League of Legends received a new champion every two weeks, which players could try for free a week after its release. But it’s the capture-point gameplay mode Dominion that takes away this year’s prize. While not designed for pro-level tournament play, it solved the biggest question holding the entire genre back: how the hell do we get our casual friends playing with us?

Publisher Riot Games
Developer Riot Games

Wonder why you haven’t seen a certain game yet? Hop on over to the next page, and bask in the glory of our Game of the Year 2012 award. We’ve also got personal picks from each of the editors: games that weren’t quite GotY material, but we love them just the same.

Well. Technically he only has two arms. These are his normal limbs, functioning as arms do in games where arms are only necessary to hold guns and occasionally fire them at swarms of enemies. He also has two demonic snake-tentacles.

In the last Darkness game – an under-reported and enjoyable shooter sadly not released on PC – Jackie Estacado became the host for the titular ‘Darkness’, an eternally chaotic non-corporeal beastie that gladly took up residence in the young mobster’s brainpan. The Darkness, it’s understood, is about as old as humanity itself, every so often choosing a new host with just the right balance of psychotic amorality and poignant backstory.

In game terms, it means Jackie grows two pitch-black snakes out of his shoulders that can be employed in firefights to munch on the vital organs of his enemies.

“Special delivery of tentacle for Mr Aiiiieeee.”

At first, the four arms feel cumbersome. Jackie can already dual-wield all but the bulkiest shotguns and assault rifles, and The Darkness II’s guns by themselves make for a satisfying shooter. Even the weediest pistol has a powerful kick, and they’re almost comedically accurate over distance, lending Jackie a sense of overwhelming power that is consistently fun to direct toward your foes. But couple that with the option to whip the Darkness’s serpentine limbs into scuffles, and it seems too much to fit around one WASD-ing hand.

But a few murders in, and I was surprised at just how quickly I’d managed to process the additional moves the limb graft gave me. Simplest of these is the Darkness’s ability to eat the hearts of fallen opponents, available with a tap of the R key. The leftmost snake-tentacle – the busier of the two throughout the game – whips forward and buries its improbably huge teeth in the chests of mutilated enemies. Scarfing down such man-offal gives Jackie a health boost, making the decision to chow down on a mid-fight snack tactical. At first, I’d eat my foe’s heart the second he slumped to the ground; later, as fights got tougher, I saved them, only launching my monstrosity chestwards when I was close to death.

Heart-eating might be the Darkness’s simplest move, but impressively, it’s not the ickiest. Jackie also has a variety of execution moves he’s able to perform on staggered enemies. Throw a target off balance with a withering enough attack and they’ll stumble forward, their hearts and circulatory system picked out through their skin in shining white. Tap E and your tentacle friend will grab them, dangling them just in Jackie’s eyeshot, from where they can be eviscerated in a number of fascinatingly gruesome ways.

To get a flavour of just how depraved some of these executions are, the most dignified is called ‘torso smash’ and has your inkyblack snake pal slam your chosen target so hard into the ground that his ribcage ruptures. At the other end of the taste spectrum is the sickening move that has the Darkness upend an enemy and delve into their rectum, before pulling their entire spine – skull attached – out of the expanded hole.

‘Take you apart’ is no longer a figure of speech.

Jackie’s demon-arms can also be employed as impromptu whips: holding the middle-mouse button and slashing sends a high-speed swipe across the screen. I used this skill least, however: it’s useful to clear a glut of foes crowded in front of you, but the default control method makes it a touch fiddly.

The Darkness makes Jackie superhuman, but it’s not a ‘win-all’ button. Jackie can only employ the Darkness, fittingly, when he’s in the dark. Lights banish the snakes from his shoulders with a shudder and a hiss. So too does Jackie’s ‘darkling’ disappear, a three-foot goblin-like sidekick that somehow manages to stay endearing despite cracking wise for the length of the game and urinating on enemy corpses.

The lighting problem necessitates a systematic elimination of illumination: lightbulbs are the first thing to go after I enter a room. With the room submerged in gloom, I am free to rampage effectively, Jackie’s full range of abilities at your finger and tentacle tips. Some later lights are invulnerable to gunfire, forcing you to find their power supply. Later again, enemies start to carry portable arclamps, cutting off parts of the battlefield with sweeping beams of horrible brightness and making a chap consider his surroundings carefully before launching assaults.

A successful series of kills rewards Jackie with essence – a wooshy purple substance that can be traded for extra powers. Some of these powers are functional, providing additional ammunition or shortening reload times; others are ridiculous. My favourite gave me the chance to hurl my darkling at chosen foes. I’d grab him before a fight, letting him hang off to the side of the screen in swimming pool ‘cannonball’ pose, before launching him forward, his tiny claws raking and scraping at enemy eyes.

You’re a square of blue card travelling end over end across a series of blocky arenas, pushing objects around and getting into abstract scrapes. You can climb walls, and you can crawl down the back of a level and out the other side. The twist is that traversal is just the starting point for a game that rewrites its rules and objectives with each new batch of challenges you unlock.

One of many levels you wouldn’t want to accidentally sit on.

While you’re pushing blocks off ledges in Whale, you’re leaving cubes in your wake in Planting, as your mission switches from sweeping up to covering every surface of a three-dimensional object without getting trapped.

It can make you feel giddy with joy when everything suddenly makes sense. Its challenges haunt you through the day, while its solutions come to you in the night, and you wake up happy. I’d forgotten that puzzles could work that way.

My favourite section is Advanced Cutting, in which you move over a series of spikes – each one punching a hole in your card so that you can match the template you need to unlock the exit. It’s reverse-engineering at its most tactile; it’s there, and then it’s gone, and you’re on to something completely different.

Winner of the Turner Prize, 2012.

Advanced Cutting is one of the simpler ideas, however. A lot of the things that you’re asked to do in English Country Tune exist in a terrifying realm of pure geometry, where spatial awareness is confounded by bizarre physics. In Larva, for example, you’re tasked with prodding a series of spheres into ditches. Except the spheres borrow their understanding of gravity from the direction you push them in, meaning they may simply edge along the floor if you shove from behind, but they’ll fall sideways off the screen if you shove from the side. There’s an undo option, thankfully, letting you cancel your moves one by one, unstitching a series of increasingly catastrophic mistakes and detangling the mess of thought processes twizzled together in your brain. It’s a blunt approach to handling difficulty, but it encourages you to learn while you fumble along.

And learning ultimately lies at the heart of English Country Tune. That shouldn’t be too surprising: it’s the work of indie developer Stephen Lavelle, a man who once wondered what Tetris would be like if you had to play it backwards, and then built a version that worked that way in order to find out. He’s the sort of guy we need more of, in other words, and English Country Tune is the sort of puzzler we need more of, too. It’s precise and devious. It’s infuriating and endlessly open-minded.

Review by Chris Donlan.

Unfortunately, Magicka’s Lovecraft-themed DLC goes little further than adding a little of this extra flavouring. Your group of up to four wizards has accidentally woken the Big Calamari, and only copious amounts of fire bombs, lightning walls, ARSE mines and whatever else you can mix up with your trusty palette of elements are going to send him to bed without his supper. World of Lovecraft, if you will.

Wonder what Lovecraft would have made of this.

It turns out to be a very short battle against evil, and a very familiar one. The first chapter offers no Lovecraft elements at all, set on the wizards’ Scandinavian-style home turf. The second introduces some annoying cultists and sea monsters as you travel to the village of ‘Outsmouth’, but it’s only the final chapter in R’lyeh that really unleashes the horrors of the deep… along with a few mildly tricky puzzles to work through, and a seriously challenging battle with the Great Squiddy One himself, Cthulhu.

This DLC’s short length doesn’t however mean it’s an easy ride. While Magicka is always best as a fourplayer game, only the most experienced players should try going it alone. Some expansions take the gloves off early. This one sneers at the mere concept of wearing gloves, producing multi-wave arena fights and giant bosses right from the start. The one concession to solo players is a fairy companion recently patched into the game, giving you one free revive per checkpoint at the cost of being a tiresome parody of Navi from Ocarina of Time. She is what praying for death feels like.

In a full group, your quadrupled firepower, plus your ability to combine elements more easily and to revive downed comrades, makes things much smoother. Any reasonably experienced group should finish in a couple of hours, with only the last boss presenting a major difficulty spike. Helpfully, only the hosting player needs to own the DLC, with everyone else being able to just jump into their game.

Argh! Spider! Kill it with fire! I’ll be outside. Cheering you on.

Beyond the main campaign, you also get a couple of challenge maps – one with a tendency to break almost immediately – and a few new toys. An Investigator’s robe complete with adorable magnifying glass staff is available at the start, and a waterproof Cultist robe is a reward for completing the campaign. As for the new spells on offer, by far the coolest you’ll find is ‘Portal’. Guess what it does.

As a Lovecraft parody, The Stars are Left is a deeply underbaked adventure, even at this price, and only the most hardcore need apply to take it on in single-player. It’s not a bad way to get your gang of wizards together for another evening’s spell-slinging fun though, especially if you split the cost.

As with the previous games, this is an FPS that prides itself on bedlam and ultraviolent, large-scale carnage versus tens of thousands of streaming, screaming monsters. It’s defiantly old-school PC in tone.

Even Sam’s motion feels weirdly outlandish as he scoots in all directions like a hyperactive ghost, nimble and carefree. This despite carrying a dozen different kinds of weapon, from sledgehammer to shotguns, miniguns, rocket launchers and a leash weapon obviously ‘inspired’ by Bulletstorm.

So yeah, there’s some blood in it.

Enemies spawn in their droves, from cyclopic fanged gorillas and skeletal chain-chucking horses to giant scorpions with miniguns for arms, and headless, sprinting, bombfisted kamikaze soldiers.

The latter are particularly obvious above the mayhem thanks to their rapidly approaching, unending screams. Each kind of enemy has its distinct movement and attack patterns, its own audio cues and weaknesses, and it’s in prioritising the most dangerous – picking them out of a clattering bunch of 50 or 60 foes – that challenge lies. Of course, challenge also lies in the scarcity of ammo, the lack of regenerating health (on anything above the easiest two difficulty settings) and the unforgiving relentlessness with which its developers, Croteam, inundate you with angry creatures.

So hooray that the campaign is playable in anything up to 16 player co-op, and although the population of enemies is adjusted to match, the proceedings are decidedly more relaxed when played this way. You respawn on death, for example, rather than having to restart from your last save. Alternative game modes allow you to enforce a lives limit if you want to maintain some risk of adversity. Either way, Serious Sam is at its most gratifying in co-op.

Hey look everybody, it’s the actual definition of visceral.

Survival mode is a distillation of the form, pitting you and (if you like) co-op buddies against waves of increasingly tough enemies in one of two arenas.

Despite introducing a Duke Nukemlite plot as shlocky as it is charmless, the singleplayer campaign feels like a lingering, grudging concession. A heavily templated and mazelike series of levels into which the meatpaste of Serious Sam’s sublime and pure death arcade has been pumped. There are a few moments of beautiful design: the occasional genius placement of a surprise onslaught of kamikaze soldiers, the triggering of a shrewd mousetrap. There’s little beauty in the visuals though, somehow greyer and less expansive than 2005’s second Sam. It’s left to some swanky new particle effects to impress us.

The return of Serious Sam’s most familiar weapons and enemies, at the expense of much new content, will just as likely leave you exhausted as elated. But if you felt even vaguely like fist-pumping upon hearing the tagline ‘No cover. All man.’ give Serious Sam 3: BFE a punt.

The original city of San Paro has been left standing, a monument to badly judged level design and the colour grey. The first game’s devs, Realtime Worlds, intended the place to live and breathe. Instead, it spluttered a few times before its life support failed. Its resurrection is a miserable one.

Reloaded’s missions usually pit two small squads of human-controlled criminals and enforcers against each other, asking them to perform a multi-stage series of mini-jobs. One team has to drive to a place, collect a thing, and deliver it somewhere else. The other team has to stop them. Occasionally this leads to the kind of scenes that flicker through the minds of non-players when you describe APB to them: high-speed chases through busy streets, lastsecond jumps into getaway cars.

Car chases are APB at its most exciting.

These do happen more regularly than before – little adrenaline shocks to punctuate hours spent bumbling around between jobs. More often, playing Reloaded’s missions is like beating your head against one of San Paro’s flat, grey concrete walls.

Mission locations are invariably overlooked by high ground. The first team to occupy that ground is the de facto winner, possessing sufficient cover to pop anyone who comes close. Grenades can’t flush them out. Well-versed players will simply set up camp in an unassailable location and sit out ten minutes of screaming frustration. San Paro is so full of hiding spots and high ground that it’s far easier to put someone else’s mission under lockdown than it is to complete your own.

Urban renewal doesn’t seem to have been high on GamersFirst’s list of priorities: APB had the same spatial problems, and the same tiresome missions. The new devs have instead focused on the economy. Reloaded is free to play, supported by item, modification and vehicle sales, as well as a premium semi-subscription option. Steer clear of the latter and you get obnoxious little reminders telling you what you could’ve won in XP and in-game currency if you’d stumped up the cash.

Just keep walking.

GamersFirst’s best work can be seen in the driving, which is much more responsive than before. Players had to apply for planning permission if they wanted to turn in APB’s starter car; Reloaded’s is nippy and accelerates quickly, losing out only over distance. Top-tier cars clock in at around $15, making their purchase just about reasonable. Better wheels can be earned with repeat play, and are available from mission-giving vendors for in-game cash.

Guns are cheaper – around $5 – and can be loaned for a month at a time. Lifetime access is more expensive, but players wielding chunkier weaponry have a notable bonus over skinflints. Playing with the default Star 556, I was ineffectual even at mid-range, where the weapon is meant to shine. I tried a scoped-up AK47-analogue, and was cutting down enemies in half the time. There’s little connection between weapon and world, and still no headshots. Bullet barrages inexplicably kill some players in milliseconds, then it seems to take multiple clips to down others.

Most of APB’s problems remain in Reloaded. It even inherited a few new ones, as it is currently seeded with cheaters. The original game was arguably killed too soon, so the switch to free-to-play means interested parties should at least take a weekend city break back to San Paro. But this is no revitalisation – APB Reloaded is rehash, replication, and repetition.

Here we get straight-down-theline Batman. Arkham City captures his technique, but lets some of his character slip away into the night. For a hi-tech super-ninja spandex vigilante, he is peculiarly bland.

Luckily, the Dark Knight is not a man of words, but of deeds – and this game, like its predecessor, has them nailed. Batman zip-lines, grapnels and swoops between the moonlit rooftops of this open-world city, emerging from the shadows to hammer clusters of goons. He even finds time for a spot of light puzzling and the odd platforming challenge.

The action is magicked straight from the films and comics, where discretion and detection are as important as slamming Bat-fists through the faces of the criminally insane. Well, almost as important. Batman in motion is awesome to behold: he sneaks and swoops with a deft mo-cap mastery, and annihilates room after room of thuggish mental patients with fluid violence, catching and deflecting blows in a storm of semi-procedural devastation.

Solomon Grundy: one of the many walk-on, wheel-off villains.

It’s just a pity that whenever he opens the flap in his gigantic chin he proves to be a right old Bat-chump. The world’s greatest detective only ever seems adept at detecting the extremely obvious, and when he tries his hand at humour Catwoman tells him to shut up – as well she should. It’s wise to leave the jokes to The Joker, who returns here wittier and more weasly than ever, although looking a little worse for wear after his encounter with the Titan serum at the end of Arkham Asylum.

The plot picks up some time after Batman’s efforts mopping up the mass breakout at the maximum security mental asylum. The focus has now shifted to a larger portion of Gotham, which has been cordoned off and turned into an Escape From New York-style prison city. The why and how are barely worth acknowledging. The best Batman stories redeploy the iconic figures into larger allegories, and while this has a heavy-hitting narrative payoff in its last moment, it is otherwise nakedly a greatest hits. An excuse to cram together as many of Gotham’s notorious evildoers as possible in one confined space and have Batman beat the XP out of them one by one.

It’s not that confined though. Gone are the hubs of Arkham Island. Here we get an open world of guttering neon and gothic decay, a horseshoe of heavily compartmentalised urban squalor, surrounded by frigid water and barbed wire. It’s not the most expansive of cityscapes in gaming, and any distinct character for its various locales struggles to emerge – probably because you spend more time flying over them than actually being in them.

Nonetheless, it’s dense with diversions and detail, and Batman has full rein from the off, his utility belt immediately bristling with gadgetry that similar games would take hours to unlock. The grapnel and glide are not just ways to escape combat, but the thrilling means by which you turn the environment into your playground, soaring beneath the ghostly beam of the Bat Signal.

She’s more vulnerable than Batman, but looks better in heels. Probably.

The central quest, when you find time for it, is a meaty thing, coming in at about 14 hours on my leisurely playthrough. It suffers a little from recycling its locations: flimsy plot elements ricochet you back and forth between the same villains’ linear lairs, and although they change a little each time, revealing new routes and the scars of the battles fought within, it does end up feeling a little like rigmarole. Nonetheless, the pace, variety and craft of each lair is expertly managed. Whereas the preceding game made a starker distinction between fisticuffs and stealth sections, here there is a more gradual segue between the massive brawls, which now fill the screen with goons, and challenges where discretion is key.

This time, the introduction of new, deadlier opponents is rapid, and the game wastes little time before throwing guns into the mix. While Batman can soak up a clip or two, prolonged exposure to gunfire leads straight to the reload screen – where, aggravatingly, your failure is further mocked by a supervillain. Tossing a few smoke pellets down while you grapnel a gargoyle high above allows you to evade their aim – so long as they don’t have infrared goggles – and the environments are riddled with interconnecting escape routes. Floor grates and ducts wind around each room, and there are plenty of low walls and drop points from which to launch an attack, before vanishing into the shadows again.

However, some fights leave you with no alternative but to dive in. As in the last game, such battles are a matter of restraint and timing. Enemies swarm you, readying themselves to deliver punches, kicks and stabs. You don’t precisely choose how Batman attacks – you select the direction of his assault and unleash the procedural animation system, shattering his opponents with a freeflowing chain of blows and building up a combo meter that allows you to deliver permanent takedowns. Button mashing gets you some way with unarmed enemies, but as the bodies crowd in, knowing when not to attack quickly becomes just as important, giving yourself time between combos to tap the counter button and deflecting incoming fists to bone-shattering effect. Batman’s solution for the criminally insane may be resolutely non-lethal, but he’s not really big on care in the community either.

Detection sections break up the beatings, but are tad simplistic.

These punch-ups typically last twice as long as my excitement in them, but each is initially exhilarating to behold – particularly when it all goes right. It doesn’t always go right. The battles take a lot out of your direct control in order to deliver flowing brutality, and the game’s ability to guess your intent is often stretched to breaking point. When multiple types of enemies are introduced, each requiring a specific combo, the automation with which Batman selects his next opponent becomes critical. It’s frustrating to accidentally vault into a cattleprod or waft your cape pointlessly over some inert goon, leaving the thug next to him free to heave a car door into your kidneys.

Even more aggravating are the game’s attempts to help you in combat, popping up paragraphs of tutorial text in the centre of the screen. It’s like suddenly succumbing to cataracts, mid-fight. The options to turn off such instructions are seemingly ineffective.

While the pointy-eared-one has several leads to pursue for the main mission, he has no shortage of distractions. Many of these are substantial quest chains in themselves, each focusing on a central villain. Deadshot has left plenty of perforated political prisoners for you to investigate using your detective vision to determine bullet trajectories and follow blood spatters, while Zsasz acts as the motive for a protracted point-topoint race, challenging Batman to reach the next ringing phone before he carves up another victim.

Criminals are pinatas full of yummy XP bats. Kick them free.

By far the most diverting, however, is The Riddler, who is once again neatly used to excuse a collectibles minigame. Riddler trophies dot the alleyways, rooftops and crawlspaces of Arkham City, some placed in plain sight, others locked in elaborate contraptions that require the activation of magnets or timed tripswitches. You’ll need to trade-in these trinkets for the coordinates of Riddler’s next victim – members of a medical team he has abducted and trussed up in mechanical deathtraps.

Then there are the boss battles. At least they advance the last game’s gruelling fare of attack cycles, weak points and QuickTime Events. The best are unobjectionable and look cool, but the worst fail to communicate the route to success, or actively mislead you. One battle has respawning henchmen, but you might not realise it until you fill the room with unconscious bodies. Another villain has a forcefield that prevents direct attacks – unless they are stealthy, as I belatedly discovered. Because his forcefield wouldn’t expect that.

Working out the peripheries of the designer’s rigid plan for you is sometimes harder than it needs to be. It’s particularly true in the game’s prescriptive puzzle and platform elements, but even at the most granular level, your ability to grapnel onto things remains entirely in the game’s control, and sometimes this power is inexplicably withheld. Even so, Arkham City offers a greater level of expression through your various abilities than its predecessor, and is overwhelmingly generous with the distractions it lays before you from the get-go. Even if its fundamental fighting system strains at the seams, even if Batman himself is a bit of a plank, this is as expansive a realisation of the superhero as there has ever been.

So broad, in fact, that it’s only when every collectible has been hoovered up, every crime scene scoured, every crook crushed, that you’ll think to wonder: where was the Dark Knight’s depth?

Review by Marsh Davies.

Trine is a fairytale platforming adventure, based around a magical floating sconce that’s bound together the souls of a wizard, a knight and a thief. The story itself is sweet enough – perfectly charming and a shade too earnest – but what really drives you, beyond the irresistible instinct in platformers to travel to the right, is the satisfaction that’s gained from solving the inventive physics-based puzzles.

Playing solo, you can swap between characters instantly as you require their different skills. The Wizard can levitate objects, conjure boxes, and eventually planks, allowing him to bridge gaps and create steps. But he’s all wizardy and crap in a fight, so tap him out when goblins and bosses appear.

Best use of purple in a forest setting 2011.

The Thief can fire a grappling hook and swing from wooden surfaces, and her bow makes her the best ranged fighter. Then there’s the Warrior, who dishes out the melee damage with his sword, deflects lava with his shield, and smashes delicate stuff from afar with his hammer.

If you’ve played the first game, you’ll be thinking “well, this sounds pretty familiar. Shouldn’t you be focusing on the new stuff?” The weakest thing about Trine 2 is how broadly identical it is to the first game. The energy bar has gone, and there’s online co-op play, but Trine 2 amounts to a skill reset and a bunch of gorgeous new levels.

The flexibility of the puzzles and the overlapping powers mean that often there’s no pure, one-way solution. In particular, the Thief’s agility becomes less essential as the Wizard learns to conjure more simultaneous objects. Solo, this doesn’t matter. Multiplayer changes the nature of the game.

First off, and this is such a superficial observation that I feel obliged to say it in a stupid way, it’s nice to do a solve on a puzzle with a friend. The first Trine had local multiplayer, bizarrely hidden in a sub-sub-menu, but Trine 2 brings it to the main menu, and adds online matchmaking and text chat. It’s now easy to drop into a game with strangers or pals.

He’ll feel that up his wizard kilt.

More fundamentally, dividing the powers between three players, instead of one player swapping between the powers as he sees fit, means that progress that could only previously be made by one character now has to be achievable by all three. Frozenbyte have addressed this in two ways. Firstly, the Wizard can levitate items that he’s standing on in multiplayer. But life’s too easy with a magic carpet.

A more elegant solution is Unlimited mode. Tucked away in the ‘host a game’ options, this allows multiples of each class on screen. It’s more chaotic, more flexible, and more fun. It solves some huffier moments, like when the Thief realises she’s a complete spare wheel. And that moment where the Wizard decides to avoid a boss fight, hanging out by the partner-regenerating checkpoints while an endless stream of Thieves and Knights do the work.

Trine 2 may retread a lot of old ground, but it’s beautiful. It’s like Frozenbyte are saying “Oh, did we make Trine? We meant this.” The same moderate puzzling challenge, the same characters, the same charm and some problems fixed.

Anno 2070 is a real-time management sim that tasks you with creating the biggest and happiest empire you can in a future where resources are scarce as a result of climate change. It’s a shift from the historical foundations of the previous games in the series in favour of something socially-minded and forward-looking.

The core mechanics are the same as previous games. If I’m going to solve my lobster problem, I’ll need to establish a second settlement on a whole new island, and establish the shipping routes to bring that lobster across the ocean. The difference is that your rival territories aren’t Belgian settlers, but islands exploited by independent contractors. The population is split between smogand- profit megacorp Global Trust and the environmentalist Eden Initiative, with scientists providing technology to both. “Wait a second,” you might say. “Isn’t this world visibly displaying the impact of heavy industry? Why would you choose to be an industrialist?”

Roaming merchants sell building materials and more.

It’s a fair question. Anno 2070 squanders the topicality of its subject matter with factions that are cartoonishly good and evil. Eden Initiative workers are soft-spoken and demand only tea, vegetables and a concert hall. Global Trust, meanwhile, fill their workers with booze, fast food, casinos and aspirational TV programmes. It’s Eco-Jesus going up against Scrooge McDuck in Ayn Rand cosplay.

You’ll work for both factions in singleplayer, making choices about which to support. I found myself going with Global Trust to see what hilarious mishaps their terrible decision-making would inflict on the world next – which, if nothing else, added a little life to an otherwise drab campaign.

You’re lead by the hand almost all of the way, as the game (very slowly) imparts the techniques you’ll need to succeed. There’s a story, but it’s a bit of a non-starter and Anno 2070’s voice-acting can’t carry it.

An Eden Project village, busy being correct about everything.

The single mission and free play modes are much more successful. At its heart, Anno 2070 is a game of creative engineering: building a big, interconnected machine that looks like a city but purrs like an engine. You’re free to problem-solve as you see fit, answering demand for resources with trade, research and expansion. You’re also constantly being given additional objectives ranging, such as headhunting a certain number of employees.

Should competition demand it, there’s also combat: mostly naval, with aircraft and base defences for spice. It’s far from the main event, but the need for military protection adds an additional dimension.

Playable and polished, Anno 2070 is a steady improvement on what has come before. If anything, it plays things too safe, with innovations like online elections and undersea bases making little impact. Worth your time, but lacking the resources to become a management great.

In that regard Need For Speed: The Run nails it – you can recreate that experience perfectly, even down to the masterfully-pitched, twanging country music. This would be brilliant if the game didn’t replicate the realities of a road trip as well, which include repetitive scenery, the boredom of maintaining a largely constant speed and the realisation that at most of your stop-offs there isn’t a great deal to do.

You play as the excruciatingly smug Jack, a man so fist-gnawingly in love with himself he probably announces his own arrival in a room. He’s in trouble with the mob in San Francisco, but after QTEing his way out of a near-fatal conversation with a car crusher he’s offered the opportunity to race his way to freedom, which lies 3,000 miles away in New York. And that’s about it. For a game that’s apparently about reintroducing a plot to racing games, there’s embarrassingly little to the narrative. There are only two and a half characters in the entire game and the dialogue is rare and entirely functional. It makes the script of The Fast and the Furious look like A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

The few city tracks are a rare opportunity to observe 90-degree turns in the wild.

But while the cutscenes are lacking in scripting, the action itself more than makes up for it. Unlike the vast majority of racing games, The Run is an enormously regimented experience. Each stage either requires you to pass a specific number of vehicles – the penalty for failure being a complete restart of that section – or simply beat timed checkpoints. The competition is choreographed as well: cars rubberband in relation to yours, meaning you can wear your finger out on the boost button and still end up watching an opponent nipping past on the run to the finish line. It always feels like you’re competing against the designers of the game, rather than 200-odd other drivers.

The real crime is that the game so rarely takes advantage of its tightly controlled environment. There’s a brilliant sequence that has you careening along a winding, snowy pass, dodging patches of treacherous black ice as an avalanche explodes around you. It’s a glimpse of the game The Run could have been, if it had fully embraced the art of the set piece as Call of Duty has. It’s also the only glimpse.

The more hairpin-heavy sections of road are far more satisfying to negotiate.

Instead, what’s left is a racer that claws its way to mediocrity using features we’ve come to expect from the series. There’s a huge and varied selection of cars, handling is predictable and grippy, and the engine (in this case Battlefield 3’s Frostbite 2) whips up some impressive vistas as you hammer across the US. All of these add up to a game that’s absolutely playable, but pales in comparison to Hot Pursuit’s achievements with the same tools.

The organic nature of Criterion’s chases in that game meant that returning to beat your friends’ times on Autolog was a pleasure. Not so here. After the two hours it takes to complete The Run, there’s little incentive to return to the track and watch the same things happen all over again.

There’s a good idea buried under the enormous drifts of tedium, but even EA’s signature polish only manages to panel-beat this into passable game. This should have been a modern-day Outrun, instead it’s an obvious misfire.

The game world is rendered in cubes, every one of which can be destroyed, stored in your inventory, and placed back down anywhere you like. The map generates more terrain as you explore in a new direction, almost infinitely (you will run out of hard disk space at some point). That terrain is a quilt of discrete environmental regions, or biomes: as you travel, the thick forest you spawned in will give way to veldt or cliffs, or a desert peppered with cacti. You might reach the ocean, or a marsh clogged with exploding monsters and lily pads, or an ice floe leading to a wintry island.

Such random features as rivers, caves, waterfalls and ravines thread this world. Herds of friendly, blocky animals graze happily here and there: pigs, sheep, cows and chickens all provide useful products when slaughtered, and they can even be kept and bred.

My floating wizard abode is cooler than yours.

When the square sun sets, however, you need to worry. Whenever a given tile is dark, a monster can spawn on it, and at night, there are hundreds of them. They’re a varied bunch. Spiders are low and wide, can climb vertical surfaces, and tend to jump right in your face while hissing. Zombies are slow melee oppressors, walking in a straight line towards you and able to hop over short, one-block-high obstacles. Skeletons prefer to circle you and fire arrows. Endermen are tall, teleporting nasties who only get angry when you look at them. They’re scattered infrequently throughout the night, and each requires careful attention to dispatch when you’re unarmed.

Creepers are the iconic, green, cactus-like Minecraft enemies that populate fan art all over the internet. They have four stubby legs at the base of their long, phallic bodies. They like to scuttle deftly towards you, hiss, inflate alarmingly, then explode. The explosion deals significant damage, tearing a great chunk out of the ground and any surrounding masonry. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, the impulse to rebuild – or perhaps improve – is invigorating.

Crafting caters to that impulse. Crafting enables you to make new and upgraded equipment. Once you’ve fashioned yourself a sword and some armour, stabbing skeletons is a great way to while away the moonlight. With a punchy iron sword, if you slice while falling through the air to score a critical hit, there aren’t many foes that won’t drop in a few swings. Until then, you can keep a few zombies at bay for a while, but all the teleporting and climbing and shooting and exploding will get you one way or another. Better to keep moving.

We called this ZE HELLRAIL.

Better still, you could scrape together a mud hut with your bare hands and avoid running into any monsters. Then again, it’ll be dark in there and you won’t be able to tell when it’s morning and, just, what the hell is wrong with you? Cut down trees! Make a log cabin! Sing hearty songs! Grow a beard! Then go outside anyway and punch skeletons until dawn! Endermen, skeletons, and zombies all catch fire and die in the morning light, while spiders who aren’t already chasing you become docile. Creepers still try to explode at you, but for the most part, the danger is over at sunrise. Only where it’s still dark, deep in caves and under rocky overhangs, are monsters alive and deadly during the day.

Before you’re ready to start fighting, the first thing you’ll make is a wooden pickaxe. It lets you harvest stone, which you can use to make stone tools, masonry and furniture. For a new player, it’s a steep learning curve if you don’t know about the crafting recipe page on the Minecraft wiki. This is an issue that the developers, Mojang, have been slow to address, even as they crest four million sales.

But I can’t stay mad at it. Minecraft is a phenomenally important game for the PC. The appeal is vaster than the objects I’ve built in it. You can build anything you can imagine, and it’s vastly more functional than you first realise. Waterfalls are just the beginning. You can craft pistons that shift blocks back and forth. You can harvest a curious red dust that functions like electrical wire – and you can lay it out in the shape of functioning circuits. That means logic gates. That means computation. There are computer science students who have built functioning CPUs in Minecraft, and some have even developed rudimentary computer games to run on these computers of dust and dirt.

Even you and I can easily wire a series of traps and security doors and secret panels. Crucially, you’re learning real electronics when you do this – it’s not some abstract skill that won’t help you in real life. I know what an RSNOR latch is. Do you? No? Play Minecraft!

It took two months of my life to excavate this cavern.

Again, you’ll have to make use of the community tutorials to master most of this stuff, but my point is: this is a game where you can spend a few months happily perfecting a lightswitch, and still know nothing about potions, or breeding animals, or fighting, or exploring alternate dimensions, or enchanting, or designing integrated rail networks.

It’s a good job there’s a robust multiplayer, then. If you rent a server, you can invite lots of friends to come and help you build, and this is where the majesty of Minecraft becomes undeniable. Most of the servers I’ve visited have been teeming with massive, painstaking projects, recreating whole cities from Pokémon and Studio Ghibli films. But the most rewarding experiences I’ve had on Minecraft servers were those where I got to team up with a few passionate builders on the same project. As each builder gravitated towards their areas of aptitude, I began to feel more like part of a team than I ever had in a game of Team Fortress 2. I was the wiring guy. I had this skill that nobody else could fathom. I built a wall that could automatically rebuild itself, forever. I built a secret door in a fountain, where the water drained away carefully before the plinth slid apart to reveal a long descent of stairs. By Googling liberally, following greater Minecraft architects than I, and being creative in how I implemented what I found, I could achieve wonders.

Many multiplayer games, even our favourites, offer nothing more than friendly feet shuffling alongside us. In Minecraft, each of us is a god, toiling to emboss ourselves upon the world. Other players aren’t just helping you kill things and healing you, they’re carving out mountains for the secret base you’re making with them, pouring waterfalls off your floating fortress to give you a safe way down, or carrying buckets of lava underground to help you make a sauna.

I wanted this room to say 'forge'.

I played World of Warcraft for years, and now that I think about it, I didn’t really enjoy any of it. I’ve been playing Minecraft in alpha or beta for over two years, and every piece of the game that’s clicked into place has utterly reinvented it. There’s so much left for me to do. I haven’t built a skull mountain yet. I haven’t finished my terraced farm with my brother. I’ve hardly ever played with minecarts and tracks and switches and pressure plates. I can barely fit in all the creative, arty, sexy things I want to do.

But it’s not just a fun old game with lots of hours-divided-by-money-equals- value. It’s an exciting and important direction for games to be walking in. Look, no tits! No guns! Parents can buy it for children, and leave them playing it safely! Women won’t run into horrid stereotypes of themselves wearing armoured thongs! Teachers can teach it in schools! Deus Ex, up at a score of 95, made me think: “What if more shooters were like this?” Minecraft locks me in hour-long paralysis as ideas course through me. If Doom spawned the FPS industry, what the hell will the fruit of Minecraft’s cubic womb be? Has the future of PC gaming ever looked so good, before we saw it from the top of this big blocky mountain?

I showed the game to my nineyear- old cousin and her six-year-old sister, and there was a period of stunned silence, followed by a din of suggestions and pleas and queries. My parents get it. My grandparents get it. People burnt out on WoW get it, people tired of shooting men get it. Almost everyone gets it. And you should get it too.

30 minutes had passed since my insectoid ally had asked me. It was a simple question—did I intend to resist his claim to this land?—made complicated by the previous eight hours of politics, betrayal, espionage, and war. I didn’t know what to do. After consulting five different people (including my wife over the phone), I reluctantly made my choice on the familiar BioWare dialog wheel and betrayed my always-faithful insectoid allies in order to defend the man who’d just slain his own wife to prove his loyalty. I felt used.

I immediately wanted to load a quicksave and reverse my decision, but I couldn’t—unlike BioWare’s library of other RPGs, The Old Republic is an MMO and everything you do here is permanent, with unavoidable consequences. An abandoned friend suffers his ineluctable fate; a rescued child remains grateful and secure. It’s an unexpected tool that BioWare uses to leverage player emotion and create some of the most engaging, moving story moments I’ve ever played in an RPG—moments that are light-years beyond what we’ve seen in MMOs so far.

Don't worry. I brought enough lightning for the whole class.

A galaxy far, far away
All 17 of the game’s worlds are brought to life with evocative architecture, meticulous set design, and a convincing population. Many quest hubs are the size of small cities with over a hundred soldiers, merchants, doctors, civvies, and the rest going about their business inside. While most of these tertiary characters stay in a single location (we aren’t talking Skyrim here), they’re almost always acting out a scene—a Jawa trying to protect his droids from Imperial harassers at a starport, soldiers training with a drill sergeant, or a woman receiving saddening news from a friend—and they make destinations feel like places with both a deep past and a future. There is some repetition of environmental models and building layouts, but it’s wisely kept to a minimum.

TOR is a BioWare RPG through and through, so you’ll be doing the standard BioWare RPG stuff: gathering a crew, meeting interesting people, making moral choices, killing stuff, and upgrading gear. Combat relies on the traditional trinity setup, so you can choose to focus on healing, tanking, or DPS as one of the eight advanced classes available to each faction. A few class designs do break the mold a bit, such as ranged and stealth tanks, but most fall in line with traditional archetypes. The pool of playable species, however, is miniscule—you’ll be disappointed if you were dead-set on playing a freaky-looking alien.

I like the game’s graphics style—very reminiscent of the Knights of the Old Republic series—though the light-hearted look won’t be to everyone’s tastes. I think BioWare’s bet was a sound one, and there will be plenty of folks more than happy to trade in their bows and arrows for blaster rifles. The sci-fi setting is put to terrific use in the game’s consistently dazzling animations and spell effects. The traditional gold sparkles of fantasy game healing spells are replaced by my Agent’s floating probes that fall down and rotate around my target, spraying him or her with healing kolto fluid. Blown grenades send enemies sprawling over railings. When I stab an enemy with an electrified dagger, it actually sticks in their chest as their body helplessly convulses and crackles with electricity. And, of course, every blaster blast and saber swing is enhanced with the familiar sound effects and music that the official license grants to TOR.

Also, there are wookiees with flamethrowers.

Something borrowed
Not so fresh are the game’s quest mechanics, which are rudimentary and mostly drawn from the oldest tricks in the book: kill X, use Y, or talk to Z. In my 85 hours spent on launch servers, I didn’t encounter a single vehicle or transformation mechanic that mixed up the abilities I had at my disposal. A few riddle dialog quests popped up, but nothing revolutionary. That said, the novel Bonus Objective system, which usually makes the “kill X” portions of quests optional, does a fine job of breaking out grinding and making it a separate choice. It lets those that don’t care to commit genocide on a regular basis stay focused on the story content, which is told through consistently entertaining cutscenes and enlivened with the memorable, nuanced characters we’ve come to expect from BioWare. Most everything in TOR is voiced, and the voice-over work is, with rare exception, top-notch. Subtle touches, such as my Agent slipping in and out of accents while undercover or the slightly quavering tone of a psychotic doctor, both entertain and deepen the immersion into the stories.

What’s more, you can actually provide permanent help to these people, unlike in most MMOs, thanks to TOR’s story areas. These seamless sections of the world are instanced for you and your group on the fly (no load screens or delays), allowing everything inside to react, change, and/or explode in response to the choices you make. We’ve seen similar technology used in World of Warcraft and a few other MMOs to progressively alter an environment down a linear path that all players share, but BioWare uses it to custom-tailor the world for your character and his or her personal story. That single change is revolutionary: your choices matter, and will affect the world you and your friends play in forever.

I don't think this guy's cut out for my world. Sorry, bub.

Go away, Gavin
My biggest concern going into TOR was that the focus on storytelling would restrict our ability to play with friends and guildmates, but I was overjoyed (and, frankly, quite surprised) to find that it wasn’t a problem at all. I played on-and-off with my aide-de-camp, Gavin, during the first 35 levels of our characters, and we never once had a problem finding content to do together or joining each other on our class quests. The mind-blowing ability to holo-call into your groupmates’ conversations from anywhere on the planet (you show up as a translucent projection of yourself) is liberating, allowing you to adventure with your friends without having to stumble about like conjoined twins.

But even though I could quest with Gavin, I wasn’t sure I’d want to. Making moral choices by committee can be tricky for control freaks like me. When a multiplayer conversation option pops up, everyone in your group selects the choice they want. Then a dice roll determines who gets to respond. The first time Gavin’s evil Sith butchered someone begging for mercy, I was outraged. How could he? I felt invested in and protective of my softy Sith Agent and his trajectory, and Gavin ruined my story.

But, on second, calmer thought, I realized I was just playing a different story: the story of an unlikely group working together to defeat a common enemy. It’s a very Star Wars theme, and, much like the inability to load quick saves, adds a depth and dimension to roleplaying. There’d be a similar difference between playing Dungeons & Dragons by yourself and with a full group of friends. Sure, another player will inevitably piss you off by randomly grabbing an NPC and hurling them into a fire, but that’s part of the spontaneity that makes roleplaying in a group so great. It’s an awesome, unscripted RPG experience that you can only have in The Old Republic right now.

Ah! Gavin, I take it all back! Come help me!

Keeping it casual
Spurred on by the unexpected narrative I was experiencing with Gavin, I decided to try grouping with random players. Heroic quests are exactly what commitment-shy gamers like myself need to get grouping: open-world story areas along your questing route with tough enemies that two to four players can knock out in 15 minutes. They’re prevalent on every planet, very casual, and non-threatening. They’re the MMO equivalent of asking someone to join you and your buddies for drinks after work. Hey bro, wanna come hack a few droid terminals with us? I grouped up while leveling more often in The Old Republic than I have in any other MMO I’ve ever played—by a very large margin—but it was always by choice.

Groups looking for challenges with more bite have Flashpoints, TOR’s four-person instanced dungeons. Their difficulty ramps up as you level, and high-level Flashpoints have complicated fights that are very challenging, even for coordinated groups. Thankfully, the penalty for death throughout TOR is next to nothing: players can self-resurrect wherever they died with no corpse run and a 10-second period of unbreakable stealth to move away from what killed ‘em.

The only major hindrance to teamwork is the very noticeable lack of a looking-for-group tool. A very limited attempt can be found in the social menu, but it’s so worthless that it’s borderline insulting.

Staring contests are also casual group activities, and you don't need a full group to start!

Your story
In MMOs, we usually travel around the world playing through the stories of other people. Quests revolve around the problems and desires of the quest-givers because our characters don’t have any (other than the insatiable desire for XP and loot). But you have a story in TOR and all of your adventures revolve around it: you go places because you have business to take care of there. It may seem like a modest difference, but being the center of the universe in a personalized, branching narrative weaves a strong sense of meaning and purpose into everything you do in the game.

I created my Imperial Agent to be a champion of the people—someone who signed up for military duty to protect the innocent of the Empire from enemy attacks. And it worked well, for a while. I picked all the obvious light-side options. I used cool tech like spinal-implanted holoprojectors that disguised me as a service droid to infiltrate terrorist cells and save lives. But as the story went on, I began to find out that the world of an Imperial Agent is not so black-and-white. My enemies were constantly changing, and they weren’t always the people I assumed them to be.

Without spoiling plot details, I’ll just say that I was very impressed by the overarching story TOR empowered me to create: one of a naïve agent trying to do the right thing in an Empire filled with both evil and noble people. Around level 15, I even turned down a perfectly good quest because I thought my character would have refused it (an MMO first for me!). My character had gotten sick of being told to exterminate the native populations every time he arrived on a planet, and he started to wonder if he was the bad guy. The story evolved almost perfectly with my own narrative—it was on that same planet that BioWare tested my resolve by putting me in the situation described at the start of this review: the same native population that I’d championed now demanded the blood of a betrayed man trying to redeem his family.

The trickiest quest: stop your teenage Sith daughter from going out dressed like this.

Constant company
A few people are going to want a say in what you do in that big story of yours. Namely, the members of the crew that you assemble while playing. TOR’s companion system lets you have one crew member out fighting with you at any time, and all of them can be customized with new gear and appearance options. This may not be new for BioWare RPGs, but it’s one of the most innovative and successful elements of TOR as an MMO, providing you with an ever-present audience that reacts to and reflects your choices, via dialog and affection/romance options.

Each class recruits different companions, each with their own unique quirk and backstory. As a level 35 Imperial Agent, I’ve gathered a violent anarchist, a groveling robot, a diplomat who’s merged with the hive mind of an insectoid species, and a doctor who can transform into a space werewolf at will.

Crew skills are the game’s crafting system, and provide the usual activities—gather materials and use them to build weapons, armor, and consumables—with a few added twists. Gathering professions also allow you to send companions on missions, which removes access to that companion for 5-20 minutes and gives them a chance to return with crafting materials, credits, light-side and dark points, new recipes, and skill points. It’s a decent system for people that don’t want to spend the time gathering and crafting themselves, but it can get fairly annoying to have to continually send companions on new missions every few minutes—there should be an automated option.

Yes, yes, my minions. Build thousands of items so I can reverse-engineer them all, undoing your life's work.

The little things
It wasn’t until I discovered that you could reverse-engineer items in TOR to discover new recipes that I began to really get drawn into the crafting system. Suddenly, there was a whole complement of unlisted recipes out there for me to work toward. It’s a rarely-used concept that’s expertly implemented to give crafters another way to really hone in on the specific areas they want to specialize in.

Another wonderful surprise I unearthed while item-tinkering was moddable gear, select weapons and armor whose stats are fully decided by the modification items dropped into them. Once you find moddable gear with a look you like (or a helmet that changes your voice in a cool way), you can conceivably keep it forever, tossing in new modifications to boost the stats as you level up.

It’s a great system that helps you establish a unique look in the universe, and its interface is very well designed. The only problem I had was trying to figure out which stats were best for my character. Ambiguously named stats like Surge aren’t explained, and I had to go digging through sub-menus in my character pane to even get a hint at what they offered me.

TOR is full of clever new approaches and tweaks to long-standing MMO features. The auction house automatically suggests buyout prices to undercut the lowest seller; datacrons are nestled on every planet, offering small permanent stat boosts; and there’s a full codex stuffed with lore, backstories, and interesting info for the knowledge-seeker. The only major disappointment on this front were achievements, which appear as tiny, uninspired codex entries—clearly a hastily-built afterthought.

You companion distracts 'em while you slash 'em.

Shooting up the place
Where The Old Republic makes the flimsiest attempt to break the mold is in its combat design: a very traditional click-to-activate ability system that borrows heavily from the big MMOs of recent years. It’s enjoyable enough to play with, and has a few nuances, but will ultimately leave MMO vets with a sense of déjà vu at a time when most are eagerly looking for something different.

The 16 advanced classes do, however, offer a strong breadth of playstyles, ranging from ruthless Sith to tricky Smugglers, and most can fulfill two roles in groups, depending on the skill tree you choose to specialize in. Skill trees are very different from one another, but there’s almost zero room for customization within each of the trees, so you won’t be able to experiment much after you settle on one.

To the stars
Around level 15, you gain command of your own starship, which matches the style of your class, and are free to cruise around the galaxy. You can march imperiously around your ship like you can in Mass Effect, but alas, your ship is tiny and there are only a few interactive spots.

There's gotta be an exhaust port somewhere on this thing.

Your ship can see action in any of the dozen or so space combat missions drizzled around the galaxy map. In each, your ship proceeds along a fixed path as you use your mouse to target enemy fighters and battlements on enemy capital ships and take a few minutes to complete. Ship combat is a pleasant diversion that breaks up your questing routine, but it’s definitely not why I’d recommend TOR.

No fair, that’s cheating
Likewise, I’m lukewarm about the PvP elements, at least at early levels. I’ve played the three instanced PvP WarZones 25 times, and most matches had a very broad range of players (anywhere between levels 12 and 50). Almost without exception, the highest level players—who have the most skills and skill points at their disposal—dominated the match. The measures put in place to balance incongruous player power do help at higher levels, but PvP is often full of frustration as a low-level player.

These annoying balance issues will hopefully be alleviated at 50, or when more players are made available to the match-making tool—either by BioWare deciding to implement cross-server sign-ups or simply after people stop questing 24/7—allowing the game to force tighter level brackets. The WarZones house some fun gameplay (especially Huttball, which is a twisted version of soccer with flame pits, acid pools, and death) and it’d be a shame if you had to avoid them until max level to find a fair fight.

The MLS should really consider adding pillars of fire.

The game’s designated open-world PvP zones look extremely promising. Particularly the endgame planet Ilum, whose expansive, intricate battlefield filled with battling war machines and giant turrets is entertaining even without other players in it. They’re currently ghost towns as players focus on leveling, but I hope that the zones live up to their potential to serve as bloody hangouts for PvP enthusiasts like myself.

Tech specs
BioWare hit a big homerun with server stability. I didn’t hear of a single server crash in the entire first week, and the constant addition of new servers kept queue times reasonable. Inside the game, things were a bit creakier. My client never crashed, but the typical MMO bugs showed up to cause problems, like a few broken quests, unusable gathering nodes, and UI glitches. I only saw reports of one game-breaking bug, but it was fixed on launch day.

Don't get distracted by the falling ice meteors. Stay on target.

Into the future
A lot of questions remain for The Old Republic, particularly regarding the endgame. We know that hard-mode Flashpoints, raids, and PvP areas await us at max level, but we don’t know if they’ll prove diverse and interesting enough to keep our attention for the long-term. If the endgame consists of gear-grinding and standard raid encounters, it’ll have a very jarring effect on those who loved playing through stories for the previous 200 hours. I’m also concerned that the need to record new voice-overs for every bit of new dialog will slow down production of content updates and make the team more likely to focus only on raid content post-launch.

But that’s all speculation for now. What I know for certain is that it takes close to 200 hours to level a character to 50, and there are eight different class stories that I intend to play through. There’s a ridiculous amount of content in The Old Republic. The game’s quality is consistently outstanding and, if you enjoy RPGs at all, the price tag is easily justified—even if you never step foot past max-level.

The Old Republic plunges players into the Star Wars universe we’ve always wanted to live in, and succeeds as both and RPG and an MMO. And perhaps just as thrilling, there’s an oversized Bantha’s worth of potential in expanding areas like space combat and the companion system, or in adding new features like guild housing. This one’s got a long, bright future ahead of it.

While DCUO’s style certainly didn’t appeal to everyone, its big problem on release was that the month provided in the box turned out to be more than enough time to hit max level and see everything you wanted to. After that, why keep paying a subscription for more? It’s no wonder that Gotham and Metropolis became ghost towns, especially with the lack of major updates since release.

Nothing personal. I'm just better than you.

As a free game though, DCUO more than deserves a second chance. For starters, when Sony say ‘free’, they mean it. In a store that stocks such things as a bouncy ball with Batman’s logo on it (for growly trips to the beach) and a Superman hoodie, the only real content pack worth considering is a $10 pack of Green Lantern/Sinestro Corps-themed Light powers. Without paying, you will face a number of free-player restrictions, including limited in-game cash and a lack of inventory space, plus the increasingly standard ‘only monthly subscribers can create guilds’, but none of these will stop you creating your choice of hero or villain and blazing through the scripted content like the vision of awesomeness you are.

However you play, you’ll never mistake DC Universe Online for an all-out action game, but it does get closer to that goal than any other MMO to date. Brawls are fast, furious, and above all, kinetic, with enemies going flying, heavy objects joining them in the air, and a massive range of attacks that mix up weapons, powers and fancy gadgets as grappling hooks based on your choice of skills and mentor. Acrobatics is particularly good fun, letting you fly around the city, grapple up buildings and mock the poor non-acrobatic suckers who thought Flight or Super Speed sounded more entertaining.

All this good stuff does unfortunately remain wrapped up in clumsy controls designed primarily for the PlayStation 3, along with the worst chat interface ever inflicted on the genre, but still manages to be satisfying – especially against iconic characters. They’re all Saturday morning cartoon versions of themselves rather than anything gritty or grounded like in Arkham City, but make up for that with plenty of gimmicks, like having you face all the Teen Titans at once, or defeating two generations of The Flash with careful use of a magic devolution ray. As bland as most of the street-sweeping quests are, DC Universe Online more than makes up for them when you head into a cool instanced dungeon.

Guns dull? No! Sweep 'em, watch everthing die.

The big problem, however, is exactly the same as it was at launch. MMO fans love to claim that the endgame is the ‘real’ game – but here, almost all of the best moments are to be found on the way up. At Level 30, a swathe of stuff does open up, but it’s mostly uninteresting repeated raids, daily quests and other disposable content, and the carrot of earning new armour suits doesn’t work here as well as in other MMOs. Yes, you can absorb their powers without taking their visual look, but either way you’re sacrificing part of what should make hitting the endgame content satisfying – your individuality, or knowing everyone else can see the physical proof of how hard you rock.

As for the rest of the world, there’s no real good vs evil struggle, no exciting world events worth sinking your teeth into… nothing likely to hold your attention when the appeal of the world and characters fades away. The closest it gets are a couple of regular open-world games like Ring War, which isn’t close to fun enough to keep you coming back when you’ve run out of new stuff to smash through.

For the original game, that was a killer. For free, it’s more of a low-level thug. DC Universe Online’s simplicity, focus on action, and new F2P approach all makes it perfect for casual play and dipping in as and when new content is released. It’s far from the best MMO around, but you won’t find many with more personality, or better solo-friendly content if you’d rather not team up and play nice.

The star map is beautiful but confusing.

The 3D system maps are lovely. I was itching to spread my race of space lizards to every corner of each floating nebula, but found it took ages to order the simplest tasks. The act of moving a fleet from one star to another should be a matter of selecting that fleet and selecting a destination. In Sword of the Stars 2 I had to create an abstract mission, then work my way through a series of screens and dropdown menus to assign a fleet to that mission and finally give the order.

Buying vessels means compiling a poorly explained collection of ship designs into invoices that must be labelled and submitted. Precise information on different components, weapon systems and technologies was nowhere to be found, and I often found myself angry and lost in completely superfluous empty menu screens and system views.

Building an empire is a game of guesswork, as epitomised by the dreadful randomised tech tree. The items on each branch are decided by dice rolls, so that deadly X-ray laser tech you were shooting for simply might never appear if the behindthe- scenes number crunching goes the wrong way.

Customise each vessel in the awkward ship designer.

It’s all made worse by the fact that there’s an interesting strategy game buried somewhere under the halfbaked menu screens. When two armies meet you’re thrown into a five minute real-time skirmish: that’s when the new Mars 2 engine shines. But while the space battles are pretty enough, they never offer a strategic challenge. They mostly involve keeping your ships’ weak points away from enemy lasers.

It’s a dangerously unstable game, too. I reviewed it after a couple of patches, but still had hours of progress erased by a crash on the way to the saving screen. Even when the bugs are exorcised, you’ll have to wrestle with that terrible interface. Better to consider this one lost in space. Try the Sword of the Stars Complete Edition instead.

You move and shoot in four directions, like a weeping, terrified Robotron, and at the end of each level is a boss. Along the way, if you’re lucky, you’ll find upgrades that make the going a little easier. Die, however, and it’s all lost: this is a roguelike of a traditional sort, the kind that’s far more about failure than it is about success.

Isaac is the brainchild of Super Meat Boy co-creator Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. SMB threw you under a bus so often that your keyboard had teeth-marks on it, but it never put you in a situation that a little patience and skill couldn’t see you through. The Binding of Isaac has no such qualms. It doesn’t need to throw you under a bus, because the bus is being driven by driven by a madman who holds you personally responsible for all that’s wrong with the universe.

Probably the face I'd make too.

McMillen’s signature body horror is a natural fit for a genre where the slightest error can cost you everything. Isaac is grotesque both in design and subject matter: Isaac’s initial weapons are his tears, with which he fends off oncoming hordes of bulbous infants and bloated flies. An upgrade might pierce Isaac with a coat-hanger, or embed a third eye in the back of his head to enable him to shoot backwards. Between stages, Isaac’s dreams show him being humiliated by everyone he knows.

It’s a broader-ranging expression of McMillen’s interests than we’ve seen before, drawing on The Legend of Zelda, Bomberman, and Ren and Stimpy as well as the Old Testament. The unifying theme, if there is one, is childhood: but this isn’t a game on a mission.

There is, however, an intelligence to The Binding of Isaac that prevents its excesses from ever becoming crass. Instead, the relentless cruelty of the game is a joke that invites you in but asks you to see it for what it is. Firing it up for a single run-through quickly becomes a refreshing aside, a willing engagement with a world that is unfair, nasty and short and doesn’t care to hide it.

I really want that key. I cannot have that key.

The genius of the game is that it grounds the roguelike in a context that is as meaningful as you want it to be. Whenever you curse the game for delivering you into a no-win scenario, the temptation is to blame the unseen hand that hates you so very badly: and it’s then that it hits you that there isn’t one. The Binding of Isaac is a piece of software, made by people, and it is neither out to help nor hinder you.

The game’s nature will divide some and outright offend others, of course: but that’s exactly as it should be. A worthy, compact and highly enjoyable experiment.

But in a move that would make Christopher Nolan blush, while you control Desmond’s Renaissance ancestor Ezio in Constantinople, Ezio is himself discovering magical memory-unlocking keys left behind by his 12th century ancestor Altair. If time travelling, science-fiction oddness is what put you off Assassin’s Creed in the past, prepare to groan a decade of groans as Revelations routinely expends drastic countermeasures trying to avoid doing what it does best.

What it does best, of course, is death, and the third game in the trilogy has entire morgues of the stuff. Arriving in Constantinople in search of his keys, a bearded, greying and creaky-shouldered Ezio ends up embroiled in a conspiratorial Templar powergrab. Cue the series’ most championed features: Ezio shadowing targets, infiltrating enemy strongholds, free-running and executing choreographed, riotous assassinations. Stabbing somebody in the neck has never looked so much like ballet.

Revelations is thankfully light on the cannon sequences.

The guild-building of Brotherhood is expanded upon. Assassins in your employ may now be put in charge of dens around Constantinople, or sent to other Mediterranean cities to establish new guilds, which generate experience points for assassins stationed in those cities as well as income for you. This is as compelling a pursuit as it was in Brotherhood, as your assassins level up, becoming more powerful allies when called upon in battles and, eventually, preventing dens from falling back into Templar hands.

Seven dens around the city can be captured by assassinating a local Templar captain, but once under your control they can be contested whenever your notoriety reaches a critical point (Templars keep a vague tally of how much stabbing and renovating you’ve been doing, which, as in previous games, can be reduced by paying off heralds and murdering officials). This leads to the first of Revelations’ new features – a tower defence minigame in which Ezio must place units on rooftops in order to stave off a Templar assault on a random, unprotected den.

It’s a strange distraction that feels absurd on the first play, unnecessary on the second and frustrating thereafter, as you frantically order many different flavours of assassin to occupy every bit of clickable slate available. Placing units and blockades requires spending ‘morale’ points, which not only implies that there’s an off-screen cache of unenthusiastic assassins who simply cannot be arsed to climb up on a roof in defence of their lives, but which entirely detaches the act of den defence from the other currencies and mechanics of the game. Templar attacks are just frequent enough – and enduring the sideshow is just slightly less hassle than losing the den – that you’ll feel slavishly obliged to take them on as they appear. It’s rudely intrusive, like being forced to Alt-Tab out to a game of Bejeweled every 45 minutes.

Kill a soldier and you can string together murder combos.

Bombs and bomb-crafting have arrived too, in case you don’t remember requesting this feature. Ezio can use bomb ingredients to construct dozens of different kinds of exciting explosives, from sticky shrapnel bombs and stink bombs to poison-gas tripwires and pedestrianslowing caltrop grenades. The usefulness of these devices varies depending on whether or not you remember they exist, and it’s remarkably easy to forget that they do. The game seems awkwardly obsessed with its new bombs. Almost every chest in the city contains a sort of gunpowder or bomb casing, and the cities you conquer shower you with daily deliveries of bomb ingredients. But bombs feel as brash, blunt and clumsy as Ezio isn’t, requiring you to reconfigure your fingers and brain to unfamiliar positions to use them. The alternative of open combat or impromptu parkour requires less mental effort, and you’ll find yourself relying on these escape methods more. Rather more saddening is that you’ll soon be carrying as many bomb ingredients as is permitted, until your magpie instinct for looting chests withers and drops off entirely. Instead you’ll ignore those hitherto glistening treats, with glum resignation.

A new hookblade replaces one of your regular stabby wristblades, which is incredibly useful given that Constantinople is strewn with ziplines. These not only allow for quick and dramatic access to restricted areas, but enable a new method of assassination of guards who loiter underneath these aerial assassin thoroughfares. The hookblade also enables your new double jump when climbing, and allows you to evade guards by running towards them at full whack and ‘rolling’ over them. It also comes with its own sickening combat animations – including one in which Ezio unapologetically hooks somebody in the face. It goes into the eye socket. Pedants, meanwhile, will find it irritating that despite the obviously hooked end of his new blade, Ezio can stab with it as if it were still sharp. Just as with bombs, there’s a certain inelegance, as it stabs illogically, clanks loudly on ledges and jerks to one side as you mount ziplines. Infrequently useful ziplines, which, it soon becomes obvious, prompted its inclusion.

A bridge too far.

New collectibles appear in the form of hidden Animus data fragments. For every five of these you discover, a new chapter of Desmond’s backstory is unlocked back on Animus Island. Dropping you into a first-person, Desmond’s eye-view perspective, these chapters take place in virtual puzzle rooms not far removed from those of Aperture Science, where cubic, concrete and dark rooms are pierced by streaks of burning natural light. It’s a visual spectacle in places, though the actual puzzles feel like a poor man’s Portal as you conjure up magical platforms to navigate the space. All the while Desmond ruminates on his life as a whiny, unwilling assassin, as if being an assassin wasn’t the coolest thing in the world. This is Ubisoft’s storytelling at its worst. Ezio’s Sex and the City monologues as he pens expositional missives to his sister back home, just in case you were wondering, are Ubisoft’s storytelling at its second worst.

But while these mutant additions might not fall neatly into the existing Assassin’s formula, that formula still prevails. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations remains a thrilling, violent and at times astounding adventure. It’s ultimately an exercise in plot tidying, drawing together and bringing to a satisfying close the disparate threads of Ezio and Altair’s stories in preparation for a hopefully more progressive Assassin’s Creed 3. And once you forgive its clunky and staggered delivery, there are touching, and indeed revelatory moments to be had.

Some enemies can only be defeated via counter attacks.

Revelatory too, is Ubisoft’s apparent abandonment of its always-on DRM. I’ll stress that this is the case with the finished, nonretail review build – Ubisoft could still be devising an even more nefarious DRM method in which you’re prompted to place your genitals into a primed USB mousetrap – but it appears, for now, that Ubisoft no longer care where you stick your ethernet cables. A one-time activation is required, but Revelations can be freely played offline thereafter.

Other PC woes, such as abhorrent mouse acceleration rendering the game near unplayable on keyboard and mouse, remain. Revelations, more than most, was designed around the buttons, sticks and triggers of 360 and PS3 pads, and as such almost demands the use of a controller. If you can deal with that indecency, it’s an otherwise neat port.

So: much the same murderfun but with unnecessary tangential baubles – that’s Revelations in a teacup. It’s milking the Assassin’s teat for certain, and while the milk’s still sweet, the teat’s clearly going a bit raw.

It’s about the same experience as playing this game, only £19 cheaper. Maybe more!

PRESS X TO KEEP READING.

Yes, Jurassic Park: The Game is an unwelcome trip back to the interactive movies of the ’90s, somehow surviving their extermination like one final smallpox virus hiding in a dung beetle’s arse. It’s 3D instead of FMV, but you’re still stuck doing little but hitting keys as they flash on screen and trying to convince yourself you’re in control. Between those bits? Equally bland adventure screens, offering little but the chance to choose the order in which you click the handful of hotspots and dialogue options masquerading as puzzles, with an interface that feels like an iPad port. Natural selection? Bah!

Just what we needed - a T-Rex with the horn.

PRESS X TO KEEP READING.

If you’ve played Heavy Rain on the PlayStation 3, you’ll recognise exactly what Telltale are copying, and what they’re trying to do to keep the action flowing. In theory, that’s fine. What’s missing though are the reasons Heavy Rain got away with its simplistic action in the first place – the plot branching, emotional situations, and above all, the (admittedly often illusory) feel that your decisions actually mattered.

Here, forget all that. You’re not the star of this Jurassic Park adventure. You’re the projectionist, your only real job being to keep the film running smoothly until the end credits finally roll.

PRESS X TO KEEP READING

To give it some credit, your film is at least decent – assuming you don’t expect the Spielberg touch, can tolerate Telltale’s ‘scary’ new dinosaur owing more to Alien than it does to palaeontology, and somehow don’t notice that the plot would end halfway through if not for the entire cast suddenly becoming denser than osmium when they should be watching Isla Nublar disappear in their rear view mirror.

Yeah, you'll be seeing this a lot.

The main plot is a hammy but watchable sequel to the first movie, focusing on a father and daughter lost in the park, and the hunt for Dennis Nedry’s lost can of embryos, played out under endless button prompts and punctuated with much goofier death scenes. Like the new dinosaur, it’s hard not to think of Aliens as much as Jurassic Park, but it’s excellent machinima – and even at its worst, still better than The Lost World. Mind you, so is being locked in a jeep with a flu-ridden dilophosaurus…

PRESS X TO KEEP READING.

It’s not, however, much of a game. Which is a problem for anything that has ‘The Game’ hanging from it with all the sincerity of a pair of plastic comedy breasts. If you want a barely interactive movie that asks nothing of you but the most basic of motor functions, maybe you’ll love it. Beyond that? No.

The changes to the classic turn-based strategy game are pervasive. They’ve got rid of that peasant whose icon looked so bloody gormless you kind of wanted them to die, for starters. There are slightly fewer resources, making the map less fussy. And there’s a new faction, in the form of the Eastern-flavoured water creatures of the Sanctuary.

Another new feature is the reputation system. Fight defensively with debuffs, show mercy and use diplomacy, and you’ll progress down the path of Dragon Tears. Use offensive magic and kill where it’s not needed and you’re going down the path of Dragon’s Blood. It affects the powers your character learns, so read ahead and stick to a choice, because you can’t go both ways.

But underneath the new meat and skin blows the lungs of classic Heroes. The same turn-based balance of world-level resource generation and city building. All centred around manufacturing and tactically distributing creatures that you can then take into battle for an intricate and constantly changing game of angry chess.

'Contender ready! Gladiator ready!'

Heroes VI is also an imposingly tough game. You’ll find yourself picking off so many different bands of ‘trivial’ and ‘low’ threat enemies on the world map that you might get complacent. But Heroes doesn’t tell, it shows – and it’s teaching you how combinations of units interact. The second you meet your first equallypowered hero, prepare to be handed a plate piled high with your own arse.

There are no hints on strategy, just an ever-expanding palette of units per faction, upgrades with extra powers and hero abilities to consider. The difficulty and lack of guidance would be frustrating if the game itself wasn’t so absorbing and well-built. The animations are fantastic – you’ve never seen Centaurs collapse until you’ve seen Heroes VI Centaurs collapse. Tellingly, I found myself replaying battles I’d won to see if I could have won them better.

The regular auto-saves mean you can rewind a fair distance, but there are so many times you’ll want to try something again that a more comprehensive rewind system would have been welcome.

What there is, though, thankfully protects you from Ubisoft’s always-connected DRM, which is imposed in shamefully full and distressing effect: I had a half-hour chunk of progress that would have been lost to the ether were it not for the autosave workaround.

This looks like a game of chess worthy of the Red Queen.

The scale of the game is absolutely huge, a large game made larger by slow progress. The two tutorial maps took me an entire day to complete to my own satisfaction. With five fuller faction campaigns (that you can, unlike Heroes V, play in any order you like) and an epilogue map based on your Tears or Blood reputation, the singleplayer is massive, and it has a brilliant, over-earnest script with endearingly stilted acting, and there’s a great soap opera feel to the story.

Multiplayer feels like there’s room for expansion, though. Essentials such as hotseat are present, and there’s a good range of maps for up to eight players on skirmish. Factions occasionally fight together in the campaigns, but if you want to forget the long game and play a simple duel with a friend, there are only two army configurations per faction.

Hopefully, the ability to mix decks and build your own armies from a stock of points will come with patches or expansions. What there is, in the meantime, is a formidable, engrossing timesink. A game that’ll test and punish you before giving you a pat on the head and making you do it all over again

Yes. The thing is… that’s not what they’ve done. Far from it. City of Heroes: Freedom is one of the most generous free-to-play games ever. Bad news for crime. Great news for us.

If you’ve ever bought it in the past, you keep everything you unlocked. Even new players can access almost everything. Pet classes get the shaft and have to be bought, as do a few other archetypes and powers, but most are available. So are most costume pieces aside from a few auras and themed sets, and both Hero and Villain factions. The Going Rogue expansion is the only major lock-out, although you can still wander its questless streets if you feel like taking a boring holiday from the fight.

Evil testicle, today you face your doom!

Get into the world itself and things keep getting better. City of Heroes hasn’t had a visit from Deathwing, but the leap in quality of the opening areas at least is a Cataclysm-level update… uh… in a good way. For starters, while Paragon has always understood the importance of making you feel awesome from Level 1, the opening missions now serve up stories that let you do proper hero stuff, not just painstakingly sweeping every last bloody warehouse from Atlas Park to Kings Row.

Returning players will appreciate the changes the most, such as the new plot arcs and signature characters, scripted missions, and a brand new Trial you can jump into immediately for speedy levelling. You’ll still get sick of the repeated tilesets and locations, but there’s far, far more variety to keep things fresh. New characters also benefit from a tutorial that’s only about five minutes long, and getting proper travel powers like Fly at Level 4 instead of having to stumble around like some kind of civilian.

APB beats City of Heroes' character creator... but not much else ever has.

Free players do have some major restrictions, such as not being able to play user-created content in the Mission Architect mode or join guilds. Purchasing anything in the store grants Premium status that directly unlocks these, or makes them available as in-game Rewards, and you’ll most likely want to do this relatively early just to get it out of the way. All players can reach Level 50 without paying a single penny though, with the majority of regular content open to everybody.

Subscribers get a monthly stipend of points to spend, along with being the only ones who can create guilds (an unfortunate, but increasingly standard restriction) and getting free access to all game systems – the auction house, Mission Architect, and so on – though not all of the premium content. They’re also the only ones who can continue improving their skills as Incarnates in the endgame.

Paying or not, this is all very impressive, making CoH well worth trying, or better yet, firing up an old account for a return visit. DC Universe Online beats it in terms of kinetic combat and dungeon design, but City of Heroes remains by far the best superhero MMO in terms of content, systems and community – and going free-to-play gives Paragon Studios a damn good reason to keep the new stuff coming. Even if what you got from a free account was all you’d ever get, and there were no more updates, there’d be more than enough BIFF! and POW! for one hell of a heroic or villainous career.

That’s the setting for Nuclear Dawn, a class-based multiplayer shooter that manages to take all the best mechanics of Team Fortress 2, but strips it of its cartoony silliness and adds a layer of serious-face real-time strategy over the top. Most of the time, you play from an FPS viewpoint as a footsoldier in one of the aforementioned armies, battling over a series of checkpoints that generate a steady stream of resources for the side that controls them.

When clocktowers carry guns, it's wise to spend time hiding.

These resources can be spent by a commander – one member of each team, randomly selected from volunteers – who can build turrets, resupply depots and spawn points anywhere on the map. These structures have to be powered, and it’s vital that your team protects the power infrastructure.

The classes are diverse. The Stealth character can choose a knife-or- sniper-based loadout, is quick, and can cloak. The Exo has a huge stack of hitpoints and can choose between a minigun or a ‘siege’ loadout – good for taking down the buildings the other team magics up, but weak against other players. The Assault class has assault and sniper rifles, as well as a grenade launcher kit and the ability to detect enemy Stealthers. Finally, the Support class can choose between playing as a building-repairing Engineer, a flamethrower-toting ‘BBQ’, and a healthpack-pooping Medic.

The maps are extremely well designed, and evoke a strong sense of place. The compensating-forsomething Big Ben is the centrepiece of a London-themed map called Clocktower. Silo is a mountainous, snowy, missile house, Oasis puts you in a Middle Eastern city with plenty of open space to snipe and be sniped. My favourite, though, was Hydro – set in a wind turbine power station where it’s perpetually raining. Reminds me of home.

Getting this close isn't wise.

There’s a few rough edges here and there. A levelling-up system is in place that unlocks certain ‘gizmo’ perks, but it’s muddled and unclear at the moment. There’s no way of practising commander mode except in a real game, so the first time you step into that chair, you’ll be shunned by your peers for your ignorance. It’s also often tough to tell what you’ve been killed by.

But those negatives are far outweighed by the inspired map design, the surprisingly complex technology tree, and the fun of throwing yourself against, or sneaking around behind, enemy lines. It’s well worth dropping in on Nuclear Dawn: despite frayed edges, it deserves a community explosion.

'You play Thomas, I'll be the Fat Controller...'

Anticipating the fury of those simming on older rigs, the devs have provided a legacy mode. With its simpler shadows it’s gentler on GPUs, but some are still reporting frame rate loss. There are those in the RailWorks community that feel this free upgrade should have been optional. However happy you may be with TS 2012’s performance (and I’d count myself as content) it’s hard to disagree.

Other reasons for resenting the change include add-on aggravation: if you’ve got loads of third-party content, you may find that some of it no longer functions perfectly. With DLC such a central plank of the RailWorks/TS 2012 brand, the lack of robust backwards compatibility is pretty disappointing.

It’s not all bad news though. TS 2012 incorporates some very welcome cab ambience buffs. New dynamic rain and snow clouds bejewel windscreens. Canted tracks and acceleration-related head movement add vitality to one of the sim’s weaker areas: its physics. The official website boast – “the most immersive sense of reality yet seen in a PC simulation” – remains dubious, but this is definitely a sim that can do ‘spellbinding’ on occasions.

Improved ambience makes TS2012 a more immersive experience.

Whether it deserves its self-proclaimed ‘sequel’ status is another matter. Buyers of the Deluxe version get a 45-mile stretch of high-density Pennsylvania track incorporating the iconic Horseshoe Curve, on top of nine familiar RW2 routes. What they don’t get is much in the way of fresh motive power. A refurbished F7 and a Hitachi Super Express with no natural habitat mean it won’t be long before you find yourself at the controls of old friends. When I was a lad, part of the joy of buying a sim sequel was seeing what machines had been added. Now it seems new rides have too much potential as lucrative DLC to be bundled with base code.

Chalking a number on the end of this review will be tricky. If you’re new to rail simming and have a system built or beefed-up in the last couple of years, TS 2012 Deluxe is a bargain. Those with less sprightly specs and/or those who are perfectly content with RailWorks 2 may find themselves resenting this potentially disruptive gift-horse.

Take On Helicopters has blown away thatmelancholy. Combining flight sim, adventure and a little dash of business, it’s the most refreshing flying game I’ve played in years. I may, courtesy of an FSX or Search & Rescue 4 sortie, have delivered SWAT teams, skycraned cargo, and medevaced accident casualties before, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never combined aviation with flirtation or interrogation, or spent inter-mission intermissions in a 3D hangar overseeing helo upgrades, repaints and repairs.

A new Pope has been selected.

The story revolves around Larkin Aviation – a struggling Seattle chopper operator – and relies heavily on dialogue for propulsion. A lot of that chat takes place in the air. Usually, your ears are absorbing plot developments while your eyes and hands are busy making sure your speeding rotorcraft avoids the myriad structures and trees that cluster the game’s handsome Washington State map.

As some of the voice-acting is more school play than Broadway, and a few of the plot twists shakier than a Huey with a bent swashplate, having that element of exhilarating distraction is a real blessing at times. Bohemia Interactive can definitely do plausible helo physics, ravishing scenery and fresh play concepts, but I’m still not entirely convinced by their storytelling skills.

Take On Helicopters’ narrative starts intriguingly, but rapidly autorotates towards absurd anticlimax. Skip optional commercial and government contracts and the ten-mission career will barely see you through a day’s solid gaming. In an Arma spin-off it just means you find yourself messing around with the super-powerful editor and sooner rather than later.

Seattle. Birthplace of Frasier, Jimi Hendrix, and Peggle.

Now I’ve discovered what the deeply sinister Vrana Corp’s deeply sinister CEO was up to (SPOILER! something sinister) I honestly can’t see myself ever replaying the story missions. What I will be doing on a regular basis however, is strolling out of the Larkin Aviation hangar, clambering aboard one of the sim’s three types of flyables, and heading off for a spot of high speed, low altitude lunacy.

Ironically, the best thing about Take On Helicopters isn’t that it breathes new life into sims by adding drama. It shines by capturing the visceral buzz of flight better than its starchier peers. To weave between Seattle’s glittering skyscrapers and skim its bustling wharves and forestcapped hills is to experience PC aviation at its most joyful.

The Sims 3: Pets caters to unbridled hooflust in ways previous Sims pets expansions wouldn’t dare, introducing equine buddies to the already heaving assortment of available canine and feline companions. Dogs, cats and horses are now the three primary forms of petkind, while birds, fish, gerbiltypes and lizards steadfastly remain on the ‘interactive furniture’ side of animal husbandry.

You can teach parrots to talk, you can even teach them to swear.

Whether furry, hairy, scaly or feathered, pets integrate seamlessly into the life simulator. They can be inserted into new families from the outset, or adopted from other Sims or the adoption agency. And, because The Sims 3: Pets fills your town to the brim with wandering strays, your Sim can also befriend vagrant woofers, taking them off the streets and showering them in mind-smearing luxury.

Gone are the pet careers of The Sims 2, replaced by more realistic functions: dogs can hunt and dig for treasure. Cats can catch vermin. Horses can be ridden in races and made to jump over things for money. Riding itself is a skill Sims can learn, while hunting and other tricks can be taught and improved. The pets themselves can be controlled exactly as you would a human Sim, allowing you to placate their immediate desires (typically: sniffing and eating things) or attend to their needs without the interaction of a human Sim. And, just as with human Sims, wish fulfilment grants rewards – such as the ability to vomit at will.

Ride you horse to the shops, like you're in a music video or something.

The animations and animal vocalisations, are of an incredibly high standard – pumping immense, wet-nosed character and playful personalities into every pet. You’ll want to crawl into your monitor to stroke the things, instead of stoically resigning yourself to proxy in-game cuddles and indirect cooing. Animals age and expire, too, flinging Sims into depressions of such crippling magnitude that, much like real life, you wonder if it’s ever worth forming an emotional bond with a living creature ever again. But don’t worry, you’ll find some consolation in the customisation options in the pet creation suite. Maybe.

The pets expansions for the Sims have traditionally been the most, well, expansive, introducing players to a new emotional vocabulary through the unconditional and universally appreciated love of captive animals. The Sims 3: Pets is the most balanced of these expansions – more pragmatic than the wackiness of The Sims 2 superstar mutts, and… well, I doubt you even remember the awful state of The Sims 1’s autistic, grid-based dogs. It’s the only Sims expansion I’d ever insist upon, and a must for Sims 3 owners.

The rest of the time, you’ll be too busy fighting bugs and obtuse systems to engage in deep and empowering strategy.

The first thing you’ll notice is how miserly the game is at providing you with essential information: the tutorial gives only basic instruction about early-game units and industry. As more complex relationships between raw goods and workshops develop, you’re left to figure out why your stone isn’t moving from the quarry (it needs oxen to transport it). That lack of feedback plagues your military understanding as well. Units have three stances – defensive, aggressive and stand ground – but no information is provided as to the benefits and drawbacks of each style. The interface doesn’t even give basic statistics about a unit’s armour, attack power or function. As for the overhead view, all it really tells you is that, surprisingly, there is a castle on the map.

Out of rocks? Fling dead animals.

It doesn’t help that troop management is unintuitive and full of glitches. Archers routinely refuse to attack enemies in elevated positions. The only reliable way to overcome this is to order them into the line of fire, then set them into a defensive stance until they realise they’re being slaughtered and eventually retaliate. As workarounds go, it’s brutally stupid.

Even attacking regular units is problematic, as the game’s position detection is inaccurate. The location you have to click is never quite where you expect, always slightly above or below where an enemy appears on the map. Losing a man because the game hasn’t recognised that you’ve selected another target is a frequent and rage-inducing event.

Weirdly for a game that’s all about the creation and defence of castles, walls offer no defensive bonus. Ranged units occupying fortified structures are just as vulnerable as those attacking from the ground. Arrows and spears can also pass straight through walls, and yet the AI can’t see behind them. This means that skirting the enemy’s stronghold, killing all units too close to the castle borders, becomes a viable, if cheap, tactic.

The brute force approach is usually the best.

There is a separate economic campaign, which primarily focuses on castle-building and upkeep, and it’s consistently the most entertaining part of the game. It’s really lacking any form of speed control, however, with multiple missions, where you’re waiting for your stockpile to hit the required amount, left at a loose end while your workers sluggishly go about their tasks.

But the economic campaign doesn’t offer what should be Stronghold 3’s highlight: epic sieges against grand fortifications. The Historical Siege mode attempts this, but with no way to call in back-up, every unfair loss frustrates. A more obvious solution would have been a skirmish mode. The best missions in the military campaign already follow this template, and the ability to create custom battles would, at least, have made it easier to get at Stronghold 3’s rare moments of excitement.

Review by Phil Savage.

Within seconds of that thought, Renegade Ops thrillingly chucks me an armed-to-the-teeth chopper, and for a few minutes it’s not just like Jungle Strike, it is Jungle Strike, and I fly off to obliterate a humongous warship. For those of you who are too young to remember the ’90s (lucky buggers), Jungle Strike gave you a ludicrous chopper to deal death to hundreds of thick terrorists in a florally unkempt setting.

Developer Avalanche Studios has already proved itself in the field of sandbox mayhem with its absurdly wonderful Just Cause series. Renegade Ops is built on the same engine, and even though the topdown view doesn’t let you see the skies, you can be guaranteed that they’re the same technicolor azure hue as Just Cause 2’s.

Even the mudhuts explode. Brill!

This isn’t a Just Cause 2 spin-off in the same way as last year’s Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, though. Some assets, like the water and trees, seem to have been nabbed wholesale from Just Cause 2, and it maintains a familiar air of general ludicrousness as you plough through buildings and blow up explosive barrel after explosive barrel. But despite the obvious similarities, it’s very much its own game.

Rather than just driving or shooting, you’re doing both. Mouse and keyboard give an obvious advantage to the shooting, but a disadvantage in the driving. I found the best way to play was to switch between good old mouse and keys when accuracy is required, and then to go back to an Xbox controller for the drivey bits.

There’s a limit to the format, though. After a while, spinning your beefy truck through the wilderness and executing anything that casts a shadow becomes a tad tiresome, in a way that it didn’t in my 86 hours of doing exactly the same thing in Just Cause 2. Thank goodness for the co-op mode, then. It’s here that just a little bit of RTS love has been thrown in. Each of the four characters (well, five, but wait a second… ) has a special ability, such as the ability to turn into a static cannon or unleash an EMP charge.

Every evil tyrant needs petrol stations no-one uses.

That fifth playable character is, um, Gordon Freeman. He’s got an ‘Antlion’ special ability that can deal an inappropriate amount of damage to steel-based vehicles, but he just doesn’t fit in. You can imagine him inside his knackered Half-Life 2 car. “Seriously, has that teleportation thing gone wrong again? Whatevs, Gabe.” At least he doesn’t utter a word or show his face.

Despite the tackiness and slightness of the game, it’s still worth £9.99. It’s an open world like Just Cause 2’s – albeit from a dinkier perspective and with much less interaction. But it seems to have a different target audience in mind: during Renegade Ops’ opening cutscene, the evil tyrant Inferno threatens the cities “where your children go to school”. The kids of 1993 are old enough to care about the fate of their sprogs now, and have fewer spare hours for lengthy timesinks. Fortunately, Renegade Ops’ short-term sessions are still a complete blast.

No orcs were hurt in the making of this game. No, wait...

Spiked pressure plates on the floor are all well and good, but a spring trap that launches flailing orcs helplessly into pools of lava is more stylish. I also delighted in the cruel irony of a push trap that shoves surviving orcs back into the same gauntlet of traps they just escaped.

The traps are the most fun way to dispatch orcs and their allies (like fast-moving rat men and huge, hard-hitting ogres), but using my War Mage to personally slay, shoot, and fry them in third-person view can often be the difference between victory and defeat.

He’s basically Gandalf’s intern – a wizardly fratboy of dubious competence and limitless arrogance. I don’t like his attitude, but when he’s equipped with the awesomely powerful Flame Gauntlets, it’s hard to deny he’s an essential part of any defense. Still, you get more points for killing orcs with an elaborate combination of traps and minions (archers, for instance), so earning a high score is a gruesome balancing act of slaughtering the hordes by hand and feeding them into your machinery of death.

If there were a backstory, it'd be that Orcs ate his family or something.

And even with its whimsical, World of Warcraft-derived art style, it certainly is gruesome. There are moments of eye-popping carnage as orcs are chopped into pieces, or sent catapulting through crowds of their fellows before plummeting into waiting acid pools.

Orcs Must Die!’s levels defy easy solutions, and that’s what sets it apart from other tower defense games. Solutions themselves change in hugely interesting ways as you bring more advanced items and powers back from the later levels, giving a challenge that not only doesn’t pale with experience, but actually grows richer. Not since Lemmings has a game so seamlessly mixed engaging mechanics, humor, cuteness, and gleeful cruelty.

Voiceover might be an overplayed gimmick in the motion picture industry, but in a game, having an omniscient narrator describe what my character does is different… he’s actually talking about me.

The narrator continued to fill in the details as I explored the beautiful, watercolored world of Caelondia, adding layers of minutiae to every location, enemy, and item I came across. It’s an important service, too, because after a large, world-shattering event called the Calamity, there’s really no one else left to tell the story.

There are a few survivors, and they all have strange proportions.

In many ways, Bastion reminds me of BioShock: there’s some good weapon and power customization, but the real star of the show is the world: a floating city torn apart before I even knew it existed, and one that I’m eager to explore.

That exploration makes up the bulk of the game: travelling through different areas and hacking-and-slashing baddies while gathering the necessary supplies to upgrade and enhance the titular Bastion. A sort of fantasy fallout shelter, the Bastion functions like a hub world between the levels.

Each area is unique – I love running through the heavily fortified Cinderbrick Fort and the Sundown Path, which used to be a romantic getaway of sorts before things went wrong – and there’s plenty to smash in the six-hour-long game. Some districts have been overrun by enemies and play out like traditional dungeon delves, while others are on rails. Some just had me running for my life as the terrain crumbles. I never knew what I was getting into until I was in it.

Some enemies can knock the ground out from under you.

When I did have to fight – which was often – it was a fairly straightforward affair. Attacking, rolling, and blocking are simple, but customizing the Kid’s abilities drastically changes how Bastion plays. You can equip two of the eleven upgradable weapons at a time, as well as a special ability and a number of passive bonuses that improve as you level. Tinkering with these skills creates several different loadouts, including a mine-laying swordsman and a grizzled sniper who only uses ranged weapons (essential in the post-completion New Game+, which buffs all the foes to godly levels).

Bastion is special. The soundtrack is phenomenal, the world is breathtaking, and the narration is a brilliant new idea for gaming. Finding a new enemy in a normal hack-and-slash is an uneventful affair – you kill it and move on. But in Bastion, the entire battle with Sir Lunky – a giant, colorful frog with a stone-covered head, in case you were wondering – is narrated and given soul. By the time he’s dead you know more about him than most game characters, connecting you to the world. Nearly every moment of the game is like this, continuously reinforcing your attachment to the game. You’ll be cheating yourself if you skip Bastion

Most games work with very little configuration, but some, like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, simply will not run with Nvidia’s 3D Vision (thanks to an exclusive deal for AMD’s 3D products; you can check Nvidia’s site for a mostly comprehensive list of which games will work). And as with most 3D hardware, 3D Vision effectively halves your monitor’s brightness, meaning you won’t want to use it in a well-lit room.
The glasses themselves are largely the same as the wireless version, though the build quality is noticeably cheaper on the wired model. The set is matte instead of shiny, has more visible seams, and just generally feels a bit more plasticky than the wireless version. The wire is a long 10 feet and never left me feeling overly tethered, though it did have an unfortunate tendency to get tangled up.
The glasses come with swappable nose-pads, but even with them, I’ve never found the 3D Vision set to be very comfortable. Also, as with most active shutter glasses, the lenses are pretty narrow, which means they intrude on my peripheral vision more than I’d like.

At $99, the wired 3D Vision glasses are two-thirds the price of the wireless alternative. I’m not crazy about the build quality or design, but the 3D technology is a lot of fun, and these glasses are the cheapest, fastest way to get it on your PC.

The premise is simple. You put rocks in space, set various physical properties such as velocity, mass and density, then watch them whizz about while cackling with glee at your power over the universe. If you get it right, their orbit carves a graceful arc across the empty darkness of space.

What’s more fun is getting it wrong. Accidentally making Earth the same size as the Sun and pinging Mercury and Venus out past Uranus, Neptune and the Kuiper belt into the interstellar medium, for example. Or accidently blowing up Jupiter and watching the debris form into a second asteroid belt.

Some bad news for Bertrand Russel here.

The options you have for destruction are nearly as diverse as the options for construction. You can simply delete a planet, but it’s far more fun to explode it into eight chunks. Or 16. Or 237. Or, best of all, shred the planet and leave it as a dusty space cloud.

After loading up a model of our solar system, I methodically turned every single planet to dust, and sped up time so that each second in the real world was ten days in the simulation. Mercury was the first to smear out into a ring, followed by the remains of Venus, Earth and Mars. A few hundred years later, the solar system was little more than a series of concentric rings of dust. Which, if you think about it, is a bit bleak.

Universe Sandbox’s most impressive achievement, however, lies in illustrating how the force of gravity affects every tiny little object in all of existence. One scenario has baseballs, dice, golfballs and footballs orbiting a 20cm-wide bowling ball. After a while, they clump together into little groups like baby planets.

You can simulate past and future spacecraft missions.

That’s what elevates this above most other physics simulations: the balance maintained between ensuring that processes are accurately represented and simultaneously ensuring that the sim is accessible enough to pick up and play with. Not every single physical process is perfectly modelled (partly because we don’t yet perfectly understand every physical process), but it’s accurate enough to answer important questions such as “what’s the most efficient way to hurl the Earth into the sun?” The answer, if you were wondering, is to stop it dead in its orbit.

As with most games of this type, you have to be content to make your own fun. Universe Sandbox won’t tell you a story, and it’s not going to hold your hand beyond a brief tutorial that introduces the interface. After that, you’re on your own in the cosmos, albeit with a stack of fansubmitted simulations to play around with. It’s far more fun mucking about with those than creating your own universe from scratch.

Slamming moons together is tremendous fun.

The camera is a little fiddly at times, but my biggest complaint is that the simulator doesn’t come with any sound or music. While I appreciate that’s realistic, given the lack of orchestras in the vacuum of space, it would have been nice to have some ambient music quietly twinkling away in the background.

Universe Sandbox isn’t going to change your life. It isn’t going to make you cry, and it won’t sit in the top of your most-played list in Steam for weeks. But if you like the idea of an interactive orrery that you can rip apart and put back together in whatever way you like, and you’re happy to feed it with a bit of imagination, it’s hard to find a better way to spend £6.

The resurection of zombie Plato and Aristotle mark the beginning of the Renaissance.

The rolling is the most fun by far. You’re in direct control of the rock, which feels incredibly weighty and substantial as it skips, jumps and crashes through obstacles. Carefully guiding the boulder around, over or through defences, is where the real challenge lies – and crushing catapults, cows and elephants beneath your mighty boulder is just smashing. Occasionally you’re interrupted by a pointless boss fight, which is nowhere near as much fun as the rest of the game. Still, it’s hard to complain when you’re defeating an animated version of Michelangelo’s David by repeatedly hitting him in the stones.

Where the artistry of Rock of Ages crumbles is in that first, strategic-defence building phase. In theory it’s the more thoughtful, tactical side of the game, with a whole variety of towers, animals and siege weaponry for you to deploy. The problem is that there’s a very narrow window of opportunity in which to place your defences before your boulder is unleashed, so there isn’t time to do much but scatter these things at a few key chokepoints. Multiplayer opponents are smarter and require more thought, but more often than not games end in a straight race between two rolling stones.

That's no moon!

What keeps you coming back is the brilliant silliness of it all. Rock of Ages takes you on a tour through art history, having boulder-based battles with a variety of historical figures, from King Leonidas to Leonardo da Vinci. Each is represented by a cutout model based on famous paintings, dancing around and gibbering unintelligibly. The mix of highbrow art and lowbrow humour is clearly inspired by Terry Gilliam’s classic Monty Python animations, and even if you know nothing about art it’s hilarious to see that one picture of Vlad the Impaler that everyone uses starring in an impromptu Castlevania skit.

Rock of Ages provides a few hours of great fun, and the unique flavour and hilarious cutscenes are worth the budget pricetag. Don’t expect it to hold up to repeated playthroughs, but this is a game about smashing up artwork with a big rock, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I won’t be Shogun – my territory is too small and my victories similarly tiny – but my four wives mean I’ve produced enough offspring that one of my children might be. If someone else doesn’t get there first.

Sengoku is a feudal conquest sim set in the Sengoku period of Japan – the same era as Shogun: Total War. You can start as almost any lord, ranging from greats like the Uesgi and Hotokawa clans, to the most minor lord isolated far off Japan’s coast with responsibility to a great chain of lieges and about as much chance of becoming Shogun as Jimmy Saville.

A cartographer's dream. Wally would be so excited.

What the game doesn’t tell you is… well, a lot. You’re told you need to own 50% of the country to be Shogun, but Paradox seem to have eschewed the oft-derided tutorial for an in-game help system, which explains the interface as you click on it without revealing much of the core mechanics. A brave/foolhardy choice that will lose them a lot of impatient players. What are we meant to do, read Sun Tzu?

For example: honour is one of the key concepts, built up slowly through such actions as the assignment of titles, donating money to the Emperor, and religious observance. If it drops too low, your vassals rebel or plot. It’s like a band where the lead singer has been an arsehole once too often. I had half my home territory rise up and form a new state because my honour was too low from going to war. But the game doesn’t tell you what constitutes ‘low’ honour, or how many other hidden mechanics are at work, and it’s not always clear what the honour cost of an action is.

The diplomacy AI isn't great; this guy really should have accepted.

Both you and the AI can take part in plots, scheming against your enemies, allies and overlords – and they against you. One character selects the target, then invites other players to join in. When it works, it’s spectacular. All the tools of medieval Japan are at hand to encourage plotting: hostage swaps, ninjas to undermine or assassinate, split inheritances and so on.

Beyond this, the diplomacy system is lightweight: Sengoku is a little more stripped down than Paradox’s other dynastic titles. There’s no tech tree, for example. Combat is equally rudimentary, consisting of at most three types of unit (spearmen, cavalry or primitive gunmen), and numbers ticking down according to defences and location. The largest army normally wins.

The simple building system is slow and expensive, often taking years, and enemy ninjas can destroy guilds or religious locations with ease. Despite this, the actual map of Japan is easily the best thing in the game, packing in more easily-digestible information than an edible library.

All this offers little to distract you from the constant attacks by mutants and monsters at every step, and that’s the third problem. Instead of going out on a big, adventurous high, Lonesome Road is practically a Fallout FPS, complete with named minibosses, Deathclaws and the new Tunneler enemies liberally scattered around. There’s even one of those sequences where you have to stay alive on a slowly descending lift. Sure, they fit the setting, but not the role-playing action that New Vegas does best. It’s like Deus Ex: Human Revolution spawning a whole expansion based on nothing but bosses.

Drat. I can never find the barcode on these explosions.

Your reasons for this suicidal insanity are oddly underwhelming, given the build-up to them in the original game and last three DLC packs. During the main New Vegas storyline, you discovered that your unlucky courier wasn’t the one meant to deliver Mr House’s Platinum Chip. The man who was, an infamous figure called Ulysses, passed on the job so that you’d get the assignment instead – and not to do you a favour.

Lonesome Road is the story of why he set you on the path to being shot in the head and left for dead, and why he’s still nursing a grudge – even if the best in-game reason he has for you actually running his gauntlet may as well be, “Because otherwise you just wasted £7.49, idiot.”

As a character, he’s shown up in name and action throughout the DLC packs, but this is the first time you get to meet him face-to-face… and he’s not worth the wait. His motivations are reasonable, but while he thinks he’s an erudite philosopher, he comes across as a pretentious, jabbering bore, obsessed with something that you as the player never actually did, trying to lay down a guilt trip that just feels hollow. He does at least vary his spiel based on the faction you support, and has a very good chance of kicking your arse if you don’t have the necessary skills to talk him out of his grand plan at the end.

Stop! My 100 points in speech compells thee!

And that’s about all you get, ignoring a few new toys such as a cool rocket launcher, some forgettable items and Perks, and another unnecessary boost to the level cap. None are particularly vital though, nor justify the expense if you haven’t already rushed to buy this. If you simply feel nostalgic for the Mojave and want to go back, get the Old World Blues DLC. After conquering that, walking the Lonesome Road isn’t the only thing that makes this last DLC a pedestrian affair.

It’s a bit of both. This is an offline version of EA’s Tiger Woods Online game, built using the browserfriendly Unity engine, which enables players to compete in the Masters tournament and exhibition matches without the fear of slicing it in front of people. But it still hooks into the subscription based-Tiger Woods Online, and I don’t think I’ve ever played a clumsier attempt to integrate offline and online.

I was contentedly chipping my way to a par in a Master’s game (the golf is still decent, if unchanged since TGO launched in 2010) when I was warned I had ten minutes to save or lose my progress. I ignored it, assuming it was a general message to the entire server, as I was playing offline. The same pop-up appeared at five and two minutes before stopping the game and kicking me back to the desktop. When I tried to return to my offline game it wouldn’t allow me access.

Please stop looking at this screen and give me £15.

When Tour 12 did grudgingly allow reconnection, I poked around online and discovered something sickening: this game doesn’t even have a dedicated online mode. It has a three month’s membership to Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, after which you’ll have to pay either £3 a month or £25 per year. That’s on top of the £30 this glorified demo costs in the first place.

Yet without that membership you’ll feel hard done by. Even if it is ugly, easy to play, and attempting to drain your wallet every second, at least there are a good number of online competitions to triple-click your way through. Are they worth the subscription cost? Don’t be silly: this is golf. Actually, this is old golf: an old game, repackaged without a good going-over by the greenskeepers. Ratty, tattered, and begging for money from the first time it loads up. They’re selling you half a round and charging you more when you get to the ninth.

Altogether now: ooh!

There might be a good model for a subscription-based golf game out there, but even when this was free-to- play the cost was too high. Now that it’s saddled with a pricetag, the bare minimum of polish and one new course, I’m not even sure just telling you to avoid it is enough. As it stands, EA are already giving refunds to people who feel ripped off by what they bought.

The publishers hoped to use the connectivity of the PC to fill their pockets, but in the end it was that connectivity that brought forums and websites together to demand they do better. I can only get behind those dissatisfied customers.

Don’t let EA get away with this. Don’t buy it, and tell them this isn’t good enough.

There are no war cows in Rise of the Samurai, in fact this expansion is free of gimmicky bullocks/bollocks of all kinds. What you get for your very reasonable six quid is a cartload of new content that leaves Shogun 2 feeling sushi-fresh.

At the heart of the transformation is a corker of a campaign involving six pleasingly distinct and enticingly unfamiliar playable clans (see Pushy Bushi). Vying for control of a re-regioned Japan map, these clans have their origins in three different families, meaning you always start out with one powerful ally nearby. The blood ties between you aren’t indestructible, but the relationship usually lasts long enough to give those early years of expansion a comforting co-op feel.

No No-Datchi doesn't mean stupidly large swords.

If sister clans sent the occasional “Prepare yourself. I’m about to attack those swines in the east!” missive, and were a bit more attentive when it came to mutual defence, that feeling of companionship would have been even stronger. On a couple of occasions I’ve watched my empire crumble before my eyes while sizeable allied armies in neighbouring provinces sat around gassing on their camping stools.

On the battlefield those armies look a lot more rustic and realistic than their base-game equivalents. The 400-year rewind brings a slightly simpler unit mix and far less fancy metal armour and flamboyant pageantry. Ashigaru and matchlock units are out. Cavalry is rarer. Formations are smaller and airier.

As the title of this supplement suggests, versatile bow-and-katanaarmed foot samurai are the new skirmish stars. The only units capable of poaching their limelight are the knots of club-wielding Tetsubo monks and the whitefaced, warhorse-spurring Onna Bushi heroines.

The Europe of the 1180s was equally stabby.

Women contribute to the war effort as sly Shirabyoshi, too. These traditional entertainers use poetry, dance, and, presumably, cuddling [Tim, we really need to have a chat - Biology Ed] to persuade enemy generals to defect and friendly ones to stay loyal. Picture how crestfallen The Creative Assembly’s cutscene team must have been on being told agent animations wouldn’t feature in this expansion.

Shirabyoshi share the agent mess room with Metsuke-like Junsatsushi, the Ninja-esque Monomi, and the rabble-rousing Sou. None of these strat-map wanderers are radically different from their Shogun 2 prototypes, but there are enough variations to encourage fresh approaches. Currently I’m playing as the well-heeled Hiraizumi and doing most of my conquering bloodlessly via the Junsatsushi ‘switch allegiance’ ability. First the agent spends a few turns passively influencing the target region, then a bulging carrier-bag of cash is handed over, and – bingo – the region usually switches sides. It’s a very effective tactic. Perhaps too effective.

'A man without sandals is a man without fear' Old Buddhist claptrap.

New agents are hired through such new structures as the barter house. To unlock these, Rise of the Samuraispecific arts trees must be climbed. Don’t let anyone tell you this DLC is a lazy cash-in. Creative Assembly have thoroughly Genpei-fied almost every aspect of the game.

One of the few areas that hasn’t felt the wind of change is the historical battle folder. Anegawa, the one previously unseen scrap, is a Sengoku-era affair.

Crawley’s finest are already hinting that they’ve more Shogun 2 adjuncts up their voluminous kimono sleeves. If the coming packs are as full-featured, historically sensitive, and as transformative as Rise of the Samurai, then hang onto your Hattoris, we’re in for a treat.

Well, by not capturing that feel at all. The RTS element has a structure as traditional as Age of Empires II. The singleplayer campaign tracks, somewhat tediously, through the lightly-sketched history of Westeros. The missions are varied but plodding, where characters about as strong as paper bags follow arbitrary paths on 2D maps.

This isn’t the majority of the game. That’s House to House – the skirmish / multiplayer mode. The Houses (the leading families of the books, eg, Stark or – spits – Lannister) must raise prestige to win. This is gathered in a range of strange ways – not having your bastard children revealed, not being humiliated by betrayal, or even by killing the most people – and it’s this mode and only this mode that’s worth playing. Once your prestige passes 100, you win.

'You may use the dragon'? Like using dragons is optional.

There are two types of resource economy. Ally with towns or castles and you’ll create merchants to bring you gold, to hire social agents or mercenaries. Meanwhile, peasants work on the fields to create food. Once you have an excess of food (a shortage is strangely not a problem) it can be used to raise armies, which are slightly more specialised, tougher mercenary units – pikemen, crossbowmen and the like.

As players perform ill-defined aggressive actions, a ticker at the screen’s top tells you how near you are to war. It’s a nice idea, but not mechanically obvious.

Each house has a specialism and special unit. The Starks, for example, field tough commanders, fast footmen and direwolves. Despite this variety, combat is mostly messy and the unit AI is poor.

It’s lucky, then, that the core of the game is subterfuge. Each player has agents, bought with gold, with a variety of talents. More abilities can be unlocked by experienced units (which can be bought, for a premium) or through another resource. These agents can be used to acquire territory, scout, nobble or protect other agents, and generally confuse the issue of who’s winning.

The Iron Throne is mine by rights.

The Spy can detect hidden enemy agents as long as he doesn’t move, and detect traitor towns and agents by inspecting them. If he gets experience, he can take an enemy disguise and be upgraded, enabling him to sign secret agreements with the enemy’s allies – so they’ll join your side if it turns to war. The cheap Envoy makes agreements, the Noble Lady makes alliances unbreakable – until the Assassin kills her. The Rogue raises rebellions and buys loyalty, and the Guards protect important characters and arrest enemy characters – who can then be ransomed back. All of these tools are fun to use, but in larger levels the micromanagement swiftly becomes overwhelming, and it’s not always clear whether what you’re doing is relevant to your success.

As a singleplayer experience, this isn’t great. It’s messy, slow without being clear, graphically not cutting edge, and the loooong campaign just isn’t compelling enough. The skirmish mode would be fun, but all of these espionage tools are no use without a real person to use them on, which is what multiplayer’s for. And, as we knew already, that’s the only way to play the Game of Thrones.

Looking down through the rubble, you see an enemy soldier break from behind a wall. You aim and fire in a single motion. You’ve shot him and now he’s dead. It’s exactly like a million other games, but it feels nothing like any other game. It’s the little things that make the difference, such as the sound of your own breathing when you lifted the rifle to your face, and the way it bobbed slightly in your hands. It’s in the mark on your enemy’s chest where the bullet hit, and the way his blood spritzed from his back, marking that bullet’s exit. It’s in the way he fell, forced by some terrible weight. Sometimes, but not this time, it would be the way he clutches his stomach, yelling in Russian, or the way he fires his machinegun madly during his last few seconds of life.

Artillery strikes destroy buildings as round progress.

At some point, the developers of Red Orchestra 2 realised that if the primary interaction in your game is killing, then you should probably make the killing feel incredible. It’s this attention to detail that turns an otherwise ordinary game, a slightly more realistic Battlefield, into something great, with Soviets fighting Nazis across mother Russia.

Take the game modes, for example. The most popular is Territory, in which one team starts in control of a map’s capturable points and the enemy must take them. In this mode, reinforcements spawn every 20 seconds or so, and on maps designed to support 64 players it does a fine job of focusing attention on the shifting frontline. But it did the same in Battlefield 2, where it was called Conquest mode. Countdown mode has similar attack/defend objectives, but players get just one life per round, and the teams swap sides midway. No one is currently playing it. The third mode is Firefight, a team deathmatch variant which is popular, but feels as if it’s missing the point of Red Orchestra.

While the weapons feel remarkable, the classes that carry them are familiar. There’s the Assault class, with a sub-machinegun; the Marksman, with a sniper rifle; the Rifleman and Elite Rifleman; and a few others. The few inventive classes, such as Squad Leaders and Commanders, do little to change the flow of battle. Both roles have valuable abilities, but nobody follows orders on public servers.

Good work, tank.

Even tanks don’t add much to the experience. They require a whole different set of skills to use well, and have lovingly detailed interiors, but they are an easily ignored nuisance on the few maps that actually include them. On any server I’ve ever joined, the one tank-only map is the moment in the war when everyone disappears to write letters home to their mothers.

Let’s be clear: none of these things are bad, they’re just not why Red Orchestra is great. Ignore how dull the idea of another World War 2 shooter sounds, and look to the experiences RO2 provides. Again, it’s the little things that have made me play it for 25 hours in a week.

It’s creeping through the ruined buildings of Pavlov’s House, one of the best maps, and jumping every time you see a piece of paper float through the air. It’s listening to the footsteps echoing through the building, and freezing as you hear creaking on the stairs. It’s the time I rounded a corner to come face to face with a Nazi holding a grenade above his head, bayoneted him in the stomach, and then dived down some stairs to escape the blast. It’s the thrill of sprinting across an open field, enemy machinegun fire whizzing all around you.

Being hit could reduce this guy to a bloody smear.

Death in RO2 is so sudden and violent that you’re constantly on edge, an experience that’s exacerbated by all the little pieces of information the game is keeping from you.

Firstly, at a distance there’s no easy, instant way to tell if a soldier is on your side. The uniforms are distinct, but not the fluorescent green cycling jackets you need on a smoky battlefield. If you’re close to someone, looking at them, and they’re on your side, their name will appear, but often you don’t have that kind of time.

Secondly, there’s no instant kill confirmation. You’ll be fighting across the ruined tenements on the wonderful Pavlov’s House map, and you’ll spot a head in a window across the street. From the shape of the helmet, you’ll infer that it’s an enemy and fire. The head will disappear from view. Are they dead? Did you miss? Are they wounded and bandaging themselves? Is it safe to move on? You can only hope. Wherever it can, RO2 makes murky what other games want to be clear. There’s no ammo display on the HUD; you have to check the barrel for a rough estimate, or count your own shots. Realism mode, which is activated on roughly half of the servers currently running, removes certainty altogether by taking out friendly names, kill confirmations and the radar. It doesn’t make a huge difference, but I had more fun in non-realism mode.

Tanks are always kissing behind the bike shed.

Lastly, the heart-munching adrenaline you feel in front of your PC is mirrored in the soldier you’re controlling. When you’re stood at a window and bullets start to chip against the frame, all the colour drains from the screen, the world blurs, and your aim becomes worse than a drunk teenager in a nightclub bathroom. You need to get out of there to catch your breath, like the person who enters the bathroom after the teenager. It’s a smart way to stop camping.

All this attention to detail hasn’t prevented the game from being miserably broken. Connecting to a server frequently plops me on to a team selection screen where the buttons don’t work. The server browser refreshes only once, meaning I have to restart the game to try again. If I do successfully connect to a server, the bugs don’t stop. Sometimes when I die, I’m unable to re-spawn until I re-select my class. The XP system, which is supposed to reward you with new weapons, is completely broken, and the Steam achievements system will often reward you for things you haven’t done. At least once every two hours, on two different PCs, the game crashed entirely.

It’s like buying a beautiful dining table from eBay, having your editor help you carry it up two flights of stairs, and then discovering it has Death Watch Beetles pupating inside it. Tripwire say they are aware of the issues, and I’m confident they’ll fix them, but right now it makes playing a chore.

'Sir, there's an archaelogist hanging from our gun'

Less likely to be fixed any time soon are the German and Soviet singleplayer ‘campaigns’, which amount to nothing more than multiplayer matches with bots, connected by brief, animated history lessons. They would be fine, but the bot AI is more stupid than the larvae tunnelling under my dinner plates.

Let’s make a list, then. The AI soldiers are blind, and will run directly past soldiers on the enemy team without firing. They’re cripplingly indecisive, and will leap in and out of the same window over and over. If an enemy is close enough, he’ll try to melee you, but if you run backwards, he’ll chase you interminably and never fire.

I’ve seen machinegunners set up with their backs to the enemy. I’ve seen machinegunners set up on top of kitchen cabinets, facing a wall. I’ve seen soldiers run in infinite circles, unable to navigate a corner. I’ve seen enemy tanks drive forever into walls, and crash into the front of me, but never fire.

The singleplayer option appears at the top of the main menu, and to newcomers who aren’t familiar with Red Orchestra it provides a terrible introduction. It should not have been released. Ignore it.

But don’t ignore the game. By perfecting a lot of tiny, gruesome details, its developers have created an experience where killing a man is as satisfying as getting a tetris, and when I close my eyes I’m still firing rifles in my head.

Why? Because Hard Reset isn’t just a reference to what you’re expected to do to the army of killer robots infesting the city: it’s what the game tries to do to shooter design itself. It’s a back-to-basics FPS in a shiny modern engine, not so much throwing out such things as moral choices and fancy physics puzzles as declaring them officially irrelevant. It’s you versus roughly seventy squillion enemies, hoping to save at least slightly more of your futuristic home than you blow up.

There are at least three reasons not to fight here. All are labelled EXPLOSIVE.

There’s a bit more plot than that, but it’s not worth worrying about. Hard Reset’s story bits, which mostly serve to give you something to look at while the next level loads, are a confusing, barely coherent mass of graphic-novel type scenes that fail miserably at introducing any of its characters, or even explaining why an army of machines is attacking a city named after a lump of hair dug out of the digestive system. Beyond ‘shooting stuff’, I honestly couldn’t tell you what I was doing for most of it, right up to the point where Hard Reset just decides it’s had enough and ends with nothing actually resolved.

Luckily, it’s a much better shooter than storyteller. Members of the team worked on both Bulletstorm and Painkiller, and it shows. Weapons and environmental explosions have terrific weight to them, and enemies attack in hordes of whirling-blade death machines instead of just a couple of tough guys at a time. You spend most of your time circle-strafing and running backwards: cover mostly exists to be blown away by a charging tank and scenery is every bit as deadly to you as the enemies. Ammo is plentiful (and recharges on its own if you run out), as is health. That doesn’t mean you won’t be seeing your own splattery death a lot, however, especially in multi-wave arena fights where you have to ration your pick-ups carefully to survive.

Sometimes your best weapon is a smile. Not here. Here, it's the shotgun.

As good as all this feels, it doesn’t take long to get repetitive. There are very few enemy types, and none of them require any more advanced tactics than dodging a charge or switching to a rocket launcher to hit a boss’s brightly glowing weakpoints. Bar a spectacularly hateful final boss, you feel like you’ve seen it all very early on… and actually will have before very long. On Normal difficulty, I polished off the campaign in a casual afternoon’s play and was left with no incentive to replay it. There aren’t any multiplayer modes, and you’ll have all the weapons you actually want long before the end.

As a one-of-a-kind game, perhaps the nostalgia factor would be enough to compensate. Unfortunately for Hard Reset, it has company from both the original Painkiller and the balls-out cheer of Bulletstorm, with Serious Sam 3 close on its tail. In comparison to any of them, its back-to- basics charm feels firmly in tech-demo territory – albeit really good tech, and with great combat for the short while it actually lasts.

Whatever our memories of the shooter series, the zombie survival mode introduced by Treyarch in World at War has frequently been the best part of the regular Call of Duty: Black Ops packs. It follows, then, that a DLC pack made up of five zombie levels should be the best. It is, but not by much.

Moon's evil spacemen soak up tons of lead.

Moon is the centrepiece. You and three friends start out in a facility in Area 51, with zombies rising from the mud around you. Every few minutes a horn will sound and the zombies become faster and more powerful. Anyone frustrated by the boredom of the first few waves of a zombie map will greatly prefer this frantic opening. Within two minutes, the swarms will force you to take the cackling teleporter to the lunar surface.

You’ll find yourself in low gravity, gasping for air. Snatching an HEV mask will give you oxygen and eerily mute the sound of gunfire and incoming zombies. Like all of Black Ops’ zombie maps, you must use the points you’ve gained popping zombies to open doors to new parts of the level. Your first task is to turn on the power generator to restore gravity and oxygen to the warren of creepy moon-base corridors. If you fight deep enough into the facility you’ll get the wave gun that cooks zombies inside out. Restoring power also enables you to tear off your HEV mask so you can hear where the zombies are coming from, but it can be more fun to stay outside where a shotgun blast can send a nearby zombie flying into space. Low gravity is brilliant.

Yeah, we're annoyed about the price too.

The other four maps aren’t so inventive. They’re almost identical versions of the four World at War zombie maps that Black Ops limited edition owners have been playing for months, with some upgraded lighting and slightly reshuffled weapons. The basic ruined house of Nacht der Untoten and the gloomy swamps of Shi No Numa represent the Zombies mode in its most skeletal and boring form. The huge Tesla coils of the experimental Nazi facility in Der Reise are more fun, but the real star of the resurrected maps is Verrückt [German for crazy – Foreign Ed]. This splits your squad of four into two teams who must fight through a building to reunite, shooting zombies off each other’s backs across a large central square.

It’s telling that of all the Black Ops DLC packs the most worthwhile is 80% recycled material. Rezurrection is the best of a miserable bunch. Moon is good, but not £11.50 good, and it all seems moot when you can shell out an extra £2.50 and get Left 4 Dead 2 or Killing Floor for some more substantial, meatier zombie slaying.

Tanner may not yet realise he’s lying in a hospital bed, but that doesn’t stop reality being his subconscious’s bitch. As the suspect hits the freeway, Tanner becomes a floating, ethereal spirit, possesses a truck driver coming the other way, and turns his truck into a high-speed battering ram.

And later, things get a bit odd.

If it's ridiculous and done in a car, it's probably here.

Driver: San Francisco is one of the weirdest driving games ever, in the best possible way. It’s Life on Mars turned into a wheelman’s wet dream. Tanner’s ability to shift between cars at will takes what was previously a straightlaced series and makes it constantly fun, funny and chaotic. In the main story missions, it’s treated as a superpower that only Tanner and his partner are initially aware of. In side-missions, it’s cheerfully abused to hand out such objectives as coming first and second in the same race, helping a femme-fatale evade the cops and turning dangerous driving into a televised artform.

Tanner’s enthusiasm for all of these is infectious, and the fact that he’s temporarily possessing drivers instead of simply their cars makes for great in-game chatter from other terrified passengers. For instance, to convince his partner, Tanner torments a boy-racer by leaping into him and forcing him to smash into cops and leap off moving car transporters. Another couple of missions are about scaring people to the point of heart-attack through high-speed insanity. If all this wasn’t openly presented as a dream, Tanner would be the biggest dick this side of Saints Row 2. Instead, you can enjoy the ride, guilt-free.

Follow that car, and watch out for giant floating heads.

It can be a bumpy one though, especially on PC. This isn’t a great port, starting with the fact that it quite obviously is one. Graphically, it’s unimpressive, and with no real options beyond switching antialiasing on or off. The biggest annoyance, however, is that the controls are designed for a controller with analogue sticks, and trying to play with keyboard and mouse is a recipe for insanity. You’re also stuck with Ubisoft’s DRM, which demands an online check when you fire the game up, though at least it lets you play offline after that.

Even with a controller, the actual driving is usually mediocre, with poor handling in most vehicles, and very rubber-banded races. Rarely do you come across a particularly difficult mission. This keeps the story humming along, but makes the occasional spikes all the more noticeable when they do show up.

Without its shifting element, Driver: San Francisco would be enjoyable enough mediocrity, but nothing special next to other driving games. With shifting, it’s one of the most enjoyable racing games in a very long time. Gimmicky or not, there’s a gleeful purity to Driver’s action, from its lack of gun battles and on-foot action, to the way it soon convinces you that magically weaponising oncoming traffic can be as natural as a handbrake turn. That especially is a hell of a trick.

You must protect the daughter of a former drugs official, a key witness in a drugs trial, by killing everyone she has ever witnessed and occasionally ferrying her to new safe houses in rubbish driving bits.

The Cartels have never heard of cover.

The previous Call of Juarez games were half-decent shooters set in the badlands of the Old West. They had heart. They had a grizzled Biblequoting preacher and excellent revolvers, but all that has gone. The modern day setting is brainless, generic and devoid of personality. The engine is capable of throwing out environments of notable scale, but they’re always painfully linear wide corridors full of pop-up drug fiends and pop-in textures.

There’s some attempt at pacing. Sometimes you’ll run into overwhelming fire and have to take it in turns to rush to prescribed cover locations, which is exactly as boring as it sounds. Occasionally you’ll breach and enter a locked room in slow motion, blasting mooks who wouldn’t have stood a chance even if time was moving at an ordinary clip.

The most interesting addition by far is the secret missions each team member must try to complete for extra experience. These tasks are delivered by mobile phone, and inevitably involve picking something up while no one is looking. If a teammate sees you, they get the experience instead.

Looks menacing. Dumb as a brick.

It’s a great idea, designed to add extra spice to the three-player co-op, but the dull objectives and poor execution let the system down. Mobile calls come unbidden and slow you to a crawl so your horrible character can swear down the mouthpiece for a few minutes.

There’s nothing worse than seeing that goddamn phone loom into view as you’re throwing a grenade at a cluster of bad guys. Even as the fire pours in, your out-of-control character pushes the phone into his own face to read a text message, and then actually texts back as the world explodes around him.

The Cartel’s finest feature is a mess. Everything else is merely bland, repetitive and dull.

Then the minigun wielding ogre clones showed up. In this free roaming city sandbox, you can never predict the future.

It’s worth saying right now that this is the stupidest game I’ve ever played. I mean that in a good way. If you find yourself demanding reasonable answers to questions like: “Why does the tiger in my car calm down when I do power slides?” or: “Why am I being chased by carts pulled by gimps, and why did they just explode?” then you should steer clear of this ramshackle madness. If, however, everything described so far sounds like the best game ever made, then Saints Row: The Third was built exactly for you.

The game keeps a 'mascots killed' tally. One down.

The world’s most media savvy crime syndicate – the titular Saints – are back. But they’ve fled their home town of Stilwater to find their fortune in the city of Steelport: a generic neon metropolis studded with warped versions of American architectural landmarks. The opening scene has you and returning Saints Row heroes Shaundi and Johnny Gat dressing up as bigheaded versions of yourselves in order to rob a bank. The Saints have come along way from the grimy back alley thugs they were in the first game. They’re international superstars now. Your hostages ask for autographs as your team politely fills the money bags.

Then the women in trench coats attack. The Saints aren’t the only gang in town. The pompous Syndicate are the head honchos, and they demand that the Saints give over two thirds of all their Steelport profits to continue operating in the town. Your pal Johnny Gat politely declines by ramming their leader’s head through a plane window. One free-fall later, you’re on the streets of Steelport, and the whole city is unlocked, ready to be conquered.

Your mobile phone is the hub by which you accept new missions, check your bank balance, set waypoint locations and buy new upgrades for you and your gang. Important gang members will appear in your mission list when they have a ludicrous new task for you to perform. Completing these will unlock new safehouses and put you in contact with new gang members based in different parts of the city, unlocking more missions and furthering your quest to win over Steelport. Three gangs make up the organised crime syndicate that stands in your way, the slick European gunrunners known as the Morning Star, a lime green gang of Mexican wrestlers, The Luchadores, and the cyberpunk hackers that call themselves The Deckers.

Calm your kitty down by power sliding around.

Missions can be separated into activities and story missions. Activities are short, sharp tasks, and vary in quality immensely. Tank Mayhem throws you into a tank and asks you to roam Steelport’s streets, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of gleeful damage within five minutes. A less stimulating task has you dangling from a helicopter with a sniper rifle, shooting enemies off the tail of a fellow gang member half a mile away. Even if they’re wading through the corpses of their nearest and dearest, enemy gang members will be completely unaware that they’re being sniped, and the perfect accuracy of the rifle make this a dull turkey shoot. Not good.

But then there’s Insurance Fraud. You drive out to a given crossroad, and must charge into oncoming traffic. Left clicking at the right moment to have your character ragdoll face first into the oncoming car. The more damage you take, the more money you get. Take enough punishment and you enter adrenaline mode, which lets you steer your flailing corpse in midair, letting you swerve into the path of more cars, racking up more and more insurance money. Brilliant.

Completing each mission unlocks it as a repeatable challenge on the city map. You can drive back to each location to kick off ever harder versions of the original mission for extra money. For me, only a handful survived the novelty of the first play through. The mad, mascot-slaying gauntlet that is Professor Genki’s Super Ethical Reality Climax was one of the highlights. The minigame in which I had to cruise through a dull, undulating track on a Tron light cycle dodging firewalls wasn’t. Saints Row’s activities are wildly variable, but short enough to let you blast through the naff ones.

Luchadors: Rubbish with machine guns.

For every few you complete, you’ll get access to a hefty story mission in which the Saints fend off a major attack from one of the three rival gangs of Steelport, or strike out to take some territory for themselves. These missions contain some of The Third’s finest moments. Diving out of a helicopter into a penthouse swimming pool in the middle of a rival gang party, and then wading out with a rocket launcher to the sound of Power by Kanye West was one. Taking cover behind an angry, naked Russian ogre man to do battle with an army of clones was another.

Story missions also put you in touch with Saints Row’s surprisingly funny cast of characters. Some are just jerks. Fine, they’re all jerks – but you’ll separate the ones you can’t stand and the ones you’ll choose to drive around with you based on how much of their schtick you can handle. The pimp who speaks entirely in autotune is amusing for the first two missions, then I endeavoured never to meet him again. On a more socially acceptable level, the vengeful Shaundi makes a welcome return from the second game, and the seven foot tall, turtle neck wearing Oleg is a lovable addition.

The humour blends a shock and awe assault of nudity and narcotics jokes with some knowing, clever oneliners: “When will the rescue chopper arrive?” “Oh, in about two waves of SWAT guys”. I teetered on the brink of genuine offence throughout, but stayed on the happy side of disgusted. True, it’s a game that lets you hit an innocent pedestrian fatally in the face with a huge purple dildo, but you can’t hire a hooker, drive her into the middle of nowhere and shoot her. And there are no women-slapping quick time events, or any of the other moments of nastiness that GTA slips under the radar in the name of parody.

There are few things better in life than shooting the bejabers out of shit.

The ridiculous, funny, disgusting balance that Saints Row strikes with its characters, and the all-in attitude to mission objectives, forms the glue that holds the whole thing together. Considered in isolation, its mechanics are solid at best. The driving is easy and fast, even if the cars feel a little weightless. Choppers are powerful but sluggish and the shooting is almost laughably easy at points. My most powerful weapon for the first third of the game was the pistol. You’ll be able to wipe out a room by chaining together headshots: these enemies like to cluster together and all seem to be exactly the same height. It gets around this later by throwing huge hordes of stupid but determined opponents your way. They come skidding up in decked out cars, mounted in trucks, sniping from helicopters, sliding around on rollerskates, and as you progress you gain access to ever more powerful weaponry, like UAV drones and a gloriously destructive shock hammer. The combat in The Third is rarely challenging, but it does get pretty spectacular.

This over the top combat forms the basis of Saints Row: The Third’s co-op survival Whored Mode (aping the Gears of Wars Horde Mode). It’s a good way to get into a fast fight, but it’s been made redundant by the fact that a friend can jump into your campaign at any time to play. The addition of co-op only adds to the playground feel of the city. You can start huge, escalating fights with any of the three gangs by wading into their territory and shooting them. If you’re not concerned with the story you can buy the local establishments in each territory, boosting your hourly salary and earning you discounts in shops. Unlocked safehouses can be expanded and customised, there’s a brain melting array of costume options available, and you can even buy upgrades for you and your gang’s vehicles.

It’s mad. In fact, it barely makes any sense at all. But for all its wonky bits, there’s an odd charm to Volition’s decision to leave nothing on the drawing board. It’s not the largest sandbox, but it is packed full of brilliant toys. Saints Row: The Third’s commitment to unrestricted, ridiculous fun is unflinching, and the product is a city full of glorious slapstick debauchery.

What you didn’t know is that, back at the arcade, Dr. Peter Callofduty overheard your conversation, and he’s just had an idea.

While fighting through the streets of New York, Paris, London, Prague, Berlin and more in Modern Warfare 3, I keep coming back to this. If you compare the Call of Duty series to, say, Skyrim, or even Half-Life 2, then it’s a regressive, controlling, anti-gaming experience. Don’t compare it to those games, then. Modern Warfare 3 is an arcade rail shooter, except you can control your legs a bit.

It feels this way because, for the first time, Infinity Ward have got the scripting right. Modern Warfare 1 and 2′s bombastic scenarios frequently left you in the dark, unsure whether progress meant killing all the henchmen or tripping an invisible barrier to stop them infinitely respawning. In Black Ops, wild over-scripting left you feeling unnecessary; whole levels seemed to pass without you needing to fire a shot.

Here, you always know what you’re doing, and the answer is almost always the same: reach the marker while killing everyone in your path. Or, for a change of pace, follow this other person while killing everyone in your path.

That’s unfair. Sometimes it’s: mount this gun on a side of a helicopter or car and kill everyone in your path. As long as you keep moving forward, the fantasy never breaks.

The Russians are attacking New York, for reasons of plot.

That pace is a change from previous Modern Warfare games that means there are fewer stand-out or game-changing missions. Instead of a quiet, prolonged stealth section, like Modern Warfare 1′s Pripyat, moments of sneaking are shorter and peppered across the game. A lot of the missions now have their own self-contained arc: a sneaking opening, a disaster in the middle, and then a daring escape.

Taken individually, that makes each mission a satisfying experience. As a whole, it makes the game feel monotone, relentless, exhausting. By its end, I had killed thousands of people, each with the same set of rattly machineguns.

There are two moments that do stand out from that, one good and one bad. The good has you tumbling through a plane as it falls from the sky. With each turbulent shake and twist, you and your enemies are hurled into the walls, or cast weightless as you try to line up a shot with your pistol. The whole sequence lasts around 90 seconds, and it’s brilliant.

The bad moment is optional. There’s a warning message at the very start of Modern Warfare 3. “Some players may find some game content in one of the missions disturbing or offensive.” You’re asked if you’d like to skip that content, with no idea what it really is, and the options are “Yes, ask me later” or “No, I will not be offended.”

I lied and chose the latter. I had already watched the scene, set in London, in which an American child is blown up. You’re the father of the family, filming the scene, and your wife turns to you and says, “Are you getting this?”. She’s waiting for you to move closer. The explosion doesn’t happen until you do.

It’s crude, leering, pathetic, terribly written, and a cynical attempt to court headlines. I walked towards my family with the camera pointed in the opposite direction, killing us all while I filmed the side of a phonebox.

These men forgot to put their toothpaste in a baggy.

The rest of the singleplayer isn’t so cynical. The events of Modern Warfare 2 – particularly the dismal “No Russian” mission – have tipped the world in to all out war. You again play Captain Price, Soap McTavish, and other soldiers from America, Russia and Britain as they try to finally stop the supervillain, Makarov.

When the story interjects in between shooting, like a Time Crisis “WAIT” command, it’s complete gibberish. Example: why is that American family holidaying in London while their country is being invaded by Russia? But these moments are always brief, quickly setting up the next violent sprint. Everyone you meet has a gun glued to their hands, but it doesn’t feel as objectionably aggressive as some of its peers. The experience is so straightforward that, although sometimes dull, its seven hours of stupidity feel almost good-natured.

In all my experiences so far, the multiplayer is similarly good-natured. My time with Modern Warfare 2 was spent mostly being blown up from the sky, being stabbed in an instant from a dozen feet away, or being made fun of for sucking. Every game of Modern Warfare 3′s multiplayer, by comparison, has ended with a flurry of “gg”‘s.

I’ve probably just been lucky, but the changes Infinity Ward made are all designed to make multiplayer a fairer and less frustrating experience. It has worked.

Terrible ideas like the Commando perk, which let enemies zip towards you with a knife in an unavoidable dash, are gone. Killstreaks have morphed in to Pointstreaks, giving you rewards for capturing flags and helping your team as well as for popping heads. If you don’t have the world’s best aim, you now have some hope of getting the occasional space-missile anyway.

The biggest improvement comes through the level design. The traditional Call of Duty multiplayer map used to be slaughterhouses lined by a dozen windows and doorways, with inexperienced players as the stunned cows trapped inside. Now they’re designed to keep people moving, each area flowing in to the next, without the cubbyholes for snipers to hide inside. I haven’t yet found a level I dislike, although the German shopping mall “Arkaden” is my favourite.

You shoot these men in slow-motion mid-car crash. Yeah, just go with it.

Whatever map you play, the progression system rewards you quickly and constantly. I reached level 5 in an hour, and level 10 ninety minutes after that. After almost every round, I’ve unlocked something new, be it a weapon, an emblem or entirely new game mode.

Of Modern Warfare 3′s new modes, Kill Confirmed is the one I’m enjoying most. It’s an old idea, but it works: every time a player dies, they drop a dog tag. For a kill to count towards your team’s score, you need to collect your fallen enemies tag. Similarly, if you collect one of your own team’s tags, you deny your enemy the kill.

While the other modes can either feel aimless or messy, Kill Confirmed gives your shooting purpose, and creates a kind of ambient teamwork. It’s also dramatic, as players make desperate dashes across open ground to recover a comrade’s tags and deprive the enemy.

These moments of drama are exactly what the rest of Modern Warfare 3′s multiplayer is lacking. For the most part, whatever the mode, all you do is run around and shoot people. There is no spectacle, there are no last-minute reprieves or desperate pushes. It’s fast-paced killing with rattly machineguns, with only the upgrades to provide the compulsion to keep playing.

Wait, if the Russians are attacking, then why... everything? Why everything?

If you want purpose to your multiplayer, the co-operative Spec Ops mode is probably the best way to experience Modern Warfare 3′s thrills. There are two types. The first is the new Survival mode, in which you fight against escalating waves of baddies. After each wave, you get money that lets you buy new weapons, place mines and call in airstrikes. It’s simple and challenging.

The second mode sends you in to remixes of the singleplayer campaign’s key missions, as the attackers in that aforementioned plane assault or as soldiers assaulting a submarine. You likely won’t succeed your first time through, but gradually, as you try again and again, you and your partner fall in to step with each other. Even when playing with strangers online, we’ve quickly become an efficient world-saving robot. Playing this way skips the hackneyed plot of the singleplayer, beats its boredom with brevity, and provides clearer teamwork and direction than the mayhem of the multiplayer.

Call of Duty games have always followed a simple formula. Your side-of-the-case instructions in singleplayer are “shoot men to save world”, and in multiplayer it’s “shoot men to unlock rewards”. But previous games have cluttered that formula with terrible game design, from frustrating scripting to unfair balancing.

With Modern Warfare 3, it feels like they said, “Hey, let’s stop putting in bullshit.” To which someone replied, “Sure. Let’s mostly stop.” Modern Warfare 3 is linear, badly written and one note. It’s still, from a certain angle, regressive. It’s also fun.

It’s a frozen nation, just to the north of where the previous game, Oblivion, took place. A pleasantly brief introduction sets up the plot: Skyrim is in the middle of a revolt, you’ve been sentenced to death, and dragons have just shown up. Good luck!

At that point, you emerge from a cave into 40 square kilometres of cold and mountainous country, and that’s it. Everything else is up to you.

Even after spending hundreds of hours in Morrowind and Oblivion, the sense of freedom in Skyrim is dizzying. The vast mountains in every direction make the landscape seem limitless, and even after exploring it for 55 hours, this world feels huge and unknown on a scale neither of the previous two games did.

Spells: cooler than previously realised.

Not all of the landscape is subzero, and even among the frosty climes there’s an exciting variety: ice caverns that tinkle with dripping frost crystals, hulking mountains with curls of snow whipped up by the howling wind, coniferous forests in rocky river valleys.

The mountains change everything. Wherever you decide to head, your journey is split between scrambling up treacherous rocks and skidding down heart-stopping slopes. The landscape is a challenge, and travel becomes a game.

It’s hard to walk for a minute in any direction without encountering an intriguing cave, a lonely shack, some strange stones, a wandering traveller, a haunted fort. These were sparse and quickly repetitive in Oblivion, but they’re neither in Skyrim: it’s teeming with fascinating places, all distinct. It was 40 hours before I blundered into a dungeon that looked like one I’d seen before, and even then what I was doing there was drastically different.

These places are the meat of Skyrim, and they’re what makes it feel exciting to explore. You creep through them with your heart in your mouth, your only soundtrack the dull groan of the wind outside, to discover old legends, dead heroes, weird artefacts, dark gods, forgotten depths, underground waterfalls, lost ships, hideous insects and vicious traps. It’s the best Indiana Jones game ever made.

That's a giant he's roasting, to give you an idea of scale.

The dragons don’t show up until you do the first few steps of the game’s main quest, so it’s up to you whether you want them terrorising the world as you wander around. A world where you can crest a mountain to find a 40-foot flying lizard spitting jets of ice at the village below is a much more interesting one to be in. But fighting them never changes much: you can just ignore them until they land, then shoot them from a distance when they do.

Your first dragon kill is a profound, weird moment. I rushed to the crashed carcass to loot it, then looked up. The whole town had come out to stand around and stare at the body, a thing as vast and alien to them as a T-rex in a museum.

I tried shooting an ice bolt at it, just to demonstrate it was dead, and the force unexpectedly catapulted the whole thing violently into the distance. A beggar looked at me and said, “Oh sure, just throw your trash around.”

Save the world: electrocute a dog today.

Your character gets better at whatever you do: firing a bow, sneaking up on people, casting healing spells, mixing potions, swinging an axe. There’s always been an element of this practice-based system in Elder Scrolls games, but in Skyrim it’s unrestricted – you don’t have to decide what you’re going to focus on when you create your character, you can just let it develop organically.

That alone would feel a little too hands-off, but you also level up. When that happens, you get a perk point: something you can spend on a powerful improvement to a skill you particularly like. Every hour, you’re making a major decision about your character’s abilities.

They’re dramatic. The first point you put into Destruction magic lets you stream jets of flame from your hands for twice as long as before. As you continue to invest in one skill, you can get more interesting tweaks: I now have an Archery perk that slows down time when I aim my bow, and one for the Sneak skill that lets me do a stealthy forward roll.

Again, the freedom is dizzying: every one of 18 skills has a tree of around 15 perks, and the range of heroes you could build is vast. I focused on Sneak to the point of absurdity – now I’m almost invisible, and I get a 3,000% damage bonus for backstabs with daggers. It’s the play style I’ve always wanted in an RPG, but I’ve never been able to achieve it before.

I don't care about the environment, Spriggans damn well have this coming.

The enemies you encounter are, in some cases, generated by the game to match the level of your character. In Oblivion that sometimes felt like treading water: progress was just a stat increase, and your enemies kept pace. That doesn’t apply now that your character is defined more by his or her perks, because the way you play is always changing.

Levelled content is also just used less: at level 30, my most common enemies are still bandits with low-level weapons. And I still run into things too dangerous for me to tackle.

Taking a narrow mountain path to a quest, something stops me in my tracks: a dragon roar. I check the skies – nothing, but I hear it again three more times before the peak.

At the top I find a camp full of bodies, with a large black bear roaring over them. Hah. He’s still more than I can handle in straight combat, but as he reaches me I use a Dragon Shout. It befriends any animal instantly, and he saunters casually away. Feeling slightly guilty, I stab him in the back before it wears off.

Which is when the dragon lands, with an almighty crash, six feet from my face.

I run.

Oh this thing? I thought it was a Cliff Racer.

A roar of frozen air catches me in the back, but I keep going – over a ridge, down a short drop, and straight into a bandit. I dodge the bandit, straight into a Flame Atronarch. There are five more bandits behind it. The dragon is airborne. I throw myself off the mountain, several hundred metres into the river below.

I plummet to the riverbed, and swim until I run out of breath. When I surface, the sky is alight with fireballs and flaming arrows, the dragon is spewing a stream of ice down on the bandits, and I’m laughing.

The stealthy character I built in Skyrim would have been less fun in Oblivion. Whether you were detected was a binary and erratic matter. Skyrim cleverly gives you an on-screen indication of how suspicious your enemies are, and where they are as they hunt for you. It makes stealth viable even against large groups: if you’re rumbled, you can retreat and hide. And there’s a slow, methodical pace to it – long minutes of tension broken by sudden rushes of gratification or panic.

Magic, meanwhile, has been given an incredible crackle of raw power. Emperor Palpatine would be a level one mage in Skyrim – unleashing two torrents of thrashing electrical arcs is literally the first trick you learn, and it doesn’t even get you tossed into a reactor shaft.

The man in the silly hat is my companion. I make him wear it.

One tweak is a huge loss, though: you can’t design your own spells. Oblivion’s spellmaking opened up so many clever possibilities – now you’re mostly restricted to what you can buy in shops.

While we’re on the negatives, physical combat hasn’t improved much. There are cinematic kill moves when your enemy is low on health, but whether they trigger seems to be either random or dependent on whether the pre-canned animation fits into the space you’re in. Too much of the time, you wave your weapon around and enemies barely react to the hits.

The exception is archery: bows are now deliciously powerful, and stealth shots can skewer people in one supremely satisfying thwunk.

What does improve the general combat is a feature I didn’t quite expect: you can hire or befriend permanent companions. I did a minor favour for an elf at the start of the game that earned me his loyalty for the next 40 hours of play. Sidekicks add a wild side to fights: an arrow from nowhere can end a climactic battle, or a misplaced Dragon Shout can accidentally knock your friend into an abyss.

The Dragon Shouts, gained by exploration and killing dragons, are like a manlier version of conventional magic. One can send even a Giant flying, one lets you breathe fire, another makes you completely invincible for a few seconds. Even the one for befriending furry animals is macho: it can turn four bears and a wolf pack into obedient pets with one angry roar.

Two seconds before the most satisfying kill ever.

Before I got the animal shout, I had a Sabre Tooth problem. Crossing a fast-flowing river at the top of a waterfall, a huge feral cat spotted me. A good shot with a bow made no dent on its vast health bar, and it splashed into the water to get to me. The current was too strong to get away in time, so I did the one thing it couldn’t: turned invincible and threw myself off the waterfall.

After seconds of freefall, I hit the rocks, got my bearings, and looked up. The cat – a speck above – seemed to be looking over the falls at me. Then it slipped. Its lanky ragdoll smacked every rocky outcropping on the way down, and wedged between two stones directly above me, his huge head glaring emptily.

The first few quests you’re nudged towards get you the Dragon Shouts. After that, the main quest is a bizarre mix of some of the best moments in the game, and some of the worst.

It fails where the previous games fail: it tries to make your mission feel epic by making it about a prophecy, then does all its exposition in the time-honoured format of old men giving you interminable lectures. The acting is stagey at best, painful at worst. And it adds a new problem: your dialogue choices are now written out in full, and your only options are to react like an incredulous schoolchild to every predictable development. It doesn’t make it easy to feel like a hero.

Bears are tough. They're not that tough.

The main quests themselves are mostly good: a happy mix of secrecy, adventure, and exploring incredible new places. One location, which I won’t spoil, got an actual gasp. But then there’s an abysmal stealth mission that seems to work on a logic entirely its own: guards spot you from miles away, despite facing the wrong direction. And the boss dragons it keeps throwing at you never get any more interesting to fight – adding more hitpoints just makes the repetition even harder to ignore.

Everywhere else, the quests are magnificent. Chance encounters lead to sprawling epics that take you to breathtaking locations, uncover old secrets, and pull interesting twists. Even the faction quests are better here. It feels like Bethesda realised these became the main quest for many players, and built on that for Skyrim. They start small, but each one unravels into a larger story with higher stakes. Some of them feel like the personal epic that the main quest has always failed to be.

We got a review copy of Skyrim the day the game was officially finished, but it’s curiously buggy. Among a lot of minor problems such as issues reassigning controls, there’s glitchy character behaviour that can break quests, and AI flipouts that can turn a whole town against you. And the interface isn’t well adapted to PC: it sometimes ignores the position of your cursor in menus. There’s an update due as soon as the game’s out, but there’s a hell of a lot to patch here. Next time, maybe don’t commit to a specific release day just because it has a lot of elevens in it?

The aurora. Sweet Jesus.

These aren’t engine issues, though. Skyrim is based on tech Bethesda built specially for it, rather than the middleware engine used by Oblivion and Fallout 3. It’s a lean, swift, beautiful thing. New lighting techniques and a fluffy sort of frozen fog give the world a cold sparkle, and the previously puffy faces are sharp, mean and defined. Even load times are excitingly quick. On maximum settings, it runs at 30-40 frames per second on a PC that runs Oblivion at 50-60 – a decent trade off for the increase in scenery porn.

There’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of everything, and you have totally free rein of it. Skyrim feels twice the size of Oblivion, despite being the same acreage, just because there’s so much more to see and do. Searching for Dragon Shouts is a game in itself. Exploring every dungeon is a game in itself. Each one of the six factions is a game in itself. So the fact that the main quest is a mixed bag doesn’t hurt Skyrim’s huge stock of amazing experiences.

The games we normally call open worlds – the locked off cities and level-restricted grinding grounds – don’t compare to this. While everyone else is faffing around with how to control and restrict the player, Bethesda just put a fucking country in a box. It’s the best open world game I’ve ever played, the most liberating RPG I’ve ever played, and one of my favourite places in this or any other world.

In case I’m not getting it across, this is a thumbs-up.

After the rigmarole of picking a team (mostly unlicensed, so you get the real Manchester United, but Aston Villa are West Midlands Village) you’re on the pitch, ready to guide your team to victory.

Attacking players have more of a pulse this year. Instead of tottering level with the ball carrier waiting to be marked out, they’re far more inclined to take a run behind enemy lines, dashing down the wings and even making the occasional slanted run in the middle of the pitch.

He can stay like that for hours.

Gone are the days when you’d stand outside the opposition’s box with one foot on the ball, shouting at your men to sodding do something, only to be kneecapped by the sliding boot of a defender moments later. If your men are starting to loiter, you can command one to start running with a quick point and click of the right stick (play with a joypad, people!). It’s an essential move that bypasses occasional AI lethargy and gives you much more precise control.

But all that new attacking movement can leave defenders stuck in the mud. For the most part they’re sensible, but their refusal to dive in for a necessary crunching tackle means that a pressing team can get away with too much. On one occasion a simple clearance from a corner reached my pacey young striker, Gabby Agbonlahor. I’d caught the opposition on the counterattack and Gabby had the entire pitch to run into. The two Liverpool central defenders had taken up sensible positions, and dutifully dashed in to sandwich my lone striker as he powered towards the box. They ran alongside him for a full ten metres without delivering so much as a shifty elbow. I scored an easy goal when I should have ended up in the dirt at the halfway line.

Rooney's face is more detailed, for better or for worse.

No surprise, then, that matches in PES 2012 tend to be high-scoring affairs, but it’s forgivable given how much better the football feels this time around. Everything is faster and more precise. While FIFA’s trick stick has players performing ever more convoluted manoeuvres, PES is about passing and team movement. Matches are far more lively and competitive as a result.

It would be wrong to point to one big factor as the reason behind PES’s revival. It’s the result of a number of incremental improvements on the pitch. Players are more responsive on the ball, a tricky attacker feels different to a lumbering defender, the animations are more convincing, the crowds noisier and attacking play is enormously improved.

PES still struggles to offer anything its monolithic competitor FIFA can’t do with more polish, but 2012 is an incisive diagonal run in the right direction. If only the defenders were a little braver.

For the first time in many seasons, this year’s edition of FIFA on PC is identical to its console cousins – the same engine, animations and online modes that console players have come to expect, as well as the new defensive controls and an ‘Impact Engine’ designed to render player collisions with devastating accuracy.

The Impact Engine is great, mostly. When players collide, either in a tackle or a shoulder-to-shoulder tussle for the ball, the procedural physics system will take into account both players’ physiques and simulate the precise result. In big tackles, this means sprawling falls, in possession battles it leads to some slightly cuddly wrestling, and in mismatches the smaller man is comically flattened.

Improvments in FIFA 12 include more realistic defending.

It simulates the physicality of the sport with more realism than any other football game before it, but can occasionally be a bit too exuberant. Players off the ball who accidentally cross paths can find themselves locked in a panicky tumble of limbs. Watching footballers fall over is inherently funny, though, and the layer of unpredictability the Impact Engine adds is well worth the occasional mad moment.

The defensive overhaul is more controversial. Defenders can now ‘jockey’ attacking players, strafing in front of them with a wide stance waiting for the right moment to tackle. Most defensive encounters are about standing off the opponent, shielding areas of the pitch and blocking sneaky through balls. This is what defending is like in real football, of course, but it’s a change of pace from the close harassment and tackles of FIFA’s previous years.

This will likely prove unpopular with some players, but if you’re looking for an accurate simulation of the sometimes ponderous ebb and flow of a real football match, then FIFA 12 comes close. Occasionally teams will mark each other into oblivion, and there will be nil-nil draws – but that’s the game, and breaking through and scoring that elusive goal can feel more difficult than ever in the face of an organised and patient defence.

This looks like one of those 'Impact Engine' moments.

Until now, football games have simulated a kind of hyper-football, packed full of overhead kicks, snaking runs and raking tackles. FIFA 12 makes the brave decision to slow the game down and bring the action closer to the real sport.

It’s all the more annoying, then, to come across the small but infuriating problems that have dogged FIFA for years. A running player can be so happy to be selected that they drop off the pace – a calamity if they’re shadowing a flying striker on the way into the box. Player selection in general can still be a bit of a gamble, and free kicks and crossing can feel like a dark art.

But on the whole, it’s superb. The sensation of motion and momentum when a team breaks is incredible, and FIFA taps into the strange cocktail of agonising frustration and explosive joy that is football, and does it better than any other sports sim on PC.

If you’ve played the series before, you’ll know this isn’t quite how it works. A typical ‘race’ doesn’t end at the finish, but rather somewhere in the melee of often disastrous, constantly resetting, occasionally awesome time trial attempts. Everyone in a session races with and around one another – through one another – but only ever against the clock. They learn from their own mistakes, and from others that send cars bouncing off the approaching scenery. And, boy, do they bounce.

Thank you, tiny danger sign, I hadn't realised.

Playing the game accounts for one third of TrackMania. The other parts are creating (tracks, cars, music, minigames, general Eurotrash oddness) and sharing (via in-game personal storefronts, forums, YouTube, wherever). It’s been this way for eight years now, and the numbers involved are massive. Today, however, the one that really matters is the creating.

What does it mean when a game that’s been updated plenty of times already decides to call itself a sequel? If you ask Nadeo, it means the start of a new adventure. Season two, episode one. TrackMania 2: Canyon includes just a single terrain type, a single car/handling model, and a single ‘pure’ racing mode. No platforms or puzzles. No cities, islands, or stadium. The changes are seemingly few, but in a game of degrees and milliseconds they can feel huge.

The handling is no longer that of a toy racer. The new car is heavier, throatier, and it drifts big-time. Unlike the first game’s vehicles, it has no air-brake. That means greater surrender to the science that kicks in when, after all that panicked steering, you finally hit a jump. The tracks feel more natural, the cars animal. Is it better? Try ‘different’, like Stunt Car Racer meets Daytona.

The red paint makes it go faster.

The Canyon, for a place made of pluggable building blocks, is magnificent. A Scalextric of the gods: bored into mountains, soaring over lakes, twisting against rhyme, reason, and gravity beneath a Segablue sky. And the light: baked into the rock, lost in the cracks, gluing it all together and bringing it to life. It’s a static environment, too, which means that it’s all precalculated by the track editor. Result: you don’t need godlike hardware to play it, even in the new splitscreen mode.

As you can tell, I get rather high on TrackMania. It appeals to my inner geek with all its outward-facing technology. If I want to take a screenshot, I can spend hours on the camera angle alone, or on adjusting the replay timeline of every car. Then I can impose – heavens – 100x antialiasing on the scene. I can pretend to know what ‘GPU/CPU synchro’ really means. I can take longer making a movie about driving in circles than it took to make Inception. I can build and paint cars and then make myself some Planets, the game’s new virtual currency. I can build a casino to waste them in, or a bank to lend them to someone else. And a digital bailiff to go smash that person’s fingers? Probably! I can – which is to say I could – script all kinds of marvellous things. If only someone would show me how.

Not pictured: Donald Pleasance stroking a white cat.

Ah yes, the comedown. Being a ‘community-driven’ game by a studio so small it could barely populate a race, TM2 has no manual. Not quite, anyway. Not yet. Instead it has a wiki, designed to silence the abject what-the-fuckery from newcomers on the forums – but it raises more questions than it answers. Grilled about the lack of documentation, a studio spokesman posted: “No one at Nadeo knows every feature of the game. We are about twenty people, adding sometimes more than five or six features a day (like keyboard shortcuts, buttons, player page options, new dialogue boxes, maniahome…). I don’t know a single thing about the Media Tracker, and nobody else than me knows the whereabouts of the ManiaScript.”

This is the candour people love about Nadeo – even when, as happened recently, a power cut in France made most of the game temporarily unplayable. The angry and confused were then told by its second-line support people, the community elders themselves, that they should wait in silence or discover the rest of the game. Build a car, edit a replay, or toy with the slightly-improved track editor. Which is fine if you’re a veteran, or have a decent grasp on the game’s sprawl of user-developed content.

I must write that name down somewhere. Mania... what was it?

But what if you don’t? Sure, the track editor is simple in principle, but it can seem anything but when nothing you select or do conjures a tooltip, warning, or log entry of any kind. It gives you the right number of tools and blocks to ‘get it’ quickly, then get inventive and build tracks like the official ones. But it’s far from painless when it fails to identify what you’re trying to do (drive a road through a cliff, maybe), or even hazard a guess. An entire layer of things we take for granted is missing from this toolset, requiring players follow an online paper trail of variously handy tutorials.

Part of the problem is that Nadeo are so active in their community – married to it, effectively – that they think the game is spoken for. A major change as to how official time trials work, for instance – you have to get the gold medal time in practice first, then wait five minutes between attempts – was left a mystery for new players. Also, as with older games in the series, large portions of its ‘interface’ are just jumps to websites and forums. Others might prefer the term: ‘massive bloody holes where the user interface should be’.

Don’t get me wrong: TrackMania 2 is a beautiful, heart-stopping, narcotic racing game. Its readiness to just sit there as operating system furniture, idling in the background before roaring to the fore, is a credit both to its engine and its design. To the PC, no less. Better still is how it has embraced different control schemes – the drift mechanics favour braking with Ctrl, or tweaking the deadzone on a 360 pad – while keeping the playing field level. And, for all that will be said about the changes to the handling, there’s always TrackMania United Forever. The TM community is huge, and no stranger to divided loyalties. Why be frightened of change?

They say jump you say HOW high!?

I’ve built tracks and made ‘paks’. I could tell you just what speed of footage creates just what kind of motion blur, and the advantage of using a Hermite-interpolated custom camera. I am a proud TrackManiac. But this game is not for everyone, and I’ll even go one further: after all this time – with the name of one of the world’s biggest publishers splashed across cars and tracks – I’m not sure it’s enough.

Maybe Nadeo have some strange Peter Pan complex. Maybe Ubisoft have some strange ‘what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?’ complex. Whatever the reason, TrackMania should have been ready at launch. Obviously there’s a whole lot more to come, but basics like the interface should have been immaculate, or at the very least presentable. It should have had tutorials, pop-ups, tooltips – the works – springing from every mode and button, not sitting on someone’s esoteric fan site. It should have been bug-free and user-friendly, yet its editors are quirky at best. It should be conquering the world.

Review by Duncan Harris.

I do this a lot. Battlefield 3’s multiplayer makes me want to place a deckchair in the desert and watch the chaos happening all around. On its best maps – like the 64-player Caspian Border – every pixel on screen flickers with battle. I’ll climb to a rooftop and just freeze. In the distance, smoke stacks rise from a burning forest. In the air above me, jets twirl, chased by artillery. On the ground below, a tank has smashed through the lower floors of the building. I’ll spot a glimmer from a hillside 300 metres away, and it’ll be a sniper readying to kill me.

If someone had told me 15 years ago that this is what online gaming would be, I wouldn’t have believed them. Battlefield games have always been grand, ridiculous, futuristic designs. Wouldn’t it be cool if deathmatch had vehicles? Wouldn’t it be cool if it wasn’t deathmatch at all, but teams, and squads, and objectives, and dozens of players? Wouldn’t it be cool if there were tanks and jeeps and helicopters and jets? Wouldn’t it be cool if the maps were enormous and buildings could collapse?

Yes, it would. Yes, it is. No other modern combat shooter provides the feeling that playing Battlefield does. I love to watch that helicopter fly overhead and wonder where the person inside is going. To know that every thing I see is being controlled by another real person, each playing director and star in their own miniature war movie.

So real you can almost smell the burning people. Hmmmn, bacon...

Battlefield 3’s singleplayer is not a movie. It’s a waterslide with pictures scrawled on the insides. It’s a ten-hour long exercise in contractual obligation: here are the multiple protagonists; here are the vehicle sections; here is the terrorist intrigue and appropriate level of moral grittiness. It’s an undercooked potboiler. It’s the world’s most expensive audition tape for the job of developing a Call of Duty rival.
You play Sergeant Blackburn, who starts the game by leaping onto the roof of a moving train, kicking in the back window and then shooting his way through each narrow carriage filled with terrorists.

The game never gets any less linear. At the end of the train, we’re taken back eight hours to where Blackburn is being interrogated by two government agents. He’s telling them tales of his adventures in Tehran, fighting the PLR, and you play each of his missions in turn. His story goes like this: “I shot a man, and then I shot ten men, and then I got shot and my eyes felt like they had jam on them, so I hid behind a wall for a bit and then I felt fine, and then I shot three more men, and then I threw a grenade into the next room, and then I shot six hundred more men, and then I realised that they were infinitely respawning.”

When you find the right weapon, and in moments where the level design is particularly fine, all the shooting is great. The guns feel punchy and responsive, and enemies mostly go down with just a couple of shots. A section set in Paris in the middle of the game is the best it gets. But too often, making your way from area to area, from cover to cover, feels like a dismal slog through uneven checkpoints. Death can be instant, and you’ll play through the same three or four rooms again and again until you crack the one area that’s giving you trouble.

The government agents never flinch at the ridiculous, super-soldier adventure either, but instead play good-cop/bad cop and occasionally interject with their own war-flavoured anecdotes. “What about Lt. Jennifer Coleby Hawkins?” asks one. “Hawkins? Never heard of her,” replies Blackburn. At that point you leap in to her story: she’s a jet co-pilot, and it’s one of the most beautiful looking on-rails gun sections I’ve ever played, and one of the least interactive bits of game. At its end, after you’ve fired all your rockets, launched all your flares and bombed some targets with the expected black-and-white bombo-cam, it cuts back to the room. “Nice story,” says Blackburn. “But I don’t see how it’s relevant.”

Everybody wants to hug the man with the ice hockey puck.

It’s not relevant, and Hawkins is never mentioned again. Battlefield 3 is desperate to hold your attention by constantly throwing new experiences at the screen.

To its credit, it never reaches the manipulative, frothing madness of the latter Call of Duty games, but it never aims higher than providing a pretty looking slideshow, either. The jet section is beautiful, but you’re merely the game’s co-pilot, along for the ride. The tank section might put you in the driver’s seat, but only so you can be the game’s taxi driver. You survive an earthquake, rappel down a building, and skydive from a plane – but in every instance, you’re a puppet going where you’re told so the game can show you the next razzle-dazzle animation.

There isn’t a single interesting decision to be made in the entire campaign. If you ever try to deviate from the script, even during that touted moment of moral greyness, you simply fall over dead. The only reason to even keep your eyes open during most of these scenes is the terrible risk they might turn in to another tedious quicktime event.

If someone had told me 15 years ago that this is what singleplayer games would be, I wouldn’t have believed them. It would have been too depressing.

The co-operative mode isn’t much better, either. It provides six unique missions specifically designed to be played with a friend, but they serve as a kind of hardcore mode, and each is much harder than the regular singleplayer. I found them more frustrating than fun, and subject to the same connection problems as the regular multiplayer.

Go damage Tehran for a little bit. It's geopolitcally exciting/callous!

If you want your games to be games, don’t play Battlefield 3’s campaign. Play the multiplayer instead, where the spectacle is far grander, more exhilarating and more cinematic for being entirely under your control. It makes you want to sit back and watch.

But you can’t. Your friend just blew up the last M-COM station in the area and the defenders are falling back. You need to move up fast, so you sprint towards the cliff edge, jump and free fall. Fifteen feet above the ground, you open your parachute and land safely. It’s a moment that happens to you in the singleplayer, but here you get to do it all by yourself. It’s like graduating to big boy school.

If you’ve played Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the last game in the series, the multiplayer will be familiar. Conquest and Rush return, and so do many of the weapons. The most visible and talked about change is the welcome addition of jets, returning to the series for the first time since Battlefield 2.

You’ll spend only a fraction of your time piloting them – they spawn at base, but it’s first come, first served, and you’ll be lucky to get there before everyone else. They’re also ineffective against ground units, meaning that jet pilots are almost playing an entirely different game from everyone else.

Page 2: Multiplayer – Where it succeeds and fails.

Now something I hate: the player interactions. Not so much the intent but the lurching unpredictability. In attempting to add variety and further subtlety to talking to your charges, a new ‘Tone’ feature has been added. Sadly, it has just further muddied the waters, leaving me treading on eggshells with most of my touchy prima donnas. With morale such a key aspect of the already fluctuating player and team form, another level of obfuscation is hardly welcome.

The only Super Mario you'll see on PC.

I still love the tactics. For a country in which 4-4-2 has been a mantra for decades, one of the abiding strengths of the FM series is the versatility of its tactics. The new orthodoxy of two defensive midfielders and an attacking front four works well, but FM 2012 likes square pegs in square holes, so you’d do well to play your best players in their best positions – making forays into the transfer market essential for tactical regime changes.

I have come to hate the drudgery that still pervades FM 2012, though. So many mouse clicks to get through so much news – and I can’t risk filtering a lot of them out in case I miss something crucial. And the more that’s bolted on to the core FM engine – the more screens there are to click through to get to matches, to get through transfer and wage negotiations, to do just about anything – the more annoying it gets.

And most hateful of all is the amount of time wasted staring at an advancing progress bar waiting for the word “processing” to disappear. Come on, it’s 2011 – can’t this stuff be done in the background?

Germany takes a free kick against England. A Paul Parker-esque calamity is moments away.

But I love the matches. The 3D engine may have some clunky animation and may look like a ’90s FIFA/PES also-ran, but matches are genuinely enjoyable to watch. More importantly, they’re an ever-improving diagnostic to see what is and what isn’t working in your team – how on earth we used to cope with the CM-era text commentary to figure things out is anyone’s guess.

The thing I love most about FM 2012? That moment when I get it absolutely right, when I outfox the opposition and prove my innate footballing genius to the world. And when it all goes wrong? That’s when I can’t figure out whether I should be hating FM 2012 for not making things clear enough, or hating myself for just being so useless at it. Twas ever thus.

FM 2012 has seen off all its rivals but even before this, the FM series was the only choice, with its sheer depth and freedom compensating for the flaws that accompany it.

Review by Chris Buxton.

To do so, you accept missions from beardy quest-givers loitering under giant yellow exclamation marks on the streets of your capital. They’ll point out nearby enemy towns ripe for pillage. Stolen materials can be combined with blueprints to build more structures, which in turn can be upgraded to boost the strength of your units.

When you jump into a quest, you’re transported from your capital city view to a separate battlefield. Here AoEO morphs into a traditional RTS that will be semi-recognisable to fans of the old games. You build a base, send out a mounted scout, set your villagers foraging, throw up barracks, train an enormous army, then roll out as one angry mass and burn everything.

Take out the town centre for a quick win.

At one stage my Greek civilisation was at level five, and I was taking on a nearby tribe. My army was on autopilot and averaging about one war crime a minute. The enemy town centre was about to crumble. Their huts were aflame, my soldiers had stamped their farmland into useless dirt. A lone villager dashed away clutching a basket of fruit. An archer took aim and felled her with a shot in the back.

The gorgeous cartoon visuals didn’t soften the blow. I felt a twinge of guilt. The yellow exclamation marks made me do it, but it wasn’t their fault. The problem was that for the entire duration of our battle, the enemy village I had razed had never launched a single attack on my base. When provoked, they defended themselves, but were crushed by sheer force of numbers.

It was a sign of things to come. Sometimes I’d have to rescue a group of kidnapped tribesmen, or defend friendly bases from attack, or destroy a barricade designed to stop and annihilate fleeing friendly NPCs. Irrespective of the mission, every battle adhered to the same formula. I would build up my base, train a few dozen warriors, then roll out and destroy all enemy forces safe in the knowledge that the lethargic AI would never respond to my actions.

Troops tend to go off on their own rampage.

This was satisfying for a while, but it’s not long before missions start to feel like a chore. A constrained choice of units doesn’t help. Levelling up your town grants you points to spend on an enormous, three pronged tech tree where you can unlock and upgrade new units and buildings. As you advance further down the tree, your civilisation advances through the ages, but after six or so hours spent grinding homesteads into the dirt, I still only had access to spearmen, bowmen, swordsmen and a useless variety of javelin-throwing cavalry.

Each unit is designed to counter a type of enemy unit. Spearmen are adept at taking down mounted enemies, for example, while swordsmen mince up foot soldiers, but in practice every problem can be solved by box-selecting everyone and right clicking on it.

Occasionally, missions will gift you a devastating advanced unit to play around with. The Hetairoi are a Greek example. Mounted on barded steeds, flaming torches in hand, they’re adept at smashing buildings to pieces. They’re tough, and their rarity makes them worth protecting.

You can loot hidden chests during missions.

At level eight, I finally had a reason to change my strategy. I created a vanguard of swordsmen and spearmen to sweep away enemy combat units, then scurried them out of the range of the lethal guard-towers to make room for the Hetairoi, who formed a column and stampeded through the town. They crushed every building and razed the town centre in a matter of seconds. Most satisfying.

It was a rare moment of excitement in a campaign that was quickly becoming dull, but unique units like the Hetairoi can’t be unlocked through the skill tree. To train them on the battlefield you must install that unit’s commander at your advisor’s hall in your capital city, but you can only do this if you’ve paid for the Greek or Egyptian Civilisation Pack, which costs around £12.

As well as adding unique units, advisors confer general bonuses to your empire, and you can appoint one for each age your civilisation has progressed through. My copper age advisor lets my villagers take more wood from trees, my bronze age advisor makes my guard towers more powerful and my silver age advisor lets me train Phalanx warriors.

The capital city offers layers and layers of customisation like this. My city’s many shops and crafting lodges held interest long after the steady stream of missions had started to feel like a grind. You can boost your troops’ performance in battle by equipping them with special weapons and armour pieces at your capital city’s armoury. Separate crafting houses for infantry, cavalry and naval units let you create new gear and one-shot consumables that can buff units in the middle of a fight, or even summon new ones to your town centre at a pinch. You’ll need to buy a civilisation pack to equip the most powerful elite gear.

The square of death wins every time.

While the idea of developing new armour and weapons for my warriors from my capital city was enticing, the incremental nature of each upgrade meant I never saw much effect from my meddling. A new bow might give my archers a little extra range, and new armour might make my spearmen 20% tougher, but this never changed their level of usefulness in combat. If new items gave units new abilities and new roles on the battlefield, the upgrade system has the potential to be much more compelling. As it is, your units may as well just be levelling up. They grow slightly stronger now and then, but never become more interesting to use.

As a result, AoEO feels like two different games that happen to share the same economy. Your capital city swells, earns money, generates items and lets you configure a complex, abstract build for your armed forces, but during the brief loading screen that separates the city view and a mission, that build degenerates into a repetitive, straightforward RTS. Build. Farm. Forage. Chop wood. Build barracks. Train army. Boxselect. Right click. Win.

The Egyptian civilisation doesn’t offer much more variety. Their units are a little cheaper and slightly more fragile, but while Egyptian axemen and camel riders look different from Greek swordsmen and cavalry, they all work the same way in a fight. The Egyptian healing and support units, such as the Priestess of Ra and powerful War Elephants, are the only things that really set the two factions apart.

Build enough troops and victory is assured.

If you want more of a challenge – and you will – you can also face off against other players in one-on-one or two-vs-two games in Sparta. This unlocks at level seven, and gives you a new way to earn experience, and acts as a much better test of your army’s build. Writing this review during the beta period meant there weren’t many opponents to face, and battles were inevitably mismatched. These problems will be alleviated by more players, but others won’t.

Currently, paying players who have access to Commander advisors will be able to use elite units like the Hetairoi, and even if two players are evenly matched, it’s difficult to see what upgrades the enemy has equipped, adding an unpredictability that makes countering enemy units difficult. At the very highest level, elite items can make innocuous units incredibly powerful.

So PvP will likely be tough for players who haven’t paid, but otherwise you can theoretically hit the level 40 cap without spending anything. There are no microtransactions in AoEO. You buy civilisation packs to gain access to the best loot, or campaign packs for more missions. There are plans to add Celtic and Persian factions.

Age of Empires Online feels perfect for a casual, occasional fling. If you want to build a great big army and thoroughly stomp an enemy then it delivers. It’s a beautiful game, packed with personality. The Hetairoi charge proudly, siege towers waddle comically and farmland burns convincingly, but even in the throes of my toughest battle I found myself clicking around, looking for more to do. As my forces overran the city walls, I collected all the cows on the map. I herded them into my base to form a bovine defence force, and suddenly realised just how bored I was. Until the battles become more challenging, all that city-building is just meaningless fiddling.

Best pack a portable stove and some marshmallows, because we’re going camping: the new maps are perfect for snipers and hidden bastards who like to find a corner and wait for prey to pass by.

The wide-open golf course of Hazard is the worst for this. Overlooked from both ends by marksmen, it’s virtually impossible to cross from one side to the other without a sniper adding an extra hole to the green, by way of your face. For a while the bright, undulating fairway and abandoned golf carts may fool you into thinking it’s an entirely fresh map. In fact, it’s a crafty re-hash of World at War’s Cliffside arena. This map pack costs £11, by the way.

Good shot. He'll be back in two seconds.

Hazard’s bright and airy style at least provides a break from the dreary greys and browns of Black Ops. The same can’t be said for Drive In, or the military labs of Hangar 18. Drive In’s burnt-out arcades are suitably post-apocalyptic, and the enormous stealth bomber in the middle of Hangar 18 provides a striking centrepiece, but both maps suffer from the same problem. As Black Ops’ visuals become more interesting, the map layouts themselves become more and more remorselessly predictable.

Let me give you a guided tour. Here’s the big open middle bit overlooked by elevated hidey holes. I like to call it “doom alley.” Nobody goes there. Next up, the warren of rat-runs around the outside where the actual fighting happens. Let’s go take a look at – oh dear, we’re dead. Turns out there were men hiding in two of the nineteen corners of this room we wondered into.

In Black Ops, there's always someone behind you.

The sprawling, monolithic Silo come closest to providing something new. Its maze-like geography and huge concrete installations funnel players into a series of small and difficult skirmishes, but until you learn its complex, fiddly floor plan, you’ll find yourself getting shot in the back by unseen opponents over and over and over again.

Which leaves Shangri-La, Black Ops’ latest zombie offering. The lush jungles and ancient stonework make this one of Black Ops’ best-looking zones, and the addition of spike traps, zombie-bothering golden gongs, infected monkeys and even a shrinking ray, help it to stand out from the game’s bizarre selection of zombie levels. It’s silly, funny and surprisingly nerve-wracking, but is it worth £11? No.

Black Ops’ competitive maps are becoming more and more like novelty paintball arenas. Visually fancy, geographically familiar, and as frustrating as ever for non-snipers. The ambitious zombie level doesn’t even come close to justifying the ludicrous price tag.

Here’s one they did. I won’t spoil anything about the plot of the new Missing Link DLC, but I’ll tell you how I took out its boss.

After ten minutes of methodically stalking and knocking out the guards patrolling the area, I hacked a turret. Bulletproof glass separated the room the boss was in from the larger open area I was clearing out, so I couldn’t make the turret shoot him directly. But I could get beneath that room, and when I did, I found an open doorway at the back. Too high to jump to, even with my augmented legs, and no crates nearby to stack. But there was that turret.

Avoiding the gaze of a well-armed heavy on a high balcony, I snuck out to grab the gun emplacement with my strength aug, carried it beneath the boss room, and climbed on top of it. Using X-ray vision to see the boss through the floor, I waited until he turned away from the opening, leapt up through it, and grabbed him from behind in a sleeper hold.

It was tense, tough and brilliant, and this whole enormous mission is tense, tough and brilliant. It inserts itself into the timeline of the original game, between leaving Heng Sha on a mysterious boat and arriving in Singapore. Rather than sleeping soundly in a stasis pod, as the main game implied, you’re discovered and wake up in captivity.

You’ve lost your items and all but the basic augmentations – punching and level one hacking – but you’re soon given a generous windfall of praxis points to buy new ones. Starting from scratch, using what you find, and trying new options in a hostile environment – it’s all an intentional nod to the excellent prison break in the original Deus Ex.

I assumed that was the whole thing – an exciting escape section on a prison ship – but that’s just the intro. The bulk of it takes place after you dock. It’s a huge mission with masses to discover, and Eidos Montreal have given it an almost hub-like structure. A lot of the later encounters take place in areas you’ve already cleared out, repopulated with guards and hastily set up defences – like that turret I used for a boost to take out the boss.

It’s not like the main game’s cities, Detroit and Heng Sha. This isn’t a friendly area, and despite a few sidequests, it doesn’t have that same sense of open exploration. But there is a surprisingly in-depth story, and some tricky decisions to make.

While the backtracking is necessary for the story to make sense, the way it’s handled isn’t ideal. There are no loading screens, but you have to sit through a suspiciously long ‘bioscan’ between each area, during which the game is obviously loading the chunk of level you’re about to enter. When objectives lead you back through two or three areas you’ve already visited, it means a boring walk through covered ground with several painfully long waits along the way.

It’s not a big deal. The levels themselves are magnificently rich with alternate routes, plot detail, and subvertible security systems – including a new turret that fires Typhoon mines. The structure makes it possible to complete later objectives before you’ve been given them, and it’s handled elegantly – you can even steal the boss’s personalised weapon before you fight him. And the whole thing is just massive. It took me five hours to play through, with a quick and brutal stealth combat style, exploring the levels but not scouring them.

The excellent boss fight and a satisfying story conclusion end it on a high note, with a strong hint at more to come. It’s rare for DLC to live up to a great game, rarer still for it to fix that game’s biggest flaw.

The Missing Link is priced at £8.99 / $14.99 / €10.99, and it’s out on Steam next Tuesday – October 18th.

Splendid. A snowy forecast means a turn without US air attacks.

The basics of battle are as easy to understand as the internal workings of a Molotov cocktail. Move a unit next to an enemy (artillery and naval units have longer reaches), check the combat odds tooltip, then commit to an attack, or think again. What gives the scraps their amazing texture is the vast range of units (400) and the telling influence of terrain, experience, and luck.

Yes, I could probably take Bastogne by battering it with green Panzers for a few turns, but it would be cheaper to soften up the defences with nebelwerfers first, then go in with those grizzled flamethrowertoting pioneers I recruited on the way to Moscow. Without swamping you with stats or suffocating you with theory, the game nudges you towards historical tactics.

A somewhat ambitious route for a tank.

Before Alex worked on Panzer Corps, he fashioned free prototype Panzer General Forever. The lengthy apprenticeship shows in the quality of the AI. Though a little flummoxed when asked to play as the Axis in the Operation Sealion scenario (the 26 campaign missions can be played separately as either side) most of the time the CPU handles itself with deadly aplomb. Leave bombers unescorted, arty unprotected, and badly damaged units exposed and the enemy is drawn to them like wasps to a jammy-faced toddler.

Apart from the AI, overhauled visuals, and some minor Panzer General 2-style rule changes, the most significant improvement has to be the sleek inbuilt PBEM. Last seen in Battlefield Academy (76%) it makes finding opponents and exchanging files a breeze. I’d like to have seen a few more than ten bespoke MP scenarios, but with the bundled editor this store should swell rapidly.

Scratching around for reasons not to buy this, the best I can come up with is the price. For a game that draws so heavily on an old design, £30 feels a tad steep, especially when there are free fan-made versions of Panzer General 2 available.

Desktop Dungeons was designed a year ago as a simple short web game, with the look of a cutesy roguelike. After extensive rejigging, it’s been recreated as a more polished but equally compelling paid-for browser-only game. The art has been redrawn, so the creatures and heroes are now all gurning handdrawn faces. While it’s still very simple, Desktop’s cartoony style comes across better than the recent Dungeons of Dredmor.

Each ten-minute-long level starts with your hero alone in a singlescreen labyrinth. As you click to move him, he uncovers more tiles, Minesweeper-style, and regains health and mana (also recoverable through a very limited number of potions). So part of the game’s puzzle element is to not explore the dungeon too quickly, as the fog of war is effectively a secondary health bar. If the hero dies, the game has the same attitude to its heroes as Majesty: they are simply a limitless resource to be exploited by the Kingdom Administrator – you.

Goblin beserkers: when you don't care if your hero comes back.

Your aim in each dungeon is to kill the end boss – much harder said than done, as he’s a high level monstrosity. Heroes can reliably kill enemies of their level or below, but that doesn’t pull in much experience. They get bonus experience for killing high level enemies, so the bigger puzzle of each level is in gambling your limited resources to level your hero up to kill the boss, without dying en route.

You’re aided in this by a clever little system that lets you know what the outcome of your next attack will be (although it doesn’t always take special powers into account).

Kill the boss and you can take his trophy (worth lots of gold) and escape the dungeon.

Each of the randomly-generated dungeons is balanced so that there’s always a levelling path open to you, though you might need to think it through. Some tricks are explained in the excellent tutorial, others you’ll need to work out for yourself, such as only attacking poisonous or manadraining creatures just before you level up, or using the Warlord class’s death protection spell to stay alive.

The dungeon map. Glorified sandpaper.

Once you’ve established a town on the surface, you get to explore dungeons in the local hinterland with a hero chosen from the races and classes available to you. As you upgrade the town buildings to unlock more classes and races, you also unlock a wider variety of monsters, seemingly balanced against a related class.

The brevity results in some balance issues. I found myself in a loop, where the difficulty of missions had risen to the point that I was forced to grind the easier ones for the money necessary to attempt the harder ones. A game rule that diminishes the returns from a given boss-trophy means that repeated failure can spiral downwards. You’re never in the situation where you can’t do a mission, but you will often be without the more expensive unlocks that make the mission easy. If they introduced micropayments, I’d definitely pay for a shortcut.

With that strange, enthused humour that’s become the norm in indie games (for example, all the spells have pidgin english names, such as Cydstepp), the main problem with this wonderfully netbook-friendly game is that you can’t play it on the move. Hence the name, I guess.

Do you hang off the left corner of the lorry or the right?

Upon arrival at bins, you assume control of your perambulatory colleague. That’s when the real excitement begins, as you take each bin (both wheelie and bag are represented) and slowly, tediously empty their contents into your lorry.

It’s a clinical and frankly naive overview of municipal waste management. One in which nappies never fly out of binbags and smear down your shins, and Co-op bags with small amounts mysterious liquids collected in the bottom never leak down the back of your neck. It looks and plays like an otherworldly, 3D animated concept pitch, something Suffolk council might create to sell the idea of waste management to a planet of mucky, indifferent idiots.

It’s a sim as unappealing as its title, and impossible to enjoy even in that ironic manner you can often get away with in games like these.

Arma has been like this for ten years. Its developers, Bohemia, have always resisted the urge to smooth out the experience, instead adding more layers of complexity.

If you want easy, simple or even a fully working game, look elsewhere. Arma X: Anniversary Edition is every game in Bohemia Interactive’s Armary (they cruelly didn’t take the opportunity to call it that). They’ve rescued 2001’s Operation: Flashpoint and its Resistance expansion pack from the original publishers, Codemasters, and rebranded it as Arma: Cold War Assault. It joins the current platoon of Arma games: Arma: Armed Assault and its expansion Queens Gambit, and Arma II and its various add-ons, Operation: Arrowhead, Private Military Company and British Armed Forces.

An AI soldier, not reacting to gunfire.

It’s a huge package. The biggest game has 400km2 of island to explore. The most recent games have a huge number of real-world military weapons and vehicles, civilians and even animals. The islands vary in setting – dense Eastern European forests, cities, crumbling villages and foggy deserts are all there to patrol. It’s a complete military toybox, using real places as the backdrop for fictional wars, in an ever-growing world the developers and fans refer to as the ‘Armaverse’.

Dropping back into the first game is like slipping into a pair of wellworn army-surplus boots: the newer games are still built on some of the tech that powered OpFlash, hence the familiarity, even if the spectacle is somewhat muted.

I can still remember my first attempt to play OpFlash: the comforting muscle memory of every other shooter suffered a severe cramp when attempting the ridiculous finger contortions asked of me. Coming back to it now it’s still tough: beyond the simple movement controls there are a series of nested menus – the calls and responses of military manoeuvres – right where you expect weapon selection to be. It’s Bohemia’s clumsy solution to their ambition: they want you to have lots of control over your soldier and his subordinates, to be able to order them around with a huge degree of freedom. They want you to be able to split squads into teams and individuals and send them all over the battlefield. But their game is also a shooter. Reconciling those two extremes has always been the series’ biggest challenge, and it’s still an uneasy balance.

Tanks can be used as impromptou cover.

Soon I was running in the early morning sunlight, to my left and right a platoon of soldiers dashing across the undulating landscape. The world is a huge landmass of rolling hills in which Bohemia place missions: there’s a day and night cycle, villages, roads. It allows for astonishingly open-ended action. Over the horizon, a full two minute’s run away, is the enemy. I hear the warnings of chattering friendly soldiers before I’m able to make out the opposing force: miniscule, camouflaged figures against a brown background. Then a puff of smoke explodes from behind a tree and I realise they’ve got a tank.

We split up. One set of soldiers runs down the hill, using a treeline to keep separated from the enemy. My squad simply stays where it is, holding back from the fight, engaging from the high ground. It’s my favourite bit of any Arma game: while the battle unfolds I get to watch all the systems interact from a cosy vantage point.

Another puff of smoke from the tank as the enemy notice my nearby soldiers. A tree collapses under its tracks as it heads towards them. Tiny flashes of gunfire from the supporting soldiers hundreds of metres away. It’s all unscripted, generated according to the AI rules. I can’t fathom how this could even have existed a decade ago. Even when the AI breaks, and I watch the tank grinding over the fallen tee, nose up, barely any forward movement, it’s something to behold.

12 enemies are hidden in this screenshot.

There are battles like this across all three games. Brutal, buggy slogs that put you in position, give you orders and tell you to get on with it. They range from single-man assaults on tank bases, and belly-down crawlfests where you lie yards away from patrols, holding your breath, to ground-jarring, PTA-inducing hell fights. You’re dumped in tanks, planes and helicopters, or given a tank platoon to order about, in single- and multiplayer. The simulation scales to the challenge.

Given that it’s a dynamic simulation, which creates its own outcomes – and that it’s not playercentric, so an AI teammate could complete the objective – it’s odd that Bohemia insist on providing us with a story. They funnel you through the world they’ve created, sometime giving you optional vignettes to take part in. The increasingly sophisticated way they do this, from Cold War Assault’s fairly straightforward yomp to Arma 2’s branching epic with its different paths and multiple outcomes, provides the clearest sense of the progression of the series.

There’s also Arma 2’s Armory: a multiplayer lobby set up like a tradeshow for military hardware. The players wander the grounds, inspect the hardware, then select items they like and vote on the scenario – attack or defend, etc. The game then takes all these elements, shuffles them like a deck of cards, and – tadaa, you have a mission incorporating them all.

Enemies are often far away and in cover.

In the past I’ve been dropped into a fight against a tooled-up military helicopter armed with only a quadbike and a handgun. I’ve chased through the hot desert sun with a giggling Welshman on my tail. I’ve never known fear like it, and never been more amazed at a game’s ability to accommodate player choice.

The Armory system will be used to generate missions that form part of the main story of Arma 3, the game building the story around you, but right now it’s the easiest way of getting into the game for a quick tank vs sniper battle with friends.

It’s a good starting point. Arma is best when played with other people, but finding an unmodded server and a place where newbies are gently walked through their tottering baby steps is getting harder by the day. You should persevere. Find your flavour of Arma and hunt down a group of players who will accept your clumsy attempt at playing soldiers, because you’ll have moments where that inherent clumsiness won’t matter. You’ll be hooked up to Teamspeak, hiding behind a bush while a teammate, miles away, is watching you advance through binoculars reporting on enemy positions. You’ll freeze, pinching your bladder as he shouts a panicked warning to stop, wait. As you lie there in the dirt, a tank will rumble by, and the pair of you will take deep, deep breaths. When it passes and you’re free to move, you’ll know why Arma is worth all the trouble.

Bravo Oscar Oscar Bravo Sierra , over.

Is every game in the package worth playing? Arma 2 is certainly the best: the AI is generally smarter, making possible larger open battles than the original was capable of. They’ve also worked on the engine since launch: it ran at close to 20fps on the machine I originally reviewed it on, that same PC can now get 60fps.

Just that and the expansions justify the price. The basics remain the same, but each game in the series has its quirks and community. Arma is as much a platform for vehicle designing, world-building, soldier tweaking modders as it is a game. Buying the full package gives you access to ten year’s worth of that community’s work. A clunky as the original might seem, as middle-childish as Armed Assault feels, there are reams of mods, technical upgrades, new weapons and vehicles and more missions, for all the games.

There’s a reason why Arma stands alone in what it does; it’s because what it does is so ridiculous, so impossible and so clunky that copying it would be the road to ruin for anyone else. Codemasters tried and failed, and instead turned OpFlash into a linear shooter.

Arma is a soldier simulator that takes you from the lowliest grunt to a commander or a sky-troubling pilot. Is it tough to get into? More than any other game that has hooked me, and it has a habit of breaking quite spectacularly. But Arma is only complex because it does so much without compromise. It asks a lot of its players, but you’ll get so much out of it in return.

When enemies get too close, panic spam electricity.

There’s no PvP, yet. Along with a few other bits some would consider part of the core experience: crafting, gathering, auction houses. These are part of the post-release timeline. Instead, Gods & Heroes brings something new to PvE: minions.

Early on, you’ll find people that swear loyalty to you, and you can slowly build an army of these AI companions. They serve in damage, aggro-attracting defence, and healing roles. They’re not as powerful as other players, but they do make you a balanced solo unit.

It gets chaotic in groups, not least because the AI is baffling. My AI healer was flawless – he healed – but my defender would brazenly pull off idle animations while I dealt with the aggro from a single fireball. Minions also give you a lot of visual clutter to worry about: even a small group begins to feel like a raid.

This – or the unfriendly chat system – may be the reason for an unfortunate side effect: Gods & Heroes is the least sociable MMO I’ve played. It wasn’t until level 12 that I managed to get someone to talk to me. I tried everything. “Hello! Bonjour!” I even tried a cheerful roleplaying salutation. “By Neptune’s gills, ‘tis a fine night to be punching spiders!” I was ignored.

Two players, four minions, one enemy, no cup.

Even with the nice touches, such as your estate – an instanced homestead with its own mission chain of rebuilding – and your growing band of minions, the world as it is now is too… well, Spartan. With too much left for post-release, cities are filled with vendors selling useless grey loot. A few friendly and generous features are in place: quest objectives are marked on maps, and there’s a fast-travel system that teleports you to any Pegasus statue you’ve visited. But that’s not really enough.

The fact I’m playing Gods & Heroes this early isn’t ideal, either for me or Heatwave Interactive. But this is the product that’s being sold, and that’s not ideal for you. All I can do here is appreciate the potential, roll my eyes at the utterly expected chains of killing and fetch quests, and thank the two Frenchmen who eventually grouped up with me to take on the instances. Hopefully, enough people will play that the developers get the chance to fill their world. And hopefully they’ll do it while people are still there.

Swoosh. The door opens.

For all its open roads and bright blue skies, for all its sweeping canyons and hub towns, Rage is still resolutely an id Software shooter. For all their pre-release bluster of expansive worlds and template departure, no one knows this better than id Software. The keycard is as much of a nod to their previous works as the Doom mug collectibles players can sell to shopkeepers, but it also feels like an acknowledgement of a design lineage: despite the apparent differences, Rage is the continuation of the corridor.

The perils of driving home on November 5th.

You wake from cryo-sleep as one of the world’s last super-soldiers. You’ve been put in the freezer and sent into space due both to your perceived aptitude at rebuilding societies after mini-armageddons, and your badassitude. But – as the desiccated corpses of your chums in the tubes next to you demonstrate – something went a bit wrong. It’s 106 years after the mildly explained apocalyptic Bad Thing happened, and the destroyed world has split between rival gangs of mentalist bandits, flesh-eating mutant freaks, moustache-twirlingly evil fascists, and honest folks trying to make a living. It’s this latter lot with whom you throw in your hat-made-of-guns.

These folks might peddle an image of the innocent settler, but almost everyone you meet on a polite conversational basis – as opposed to those who want to make your skin into a coat – wants you to go and eradicate swathes of humanity. Rage’s missions don’t need much explanation: you’re sent down into a pit, and once you’re in there, there’s no talking to the man-monsters that dwell within.

I followed tight paths through power plants, down sewers, and clifftop shanty towns. Doors are kept conspicuously shut, partly to dissuade the dream of deviation, but also so the same area can be rearranged and returned to as part of another, later mission. Missions aren’t ever complicated, but they are consistently well paced and imaginative – never too short, rarely too long – and spotted with the right amount of spectacle and surprise.

3,2,1, moustache off! Awww, you win.

Rage’s post-apocalyptic wasteland regularly opens out into bowls and basins: little thunderdomes for the game’s car combat. They give players space to use their vehicles’ boost and handbrake, time to deploy rockets, machineguns and strange pulse weapons to immolate the bandits on their tail. But these sections aren’t the norm, just thicker beads on the thread connecting the game’s three hub-towns. Driving between these townships is where you work through Rage’s more typical shootery bits: murder anyone who gets in your way and never stop moving forward. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

There’s not much to distract in the wasteland, in any case. Hub towns provide missions, each of which requires Rage’s Mr Rage (not his real name, but better than his actual title of Mr Buzzcut Generosoldier) (also not his real name) to go to an allotted place and introduce bullets to the skulls of everyone who lives there. Accept a quest and you’ll be given a little marker to head for. Chug around the game’s outsidey bits without a quest and you’ll find a true wasteland: there’s little to do beyond wreck the handful of car-driving bandits who respawn every time you poke your head out of a settlement. I quickly started to reserve my jaunts outside to mission-specific journeys, only hopping in my car when the job asked me to leave town.

The jobs did that often. In a ten-hour game, I spent about an hour at the wheel, and a few more in multiplayer (the only competitive modes are vehicle battles, and two player co-op missions the only way to shoot with a friend on foot). Fortunately, Rage’s vehicles are fundamentally pleasing to drive. They feel responsive, even with the binary input of a keyboard. But better than that, they feel fast.

Page 1 of 2. Next: Driving and controls.

Dreamlike Forests give way to a harsher, industrial landscape.

Everything in Limbo is out to harm you. From the moment the scenery come to life when that first giant spider-leg unfurls, a hundred times more menacing than it has any right to be, you’re in world that doesn’t want you there.

It’s a meat grinder, coldly snapping beartraps around your fragile little frame, crumbling the boy into a pile of body parts. It stresses you into making mistakes: you know exactly what horrible thing is about to happen to your little ward when presented with a pressure plate and a crushing device.

Limbo’s obstructions are grossly imaginative, requiring morbid solutions: one puzzle’s resolution comes when you drag a corpse into a pool so you can use it as a bloated, floppy stepping stone to the other side. When not being chased by implacable spiders with a penchant for skewering bodies, you’ll be feverishly searching for floating crates to ride as water rises above your ankles, or plucking the remaining leg off a maimed spider and rolling its body to block spikes and clamber to a ledge.

The only people you meet want to murder you.

Limbo’s initial morbid world of beartraps, corpses and ravenous arachnids eventually leads you into industrial levels, full of more conventional puzzles, such as gravity switches, elevators and even machinegun turrets. It’s around this mark that the puzzles become far more frustrating, requiring precision timing to progress. You’ll occasionally be reduced to a weeping mess of tears and tantrums, defeated by a straightforward but deadly puzzle that can only be overcome by getting everything just so.

I spent a lip-gnashing, keyboard smashing 20 minutes trying to run across a length of railway track before a descending minecart hit a switch to electrify the rails. Twenty damn minutes watching my boy judder as his tiny legs failed to make the last jump.

Fear the brain slugs, who force you to walk into buzz saws.

Your most horrific foes are the brain slugs, which drop from above and burrow into your skull. Once nestled in your cranium, they force you to stagger in one direction – normally straight into a pit of spikes.

Make no mistake: you’re going to die. A lot. It’s impossible to pass five minutes without succumbing to Limbo’s sick snags. But finally realising the infuriatingly simple solutions and achieving that bloody jump will reward you with Portalsized feelings of smugness and relief.

It’s a little disappointing to have waited a year for this game to get ported to PC only to find keyboard control is locked to the cursor keys, but in spite of that – and Limbo’s short playtime (around three to five hours) – you simply cannot miss out on this darkly evocative experience. It has its frustrations, but it’s a beautiful argument for games as art

Last year’s game touched on that spirit, and now Codemasters Birmingham have sent a few thousand volts through the suspension for 2011.

The key is a far more accurate driving model. You’d think being chastised by a new, more demanding physics system would make you feel less of a hero, but actually it’s the opposite. The new, more lively handling makes every successful corner in F1 feel hard won.

Rammed multiplayer grids mean messier first corners.

To help, there’s a configuration of driving aids. With everything switched on, your car is painted to the road. In addition, there’s a new driving line that rises up around corners for a better view from that carbon-fibre coffin the F1 drivers wedge themselves into.

F1 can now hustle a McLaren, which I try out. I’m launching off the line and deftly scything through the pack on the run down to the tight left-hander. With nary a hint of tyre smoke, I sweep in and kiss the apex of the corner. Turn two is dispatched with a chuckle of haughty disdain as I neeeowwwww past F1’s Dick Dastardly, Fernando Alonso. I’m Lewis Hamilton!

Now it’s just the simple task of slicing left around the uphill turn three. Except it isn’t – the rear of my car is galloping past me and I’m in the process of being violently deposited, backwards, into the nearest run-off area. OK, I’m not Lewis Hamilton, but for a moment there it was close.

Until we perfect the tech, you'll have to make your own vrooom sound effects.

For the solo player there’s not a great deal of structural change – the career mode is basically as it was, barring two new circuits and more frequent updates on rivalries with other drivers. The biggest challenge is getting to grips with KERS and DRS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System and Drag Reduction System), two genuine features of the sport that act like the traditional videogame turbo boost.

Venture online and F1 2011 boasts a vastly upgraded offering. Not only can you now play with 15 other drivers, but any empty grid spots can be filled with AI competitors so you’re always elbowing your way through an uncommonly populated field of cars. There’s also the option to run an entire championship in co-op as team-mates, collaborating to win the Constructors’ Championship but competing to secure the Drivers’ title. PC gamers are spoilt for choice when it comes to online racing, but F1 2011’s competitive additions are wonderful.

The feature set may be loaded in favour of multiplayer, and there really hasn’t been a great deal added to the career path, but even if you’re devoid of contact with the outside world, the new physics engine is a meaty challenge. If you do pluck up the courage to head online, though, that same handling model, combined with the blend of human and computer drivers, makes this one of the most exciting multiplayer racers in years.

Scary, horrible, hilarious. Three traits of the best zombie fiction, which developers Techland have successfully infected their openworld zombie apocalypse sim with.

The setup is simple. You wake in a hotel on the beautiful holiday resort of Banoi Island. A mysterious man on the other end of a distant radio system is promising escape. You need to contact him, but there’s a more pressing concern. Almost everyone is dead. And walking.

Smacking zombies never gets old.

A brief prologue, and you’re shoved out of the door of a beach hut, armed with an oar, and instructed to clear out the nearby lifeguard tower. Dead Island’s story is centred around a series of safehouses scattered about the open world, and its primary missions send you deeper into the island as you move from one group of survivors to the next.

The first thing I noticed was the blood. When a zombie left its desiccated meal and lumbered towards me, I smacked it with the oar so hard its ribs flew out of its body and span away, spilling red stuff from its torso in all directions. The zombie groaned a little, then tried to get back up. I whacked it on the back until it expired. The gore was spectacular. The violence of Dead Island remains remarkable throughout the game.

Half an hour later, the lifeguard tower was secure and the survivors in the beach hut are free to move in and start building a stronghold. Once your comrades are established, you can wander around chatting to them, taking on more tasks to help them out. There’s always a main quest objective to follow, but it’s often more satisfying to complete the dozens of sidequests that you pick up from survivors. If you’re willing to risk your neck finding lost loved ones and medicine, they’ll reward you with cash and weapons.

When plumbers go bad.

So I found myself heading into the surrounding bars and swimming pools, to find food, water and booze. In this order: food, water and booze.

Missions sent me all over the island. I travelled to the coast to get flares from a downed helicopter, drove out to a gas station to secure some vital orange juice, and braved the resort’s hotel basements to rescue radio equipment. You spend a lot of time in Dead Island on fetch quests, but they’re enlivened by the constant threat of zombie attack.

It helps that the island is a beautiful, convoluted place to explore. Small wooden stairways coil around little pools and holiday huts, each area encircled by tropical fauna. It’s a careful layout that encourages exploration and puts you in close quarters with the lingering undead.

As I completed more missions, I gained experience and levelled up. There are four characters to choose from, and each has three skill trees from which you can unlock new combat moves and general buffs to make you and your weapons more resilient. I played as Xian Mei, mistress of sharp things. As well as the ability to deal hideous damage with edged weapons, I would eventually gain bonuses for backstabs and flying stabs. She’s fragile, but her limb-severing talents make her the most effective of the bunch.

The locals. I'm getting a nasty gap-year flashback here.

The other three characters can gain more ludicrous abilities. Rap star Sam B, master of blunt objects, has a rage mode that eventually causes his punches to send zombies flying through the air. It’s funny and brutally effective. Master of throwing tat, Logan, has an ability that causes tossed objects to return to his grasp. They don’t fly back to him, they teleport to his hand and BOOMERANG! appears in big red letters on the screen. It makes no sense, but is tremendously satisfying to inflict, and can wipe out a small horde in seconds. Finally, Puma is master of Dead Island’s rare but largely ineffectual firearms. You don’t encounter guns until a third of the way into the game, and when you do, they’re pathetic. It makes Puma easily the weakest character, though her group buffs are useful in co-op.

In some ways, it’s a better game as a singleplayer experience. The sense of unease as you wander the deserted island is more powerful, and the zombies a greater threat. But with friends, it becomes pure slapstick. Like the time Tom ‘goddamn’ Hatfield and I took on a Thug and an army of zombies in a parking lot.

I was dedicated blunt close-combat specialist Sam B. Tom was ranged ninja Logan. With barely any plan in mind I charged in and launched a flying kick at a zombie. It connected with a bloody crunch, and then everything exploded. Tom, targeting the same zombie, had thrown a plank of wood just a moment after my kick flattened his prey. His auto-aim cursor shifted to the explosive canister positioned just behind that zombie. Hollywood physics did the rest, and I died horribly in the flames. It took a full minute for Tom’s laughter to stop.

Molatovs are a good last-ditch solution.

One of the benefits of rolling with friends is the ability to swap items. Dead Island’s weapons start out as flimsy, breakable tools that wear out after a few swipes. There’s always some debris to hand that’ll get the job done, but as time passes you gain skills that increase the durability of your items, and you start spending money on upgrades. You’ll find recipes that will let you craft mods for weapons, adding explosive, electrical and venomous effects. By the time I got beyond the tropical beachfronts, I had a favourite murder weapon that I kept in tiptop condition: an electrified sickle that I could never quite bring myself to chuck, unless it was at a zombie’s head. I called her ‘Old Zappy.’ Her critical hits could reduce a zombie to a fizzing electric puddle. She never let me down.

Beyond the holiday resort lies the game’s best-kept secret: a vast inland city. It’s a warren of baked brown slums covered in litter and streaks of blood. The streets are lined with burnt-out cars. and the shattered shopfronts have been looted bare by gangs. This is Dead Island in survivalist mode. Pockets of humanity have scratched out safehouses here and there, while other areas have been taken over by bandits who will shoot you on sight. You have to pick your way through the rubble, avoid large groups of zombies and constantly assess the best route to your objective. Is it safer to take to the rooftops, battle through the alleyways or brave the open streets? It feels like a war zone, with a tightly packed geography that makes it a fascinating place to explore. It’s inhabited by some memorable characters, too, not least the nun who sends you on a quest for booze and rewards you with a mace. Aside from some tedious sewer sections, each location feels busy and new. Later, you’ll travel further afield, but I don’t want to spoil to much of what lies ahead.

NPCs: Immune to a kick in the balls.

Dead Island does have problems: it can occasionally feel clumsy. The skippable cutscenes seemed determined to make me hate my character, the minigame for smashing through doors is abysmal, and unless you want your zombies to bleed XP numbers as well as blood, you’ll want to turn off that counter, and the zombie health bars, immediately. Niggles such as the slow mouse cursor in menus and the lack of drag and drop on the inventory screen contribute to a sense that Dead Island is a little rough around the edges, but it never breaks the experience.

When it comes to combat, aside from the pants-but-rarely-used guns, getting up close with the undead has rarely been so grotesque and satisfying.

And the game is huge. Dead Island lacks the geographical sprawl of Far Cry 2 or Just Cause 2, but the island is so varied and packed with detail that navigating it feels much more interesting. Even when blasting through the main quest line and ignoring the many, many side quests, it’s easy to rack up 25-30 hours, and the whole thing is playable with a friend in co-op.

Part grim, survivalist nightmare, part slapstick zombie comedy and the goriest game you’ll play this year, Dead Island is the most fun you can have with an electrified cleaver and a sack of wet, walking flesh.

Tomorrow though, who knows?

The action is an odd mix of topdown shooter and very basic 4X strategy. You’re in charge of a mothership on a journey to the galactic core in search of riches, bouncing from star system to star system to collect the tech and supplies necessary to survive. Every star system has jump nodes that you must bribe or blast your way past, along with two opposing factions to either help or hinder in exchange for goodies and XP. As you climb the levels, blowing up enemy ships via relatively simply arcade combat, you earn unlock technologies that level you up from a single mining tug to a small fleet of customised ships, which in turn let you smash through ever more heavily protected systems.

A tactical view kicks in for ordering squadmates around.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but SPAZ is far more of a shooter than such initially similar-sounding games as Space Rangers 2. There’s that faction system for instance, but it’s no more complicated than every star having two groups at war, with whichever one that happens to like you willing to trade for blueprints and favours instead of shooting you on sight.

Mostly though, you fly canned, randomly generated missions for whichever side you choose to back – though with faction rep being system specific, even this has little consequence. It all gets very grindy, very fast. This is not helped by the suicidal AI or having to zoom out until everything is barely a dot to avoid being obliterated by off-screen fire. You can choose to play on a big map where the number of systems makes progress glacial, or a small one where the difficulty spikes force you to grind until your clicking finger turns to dust, but either way it still boils down to glancing at the numbers and levelling up for another thrilling round of My Space Cock’s Bigger Than Your Space Cock.

Not to get on a high horse or anything, but... SPAZ? Sigh.

SPAZ doesn’t necessarily need more depth, and does get more interesting as you push through the galaxy, but don’t expect fast progress, or much variety from system to system. By the time I’d played the millionth ‘shoot the barrels’ type mission, I was watching my TV more closely than my monitor. This side of the game, however, is by far the most likely to be bulked up in the next few months, and both the premise and shooting action are solid enough to support that. As a gamble, you can do worse than Space Pirates and Zombies. To be certain though, keep an eye on the patch notes.

This time out Che’s only vice is his paranoia, and super-smart Juan leaves the gaseous emissions to his chemical works. Welcome to the subtly tweaked world of Tropico 4.

While this instalment confirms the series as gaming’s most charismatic city builder, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Bulgarian devs are running out of ideas.

We won't be putting this pic on the tourist brochure.

Exhibit ‘A’: the introduction of pointless building plans and inconsequential ministers. Exhibit ‘B’: the extra foreign presences. I’m perfectly willing to accept that my tiny banana republic must spend much of the Cold War delicately courting the two superpowers, but should I really be worrying about relations with the Middle East, the ‘European Union’ and the famously insular Chinese? The Tropicos have always overflowed with tangy period flavour. Anachronistic additions like this only dilute that flavour.

The same could be said for some of the new structures. Many of the added buildables – amenities such as the shopping mall, aqua park and cruise liner – augment the game’s lucrative but frothy tourist-industry side. Personally, I’d much rather have seen transport or civil engineering improvements. Four episodes into the series, and we still can’t set up bus routes or tram lines, dig tunnels or build bridges. Just as in Tropico 3, the most pressing late-game concerns are usually traffic jams and garage provision. Huge island communities can get by with a single restaurant or pub, but seem to need a vehicle supplier on every corner.

The most useful new facilities have to be the weather and fire stations. Erect these and your populace is protected from the worst ravages of volcanoes, tsunamis and twisters. More tiresome than fearsome, these natural disasters are accompanied by some of the game’s most toe-curling humour. When the DJ narrators make sly references to El Presidente’s colossal ego or economic illiteracy, giggles are sometimes justified. When they make jokes about tsunamis and earthquakes, it’s hard not to think about Japan and Haiti, and cringe.

Sod the tourists, I want a surveillance blimp.

I did find myself chortling at the nods to the Chilean miner rescue and Icelandic dust cloud. The 20 story missions milk recent news events mercilessly. Crammed with optional challenges and intermediate goals, the campaign episodes feel more structured and, perhaps, a tad easier than those in Tropico 3. They are, however, just as silly, and just as effective at turning spare time into sprawling shore-to-shore cityscapes. You know how it goes. You tell yourself you’ll go to bed after the construction of your first pineapple plantation and cannery. You finally crawl off to Bedfordshire four hours later, the happy overseer of a tinned fruit empire Señor Del Monte himself would be proud of.

I suspect the fresh batch of infectious salsa rhythms has a part to play in Tropico 4’s compulsiveness. (There’s just something about those driving Latin beats that makes me want to build another cigar factory and abduct another opponent.) The streamlined interface also ensures the game is dangerously easy to play.

Don’t let anyone tell you they didn’t enjoy this palm-fringed politics-’em-up. Do, however, report them to your local party official, if they claim not to be bothered by the game’s woeful lack of revolutionary spirit.

But life is difficult, because I also love my chainsword, and I can’t carry both. Oh, and can I tell you about my power axe? I want to explain how satisfying it is to boot a Chaos cultist very hard in his scarred face before burying a five-foot axe in his shoulder. Sorry, hang on. I’ve got too excited. Let me calm down.

Space Marine is a third-person action game that understands weight. A space marine is nine feet of purebred superhuman, dressed in power armour as heavy as half a car and the universe’s biggest shoulderpads. That shit is massive, and Relic’s greatest feat with Space Marine is making you feel it. Every step you take across the scorched earth of besieged forgeworld Graia is a mighty clomp. Start running, and it’s so loud and screen-shaking that were I my mum, I’d ask Captain Titus if he was a herd of elephants. Then make him tidy his room.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a walking tank.

But Space Marine isn’t about walking. Ninety percent of my time in-game was spent up to my heavily armoured elbows in combat, and Relic have also brought weight and heft to the battles you fight. Which is why I got so excited about my axe.

Sprint Titus into a fight and press the right mouse button, and he’ll begin a bullish shoulder-charge. Aim this at an armoured target – one of the bigger orks, or one of the lategame’s Chaos Space Marines – and they’ll stagger back. Charge into something squishier, like a goblinsized gretchen, and they’ll just burst. For the first quarter of the game, I found it hard to employ any combat tactic beyond laughing madly and popping small green creatures with my shoulders. The Warhammer 40,000 universe says one space marine will happily eviscerate 20 orks in a stand-up fight, but Space Marine takes it to extreme levels. Titus is so gloriously overpowered that a sea of green is an invitation to wade in, chainsword swinging.

As if Titus’s standard weapons weren’t lethal enough, Relic have included little moments of ludicrous excess. From time to time, he happens across jump-packs and heavy weapons. The latter offer a few minutes of extra-swift murder, but the former is an absolute joy to use.

I can see my hab block from here!

Any Dawn of War 2 veterans will know the drill: the pack lets Titus boost high into the air, before crashing into the ground and shattering anyone standing nearby. Space Marine gives you a little yellow reticule with which to aim your ultra-slam, and I found myself hanging for a few extra seconds in the air, savouring the oncoming carnage, before launching myself into the fray. The jump-pack is rationed in use, but every chance I had to use it began with an audible “YES!” on strapping it on, and an “aww” when the fuel ran out.

Back on the ground, the combos aren’t complicated, and there’s not much nuance to their deployment: the only consideration I had amid the mouse-button spamming was when to unleash Titus’s fury meter – a buff to his attacks that’s built up by killing enemies. But the hand-to-hand fights feel so meaty and so good that I didn’t mind the simplicity.

I survived most of these battles by spamming the right mouse button to weave together four-stage attacks. Each weapon feels different in Titus’ ham-sized hands: the chainsword is zippy, and cleaves through targets without stickiness; the power axe is heavier, and its killing blow is usually a jarring thwack rather than a deft slice. Each has a slightly different combo animation, but the end results are the same: right-mouse button four times ties four swipes of increasing intensity together. Three times then a tap of F adds an area-ofeffect slam to stun nearby enemies.

He's spinning around. Get out of his way.

During that stun, they’re open to Space Marine’s glorious execution moves. Press E on a reeling foe and Titus will jab his chainsaw down their throat and open their skull. Or pick them up, hurl them to the ground, and stamp on their head so hard it pops. Or kick them in the ribs, wheel around and break their back with his hammer. As well as being so grimly over the top I wasn’t sure whether I should be clapping or retching, the executions provide health regeneration. Titus’s shield repairs itself after a short respite, but his health won’t recharge without him getting his hands dirty.

It’s a trade-off that forces you to weigh up risk and reward. If you take the time to execute that Khorne Bloodletter, you might recoup some lost health – but chances are his friends will jab you to death with their swords before the animation’s over. It’s smarter to dice through the main mob first, riding your last chunk of health, then isolate one foe off in a corner to eviscerate him.

Space Marine doesn’t do a great job of warning you of imminent death. When it spawns a few rocket troopers who stand back and pelt you with missiles, Titus can go down easily. At such times you have to employ that most un-space mariney of behaviours: running away. Early in development, Relic were fond of saying “Space marines don’t take cover,” but I repeatedly had to park Titus behind boxes to recover from some misjudged sprint into combat.

Lucky that armour's wipe-clean.

Fortunately, stabby time isn’t your only method of murder. Titus can carry up to four guns, and each of these has a physicality only slightly less palpable than the melee weapons. His bolter is the mainstay. It’s essentially a standard assault rifle, but Relic have imbued it with just the right kind of crunch. Take aim at an enemy’s head, squeeze the trigger, and that head will disappear with a wet splat. Firing bolter shots – particularly with the ‘kraken’ upgrade found later – is like firing super-powerful long-range punches: you can feel each one connect.

The other weapons vary between satisfaction and usefulness. Perhaps the least impressive to fire is the lascannon – which launches a beam of light that only leaves a wisp of superheated dust in its wake – but it remains useful throughout the game, enabling the immolation of tough enemies from long range with minimum fuss. One of the most fun, the rapid-fire storm bolter, is less durable. It’s inaccurate over distance and replaces your other long-range weapon slot, so I saved it for moments of cackling madness where I could unload an entire clip into a clump of Chaos cultists.

Space Marine is the first time Relic have taken their Warhammer 40,000 licence to consoles, but having tried playing with both a controller and mouse and keyboard, it’s clear they’ve not jettisoned their PC heritage. Using a controller, I’d pick a fighting style – ranged or up close – and stick with it throughout the duration of a rumble. With the speed and precision of a mouse, I could flick between both, decapitating an ork nob’s retinue, moving in to stun him with my chainsword, before ducking further out to take potshots at machinegunners firing from the surrounding masonry.

Orks give way to Chaos later on.

I quickly came to love all of Titus’s weapons, but never the man himself. Space marines are the most boring thing – men in armour – in a universe full of wonder. Ultramarines – the perfect choirboys of the space marine school – are the most boring of the lot. At the very least, I’d rather play with one of the other chapters: give me a Dark Angel hero and reference their near fall to Chaos, or let me be a techno-viking Space Wolf.

And there’s an underlying fascism to the space marines that Relic have sidestepped: instead, Titus is an unequivocal hero. The game’s only real baddie is so pantomime that he might as well be tying a damsel to a train track the first time you meet him. He’s even got weird, lank hair. He only needs a moustache to twirl to complete the image.

Space Marine is not a long game. It’s not a complicated game, and there’s little incentive to replay the campaign once you’ve stomped through its eight hours. There’s little to the story beyond “kill all the ork troops because they’re bad, then kill all the Chaos troops because they’re worse.” But I didn’t need plot investment to keep me playing: I just needed the next fight. Relic have Space Marine’s pacing just right: playing in lengthy sittings, I’d repeatedly reach what I thought was the end of my tether with endless war. Then I’d round a corner, and be handed a jump-pack, reigniting my desire to carve the limbs off sentient beings all over again. The darkness of the far future is less grim when constant war feels so good.

Fthreear’s refusal to give you a less stupid name becomes increasingly awkward as it puts more and more focus on the conflicted relationship between you and your dead telepathic evil ghost brother Paxton Fettel. I’m going to stop talking about the plot now, hope that’s OK.

The original FEAR tried three things at once – horror, slow-mo gunfights and first-person kung fu – and it largely succeeded. Fthreear does each a little worse. The horror element is still just a little girl appearing and vanishing, this time joined by the monster from indie horror Amnesia trying to tongue-kiss you. But as before, getting everything short of written notice that a ‘scare’ is coming rather undermines the surprise. And the fact that these recycled horror movie tropes never hurt you – in a game where everything else does – makes them the least scary thing in it.

A horror moment! If only games hadn't de-sensitised me to death.

The slow-motion gunfighting is fine: there’s a decent shotgun, headshots kill, and enemies flank. It’s just that FEAR 1 did it all much better six years ago. Its shotgun was incredible, the enemies truly surprising, and gunshots curled the air and spat gorgeous showers of sparks. It’s not clear why even its own sequels can’t recapture that.

Kung-fu is present, but it’s lost the elegance and weight it had in FEAR 1. Kicks only connect at the shortest possible range, and fail if the enemy is busy with a particular animation. The default melee attack is a knifestab, and you frequently get stuck performing it instead of your intended flying kick or slide move.

None of these failures are damning; Fthreear’s singleplayer is occasionally fun, it’s just weird to be overshadowed by a six-year-old game in the same series. Happily, though, there’s more to it than that.

Don't worry, it's just red paint - blood dries brown.

It has a weird embarrassment of multiplayer game modes: no conventional deathmatch, but five imaginative perversions of co-op and versus. One lets you and your friends hole up in a building to fend off AI troops, running out for supplies and boarding up windows between waves. Another requires you to run from an ominous grey wall of death that consumes the level as you battle through zombies and help each other up. Still another lets fallen players get corrupted, joining the zombie forces against their former friends.

On top of all that, there’s a remarkably well-built co-op option for the main campaign. One of you plays as the hero’s undead brother, possessing enemies or lifting them out of cover for the Point Man to stab, kick and shoot. Levels that felt drab alone become violently ridiculous in co-op, and melee moves that feel awkward in first-person look spectacular when you see a friend pulling them off.

Fettel can lift enemies, then do horrible things to them.

Unfortunately there’s no server browser for this, and the automatching often puts you in laggy or unreliable games. You’ll get more out of it with a friend – you can join them via the Steam friends list.

It’d be easy to fire up Fthreear’s singleplayer and dismiss it as a shadow of the first game’s timelessly brutal violence. But play with a friend, and you’ll find it’s actually the most inventive game in the series. Not the best – it’s ropey in a lot of ways – but perhaps the most interesting.

Clang.

All these classes are overpowered.

It’s difficult to comprehend. Fortyeight maps, nine classes, most of the weapons: Valve are giving them away for nothing. All you need is a Steam account. With that you have a free account for TF2: you get a 50-slot backpack to hold your stuff, access to all the standard items, and limited crafting (no rare items).

To upgrade to premium (everyone who bought the game is a premium user), with 300 backpack slots and access to all weapons and full trading, all you need to do is buy one item from the microtransaction store. The cost of the cheapest items (such as the Soldier’s replacement rocket launcher, the Direct Hit) is 29p. That the dearest item, a pack containing all the weapons and apparel of the most recent update, costs £59, is of no consequence.

Valve added a melee-only castle map.

Even though Valve make money from sales, they’ve provided a number of ways of getting items for free. You can unlock weapons for every class through achievements. You get weapons given to you through random item drops. If you don’t like what they’ve given you, you can use the crafting system to smelt the weapons into raw material for weapons you do want. Or you can trade. Simply playing the game will give you ample rewards. It’s the best example of F2P I can think of. There’s no splitting of the community, either: new maps and game modes are always free.

Whether it’s Capture the Flag, Control Point or Payload, the servers are full of glowing Heavies with pet Medics in tow, Pyros charging into flaming targets with their barbedwires axes raised over their gimp masks, Soldiers and Demomen flying through the air, boots on fire. They host last-minute dives to stop a Payload bomb detonating the server, and rows of dancing Engies. I’ve dropped in on a server where everyone was battling a laser death cat that was spitting bees from its mouth. Even with intense rocket fire and grenade spam from everyone in the game, it still reigned supreme.

The appropriate face for that wound.

Valve’s continual tinkering has led to classes that can play multiple roles. The Demo-man started off as a grenade-spamming defence class, but with his new boots, shield and sword add-ons, he’s a frontline, headhunting warrior. Possibly with an Afro. The Spy can either be skulking in a corner, cloaked and waiting for the perfect moment to strike, or he can swap watches and run into battle and drop a fake corpse just to mess with the enemy.

Anyone signing up to Team Fortress 2 for the first time now will be part of an ever-expanding community, something that Valve have smartly steered but also learned from. It’s a vast experiment in incremental game design, but one that provides comics, movies, and piles of hats. Every update is an event and every player can be part of it. For a game that started out as just a multiplayer shooter, Team Fortress 2 has become something astonishing.

He is, as I play him, the worst chief of security in the world. He works for Sarif Industries, the company who make his robotic arms, and indeed the company who gave him his robotic arms after he failed to protect the company from a major assault and got himself shot in the head. Why this caused his arms to fall off is not yet clear.

Jensen finally gets the vending machine out onto the roof. He has a plan: “Maybe if I throw this vending machine off the roof…” The plan ends there.

He’s inside gang territory, trying to make it to a door at street level. He decides to use the surprising development of a vending machine falling out of the sky to distract the gangsters, so that he can drop down and get to the door without attracting attention. A sort of pepsi ex machina.

Jensen hurls the vending machine arbitrarily and tumbles off the building after it. His Icarus Landing System kicks in, floating him safely towards the street below in a dazzling ball of golden light. When the vending machine crashes to the ground, the armed gangsters nearby all look at it in surprise. Then they look at the dazzling ball of golden light floating down to land across the street, and they draw their guns.

Jensen gets up, looks at them for a moment, and dives for cover. As he draws his custom-modded silenced 10mm pistol, the nearest gangster walks over, looks down at him and says “Hey. Get lost.”

Jensen holsters his gun and walks sheepishly to the street-level door.

Jensen: the manliest man in a floral-print tenchcoat.

The Deus Ex games are first-person shooter RPGs that let you approach your objectives in a way that suits you: direct violence if you enjoy it, stealth if you don’t, and throwing heavy objects around if you like getting caught, beaten and shot. Despite a sequel in 2003, the first is still considered by me, this magazine, and a lot of our readers as the best game ever made.

Human Revolution is a prequel: a global conspiracy thriller set at a time when replacing your body parts with high-tech prosthetics is a violently controversial new trend. It is, I guess I should mention, the best game I’ve played in four years.

So I’ll talk about it in three parts: firstly, everything that Human Revolution recaptures about the original Deus Ex (quite a lot). Secondly, the few things it misses (not that much). And lastly, what it does better than the first game ever did (amazingly, loads).

The main thing Human Revolution gets right is giving you options: every mission gives you a labyrinth of ways to get to your objective. The man-sized air vent is a cliché, but honestly, it never stops being satisfying to bypass a locked door or a group of enemies.

The pleasure of that freedom is that it leaves major elements like pacing, challenge and variety up to the player. If stealth gets too hard, you can find an easier route. If you’re bored of vents, you can open fire. And if your ears are still ringing from the last gunfight, you can slip through the next area quietly.

Tango down.

And these are just the routes the developers have planned. The soul of Deus Ex is in its systems: simple sets of rules with no scripting, no exceptions, and no accounting for what the player might do with them. If you can pick up a box and stack it to reach an alternate route on the first level, you can stack every similar box in the game and reach anywhere physically possible.

Human Revolution has that exact system – though the more cluttered levels mean it takes a while to learn which objects you can move. It makes up for that by interlocking it with other systems in entertaining ways: the slick, surprisingly natural third-person cover system lets you hide behind any vertical surface, including the ones you’ve placed there yourself. The AI in friendly areas now has a flimsy concept of suspicious behaviour, and you can build a hilariously conspicuous cardboard-box secrecy fort around a security terminal to hide your criminal hack. Even turrets are now physical objects that can be picked up, moved and thrown.

I called mine Gunther. I was only able to get to his control console by shuffling past him behind a cardboard box. Cardboard doesn’t block a turret’s bullets, of course, but it does block vision. In a potentially fatal game of What’s the Time Mr Wolf, I’d shuffle the box a few feet closer to Gunther each time he swivelled away, and duck behind it when he looked back. Once I hacked into his controls over the shoulder of a sleeping guard, he was my friend for life.

I carried Gunther into his own control room to let him mow down the guy who should have been monitoring him. Then I sat him at the top of a ramp to pelt fire at a whole gang, while I snuck up behind them and extended the fist-chisel blades of my robot arms.

When a minigun guard destroyed Gunther a few fights later, it hurt. Because he exploded, and I was using him as cover at the time.

Page 1 of 3. Next: Where it falls short, and what it does better.

Given enough time, it’s possible to see the entire game without paying anything for it. There’s no level cap or limit on the areas you can visit. You pay for faster progression, or for cosmetic vanity items.

The game works best with a small group of friends.

In spite of huge signs telling me exactly how much experience I was losing every time I completed a mission as a Free Agent, I didn’t feel the burn of the slow levelling curve until past level 15, which was more than long enough to explore Global Agenda’s selection of game modes.

The pricing model offers about a dozen hours of unhindered play, and thankfully doesn’t go down the path of selling guns for cash. Global Agenda is as fair and balanced as it was as a paid-for game.

As a shooter, the game still favours teamwork over pixel-perfect accuracy. A lack of convincing physics or location-based damage can make one-on-one firefights feel slippery and imprecise, but the jetpacks every character wears offer an addictive freedom of movement. With enough players, scraps are agreeably manic.

You should have seen the other guy.

The slight sloppiness of the battles is offset by the stream of better guns and incremental upgrades earned as characters level. The interface for keeping track of your items and skills still feels clunky, but it’s deeply satisfying to see your bionic warrior improve between each fight. The levelling system and skill trees aren’t as deep as you’d typically expect from an MMO, but it’s enough to make it worth fighting for extra XP.

For a one-off purchase of £15, you can be promoted to an Elite Agent, and instantly double the amount of money and experience you get from missions. Forever. This also unlocks access to in-game email, auction houses and Agencies (player guilds). After that you can still buy booster packs that increase money and experience gains for a set amount of time (about £10 for 30 days).

There are better free-to-play shooters out there, and better free-to-play MMOs. But Global Agenda combines the two in an accessible jumble, and ends up striking a surprisingly good balance.

Update: Re-tested, and this has changed since this review was written – the game no longer kicks you out if your connection is lost. You do need to be online to start the game, though. (Thanks John).

I’ve never played anything quite like it. It’s a game about sculpting landscape by sucking up swirls of lava, water and earth and trickling them into rivers and ridges to protect your masked tribe. It’s extraordinary, exhausting, spectacular, and frequently no fun at all.

The terraforming is smooth and organic: lava oozes and hardens, water sloshes, dust settles into soft dunes. What you’re doing with it isn’t: you need a perfect wall of rock to stop that tidal wave. That tension, between the hard rules of your objectives and the soft physics of nature, is a big part of the challenge.

This is why you want to waterproof your villages.

It can be hard, time-consuming and repetitive work, but it is compulsive. It taps into an instinctive fascination with how the world behaves, and the pleasure of tinkering with a rich simulation. A simulation rich enough that you can actually see the game’s sediment physics form river deltas.

When it stops being fun is when that hard graft is undone by glitches, limited control, and trial-and-error level design.

The glitches are mostly with your tribe. The game is about holding the elements at bay long enough for your people to establish towns and protect them with spells. When you manage to give them that chance, however, they frequently lose interest and stand around staring at their feet.

Diverting rivers is doubly fun with lava.

You don’t control them directly, so when the AI bugs out and forgets what it’s supposed to be doing, there’s often no way to correct it. It’s a special kind of sadness to have to drown some of your brain-crashed people just to make the others realise they needed to send more.

In a relaxed, playful sandbox game, that kind of lapse would be minor. But weirdly, most of From Dust’s missions are frantic nightmares of crisis management. Floods, fires and volcanic eruptions impose recurring time limits in which to get things done. So when your people get lost or distracted, it’s always a disaster.

When your people do behave, they’re adorable. They build huts on huge stilts, and honk out acid jazz on their didgeridoos to repel water from their homes. Seeing a tidal wave roar around a town’s invisible jazz barrier is a deep and unique happiness.

You make more sandy bridges than Intel.

The levels are mesmerising: angry cauldrons of lava, gentle starlit dunes, heat-blackened rocks alone in a storming sea, orange and blue ferns crawling with oversized trilobites. You transform these places as you play, diverting rivers of molten rock to clash with streams of water, splashing dry dust to raise plant life, even dropping hot gobs of lava into the sea to forge new lands with an angry hiss.

This can backfire. When a level seems impossible, you’re never sure if you’re missing something or if you’ve messed it up beyond repair. Scripted events can conflict with your work in ways that you never recover from, and lead to unforeseeable failures.

Between that and the absentminded villagers, you can spend more of your time wrestling against From Dust’s usability problems then the elements. Thank God it’s fresh, beautiful and fascinating enough to be worth it.

Unfortunately, Back to the Future is five episodes long, and those warm fuzzies are a distant memory by the end of the first. For the rest of the game, you have to make do with Telltale at their least inspired, clearly focused more on hammering their latest licence around their standard adventure game template, rather than working out how best to turn Back to the Future into a game. There are no cool time-travel brain twisters like the ones back in Day of the Tentacle for instance. None.

Wonder if the straw is for his Clockwork Orange Juice.

Instead, you’re forced to stumble through lots and lots of very easy, uninspired, but worst of all, boring puzzles, based more on cartoon logic than the tropes of the films. Where those had romanticised but iconic time periods, Telltale fail miserably at making their own circa 1931 Hill Valley anything more than a studio lot. A studio lot full of comedy gangsters and slapstick that makes Bugsy Malone look like Goodfellas. Almost everything you bump into feels, if not bad, cheap, rushed and phoned-in.

The one exception is the main storyline linking all of the puzzles. This time, we get to see Doc’s past, back at the start of his scientific career, with the timeline first put at risk by one of Biff’s gangster ancestors, and then a love affair that risks turning Hill Valley into a Big Brother style state.

In this 1986, everything is perfect. (Fascist hellhole? Fascist hellhole...)

What makes it work is that despite some incredibly silly individual moments, there turns out to be an incredibly strong emotional core to the story. As with all decent spinoffs, the best bits are when it expands on the films’ philosophies and asks new questions. Without wanting to spoil anything, the big one here is precisely what gives Marty the right to choose the ‘correct’ timeline, just because it’s better for him and his loved ones. The game still often struggles to find that authentic Back to the Future feel, the final episode especially going off the rails several times, but at least it tries.

With the same story, better puzzles, and the licence taken more seriously, this could have been the Back to the Future game fans deserve. As it is, while its adventure chops make it more than one of those old side-scrolling platformers with a popular movie’s logo on the box, the exact same kind of production-line thinking is clearly, painfully, in full force here. Marty and Doc deserved better. So did we.

Solar 2 makes a wonderful toy. It’s relaxing to play with this vast, cosmic particle system, and to manipulate its simple rules to form your own galactic phenomena. My best solar system has three stars at its core, with ten planets orbiting them, each home to life. It’s fun just to watch them move and teem with activity, and I’ve spent hours rolling up to neighbouring systems and watching the spiralling chaos as my planets’ tiny ships do battle. And when I’ve had enough relaxation, I smash the suns together and send the planets hurling into space.

Bored of life? Smash into the nearest solar system.

The game works only slightly less well during its missions, in which a mysterious god asks that you perform tasks tailored to whether you’re an asteroid, a planet or a star. These may involve protecting a planet from a shower of asteroids, or entirely destroying a neighbouring system, or in one instance, playing rock music and dodging rabid fans – including stars twice your size – trying to smash in to you. The missions are often funny, and there’s no penalty for failure, but the fiddly gravity-influenced controls mean completing them can be difficult even after a patch made it easier.

Whether you’re performing a mission or just tootling around, the universe has a habit of randomly throwing things at you. Your stars and planets will be doing battle with a similarly sized, spinning solar system, and your monitor will be alive with explosions. And then aliens will warp in to join the battle. £7 is a good price for a universe.

Street Fighter IV is an unusual prospect for us PC gamers, but that doesn’t make it any less brilliant. SSFIV: Arcade Edition is widely regarded as the best fighting game on the planet; thanks to the PC’s power, we get the best version of it.

Guile has the flattest hair and the biggest boots of the bunch.

Hubris. My online opponent, playing as Abel, has sensed my eagerness and blocked the opener to the combo – two jumping kicks – effortlessly. I mutter something offensive under my breath and try for a third time. I’m plucked from the air with an outstretched arm, whipped over a shoulder, and smashed into the ground. It’s a humiliatingly well-timed move – the kind of timing you develop when someone tries the same thing three times in a row. Time to reassess.

This is the ‘Super’ ‘Arcade Edition’: the silly extra words in the title represent a decent amount of tweaks, including 14 extra fighters since 2009’s SFIV. Granted, that roster includes Yun and Yang, who enter battles on humiliatingly hip roller blades and skateboards, but they are the most requested fighters since their SF3 debut. It seems Capcom are only restricted by their imagination and their vocal fanbase. Elite players will also appreciate the balance tweaks and online modes that make Arcade Edition the most fully-featured fighting game ever.

This is a serious e-sport, and comes with an infrastructure to match. There’s always someone to spar with in the online modes, whether it’s a competitive rank-obsessed player or a casual button masher.

Oni is an extra evil version of Akuma. With white hair.

Hand cramped like a crab due to too much play? Take a break and visit the replay channel to watch top players go mano-a-mano. Street Fighter works well as a spectator sport, thanks to the unpredictable fights, the purity of one-on-one matches, and the constant visual rewards. You’ll probably learn something from stalking the pros, too. Over time, my opponents’ defences have become tighter and my list of moves wider, but Street Fighter is still primarily a battle of wits. The timing-based inputs are generous and the flow of battle intuitive. It’s condensed, competitive, accessible and visceral – just how fighting games should be.

A perfect victory then? No. SSFIV:AE uses Games for Windows Live and requires an online connection to save progress. Depending on your experience with GFWL, that’s either a point-blank Hadouken to the face or a harmless but unnecessary taunt.

The newest additions to the roster also bring caveats. Unlike the other characters, Yun, Yang, Evil Ryu and Oni don’t get a set of trials for the challenge room or a story cinematic. The latter is just lazy, but the four missing trials are a painful omission: a list of combos gradually increasing in difficulty is a valuable tool for newbies to learn.

Waaa-chaa! A humiliatingly pretty finish from Fei Long.

These are minor issues in an outstanding package. Note that playing with cursor keys, or even a pad is good for curiosity and severe handicapping only. A sturdy fighting stick is essential.

Remember the tingly sensation when you first saw Daniel-san’s crane kick? Balboa vs Drago? McFly’s Biff-spinning punch in Back to the Future? Street Fighter IV is that feeling. Buy it, learn your Ultra, and get online. Have no fear. You’re going to love the result.

In Jamestown, big bosses have big pixels.

Jamestown is funny and cute, set in an adorably weird fusion of colonial steampunk and Martian invasion. The aliens, all tentacles and metal, explode into clouds of cogwheels and gears when killed. The ships are friendly blobs of pixels, the pewpew- pew they spew covering the screen in bright fluorescent bubbles. It’s jaunty and exceptionally silly. Silly to the point that if you play it for long enough, you’ll earn enough gold for ‘Farce’ mode, where the already exceptionally silly storyline is replaced by nonsense about plant monsters.

You have a choice of four ships, each with a different set of weaponry. I really like the ‘Charge’ ship: by holding down one of the fire buttons you can build up a giant sphere of death that cuts through any baddies on screen. Owen favours the ‘Beam’, the starter vessel. That just has a giant beam of death that takes up a quarter of the screen, but when you’re firing it, you’re unable to dodge any incoming projectiles.

That’s where the Vaunt button comes in. If you collect cogs while killing, you’ll fill a bar at the top left of the screen. When it’s full, you can briefly activate a shield that absorbs all incoming fire. It’s a great way to protect your friends during heated moments. Except that on the higher difficulty levels, Jamestown is one long heated moment.

Examine your life. You're missing a good schmup.

It all comes together in the multiplayer: four of you shouting and jostling as you take on tentacle bosses and robots. “Vaunt! Vaunt!” you shout. “Well done! Now bomb him.” When you die, you yell at your friends to survive so you can respawn via the timer, or to pick up a respawn power-up. At the end of the mission, you do a little dance to the jaunty guitar/midi medley. It’s pure fun.

But there’s not enough of it. There are only five levels, each lasting about seven minutes. To access the last you’ll need to repeat the earlier ones on escalating difficulty levels. There are a good number of challenges, but they don’t disguise the paucity of game. With friends, you’ll be done in an afternoon.

Jamestown is excellent. It’s cheap, and exceptionally cheerful. But there’s just not enough of it.

It’s my job to shoot out exploding blocks to clear a path ahead. As the barriers dissolve in flames, a turret springs up and starts spewing rockets. I distract the robotic gun as my companions close in for the kill. Enemies attack from all angles and explode in a shower of coins. We scoop up the items they leave behind and gain temporary health buffs to toughen us up for the levels below.

Evil bosses are stunned by the pricing system.

The Clockworks are vast, and full of nasties that vary according to the theme of each level. Forest areas contain wolves and pack rats, while electric zones will have more robotic foes. Each level is full of spike traps, turrets and ‘danger rooms’ – arenas that go into lockdown and spawn waves of enemies once a central switch is activated.

Each Knight can carry two weapons at a time, melee or ranged, and switch between them at will. Controlling your tiny warrior couldn’t be simpler. A quick click will swipe or fire your weapon, you can hold down the button for a charged attack or press ‘X’ to throw up a shield. From the safe hub of Haven, you can form a group of up to four knights, dive into a dungeon and immediately start your hunt for items. Every reward feeds back into the complex levelling system.

Progression in Spiral Knights is all about crafting. The level of your armour determines the depth you are allowed to reach. Higher tier weapons can be bought at massive prices, but it’s much more sensible to make them. If you don’t have the materials you need, you can combine crystals collected in The Clockworks to craft your own dungeons and control the type of loot that drops in each level.

You have to craft better weapons to survive.

We head into the elevator at level nine. The boss level is next. We huddle for a moment and form a plan. I hit the down switch. It doesn’t work. Because I’ve run out of my daily allotment of energy points. I can either buy more to continue, or come back 24 hours later. And it was all going so well.

In Spiral Knights, everyday actions such as pressing a button on an elevator, crafting new items and reviving your knight all cost you energy. As soon as the counter at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen reaches zero, you’re done for the day. Unless, of course, you choose to pay. The default 100 energy you start with is used up after a couple of dungeon runs. Another 350 energy costs about £1.50. It doesn’t sound like much, but Spiral Knights will keep asking for more.

When an energy drought stops play halfway through a session with friends, it’s like being poked in the eye. Free-to-play should mean just that: free, unrestricted play time. As much fun as the dungeons are, Spiral Knights ends up feeling like a confused demo. One that will keep asking you for money for ever and ever and ever.

As it awkwardly wedges itself into FEAR’s mythology, the plot approaches incoherence: psychic soldier Point Man once again battles the evil Armacham, a defense contractor so powerful that it can apparently conduct open warfare inside the United States; while trying to prevent his ghost-mother Alma from giving ghost-birth to the ghost-child she conceived with that other psychic commando from FEAR 2.

Pointy and the Ghost
When weak storytelling and tedious level design get out of the way, FEAR 3 shows flashes of greatness. Point Man might be a typical FPS hero with recharging health, two weapon slots, bullet-time, and a magnetic attraction to cover; but his dead psycho brother and new co-op partner Paxton Fettel can zap, stun, and even possess enemies. This power makes for deliciously chaotic battles, as both players are pushed to charge forward into close-quarters combat to feed Fettel’s need for harvesting fresh kills. The best sections are spectacular whirlwinds of bullets, grenades, knives, slide-tackles, and slow-mo headshots.

But are they organic?

Weapons don’t have a lot of personality in general, though. There’s little in the way of recoil or beefy sound effects—even the mighty, spike-launching Penetrator is watered down and unsatisfying. But they do fill important tactical roles: aggressive enemy AI and varied combat terrain gave me ample reason to adopt different approaches, even though the encounters and boss fights mostly felt the same.

Gunplay itself is rewarding, but the campaign will frustrate both solo and co-op players. Playing the early missions with a friend, the horror theme didn’t work—rambling cutscenes and scripted scares killed the pacing. Soloing the final act was an excruciating trial-and-error slog through unbalanced encounters. Scares, such as they are, come in the form of cliché blood-spattered walls, corpse-piles, distorted visions, and annoying monsters that’re more pest than terror. There is no imagination or style here, just repeated blood-textures and shrill screams.

Battle in the haunted Costco!

No safety in numbers
Multiplayer is more effective at conveying menace, chaos, and violence, and each mode cleverly twists convention. During one “Contractions” co-op survival game I was backpedaling from a pair of ax-wielding cultists and stumbled into Alma, who wanders the map at random. She instantly teleported me outside, and I had to run-and-gun my way back to my squad as cultists hunted me in the eerie mists. It’s fun in spite of the console-esque sabotage: local hosting makes for iffy connections (not that you know your ping, because FEAR 3 doesn’t tell you), and a lack of text chat in the lobby makes communication difficult when Steam’s voice chat gets choppy.

Yes, my shoes are quite nice, but no, you can't have them.

When it works—such as when the brothers eviscerate a roomful of enemies in mere seconds, or in a close-run multiplayer match—FEAR 3 is an enjoyable, even refreshing FPS. Its strong combat and clever mechanics save it from its own clumsy campaign, and it’s worth playing for those moments, no matter how hard it tries to convince you otherwise.

There’s a great big space in MMO land where that game should be. Mythos spectacularly fails to fill it.

It’s as though someone has looked at other MMOs and tried to copy them by including all of the necessary parts, but without any knowledge of why they’re useful, or how to make them work properly. There’s crafting, because MMOs have crafting, right? Except it’s an impenetrable series of screens that fails to tell you which components you need to make what. There’s a world map, but it doesn’t show you where you are, or where anything else is. Instead you’re better off navigating using the obstructive minimap overlay.

The Pyromancer's 'burn everything' skill is all you need.

There are quests, too, because MMOs are supposed to have lots of quests, yeah? Except there aren’t enough quests, they’re randomly scattered throughout the bland environment, and all of them boil down to something like “The Crown of Mo has fallen into the hands of the Blorklings. Go and steal the Crown of Mo from the Blorklings. Also, kill King Blork.”

Who are the Blorklings? What is the crown of Mo? Does King Blork really need to die? There are no answers because the world of Mythos is a world without lore. Its people exist to hand out fetch-quests, and the lands are only as big as they are to make fetching things a chore.

In fact, killing King Blork will be the best part of the quest. For all its disjointed systems, combat in Mythos isn’t too bad. Fighting is very much based on the Diablo model: you click foes to attack directly, and can access a series of more advanced skills on the task bar. Abilities differ across three classes: the Bloodletter whacks things in close combat and can summon fleshy minions, the Gadgeteer can attack from afar with muskets and crossbows, and the Pyromancer can burn enemies with the power of his mind. Each class has three skill trees where skill points earned by levelling can be assigned to unlock new moves, but these will often be wildly unbalanced. Some are utterly useless, and others, like most of the Pyromancer abilities, will reduce enemies to smouldering ash in seconds.

The mindless mobs are never ending.

Mythos is at least generous with its pricing system. You can play the entire game for free, and use the item store to buy such conveniences as temporary inventory expansions, fast-travel charms, and cooldownfree health potions, priced at between 20-70p each. There’s also a £10 retail edition of the game that comes with an in-game pet and a bundle of identification charms, experience-boost items and a summonable merchant NPC. Bought individually, these items are cost slightly more than if you went with the boxed version, but it’s not worth the gamble when you can try out the game for free.

The real price of Mythos is the investment of time it requires for you to become powerful. With the recent explosion of free-to-play MMOs, there’s no shortage of online RPGs that promise more long-term rewards for all those hours of levelling. Many of Mythos’s problems may stem from its fraught inception, and there’s a great idea at its heart, but in practice it offers a disjointed and strangely lonely experience

The scenery can be moved around to solve puzzles.

Through the 24 short levels you’ll have to dodge the attacks of robots, blast lasers and most cleverly use your antigravity beam to move bits of the environment around. For example: plucking a square of desert and dropping it to block an invisible laser, then carrying it with you to climb higher. Or moving separate pieces of environment around like those old picture slider puzzles. You even have to pile up the carcasses of your enemies occasionally. Death to the robot traitors! Early on the real challenge is getting used to the mouse-and-WASD setup in a 2D environment, but only because it’s sensitive like a pimply drama student called Malcolm.

The levels span swamp lands, desert, dark caves and ice, but there’s a distinct lack of eye candy on offer unless blocks coloured in slightly different colours are your idea of visual sherbert. There are some nice puzzles, but the looks lack that final slick of lipstick and blusher: they’re bright, but ultimately boring and too simple. The Undergarden has the same style of 2D puzzling and platforming, but with more originality.

You need to see the films to make sense of the cutscenes.

Unfortunately, as entertaining as all this is, Lego Pirates is one of the dodgiest ports in recent memory, with the longest loading times. Getting into the game takes minutes, as does waiting for individual levels and their many cutscenes. There’s still no online support for the two-player mode, and – at least at the time of writing – good luck even finding the PC version in a shop, although it’s available at Play.com etc.

When Jack gets repeatedly slapped in the face by his crew, then kicked hard in the balls for good measure, it’s hard not to sympathise. The only difference is that you haven’t done anything to deserve it, except choose to play his game on PC.

Four sweaty young men lie groaning on the floor, aching, bruised and out of breath. Three feet away a battered keyboard lies up-ended on the carpet. Nobody knows who has won, but everyone is giggling like an idiot. This is the aftermath of one round of the indie party game B.U.T.T.O.N.

It stands for Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Okay Now, and it’s essentially a real-life beat-’em-up. In the beginning, every player chooses a button on the keyboard, and the game then unfolds in three stages.

Stage one. The nervous step back. A message appears on screen telling everyone to take up to seven paces away from the keyboard. Even now, things can go wrong. The game has no way of knowing what’s going on in your front room. Halfway through the first step back, one of your friends could throw themselves bodily onto the keyboard shouting “Mine! Mine!” and there’s nothing you can do about it. Except perhaps kick him a little bit.

Lack of rainbow make goat and kitten weep.

Stage two: dance like a monkey. An instruction will appear on screen telling everyone to do something stupid. It could ask you to sing happy birthday, or spin around three times, or link arms – anything. Of course, after half a second of trumpeting like an elephant, one of your friends might make a break for the controller. At this stage a deft trip can be helpful. Brutally unfair? Yes. But that’s the point.

Stage three: murder death kill. After a three-second countdown, an instruction will appear telling you to do something to your button. It could be to press it 18 times, or hold it down for four seconds, or not touch it at all. Whatever it is, everyone in the room must dash forward frantically to attempt to seize control of the keyboard.

Then, anything goes. It’s war. We push, shove, elbow and claw our way to the controller. In that moment nothing else matters beyond the need to just get to that button and- QQQQQQQQQQ!

Then kiss them fulsomely on their quivering lips.

Sorry. Got a bit carried away there, but that’s what B.U.T.T.O.N. does so well. It whips everyone into the room into a giggling frenzy in the space of a few on screen instructions, which makes it a brilliant party game. Beyond those flashcards, however, there’s nothing to it. Once the round is over the game resets. There are no profiles to keep track of your score, and only the one game mode. There should be a way to disable the escape key as well. Too often a manic bodyflop would cause the game to close down completely, which isn’t ideal when you’re all pumped up.

Still, in the extremely limited field of PC party games, B.U.T.T.O.N. reigns supreme. It may be limited and simplistic, but it’s bloody good fun. It’s easily worth the £1.50 asking price if you’re throwing a party and you’ve got the space. Just be sure to move anything valuable well out of the way before you start.

There’s a Gravity Well plasmid that sucks enemies into a singularity and spits them back out – entertaining, but a pretty slow way of dealing with the least dangerous enemies. And the new Ion Laser weapon is a very straightforward damage-dealer, as is the new Big Daddy type that uses it.

The most enjoyable novelties are the new security bots: firing rockets, lasers and electricity. When hacked to follow you around, the electricity one is a hilarious and handy companion, repeatedly shocking your enemies so you can take your time with their fate.

Hynotise splicers - they can make interesting friends

Minerva’s Den takes around five hours to play, and the story is intriguing and substantial. It’s also focused: there’s almost no peripheral backstory lying around, every audio diary you find is a piece of the puzzle.

Accordingly, it asks you to do more exploring than the main BioShock games. Most areas are large hubs with no clearly marked goals, riddled with Adam, Tonics and Plasmids to upgrade your abilities.

For the most part that’s great, but you’ll occasionally hit a dead end and be unsure how far you’re supposed to backtrack, or what you’re looking for. And if you miss a major audio diary, the plot makes less sense.

Not that it makes perfect sense even if you don’t, of course – it involves powerful ideas, but operates under the same magical logic by which a secret city on the ocean bed is a viable thing. The main thrust of the plot requires a credulity leap of that kind, which is a shame, but it doesn’t prevent the game being engrossing.

Incendiary lasers are the best lasers.

As with both BioShock games, the antagonist isn’t nearly as convincing or interesting as the conflicted characters along the way, and his taunting wears thin. But Minerva’s Den is more consistently engaging than BioShock 2, because the meat of the story isn’t diluted by a lot of empty philosophy. The sting in its tail isn’t quite as potent as either of its predecessors, but it’s a satisfying ending once you make sense of it.

One warning: you need to buy the DLC through Games for Windows Live, even if you didn’t get BioShock 2 from there. Once it’s downloaded, run BioShock 2 normally and find it under Extras

There’s no story: just ailments, like a broken leg or tonsils, for you to mechanically slice and dice. Operating is just clicking, pointing and dragging as instructed by your frankly impertinent assistant. She barks an order at you for every action, from the hernia repair to the appendectomy. It makes it not only pretty impossible to mess up, but conversely hard to experiment and have some fun. She won’t even let you carve ‘I heart knives’ into your patient’s stomach, or make intestine balloon animals. It’s all forceps and disinfectant, spray and clamps.

Whatever it is just cut it off!

Funnily enough she’s not very helpful about the trickiest bit: fiddling with your patients’ drip and anaesthesia to keep them from crashing and ruining all your hard work. Maybe if I just repeated the tedious tutorial on that particular topic to the patient they’d go numb and pass out from sheer boredom?

Once you learn to manage the vital signs, cutting people open and sewing them up again turns out to be sort of satisfying, even if all you have to do is drag and click. There’s a ghoulish delight to pulling out a varicose vein like a bit of red spaghetti, and performing the cataract operation is more upsetting than any horror game in the past five years. But just as I was starting to think I had judged this too harshly, it flat-lined. A mere eight operations means this is over in an hour. It’s more Holby City than ER.

Performance like this is rare for a sub-$3,000 laptop, especially one that’s so tiny and thin. The 15.6” screen makes games look vibrant with no detectable blurring. HD movies (though there’s no Blu-ray drive) also play with exceptional detail—enough to spot the Kevlar weaves in Batman’s suit. The chiclet keyboard is a joy to dance your fingers on, but sadly, the trackpad is covered in a rubberized coating that creates a bit too much friction for comfort. The EON15-S’s battery life is decent, but you’ll want to plug it in for anything other than web-browsing or writing—don’t expect it to last for more than an hour and a half while playing games or watching videos. The base model comes with a one-year warranty, plus lifetime free tech support and labor—not too shabby. It won’t win any beauty pageants, but for $2,580, this is one badass laptop.

SPEC ◆ Price $2,580 ◆ CPU Core i7 2720QM 2.2GHz ◆ RAM 8GB DDR3 1600MHz ◆ GPU Nvidia GTX 485M ◆ Storage WD 750GB 7200RPM ◆ OS Win 7 Home Premium 64 ◆ Link www.originpc.com ◆ Category Dream

While the FX versions aren’t quite exact replicas of the movie props (they’re a bit bigger overall, and the on/off switches are small sliders attached to the side of the handles instead of buttons), the lightsabers feel agreeably heavy, and they’re constructed from high-quality metal and rubber. I guarantee it’ll send tingles through your skin the second you activate one (like the movies, the glowing effect travels quickly upwards and downwards instead of just instantly appearing on or off). Waving around a powered saber results in different pitches and tones in the warbling hum, and whipping the blade into random objects sends out those iconic energy-clash-on-impact noises (and all the sounds are thunderously loud—sleeping parents and roomates beware!). It requires four AA batteries to run, but they’re cleverly hidden inside the casing, and they’ll last you for hours of mock-decapitations and de-handings.

The FX lightsabers also come with a posh display stand to show off the hardware. Sadly though, you can’t remove the white, semi-translucent tubing with these models. So when you have sophisticated dinner guests over, and it’s sitting on your fireplace mantle, it’ll look a little funky turned off with the blade still there. Of course there’s an easy solution to that: keep it turned on for a fantastic supper-light ambiance! (Can table-candles stab through metal and bring about galaxy-wide peace? No. No they can’t.) If you fancy yourself a Star Wars nerd, or even if you’ve only seen the movies a few times, or hell: if you just enjoy things that are awesome, for crap’s sakes: buy an FX lightsaber. Nowish.

Grab one at: Think Geek
It’ll cost ya: 100 of the best dollars you’ll ever spend
Wielding one in full-contact cosplay is a bad idea because: The blade, while fairly rugged, will most assuredly shatter on impact if swung with considerable force into another lightsaber. Driving one into a Jar Jar Binks’-themed beanbag or an inanimate poster of George Lucas is fine though (and encouraged).

Silent but deadly
Dream-level videocards sometimes suffer from obnoxious fan noise due to the heat from their increased clock and memory speeds. But despite cranking out an amazing 47 frames per second in Metro 2033 and 90fps in STALKER: CoP (at high settings with 4x antialiasing/4x anisotropic filtering and 2560×1600 no less), the GTX 590’s single, center-mounted fan runs ninja-quiet. It’s damn nice to finally get a videocard that doesn’t sound like a helicopter starting up in your PC.

That low-decibel output, of course, doesn’t mean the GTX 590 isn’t a power-hungry beast. This card requires no less than two eight-pin power connectors to function. To be on the safe side, I’d recommend at least an 800W power supply to keep the GTX 590 stable (as opposed to the minimum 700W PSU suggested by Nvidia). Like the GTX 580, the GTX 590 supports all the fanciest DirectX 11 perks, such as hardware tessellation, and you can set it to run PhysX with only a minor dip in performance at high resolutions. It’ll also run Nvidia’s 3D Vision.

For output, the GTX 590 forgoes an HDMI port in favor of three dual-link DVI connectors and one Mini-Display­Port connector. This is a little odd, but it still supports HDCP (High-band­width Digital Content Protection), so you can watch all your Blu-rays in full 1920×1080 resolution (as long as you’ve got a monitor that’s also HDCP compliant). The good thing about three DVI ports is that hooking up multiple monitors is as simple as plugging in the cables and adjusting the Nvidia display settings on your desktop. (Enabling more than two monitors with different cables can be frustrating.)

Do keep in mind that unless you game at high resolutions (1920×1200 or above), you’re better off saving money and sticking with a single GTX 580. But if you wanna see all your games in their maxed-out, visual best on a 30-inch LCD or multiple displays—the GTX 590 is the card for you. Note: it is illegal to sell your liver.

Benchmarks: 3DMark 11/Vantage (Performance Level) P8479/P37589 ◆ STALKER: CoP 90fps/131/142 ◆ DiRT 2 122fps/120/119 ◆ Metro 2033 47fps/72/85 ◆ All games run at 2560×1600/1920×1200/1680×1050

$700, www.nvidia.com ◆ Category: Dream

3G coverage is the least of your worries.

Getting through this world is a matter of learning to use the various tools – grappling hook, kinetic ram (knocks enemies and objects away) – and large arsenal of weapons, to navigate the mostly non-linear levels. All the tools work exactly as anyone raised on platform shooters would expect. The grapnel enables you to swing around like a heavilyarmed Tarzan. The jetpack’s gentle lift has limited fuel. The ram knocks you back a bit, but the subject of its kinetic affections back a lot. And the ammo-hungry guns kill things.

The only flaw is that switching to the right weapon using the mousewheel, when the natives are raining spears on you, is like trying to find a pencil-sharpener in a geek’s satchel of techno-crap. The game is so reaction-based that having the wrong weapon out tends to hasten your death, so instead of being agreeably gung-ho, you find yourself creeping slowly forward and running away lots.

As you get damaged, the screen cracks, obscuring your vision.

There’s always non-hostile fauna moving in the scenery too: stiltlegged spiders, overgrown hermit crabs and anenome-funnels that shy away on your approach. Even the internal texturing on the landscape resembles the organic, fecund drawings of surrealists like Max Ernst. Electronic music, an oldfashioned interface and hand-drawn layered backgrounds conjure memories of such ’80s platform shooters as Metal Slug or Contra, but stepped up to HD and buffed until the game is 90% polish.

The varied, well-designed levels range from flashlit tomb-crawls to low-gravity atmosphere exploration. With these, and variety of secondary game modes – co-op, deathmatch, time trials, survival and a wonderful no-guns race – Capsized is an example of what can be done with a handful of old-school game mechanics if a developer has excellent taste.

To the casual observer, an action-RPG slashfest would seem like it’d be hard to screw up—and yet, Daggerdale’s a cautionary tale in what happens when you haphazardly dump ingredients into a pot and start stirring. The way my not-so-manly Fighter reluctantly swings his sword in response to my clicks makes the whole thing feel like it takes place in a vat of pancake syrup. Thanks to some incredibly awkward targeting, combat is comparable to playing as a glaucoma-stricken retiree running over enemies in a riding lawn mower.

Oh no, it’s something awesome! Run!

Snores ’n’ sorcery
Without interesting combat, the two other pillars of hack ’n’ slash—class progression and questing—wouldn’t have had a chance to shine even if they were imaginatively done. Each of the four classes is a bog-standard representation of its corresponding archetype: the Fighter tanks; the Rogue fires arrows; the Wizard quickly gets torn to sparkly, enchanted confetti by hard-hitting foes; and the Cleric supports. In other words, don’t expect any of Diablo or Torchlight’s crazy hybrids. Four-player co-op makes things a bit more strategic, but the experience is largely unchanged.

Quests, meanwhile, tend to go something like this: “Oh, you’re just about ready to do this crazy-epic thing, but first I need you to bring me X number of Y object.” Fine, can I do the fun thing now? Oh, it turns out to be a fight with 10 boring enemies. Worse, most of your time is spent backtracking, and you can only undertake one quest at a time.

This dwarf is clearly a liar.

Daggerdale might’ve achieved mediocrity if its lazily ported UI didn’t interfere at every opportunity. Console button prompts are everywhere, and it fails to understand the most basic mouse-and-keyboard prompts or the concept of remappable hotkeys. Could it get worse? Yes!

It’s got glitches. Glitches everywhere. Enemies regularly get stuck in the ground, armor graphics fail to load, and NPCs have a habit of disappearing without ever having the decency of offering to take me out
of this hell with them.

Which all brings us back to Daggerdale’s cowardly main character. He runs in terror from a fight with a giant rock monster, and that’s exactly what you should do if confronted by this game.

Like the first chunk of FNV DLC, Dead Money, the plot and dialog of Honest Hearts are its strongest features. The two central characters encountered in this open-world tract of Utah desert, Daniel and Joshua, are both post-nuclear Mormons working to save a peace-loving tribe from hostiles, and their passionately argued disagreement as to how to approach the problem creates a real ethical dilemma as you pick a side. Joshua’s history—and his link to the events in the Mojave—is great to read into as well.

For sinful wastelanders, it’s unfortunate that both solutions have the best interests of the tribals at heart. There’s no “evil” or Legion-friendly resolution I could find; I tried opening fire indiscriminately, as a minion of Caesar might, but the psychopathic option makes getting back to “civilization” tough, and doesn’t win you the favor of the hostile tribe. I wasn’t impressed by the scavenger-hunt quests either, and the two tribal companion characters foisted upon you (one at a time) are competent fighters, but not particularly interesting.

Everything’s bigger and meaner in Utah.

Grand canyons
Utah does have the distinction of looking nothing like FNV’s Mojave, and the bright-orange canyons can be beautiful at dusk—though that nifty sun-glare effect has a nasty habit of shining right through cliff walls. Exploration is rewarded with loads of flora to use with potent new recipes, and a background story told through journal entries in the caves, but the rough terrain is sometimes frustrating to navigate.
Honest Hearts does include a healthy portion of tribal-themed loot (mostly attractive for melee and gun-focused characters) but none of the new few perks stand out as essential—a damage bonus to raiders, for example, isn’t very helpful when most Mojave raiders are already pretty weak.

It’ll be handy against these monstrously thick-skinned hostile tribals while you’re here, though. Against Utah’s even-more-gianter varieties of the already-enlarged mutant mantises, geckos, spore plants, and really evil cazador wasps (plus reintroduced yao guai bears from Fallout 3), every little bit helps. The yao guai AI is noticably glitchier than normal, though, and I walked away from a few maulings I shouldn’t have thanks to the giant bears abruptly deciding to flee. Cowardly bears are the worst bug I encountered, but Bethesda has confirmed a potential game-breaker exists if you’re at a certain point in ED-E’s quest when you go to Utah.

I wouldn’t consider Honest Hearts to be flyover country, but once I’d completed the five hours worth of quest content, nothing here would bring me back.

1850: Workshop of the World. 2011: Poundshop of the World.

Where AGEOD’s early games – likeable curios like Birth of America (71%) and American Civil War – were geographically limited and mainly martial in their focus, this time there’s an entire globe to enslave and a swarm of economic, diplomatic and colonial factors to consider. If your notions of historical strategy have been shaped by the Total Wars, the jungle of data and distractions is going to seem impenetrable.

Yet PoN isn’t machete-proof. Though the tutorials are brief and the post-turn reports lumpen (where’s my newspaper-style digest of the last fortnight’s events?), I’d actually place this above the last two Paradox mega-productions in terms of friendliness. Choose a nation like GB, and you can, to a certain extent, learn on the job. The obscene wealth rolling in from pre-established colonies and trade deals is more than sufficient to cover early military experiments and colonial fumbling.

Designer Phillipe Thibault started out in board games.

It’s in the way those foreign forays are handled that PoN outclasses its closest rival, Victoria 2. That game just doesn’t have the same combat texture or authority. It doesn’t work nearly as hard to model the colourful subtleties of the colonial process. Here you don’t draw far-off territories to your national bosom by assigning Focus Points to them. You organise expeditions, send Biblebashers, dispatch gunboats, and initiate a plethora of other actions. It’s a slow and pitfall-strewn process (rushing can provoke revolts), but an atmospheric one. As you contemplate your next play, you can almost hear the murmuring of native bearers and feel the sun beating down on your dusty pith helmet.

There’s inventiveness and colour in the diplomatic arena too. Territorial friction that would lead to conflict in other games can trigger tense summits and cruel bloodless humiliations in PoN. Disputed territories may be staked in pokerstyle minigames. Misread the crisis and you may end up haemorrhaging precious prestige or inadvertently sparking a world war. It’s the most imaginative and captivating take on power politics since Solium Infernum.

This map reveals the juciest potential colonies.

Games like this can be wrecked by too much historical determinism or too little. AGEOD seem to have got the mix about right. By default, major powers will meddle in the general areas where they historically meddled. You won’t find Japan squabbling over Sudan, or Italy making a bid for New Zealand. Apart from the odd bizarre trade and battle result, and inconsistent treaty, everything rings true.

If it wasn’t for those tiresome timeouts, I’d be insisting you try this. It’s the thought of 84 hours of thumb-twiddling, during a 1680- turn grand campaign, that causes me to hesitate.

All together now: 'He's behind you!'

With the right company, ideally over a LAN to avoid connection issues, the repetitive combat becomes far more enjoyable. Hunted constantly forces you to work together to throw around potions, combine melee and ranged combat, prioritise targets and stay close enough to bail each other out of trouble. Unfortunately, unlike console versions, the PC edition of Hunted has no split-screen mode (and while there’s no serial code, yes, it does a disc check.) You can play online with strangers, but the bulk of the Hunted experience is a single long campaign you’re only going to play through once. Early on, it’s brutally unforgiving, but eventually eases up.

By the time you get to that point, it’s a relief. The levels are simply too long, and the gaps between checkpoints can be a real pain – especially when it means retreading the same chapters and hearing the same mediocre one-liners. It doesn’t help that while the action is technically split into chapters, the main quest is one long trawl from start to finish, not offering good points to jump in and out. The difficulty can be punishing too, with ever longer battles, and little feedback about how your partner is doing until it’s too late.

'Now put an apple on your head'

This makes for a hefty commitment, and one ultimately better rewarded by the fact that it’s 8-10 hours of time spent with a friend than anything else. Hunted is a decent enough game, with solid co-op mechanics and a decent feel – but not one that offers many memorable moments on its own. It’s far more comfortable pointing out its clichés than actually doing anything to subvert them. While it’s a game with plenty of individual mechanics, very few of them feel like they’re adding much depth. It’s not a brainless game, but it’s the kind you can play while discussing last night’s Doctor Who. Unlike most games, the question isn’t whether or not you’re up for it, but whether you have a suitable friend you can convince to join you – not just in being your wingman, but in buying a copy of Hunted on spec

At first, I balked at being forced to play as one of four inflexible dungeon-delvers, but each well-designed character’s unique nine-ability arsenal is appealing. Each has a specific combat style—swords and shield, fire magic, arcane magic, or guns—but they all fill the same role: a self-healing damage-dealer that swaps between two stances, one best suited for fighting a single target and one for taking down groups.

Better together
While you can play solo with one AI ally, the Steam-based four-player co-op is ridiculously easy to get into, and enemy difficulty and loot drops scale on the fly. I invited three friends into a game, and within seconds, not minutes, they’d seamlessly assumed control of my NPC companions and all their gear, abilities, and talent points. We got right down to the business of stomping baddies and mocking them over voice chat.

That smooth system makes playing together effortless (yay!), but it comes with an absurd restriction where only the host saves progress from a co-op game, leaving the other three with nothing persistent to show for their time. (Boo!)

Precarious Cyclops—one good shove can do more than 30 bullets.

Likewise, sharing a single camera helps keep the group together, but I occasionally felt like a dog yanking on the edge of my leash when I saw something shiny a little too far from my team. Handily, the AI takes over inactive characters to keep slowpokes from acting as an anchor.

In combat, the ability to block and dodge attacks rewards you for paying attention and keeps fights engaging. We felt confident enough to pull ballsy moves, like taking on an army of skeletons. As the warrior, I corralled them into a small area using shield blocks and wide-swinging sword attacks, allowing my fire goddess ally to light them all on fire. Mean­while, our gunner sniped the boss and our wizard zapped targets of opportunity with lightning.

Spell effects are absolutely gorgeous, and combined with the elaborate setpieces and creative enemy designs, DS3’s visuals are unmatched among dungeon crawlers.

Katarina’s guns deal an impressive ranged smackdown.

Wait…there’s a story?
The real shocker for Dungeon Siege fans is the terrific 18-hour story’s memorable characters and choices, where a spared enemy might turn out to be a convenient ally later.

But adding story depth seemed to cause Obsidian to forget some action-RPG fundamentals. The mini-map provides no indication of which direction you should be going, convoluted stats (such as Doom and Withering) are never explained, and you have to press E to retrieve every single piece of loot you want to grab.

Finger cramps aside, fighting through this imaginative, stunningly beautiful world is good fun. There are better single-player RPGs out there, but if you hunt for loot in a pack, Dungeon Siege III is a satisfying battlefield to conquer.

Set more than a decade after her adventure in American McGee’s Alice, Alice: Madness Returns finds the titular heroine receiving psychiatric care in a depressing Victorian orphanage, so it’s no wonder that she’d decide to duck out of grim reality and return to the Wonderland that she fought to restore to verdant beauty as a girl. But when a gooey black “ruin” begins coughing up baby-faced monsters, Alice’s refuge turns into a series of phantasmagoric prisons that she must traverse to find its source—in her own fragile psyche.

Alice’s melancholia is embedded even in the cheeriest levels.

And she does so with aplomb. Alice whips out her Vorpal Blade and tears into her foes with a rapid series of bloody slashes that gracefully drop into slo-mo for an instant after every combo. The result is some gorgeous combat, but despite the addition of a few more novel, vaguely upgradable weapons and a fantastic dodge maneuver that whisks Alice out of harm’s way in a burst of blue butterflies, it’s not particularly rewarding—especially in the second half of the game, where it becomes apparent that new enemies are so much like the old enemies.

Wandering Wonderland
Fortunately, Madness Returns doesn’t rely on its wind-up, clockwork combat or its vast catalog of collectibles to sustain our interest through its 12-plus hours. Instead, its strong-est feature is its extravagant, vision-ary art direction, which gleefully loots not only the sinister underpinnings of Carroll’s novel but everything from twelfth-century Japan to the grotty visions of the Brothers Quay as Wonder­land’s six sprawling domains gradually descend from whimsical dreamscapes into horrifying nightmares. Within them, Alice breezily walks into paintings that transform the game into a delicate-looking 2D platformer. She restores an underwater theatrical production resembling Pirates of the Caribbean crossed with Glee. She rides teacup trolleys, fires a pepper-loaded minigun, collects the body parts of her friends, and mercilessly, furiously stomps tiny card-soldiers under the soles of her boots.

Who’re you calling “short and stout,” bitch?

But even in its darkest moments, Madness Returns plays enjoyably with magical grace and beauty—even Alice’s spirited pirouettes from one platform to another shed blue and teal leaves. This is the real triumph of Madness Returns: you could blot out the game’s dialog and narrative, and the demented sets and gorgeous visuals would tell a mesmerizing story on their own.

Now I have a golden broadsword, a ring of health regeneration, metal pants and my very own palace. I flaunt my new copper trousers at the floating eyeball that’s attacking me. I’ve come a long way since my first night, spent madly whirling a pickaxe around my head to fend off waves of zombies.

To find the materials and items to build these things, you’re going to have to go travelling, which is where Terraria really shines. Tunnelling into a vast and intimidating cavern for the first time was horrible. How nervously I threw a torch over the edge to find out what new creature was emitting the awful growling noise that had made me tarnish my copper trousers. Then there was the time I found that underground jungle full of nether-hornets, or the giant mushroom forest guarded by a Mother Slime. It feels like there’s no end of new areas to discover.

Theoretically you can turn your world into a server and invite as many friends as your connection can handle, but currently the netcode is extremely buggy. One of the regular patches could clean this up, but for now most players resort to using hacks such as Hamachi (a shareware virtual private network) as a workaround, which is not a surefire solution. For the short time I had it working, the multiplayer was more chaotic, faster and more exciting than playing alone.

Combat is haphazard, too. There’s little strategy beyond madly waving your weapon at your foes. The warrior with the best sword wins.

If you don’t mind this, and are happy to go online for crafting recipes, then Terraria offers dozens and dozens of hours of rewarding exploration. The lack of in-game tutorial and the slow start are drawbacks, but at only £6, Terraria is a steal for those with the patience to reach its deepest caverns.

Frozen Synapse applies that kind of near-perfect foresight to controlling small teams of gunmen in randomly generated office blocks. You set waypoints for each of your three or four guys, tell them where to look as they come around this corner, when to duck behind that cover, then you watch a simulation of what will happen if they do it. Often, bullets will happen. So you go back, tweak, and simulate again until everything goes as planned.

Then you commit.

This bit always produces a little tingle of tension.

And nothing goes as you planned. Because all that time, your opponent – whether he’s AI or another player – was planning too. And he didn’t commit to his move until he was sure it’d screw you over. This usually leaves you both seconds from disaster. So you plan those seconds out, again and again, trying to factor-in everything your enemy could do to get an edge.

The genius of this is that it takes the guesswork out of the game rules. You never have to wonder “Will my sniper win because of the range, or will his machinegunner win because he’s in cover?” You try it, find out, and restrategise accordingly.

Rockets can smash up a level, changing the way it plays.

The only unknown is what your opponent will do. And you can even simulate that: as you plan your own moves, you can also give enemy units orders to see how the fight will play out if they do what you expect.

The tight, brutal battles often boil down to fraught standoffs in which no course of action guarantees survival. You find yourself thinking: “I know what the smartest thing for him to do is, and I know how to counter it. But is he actually that smart? And is he so smart he knows I know he’s smart?”

Being in cover is good. Looking the right way is better.

If you’re worried you can’t make those kinds of decisions quickly, Frozen Synapse was made for you. You have until the end of linear time. Multiplayer games often span days, and there’s no negative side-effect if you and your friend aren’t free at the same time. You make a plan, and if he’s already made his, you see the outcome and make the next one. If he hasn’t, you switch to another game – you can have loads going simultaneously, and it’s surprisingly intuitive to slip back into one. You’ll get an email when your friend finally makes his move.

There’s also a surprisingly substantial singleplayer campaign, a fun introduction to the game until it hits an odd difficulty spike.

The whole game is in blueprint-o-vision.

Synapse randomly generates office floorplans for its levels, and that can be problematic – particularly in multiplayer. So much comes down to positioning that asymmetrical maps sometimes feel like the primary reason you win or lose. I’ve won games where serious mistakes didn’t undermine my starting advantage, and lost games where I still can’t see what else I could have done.

Most of the time, though, Frozen Synapse comes down to wits, psychology, and thinking two moves ahead. There’s an exquisite tension every time the outcome of a turn is loading. There’s an evil satisfaction to watching an enemy do exactly what you predicted, and die the way you planned. And there’s a surprising sense of respect for your opponent when they outplay you with something masterful. Because you’re not struggling against the mechanics of the game, it’s rarely frustrating and often very, very fun.

Magicka’s first expansion throws your pint sized combat-mages into a fantastical version of the Vietnam War, in which the Vietcong are replaced by gun-toting goblins, and the US forces by a team of one to four psychotic wizards. There’s a rescue mission and a survival arena to battle through, both of which ask the important question: what’s best, magic, or bullets?

These huts spawn infinite enemies. Burn them.

It’s a trick question. The answer is napalm. As well as fresh enemies and soggy jungle environments, there are also new weapons, including machineguns and rocket launchers, but the real star of the show is the napalm air strike. Casting this ‘spell’ causes a US bomber jet to fly across the screen, leaving a streak of white-hot death in its wake.

Here’s why it’s great. To cast spells in Magicka, you summon elemental orbs, then combine them for use on yourself or your foes. Different combinations of orbs cast different spells. There’s no mana bar, or any restriction on the number of spells you can throw out. You can call in air strikes as fast as you can type.

Imagine, then, four wizards each calling in a bombing run every minute or so, throwing up protective shields and frantically healing between bombardments as an endless supply of goblins charge out of the jungle. These insane defences with friends on Magicka: Vietnam’s survival map are easily the best part of the expansion.

These trucks are harmless - but hard to resist.

The rescue mission is more staid. You’re dropped into a jungle and instructed to save a number of prisoners of war. Side objectives ask you to destroy ammo dumps and topple radio towers, but these extra objectives never force you to veer too far from a narrow path. Armed goblins and the occasional ogre with a minigun try to stop you. Often by standing slightly off screen and shooting you, which is especially infuriating given how powerful the new guns are.

It takes about 40 minutes to play and is extremely difficult, especially if you’re trying to run it solo.

Play with friends, and it’s possible to overcome the difficulty spike and enjoy the game’s terrific sense of humour. The deliberately mangled speech and the constant war movie references are a recipe for good comedy. When combined with the new toys and the endless survival map, Magicka fans who play often with friends will be happy with the £3.49 price tag. If you were expecting to play through alone, however, you should give this one a miss.

Not big. Not clever. (but quite funny)

What matters, though, is that this is the game where you pass a heroin addict off as a sex doll as part of a plan to blow up a porn store. If you find this offensive, don’t expect any sympathy – Hector is one of those rare games that simply does not give a fuck. If you don’t choose the most offensive dialogue options at every turn, you’re playing it wrong. Even its hints screen hates you and wants you to die. “I love that look you get on your face when you’re frustrated,” it sneers. “Fat, pouty lips, crossed eyes, acne-flecked skin pockmarked with anger and twisted into a hideous sneer of confusion… Oh, that’s just your regular face. Sorry.”

Hector is easily the most British game you’ll play this year, and one of the funniest. It’s the copy of Viz you used to sneak peeks at; the late-night comedy you were never allowed to watch. It wears its heart on its sleeve, even as its scabby balls ejaculate pitch-black venom into your eyes. You can’t approve of it, although you will laugh. And when you laugh, you can’t complain.

Although RF does include the classic game, its meat is a twisted re-interpretation in which moggies, zombs, robots, men and yetis battle for continental control. The new factions actually add little beyond some pleasing combat animations – what refreshes is the introduction of a range of new maps dotted with enticing buff structures.

Now you aren’t just invading in order to boost your ‘draft’ (reinforcements received at the beginning of a turn). Snatching and holding a dam gives you the ability to flood downstream lands. Taking a temple lets you convert territories without bloodshed. Securing barracks provides missile support during nearby combats.

Are homicidal buddhist yetis the next zombies? No.

Behind the extra tactics, Risk’s dice-driven unpredictability remains. It’s still possible for a hefty eight-strong army to be repelled by a lone garrison, and freak occurrences like this do, sometimes, cause MP opponents to disconnect in disgust. That’s a shame because otherwise the pacey, not-too-cerebral RF is a near-perfect lunch-hour distraction.

As a singleplayer game, the slim six-mission campaign means you get precious few of the amusing cartoon cutscenes. Sub-par threat assessment and less-than-optimal use of structures by the AI, means you’re likely to be the trouncer more often than the trouncee in custom skirmish games.

Check unrealistic expectations at the door and forget the ancient, hyperbolic promises of self-deluded developers before you even consider buying this suddenly corporeal ghost of PC gaming history. The development-time-to-awesomeness ratio isn’t impressive. If you can do that, Duke Nukem Forever can at least mostly succeed in its aspiration. After all of its tumultuous history, it’s ended up as an entertaining FPS wrapped in juvenile, smut-laced humor. Its gameplay is a hybrid of old-school and new, and it won’t wow players with stunning visuals—its window of opportunity for that passed years ago—but it does put on a good show of alien ass-kicking by working what it’s got.

The Cycloid is one of the cooler-looking bosses, but his bark is worse than his bite.

Like a hyper-violent, over-sexed Peter Pan, Duke Nukem refuses to grow up. Though 12 years have passed since the events of Duke Nukem 3D, he’s the exact same trash-talking, cigar-chomping, muscle-bound man of action, still rocking that ’90s-style buzz cut and red tanktop. The source of his superhuman action-hero powers is his own ego, which doubles as a literal recharging shield over his (also recharging) health. It’s reinforced by an entire world of people who worship him as an infallible man-god and sex idol—women want him, men want to be him. He’s the stereotypical teenage boy’s power fantasy personified and turned up to 11. Sure, he’s a ham-fisted action hero parody, but Duke remains one of the most memorable characters in gaming history for a reason: he’s simply more fun to play as than SERIOUS FACE ARMY MAN.

As two-dimensional as Duke himself, the story gets right to the point: intergalactic sex-criminal aliens are re-offending, and Duke must defy orders and step in to defend Earth’s chicks. Even that flimsy B-movie tribute plot is resolved (sort of) half way through—DNF becomes simply about shooting aliens ’cause they’re ugly, and bits of the script are little more than profane Mad Libs. Lazy writing or pointed critique of the state of story in first-person shooters? I prefer to think of it as the latter.

Incoming canned goods!

Reloaded
Action-wise, the single-player game fulfills its obligations as a successor to Duke Nukem 3D. It’s fast-paced run-and-gun battle against diverse, love-to-hate ’em monsters, using weaponry ranging from conventional boomsticks toover-the-top sci-fi, and fought through a long series of corridor levels where there’s almost always something unique to see and interact with. Almost every original weapon (except Duke’s boot) returns—and after taking the Shrink Ray and Freeze Beam for a spin, it makes me wonder why few shooters have appropriated the joy of killing enemies in two-step attacks. Sure, shrinking enemies and then squashing them or freezing and shattering isn’t as efficient as double-tapping to the head, but it’s more fun. There’s also the Devastator, a ridiculously powerful, double-barreled, rapid-fire rocket launcher that never pauses to reload until it’s spent.

I just want to be looooooved!

Duke’s trusty pistol, shotgun, Ripper chaingun, and rocket launcher may not be anything particularly unique or special (and certainly not realistic, lacking even a hint of recoil) but they’re loud and potent alien killers. The new weapons, a rail gun sniper rifle, an alien laser, and a triple-missile-launcher called the Enforcer Gun are pretty ho-hum—no new classics here. The biggest sadness is that DNF has adopted the Halo-style two-weapon system, which frequently forced me to abandon my beloved Shrink Ray for lack of ammo. Even with all of that heavy weaponry, I still died quite a bit—despite the regenerating health system, Duke Nukem Forever is one of the more challen­ging shooters I’ve played in years.

At least the signature remote-detonating pipe bombs, laser tripwire mines, and Holo-Duke decoys (plus melee-enhancing steroids and pain-mitigating beer powerups) exist outside this limitation, allowing you to set all manner of devious traps in the diverse range of linear, corridor-style levels and lure enemies into them. Duke battles the aliens through his high-tech Duke Cave, his self-styled opulent casino, the aliens’ disgustingly organic hive (complete with Prey-style sphincter doors that open when tickled), a Vegas skyscraper, a Dukeburger restaurant, Hoover Dam, construction sites, Nevada canyons, underwater, and more.

In Guide a Convoy: Past Turrets, you guide a convoy of different vehicles past alien turrets. You’re just one man with no weapons, running around a top-down view of urban Japan and Iraq infested with alien gun emplacements. You direct your tanks, APCs and weapons platforms by switching to planning mode with the mouse wheel, then clicking on junctions to choose which way your convoy should turn at each.

At first, you’re just diverting to avoid blockades. But later missions ask you to plan a route that’ll let you take out every turret, or reach an ally by a certain deadline. Your tanks and walking missile launchers fire automatically at the various gun emplacements they pass – it’s your job to keep them repaired with area effect heals, and distract the turrets with decoys and smoke grenades.

Planning mode: I have to pick a route past all of these.

It’s like the game’s level designers are playing a tower defence game, and you’re the creeps marching through their maze. You get to buy new vehicles for your convoy, such as shield generators that protect the vehicles in front and behind, then decide the order they should roll out and which ones to upgrade. Tough ones up front will tank more damage, but the sooner your powerful ones enter range, the faster the enemy guns will be knocked out.

It isn’t like anything I’ve played before. There’s an exciting feeling of hands-on management: your convoy is what does the damage, but you’re down there frantically trying to keep it alive. I love to run in ahead and dance in front of the enemy turrets to attract their fire. If you circle around them entirely, they’re facing the wrong way when your vehicles come into firing range, giving you a few seconds of free shots.

Here I'm bravely electrocuting myself to distract the enemy.

Turret idiosyncrasies makes route planning more interesting. One of the most powerful types can only fire directly forwards, so you always want to follow a straight road past it, never directly toward or away. Others can turn, but only slowly, so you can run ring-roads around them. Intelligently adapting your route as the threat changes breaks up the action nicely.

The whole thing is conspicuously gorgeous: the dusty roads of Baghdad are rendered with as much care and detail as if they were making a first-person shooter, so from your birds’ eye view the maps are almost absurdly crisp. There’s design polish too: every click is satisfying, every principle is easy to understand and clear in execution, and every interface reacts the way you instinctively want it to. It’s instantly and enduringly fun to play.

And the strangest thing about it all: here I am enjoying a game made entirely out of escort missions.

Grab it from Steam, or try the demo there.

Gripping the shaft of my mighty, gyroscopically enhanced hammer, I swing at the barrier. CRACK! The force of impact with steel-reinforced concrete reverberates through my character’s body. THUD! Chunks of rebar-entangled concrete fill the air as a 50-foot-long, three-foot-thick barrier dynamically collapses, with chunks sailing into the rear supports of a guard tower behind it. The dust settles to the dull moan of stressed metal as I approach the tower, knowing what’s about to happen. A sound like rolling boulders fills the air, and 10 tons of concrete and twisted metal lands at my feet. Total destruction. Absolute power.

RFA has a destruction engine like you wouldn’t believe (unless you’ve played Red Faction: Guerilla). Anything that’s not terrain—barracks, bridges, people—is all fair game to be bludgeoned, blasted, or concussed into rubble. In an engagement with a band of crazed cultists in the opening battle, a rocket trail reveals two hostiles firing from cover. I’ve got several options available: open fire directly with my assault rifle, collapse a tower on their heads, or flank them by bashing in the side wall of their firing position with my hammer. I’m a sucker for that hammer, and in seconds tenderized cultist meat spatters the remaining walls and ceiling. The open environment provides innumerable creative combat opportunities—it’s an empowering sensation that too few games offer.

The punishment for your halitosis is death.

RFA’s biggest limitation is that, 30 minutes in, its forgettable sci-fi story moves most of the action into a network of tunnels. The machine that terraformed Mars’ atmosphere has been destroyed by a cult leader, driving the populous underground—where they’re attacked by a swarm of Martian bugs. At least it’s reasonably well voice-acted and never really descends into schlock in its search for reasons for the bald hero, Darius Mason, to break many, many things.

Except for a few instances (such as a firefight with aliens on a three-story underground scaffold), that creative combat of the opening level is lost, and gives way to a feeling of playing as the unstoppable boulder chasing Indiana Jones down the tunnel in Raiders of the Lost Ark. For the rest of the game, you’re moving forward from chamber to chamber, connected by dark, narrow tunnels, and fighting aliens that jump from ceiling to floor to wall faster than a pack of third graders on Pixy Stix. The change of venue isn’t necessarily less fun, but the combat becomes something less thoughtful.

There’s simply less to destroy in these tunnels than there is on the surface. The awesome explosive weapons I pick up on my journey, such as the Singularity Gun and Plasma Cannon, just aren’t very effective against enemies that don’t stand still. Don’t get me wrong—disintegrating aliens with a Nano Rifle is always a good time, but the particular combat situations that RFA’s tunnels and bugs create are so perfectly tuned for one particular weapon that it rarely makes sense to use anything else.

The real star of RFA is the Magnet Gun. Much like Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, the Mag Gun is inventive and kinetic in a way that you won’t want to use any other weapon. Its first shot fires an orange magnet tag on any destructible surface (or enemy), and the second affixes a blue magnet tag on any other. Once both are placed, the blue tag rips whatever it’s attached to (say, a 20-foot-tall explosive canister) off of its moorings and tries to unite it with whatever the orange tag is on, such as the alien across the room. Because you’re often in a corridor, enemies can only come from so many directions, making it easy to nab baddies one by one and splat them into stalactites at the other end of the corridor. It has unlimited ammo, and it’s so powerful that I found myself going entire levels, sometimes more than an hour, without equipping another weapon.

The Mag Gun is basically a futuristic flyswatter.

Unlike the Gravity Gun, though, this weapon isn’t presented with a lot of interesting challenges. You never have to think differently about how it works—it’s always either launch the enemy into something or smack things into the enemy. RFA’s physics and destruction are by far its strongest features, but its potential feels wasted on the simple level design.

With all the destruction, inevitably a staircase or catwalk that you didn’t mean to destroy will explode. That’s where the Nano Forge kicks in—it can instantly repair virtually anything man-made with the push of a button. It’s a magic undo button that makes no sense, but it’s a clever way of preventing players from breaking the levels permanently, and handy for reconstructing cover in battle. Collecting salvage from broken objects allows you to upgrade the Forge, buffing your health or weapons, as well as unlocking new abilities.

There’re also vehicle sections to vary the pace. The four mechs Mason can pilot come in varying degrees of fantastic, but my favorite has got to be the Mantis—it’s a spider-legged robot that spits plasma rockets and a great super-heating laser that burns its targets as you sweep it over the battlefield, followed by a spectacular linear explosion of everything the laser touched. The delay between pulling the trigger and watching your target explode is just long enough to make you feel like a sun god, so large and far away that it takes a few seconds for the ants beneath you to suffer your wrath.

What could be better than a pink explosion?

Just like the on-foot sections, however, vehicle sections funnel you through tight corridors. At one point I tromped through a subterranean studio apartment complex in a one-ton exoskeleton, and the only means of maneuverability was smashing through walls and ceilings. Yeah, that’s fun, but in a simple sort of way. I’m not playing cat-and-mouse with another mech, or even trying too hard to avoid damage.

If the campaign is an over-seasoned meat sauce, then the co-op multiplayer is a deep-fried buffalo—and man, it’s one tasty buffalo. The survival-style multiplayer has you and up to three friends battling waves of aliens and/or defending an objective. You’re still mostly fighting in confined spaces, often with the magnet gun, but now there are four of you. Boulders, columns, and baddies are flying all over the place, and your Nano Forge’s long-distance repair ability makes it easy to protect your objective as long as you’re still standing. It’s social mayhem that feels great, and it leads to all kinds of experimentation like Mag-Gunning one object in multiple directions.

There’s also the single-player Ruin Mode, a highly satisfying free-form destruction playground time trial that pits your arsenal against a ton of buildings. A leaderboard keeps you from feeling lonesome, and the grandeur of taking down sky-scraping structures in some of the outdoor maps is something sorely missed in the subterranean campaign.

It’s not really the lack of open spaces that holds Red Faction: Armageddon back, though. It’s a lack of player engagement. Eventually, even with a godlike weapon, combat feels empty—a bag of pyrotechnic fun without much creative spark. Still, demolishing Mars leaves me filled with an incredible sense of dominion over my environment, and I can’t help but wonder: why doesn’t every game use this technology?

You play the sibling of the current, overly cruel king of Albion, and you’re quickly catapulted from the castle into a life of RPG rebellion achieved by winning the support of the general populace. As heir to the throne, there’s only one place you’re heading with that sort of behaviour.

Yet exposing Fable III’s endgame is no spoiler: not only is your fitness to rule taken for granted by everyone you meet, but the game has already been out for half a year on every other platform but ours.

Fable’s fights can be approached with firearms, magic or melee weapons, but jumping between the stances is far from intuitive if you’re using mouse and keyboard. You have to scroll between styles with the mousewheel, which makes your combat changes the result of planning, not brilliance. Couple that with a strange mouse lag evident on turning the camera, and I quickly switched to an Xbox 360 controller. It made fighting more fluid: whacking a skeleton with a hammer before shattering its bony body with a pistol shot becomes a satisfying process.

How very droll.

But it’s a process too often repeated. Combat is Fable III’s default state, and it doesn’t deviate much. If anything, it gets simpler. I chose to pump my guild seals – collectables awarded for doing most things, from bashing enemies to kissing dudes – into levelling my magical abilities. Once I’d hit rank five, combat was a case of holding my area-of-effect spell until it was charged, then just letting go until the B button was hanging limp.

Lionhead used the time between 360 and PC versions to add a new ‘challenging’ mode to the game, but I blazed through the final conflicts with one hand free to drum on my desk. The difficulty of tougher fights – werewolves are particularly brutal – is defused by your respawning just a few centimetres from your corpse, the loss of a pouchful of guild seals your only punishment.

In short bursts, the fights are cheerful and rewarding and the quests have a sense of humour and grace that’s missing in other RPGs. But you never get either in short bursts. Even the most engaging quests – shrinking down to play a real-life game of Dungeons & Dragons, or chasing a ghost drunk on power (and ale) through a graveyard – seem to panic when they reach their midpoints. Then they throw in a glob of turgid combat against cloned enemies.

Step away from my inseam.

My burgeoning aversion to combat led me to Albion’s other timesinks. I was able to chat to nearly all of the kingdom’s citizens, but beyond the welcome ability to belch in a child’s face, I had little to gain from engaging with my soon-to-be subjects. Fable III’s approach to morality is regimented: players can be saintly good or cartoon evil, neither of which alters the game in any serious way. Scold your staff, deny your friends or stuff your fat face with pies in front of starving children – you’re still set for power.

The only true choice comes at the end of the game, and the outcome can be either utterly mystifying or underwhelming, as a threat from across the seas either kills all your subjects, or doesn’t. This in a game predicated on talking to everyone. A little harder when they’re dead.

Fable III is pockmarked with kernels of delight and imagination, but they’re harder to root out among such a bland backdrop.

Don’t fret, feet. Once I’ve explained to the good boys and girls just how brilliant this driving-fartoo- fast-on-unmetalled-roads game is then we’ll be straight off to Finland, or Kenya, or that wild, snow-sprinkled highway in Norway that you love so much.

Codies have nailed it. They’ve produced a worthy sequel to the rollicking, Rio Carnival of a rally that was DiRT 2 (PCG 209, 88%). The new menu system – all spinny pyramids and brooding Battersea Power Station – doesn’t have half the charm of the Winnebago-based one. But where it really matters, out on the dirt, the new one is more than a match for the old.

Breaking. Dirt 3 features include dirt.

Once again, we get a bulging chocolate box full of different race disciplines and vehicle types. Pure rally events nestle in alongside boisterous rallycross circuit races; bouncy buggy derbies jostle in tense head-to-head stadium duels and knuckle-blanching Trailblazer speed runs. By the time you reach the end of the hefty four-season career mode and get stuck into the well-equipped multiplayer, you’ll have calluses on your hands the size of wheel nuts.

Pippa Funnell fans may be disappointed by the pony-free nature of the new Gymkhana events, but I think freestyle car trickery is a perfect foil to all the A-to-B motoring. The same skill set comes into play in the recreational DC Compound. Unlocked piecemeal, this Battersea wasteland is littered with optional challenges and tempting opportunities for arsing about. Drift through giant pipes, donut around a digger bucket, twirl 180 degrees while jumping… It’s joyful stuff but murder on your logoplastered bodywork.

Crystalline water is another of DiRT 3’s admirable additions. Whether it’s taunting your tyres or blowing in flurries across your windscreen, the cold white stuff transforms pace and mood. Add a squiggly mountain road and the headlight-speared darkness of a Scandinavian night and you’ve got the recipe for some of the most atmospheric automotive action imaginable. The EGO engine’s Turner-esque talent for landscape and light remains impressive. Even owners of elderly rigs can expect moments of startling beauty

Pre-1864 smash walls were made from real honeycomb.

Talking of ageing technology, the 50-strong vehicle selection includes a range of ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s machines that are sure to please the generation of gamers taught road safety by huge squirrels and crappy superheroes. Tearing along the game’s forest tracks in vintage Ford Escorts, Opel Mantas and Audi Quattros is as delightful as it is horribly dangerous. I just wish the rides were a tad more talkative.

If you’re a SimBin veteran, you’re likely to find the lack of audio feedback from tyres, transmissions and brakes mildly perturbing. The cars handle intuitively, though, especially when you’ve tweaked things such as brake bias and gear ratios to suit your driving style. However, a few more catastrophe cues would have been useful.

Some smarter co-drivers wouldn’t have gone amiss, either. The current batch can be a little overeager when it comes to pace notes. When you’re haring towards a hairpin at 100mph or more, it’s not particularly helpful to hear, “Easy left – opens” from the passenger seat.

But enough nitpicking. You’ve got a dazzlingly varied, relentlessly entertaining rally celebration to buy. I’ve got a pair of increasingly exasperated feet to placate.