A warmly affectionate remake of a browser classic, with enough new pieces to justify its existence.
An accomplished follow-up to Triple Deluxe that is energetic and tactile enough to compensate for a handful of rehashed ideas.
A handsome and brutal strategy sequel that benefits from a range of intelligent improvements
It seems destined to be undervalued, but this is a pleasant surprise - a fine fighter that's just about essential for Pokemon fans.
Too gentle and sweet to warrant the online bile, this board game spin-off is nevertheless a very limited and repetitive stopgap.
The Mario Tennis you know and love, only substantially less of it than usual. Still fun, but such slim pickings leave a sour taste.
Challenging but immaculately calibrated controls power an exciting and enormously rewarding sci-fi roguelike.
An injection of speed and creativity results in the best Skylanders game to date.
Lacking fluidity and dynamism, football's reigning king has lost its crown.
Comfortably the best of Disney's toy-to-life outings so far, Infinity 3.0 is not without its flaws.
A fascinating and absorbing headspace in which to spend a few hours.
By turns breathless, brilliant and fist-chewingly demanding, Velocity 2X might allow its tempo to drop too often, but it approaches excellence often enough to recommend - you might just fall in love.
The assumption seems to be that most players won't have the desire or the stamina to play a full round - though in light of the limited number of courses, it may simply be a way to minimise repetition. Either way, EA Tiburon has produced a game hardly befitting a player of McIlroy's talents. The so-called "next generation of golf" looks uncomfortably similar to the last, and there's substantially less of it. Only the quality of the underlying game saves this from the ignominy of an Avoid sticker.
This is a remarkable, progressive, absorbing game, one sure to prompt fervent discussion among its players, no two of whom will have shared the same experience. Your actions and deductions may not lead to a virtual arrest or conviction, but the curiosity of your inner Columbo will surely have been sated.
Tim Schafer's warm, humanist adventure is a game of two halves, but its triumphs outweigh the flaws.
This unorthodox take on squad-based strategy can be muddled and mulish, but it’s also thrillingly distinctive.
Such is the quandary at the heart of every long-running game series. Type-0 HD bears all the hallmarks of a game simultaneously keen to escape its past while being forced to embrace its heritage. At its best, it's a fine, smartly-paced action-RPG with thrilling combat mechanics that just happens to be a better fit for a handheld than a home console. But, crucially, it represents a promise unkept: this isn't so much a blend of new ideas, more a melange of existing ones. It may have been conceived as a fresh start for Final Fantasy, but Type-0 is more often a false dawn.
Such is the nature of a game that's trying to offer something for everyone; invariably, there's never going to be quite enough of the stuff you like. And perhaps Mario Party's desire to be truly inclusive will always hold it back from being a classic. This is, at least, in the upper echelons of the series: a little short of the Hudson Soft heyday, maybe, but better than every entry since the fifth, and certainly superior to the anaemic eighth entry and the pointless handheld versions. Wii U owners already have deeper and more substantial multiplayer options, but few - if any - of them are quite so welcoming to all.
It's a few minor tweaks away from something special, and the same applies to Screamride as a whole. While there's nothing in Frontier's latest to make your stomach churn - with the possible exception of its honkingly awful dubstep soundtrack - there's not quite enough here to get your pulse racing either.
The result is almost certainly the definitive version of Smash. Not all of it works, but plenty does, leaving us with a fine solo game and a wonderfully, wilfully chaotic multiplayer brawler. Smash is still too unrefined to be the choice of the Nintendo connoisseur, perhaps, but as long as you don't take it too seriously, it is riotously good fun.