OHIC

I played Brotherhood again just before I played Mirage, trying to identify the elements that made it so special to me. On playing Mirage, it turned out that the new game ticked all the same boxes — well-designed missions, strong gameplay loops, a solid soundtrack, well-presented historical information both in the database and directly in the gameplay, an atmospheric setting, and a population that sounds genuinely happy to be on its streets. Having finished the game (and I mean *finished*: every mission and contract completed to full requirements, every item bought and fully upgraded, every region 100% done), I see it has another similarity: I will be playing Mirage again, which is something I couldn't say for Odyssey or Valhalla because they're just too long. Not only do I want to play again, I know for certain that many missions will be different next time. Could a future Assassin's Creed game be better? Sure, I hope so. But so much has been improved and refined here to make stealth more important and more fun, while still allowing the fans of the "warrior's creed" style to enjoy combat. I know it's not going to happen, but I'd love to see DLC for Mirage.

Despite being hyped as a leap beyond, the true next-gen game, the truth is C2077 is just ordinary. Worse, it feels ropey: humdrum. There's no "just one more mission" excitement. It didn't live in my imagination while I was away from it, either. At no point did I care about what I was doing. This is more than the bugs, of which there are many; more than the performance issues (CDPR's own specs sheet weeks before release told me I was above spec for 1440p Ultra, whereas I actually get bad performance on 900p Low); more than the awful NPCs, who flip between being nice as pie to outright hostile and back again. Of course, there is also a ton of admirable work here. It's just been massively oversold in terms of what you'd be doing and how this world would work, and wobbles between being devoid of pleasure to be antithetical to any entertainment at all. Fixers constantly interrupt you on the phone in a way that superpasses "NICO! LET'S GO BOWLING" for sheer aggravation. The menus are nonsensical, unexplained, dreadful examples of UI design don'ts. You're given big choices that turn out, when you discuss them with others, to make zero difference whatsoever. It's all so last-gen, and worse I remember having a ton of fun with, say, DX:HR despite how janky and cartoonish it was — for all its problems, it succeeded in ways C2077 just doesn't. And there are so many games you can point to and say the same thing. This is very, very weak.

This might be my favourite ever game world. I think it's perfectly pitched, in terms of lore vs gameplay. You get a great movement and combat system, so if you're not into reading logs and watching monitor clips then you still get a great game. That said, there are hitches where, if you miss a stray comment, you might end up lost for what to do at times, and the map/navigation system is pretty terrible (but don't worry, it gets better! Once you figure it out, it does eventually get a lot easier to traverse the world). But aside from those minor issues, it's a fantastic game that only gets better in the DLC, where the movement system and combat options combine to give you unusual puzzles. This is one of those games where you shouldn't think "main missions > side missions", since side missions are some of the best parts of the game. It's nice to see a game that doesn't force you to see all its tricks, but it would be a great shame if you stormed through the game and decided you were done. There's a whole other game's worth hiding, so explore, keep going back to talk to characters, whatever you can do to find all the secrets. Still, I do like the modesty of the game that I can have conversations with other players where each of us has seen whole missions that the other has not, and then go back to catch up.

A brilliant puzzle game. When given each environment and the to-do list, it's genuinely baffling at first. The genius of the game is how exploration and experimentation leads you to the solutions for these weird problems. The humour and art style are the charm here, as the characters appear to truly interact in quite sophisticated ways. Although the game has limited replayability, it turns out from talking to friends that we solved puzzles in different ways, sometimes making use of completely different characters. At the very least, it's a great game to show to other people so that you can watch them take it on.

I'd probably have given this more of an 8 score on the original XBox price, but for under £15 on PC the game is a steal and an easy 9. It's a little tricky to learn at first, but it rewards your engagement in spades after the first few hours. I thought it was going to be pretty limited, based on first impressions. How much scope can there be, I thought, in this skateboard-plus-shooting gameplay? Won't I hate the wacky humour? I was very happy to be proved wrong, as the game revealed some great level-design and new surprises, and the humour turns out to be much better pitched than the trailer suggested. Also, as someone who loves character customisation, I love the tweaking on offer here.

It's enjoyable to fly in this game, but that's about it. It's not visually stunning enough to hold attention through graphics alone. Its story isn't singularly gripping, nor are there great characters who could make you turn a blind eye to the other shortcomings. Unnecessary (and long) loading times, glitches, and irritating mountains of boring text. It does not merit your attention in a year that has so many truly wonderful entries in this area. For £4, you can play Ubisoft's Ode. For £2, Superflight. At almost the same price point, there's What Remains of Edith Finch, where you can have a more beautiful, more emotional game with a better story. If you want something spiritual, Everything is cheaper than Aer. Rime is more expensive, but it makes more sense to get that than to waste money on this.

A decent experience with some very good ideas, some less sturdy ones, and some poor design decisions. Ultimately, it's often a drag to play, but it wouldn't be fun to watch either if you plucked a Let's Play from the internet and tried to watch that instead. Great script, at times, but everything is stretched thinly so these oases are bridged by a lot of drudgery through industrial metal environments and many return visits to the only "outdoor" environment (another miserable, dark place). You get a quite fascinating antagonist - not the on-screen "monsters", so much as the power behind them which has a very interesting motivation (not unique, I should say, but a fairly rare aim compared to almost all game enemies). Unfortunately, you have to inhabit the incredibly dull and stupid Simon Jarrett. I don't mind having different opinions on subjects to a protagonist, as long as those differences are thought-provoking, but Jarrett is a straight-up idiot who mistreats the game's only likeable character. After a while, I stopped caring about him and actively wishing for his doom, which isn't how video games are supposed to work.

A lovely game, another of this year's wordless puzzle-platformer with a child protagonist, but almost the flipside of Little Nightmares. Some people find the ending to be enormously emotional, but I wasn't as deeply affected by that as I was the whole game up to that point. If you're in either my camp or theirs, it's a wonderfully touching experience. (There's another camp of people who simply don't like the game at all, but what can you do about people like that?) The art style is like a blend of Ico and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The puzzles rarely hold you up for long, but they're really nicely designed: genuinely new ideas (or at least, ideas I'd never seen before).

If you're a fan of creepy stop-motion animation, and/or the kind of scary books nobody dares publish for children anymore, this game is a dream come true. An entire grim society is fully fleshed out without a word being spoken, and there's an ending to the story which is both horrifying and satisfyingly amusing.

Essential add-on for anyone who loves the main game. This doubles the size of the main game, and becomes part of the main game's story. If you *nearly* love Sunless Sea but find the amount of death frustrating, this DLC will help considerably. There are supplies lying around all over the sea bed, and dozens more undersea docks.

One of my favourite games of all time. It's famously harsh and keen to kill you, which is part of the dark humour. It's a humour style that won't work for everyone, but if you recognise and appreciate their references then it'll reward you in spades. Strongly recommend getting the Zubmariner DLC too - it's playable inside the main game story, and gives you many advantages once you've gained the ability to scour the surface, the Unterzee and the sea bed too. The game also makes a big deal about playing for permadeath, teasing the idea that it would be detrimental to use Saves and lose your status as a "true" player. I'd advise you to forget that, and use the Save! It's hard enough without completely crushing yourself. Abandon all ideas about finding some cheap stock that's worth a fortune at another port, too; such things are almost totally non-existent, and this isn't Elite. Money will appear as windfalls from unexpected moments in the game's story, as will life-saving food and fuel (although you will also need to buy these!). The game wants you to forget about traditional game ideas and put both feet into being a foolhardy sea captain from a horror story. Be reckless and give yourself to that premise, and the game will pay you back with more (wonderfully well written) stories.

Great idea, well implemented, but it's not always the most inviting game to play. I found myself playing it in very short chunks, like from one major save point to the next. It's a beautiful design, especially played in 4k, which helps but the gameplay itself is a pressure that rarely responds to the amount of time you've invested. In other games, achieving mastery is part of the reward of the game, and after [x] hours you're the ruler of the world, but Echo's not really like that. Every "level" of the game felt as bewildering as every other, but that's partly a testament to the design. Anything you do sabotages you, which means there are as many ways to potentially win the challenge as there are ways to ruin yourself. You never quite escape the trial-and-error experiment, and sometimes winning feels like it only happened because of a chance mistake by the AI.

This isn't a perfect game in the way that, say, Rocket League is perfect. But everyone has a pantheon in their minds of the triumphs in game design: the names that spring to mind immediately when a friend has been out of the loop and asks you for recommendations on games. Hellblade joins my list immediately. There are snags: weird instances of poor level design, chiefly. But overall, the game radically overshoots in areas that I merely expected to be good. The graphics are an obvious point, but sound is phenomenal (and headphones are essential, or you'll miss out on the 3d binaural effects which cannot be replicated by any other speakers). The swordplay is remarkably well done. I thought it would be serviceable, an interlude between the exploration and the story beats, but it's genuinely great; I can only think of one game that genuinely does this better. The acting is beyond any performance I've seen in a game yet. It's part and parcel of the careful research into psychosis. The use of this theme was one with which I expected to have problems - in the history of games, Alan Wake is about as good as it gets for the incorporation of mental illness into a hero's story. The performance of Melina Jeurgens and the actors who play Senua's voices comprise a huge step forward in acting standards in games, and the description of Senua's experience is truthful and respectful. Yes, it's only a 7-9-hour game. It blows my mind, however, that people would happily snap up an average but longer game in preference to one that pushes the limits of what a game can communicate. I'd rather have the game that beams beauty from beginning to end and sets a new standard for tomorrow's games.

It might seem odd to give a short game based around a single mechanic full marks. I originally wrote in 8/10, but then I thought about it - if there was one game I could buy for all of my friends who like games, I'd make it this one. It achieved its design aims brilliantly , it's truly unique, it's delightful, and it's going to require all of your skill to beat it. It deserves classic status. A gamepad is required to enjoy this game fully. It's the first time in a long time that I've seen a game reinvent the way stick controllers work. The most recent one I can think of was Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which used the twin sticks to control two characters at once, or perhaps Grow Home/Grow Up's use of the triggers to represent its climbing robot's hands. Snake Pass translates the real movements of a snake to the controller in a remarkably accurate way. If you want to move extra fast, you'll need to move left and right to generate the S-shaped movement. If you want to climb, you'll need to coil around an object, grip it, and keep spiralling your way upwards. It requires a constant handover of energy, as you learn when to grip and when to let go, when to raise yourself by craning your neck and when to swing your heavy head with gravity to throw it forwards instead. Snake Pass is a radically different take on platformers. It's also a physics puzzle, underneath it all. It's also a collect-a-thon, but not in the usual sense. Each object is more like a target you need to reach. Many of them look impossible at first, but you figure out how to manipulate speed, momentum and balance to achieve the grab.

I played all of the A-E endings, and achieved a few of the "joke" endings during my run. The fans insisted that this game was going to be a revelation in the endings after A: that it would completely turn my understanding inside out; that I would face astonishing philosophical ideas; that I would cry multiple times at the heart-wrenching story. None of those things happened. It's a very typical anime-esque story that ticks every box on the Typical Anime Plot Points list. The examination of violence in games is about as light and straightforward as it can possibly be. The character I'm meant to care for the most is absurdly stupid, as is the Real Story about how YoRHa works. It's undeniably stylish, and it plays with game design standards in some delightful ways at times. The combat is not so great. At least it becomes entertainingly spectacular later on, but there's a problem at the core. You have plug-in chips that radically improve your fighting abilities. On one hand, it's up to you if you use them and make the game very easy. On the other, if you die you'll have to hunt for your body and reabsorb it, otherwise you'll lose your inventory. This is enough of an annoyance that most players are going to load up their best chips simply to avoid that tedious hunting. Despite how shallow it turns out to be, it's impossible not to become fond of its world. There's a strong design language to it all, and once you've played it you will never forget it. Even so, I wasn't enjoying myself in the first dozen hours and I spent most of the final stretch attempting to race through it because I just wanted it to be over. Maybe I shouldn't have done as many side quests as I did, but 38 hours is way too long for a game of this type. Many of the side quests were mind-numbingly bad, and the game would have benefited greatly from having most of them removed, plus many of the main missions. I wanted to like Nier:Automata much more than I did. There's no question that N:A has many touches of brilliance. It's a great example of the benefits of an auteur creator being given the green light to make a very personal vision come to life. However, I can't give a higher rating to a game that made me plod through so many unenjoyable hours. It's still good, on balance, but "balance" is the operative word. This is a 9/10 game whipped together with a 5/10 game.

Once a briliant browser game resulting from a game jam challenge, Superhot made the jump to PC and became even better. Max Payne brought "bullet time" from cinema into games back in 2001, and since then it's been repeated many times in games but only Superhot has managed to reinvent it. Without question, this game instantly took its place on the GOAT list in my head before I'd even finished my first run. The story is often called "pretentious" by some reviewers. I don't get that at all - it seems to be pretty obvious deadpan humour to me, and very light-hearted. I played this along with a friend when it first came out, and we laughed a lot. I feel a bit sorry for anyone that missed the dry jokes and thought it was a serious attempt to be deep.

Some people say there's no replay value to this one. I can see why they say that, but I don't think it's true for me at all. I'll play this again just to experience the journey through these beautiful scenes. The graphics system used to create this game really is something special - the closest thing to real life I've seen in a game yet, by some margin. The gameplay is mostly "find the objects, set the order of events" stuff, aside from a couple of more interesting puzzles, but there's a good enough weight of satisfaction and purpose to carry you through to the end. For the £15, you get about 5-6 hours of entertainment. If this doesn't sound like a 9/10 for you, wait for the price to fall to a level you find acceptable, but make sure you do play it. It's a remarkable achievement, and a great sign of where games are going.

Excellent stealth game, with a charming 60s cartoon aesthetic and great music. If you want game that feels light but also engages your attention, especially if you like to play games in short bites rather than big meals, this will be great for you. Definitely at its best when played with an XBox controller. I'm giving it a high score because I think it succeeds perfectly at what it set out to do, and it was the best surprise of 2014 for me (in a year when so many big games were disappointments).

Very good. It didn't get the attention it deserved in 2014, perhaps because people had yet to see how bad the year was going to be! That said, it has a few design problems. The IdTech5 engine has many nice graphical features, but it has redraw issues, and the game's highest textures are not up to modern standards. VSync does not work, or at least it doesn't on NVidia cards - you'll have to set it to Force On via Nvidia Inspector - and there are some terrible autosave points that completely wipe the fun out of the game. The worst comes in the final boss fight, a two-stage affair which requires a great deal of crate-raiding before proceeding to the next round. Rather than saving when you enter that final round, your save is after the end of stage one, and thus every re-attempt begins with the crates. However, look past the few rough edges and you get a great game.

WARNING: Many of the game's puzzles rely on the ability to hear and discern pitch, and follow a sound through a forest based on the strength of a sound. If you have a listening disability or can't discern off-key and out-of-tune notes, don't buy this game. A true piece of art, but it's not for everyone. I'll give it a high mark because there's not a lot of this kind of thing I can point to on PC. I'd love to see more games like Flower and Journey, and the ones we do get aren't always successful in their aims. Its aim is to be pretty and atmospheric, and to encourage a kind of investigative approach to satisfying the forest characters' wants. It is not a traditional adventure game, or an RPG. It's not like Dear Esther, so you do more than simply walk, and the gameplay is much more involving than Gone Home, but again that's not saying much. I'm European, and I spent my childhood in a place where the snows were deep, ice formed on the insides of our windows, and there was a forest nearby in which my friends and I would wander, and I learned about the world among a culture of folktales and the mysterious ancient ruins of buildings in which those stories' characters might have lived. This might have some bearing on why the game particularly touches me.

I struggled with this one. I almost stopped playing it, and I'm glad I didn't. Eventually, it throws up some really excellent altered reality moments like the best of the previous two Arkham games, and some stealth rooms that are better than any others in the series. There's nice work in the cutscenes, too. But to get there, you must get through the game's early sections in which the game doesn't feel promising at all (including one massive bug that I thought I'd never be able to circumvent, and still remains unpatched). This initial disappointment overshadowed the rest of the game for me, no matter how good it became, and even the good part is a mixed bag. If you're desperate for more Arkham City, and you're persistent, you'll get some fun out of this. I've never been able to face playing it again, though. Playing Arkham City again and waiting for the forthcoming Arkham Knight might be a better strategy.

One of my favourite games. It's (knowingly) built on clichés, and all the more fun for it, but then surprises you by providing some impressively creative twists on its own set-up. It takes a little time to familiarise yourself with the knack of driving well in this game, but the time trial missions will encourage you to discover the approach required. Once you've cracked that problem, the game is a joy; cornering will become second nature. Driving itself is not D:SF's special factor. Our protagonist is in a hospital bed, with his soul untethered from both his body and our reality, existing somewhere between worlds. I know this sounds like the stupidest thing in the world, but D:SF rolls in its own stupidity with the glee of a pig in its own manure, and believe it or not you're going to love it for that. This means you can hop from your car to any other car in the world, shocking that car's passengers with a sudden detour into reckless drving. This makes objectives tactical. You could win a race through skill, or you could possess vehicles in the oncoming traffic and send them into head-on collisions with your opponents, or use the police to do your bidding. This ability also gives you the freedom to instantly select any mission on the map from an eagle's eye view, or indeed pick a vehicle for some between-mission sandbox fun. This ability improves in various ways in response to your progression, so you always feel the pull dragging you deeper into the game. It introduces some huge surprises towards the end, which I won't spoil, that you have (and will never) see in another driving game.

A great platformer and, like Rayman Legends, another one that achieves the feeling of being a living cartoon. You guide your Luchador (a man at first, but you quickly get the option to swap your protagonist for a female Luchadora) on a quest to rescue the president's daughter. It's one huge interconnected map of 2.5D environments, branching via the doors at right angles to the plane of play. It's got a delightful aesthetic, and I can't think of any other game that looks quite like it. There's a lot of humour, and it's a cheerful and colourful game whose very darkest moments are several shades lighter than Scooby Doo. I should warn you that it's quite challenging. Customers who are used to easy games, or struggle with accurate timing, could have trouble here. Then again, maybe Guacamelee will train you and turn you into a seasoned platforming expert! If I had to choose between recommending this or Rayman Legends (the two best platform games of 2013) then without question I would pick Rayman Legends, but you should certainly play Guacamelee too.

My favourite game of 2013, by far. I'm happy to give it a 10 because it's such a pure gaming experience, and beautifully crafted. It's a thrilling example of a platform game, elevated by its artistic quality to the position of a living cartoon. There's a wonderful interaction between music and visual effects which means you'll rarely be in doubt how to handle a tricky jump even when you're hurtling towards it for the first time, since you'll feel the moment in the rhythm of the music. (Incidentally, this could be a problem for deaf gamers: best to try the demo first if you have hearing difficulties.) There's the welcome option of female characters, and not just one but several to unlock. Rayman and the other characters didn't appeal to me much, so I used Barbara and her sisters exclusively. You're never short of choices if a particular level is causing you a problem, with lots of "hallways" of missions, daily challenges, and remastered versions of all the levels from Rayman Origins. As if it needs saying: if you don't have an XBox controller, buy an XBox controller! This game, and many others, really benefit from it. You might not even realise how many great games you're subconsciously avoiding.

This game is ridiculous, absurd and farcical. It is glorious. Problems? Oh yeah, a ton. It's a Konami PC port after all. No resolution settings above 1080p. No Quit (but we all know how to Alt + F4, right?). Occasional camera frustrations. Large amounts of action that happen in cutscenes, instead of by player agency. (Also: yes, it's designed for an XBox controller, but that's not a "problem"; if you're a PC gamer in 2014 still insisting on kb/m even though it's obviously unsuited to most games out there, YOU'RE the problem.) It makes up for that with its kitschy, swivel-eyed disregard for anything approaching good taste or class. It would be comforting to think that Kojima Productions know how silly their games are, but the MGS series suggests otherwise, and maybe that's for the best. I doubt this level of campness could be achieved unless the makers looked upon their wacky story with anything level than the utmost solemnity. It is toe-curlingly theatrical, and never anything less than 100% entertaining.

This game is excellent. However, you do have to muscle through the early stages, which might make you doubt your purchase. Keep at it, because the game quickly turns a corner into greatness. As with many PC games, you'll see complaints about some ugly graphics that were outdated even in the year of the game's release, and they're not wrong. The sky boxes are almost fascinatingly ugly, with extremely low resolution and low colour textures smeared across the heavens like the dawn of Minecraft. Some models show clear signs of being animated by some kind of b-team, and make jerky movements like mannequins. However, as with so many games, your brain quickly accepts this initially odd world and works around it. What matters is the game itself, and it's a treat for stealth fans, especially if you buy the Director's Cut with the extra missions. It also handles shooting well, and the upgrades to Adam's cybernetic form are good bait to ensure that you willingly stay in character and work as a good-guy detective. There are opportunities to think creatively and feel like you did the right thing, with a little extra planning and effort. At first I thought I'd just be following along with Adam's story, thinking it would be impossible to empathise with his rather unpleasant surface facets, but by the end I'd become a lot more invested in the outcome. It stayed with me for a long time afterwards, and I'll look forward to a sequel. Otherwise, I'll happily play DE:HR again one day.

What a great game. I love it that I was given the choice to avoid killing, and I made it all the way through my first run without killing a single person. I sat down for my next run, intending to try the game with a different tack... and still didn't kill anyone. It just didn't make sense that a man who was trying to prove his innocence of one murder would kill other people in that process, and the game's ability to answer that throws a harsh light on so many other redemption stories in which more killing is mandatory. The AI is not the best, to say the least, which is problematic for a stealth game. In some ways, their predictable natures and poor decision-making skills makes the NPCs into useful opponents; you can watch their patterns and wait for your moment. However, this does knock you out of the game a little bit and makes the clockwork of the game too apparent when it should be invisible, and it also diminishes your own feelings of smartness when you outwit these stupid guards. Another downside is that in order to connect with the story, you have to scour every area and find some essential messages that are hidden behind secret walls. It would be very easy not to see some vital story notes even if you were being pretty careful about hunting around, and that's a problem. We're looking at a game which, although environments have many branches, are mostly quite tight pathways within themselves. I guess that these little gems were hidden away with the expectation that almost all players would be motivated to hunt them all, but my conversations with many Dishonored players proves otherwise - I knew many things that they did not. Overall though, this is a great game with a new movement mechanic, and the DLC is for once not only good but essential - some of the best moments of the game are inside that extra content.

Definitely worth your time. It's a great-looking game if you love graphic novels, and they absolutely nailed the painted comic style. As comic-esque games go, only Dishonored and The Wolf Among Us achieved this kind of look successfully (although TWAU emulates an inked style rather than a painted one). The arm movements can seem a little wooden at times, but that's only in sharp contrast because the animation of microexpressions is so good. While a lot of the NPCs' character springs from the voice acting, the animation is no small part of the overall effect. Environments and clothing are lovingly constructed. While the backstreets and warehouses can feel pretty lacklustre, other locations such as Jackie's mansion are a pleasure to behold. The game can feel a little cramped with such a tight field of view. It's hard to ever feel like combat is going really smoothly, and I found it to be a mostly clumsy affair. There's a reward for headshots, in that time slows down for a couple of seconds after a direct hit so you can chain headshot after headshot and remain in slo-mo the whole time. I strongly recommend a Xbox-style controller for this game. The whole control system is built around dual-wielded guns via the triggers and Jackie's demonic appendages via the shoulder buttons, and it couldn't feel as good with kb/m.

The best gameplay is the series, and it captures the atmosphere of its setting brilliantly, but ultimately feels a little bit strange like ACIII before it. Perhaps the locales were too "new" to support one of the big draws of the Ezio series: uncovering mysterious tombs and retrieving artefacts. The story is okay if not really good, but I'd prefer a story that's a bit humdrum but doesn't make me wince with its many po-faced howlers (looking at you, AC:Revelations and ACIII). AC:Brotherhood took some knocks for its silly villains, but I'll take that camp theatrical scene-chewing over a story that thinks too much of itself any day. AC:R's writer does a much better job this time, supplying a story that carries you along well enough, with many nice little touches in the dialogue and some touches of daft WTF-ery. There's not enough there to make you really invested, and you'll see certain twists a mile away, but as games go it's decent.

I can't remember ever having played a commercial game that was completely unenjoyable. Usually there's something there: a nice environment in which to wander, at least one nice gameplay aspect, some fun character work. Not so with Wayward Manor. I suppose you could say that Neil Gaiman's writing style provides a few decent turns of phrase, but they can't allay such a relentlessly repetitious clanger as this. The game is about 2.5 hours long, and you'll wish it was shorter. It is the opposite of fun. I helped to crowdfund this game, so I have every reason to tell myself it's good in order to feel like less of a mug, but it's really not. Originally, this game asked for funding in July 2013 and promised a Fall 2013 release. It sailed through further release targets, and told the community right up until release day that it hadn't been able to supply gameplay videos because the team was focussed on "making the game awesome". Review copies didn't go out until a few hours before the keys went public, with good reason given the sub-50% reviews it's now receiving. That's not a nice way to treat investors or new customers.

I wish I could give this a higher score. I'm a huge fan of Emily Carroll. If you like her work, you'll find plenty to enjoy here. However, the money spent on the game might be better spent on books that contain her work, or maybe her new solo book, "Through the Woods" which is fantastic. Ms. Carroll is a uniquely talented storyteller, and she's best suited by tales where she guides the entire tale. It's a tough one, because the amount of love and hard work that's gone into this game is enormous. It would be ridiculous to ask for more possibilities in the game, since every new branch of story requires so much input from the authors. In theory, they easily earn your £7 with the effort they've put in, but in practice you're going to see situations repeating themselves quite a lot within three plays. If you like fantasy storytelling, you will create interesting stories between your choices and the creators' input, but for most players this will be only 30 minutes or so of entertainment.

Absolutely superb if you were born in the 70s or earlier, and clearly remember the 80s. It's hard to say if the appeal is diminished for younger players, but I expect they get the jokes about VHS, action films and arcade games just the same. It's a riotous and garish carnival of all the tropes of an era when sci-fi and metal were closer friends than they are today, and it does a much better job of affectionately sending up the manly action hero than Duke Nukem ever did. It's a short game, reflected in its low price, but there's a lot to do in its large map if you go looking for it. The game doesn't demand that you engage with all of its side activities, but I did and got a good 13 hours of fun out of it in return. It's certainly a game that I'll come back to in the future.

Firstly, ignore the title. This is not the 'Merica Eff Yeah game that you might imagine it to be. It is not a simplistic machismo party. This is the war shooter for people who hate war shooters... me, really. This is exactly the kind of game that many PC fundamentalists hate for being "consolised". It's built for the XBox gamepad, and I strongly recommend you play it that way. The graphics are nice enough, but they're not refined for PC at all; with a GTX770 4GB, I'm still seeing stripy shadows across characters' skin. It's a shame to crucify this game over technical points though. I'm scoring it so highly because it's a rare war shooter that has a truly interesting story. Of course, every army game out there tries to inject sophistication into its story, usually by adding betrayal. This game does something different that genuinely stands up as more than just "a good story for a game". It begins with the "Heart of Darkness" stylings of Apocalypse Now, and then runs off with them in a different direction. If you can overlook the fact that you're palpably playing a console game via your PC, give it a try.

I'm giving this a 10 because it's one of the games that makes me happy to be a PC gamer. Because it's built so powerfully around humour, your experience may vary considerably from mine. It's not like Portal 2, where if Wheatley and GlaDOS's script left you cold (you monster) then at least you had the excellent puzzle action. This game is for anyone who loved Portal 2's writing, for fans of Douglas Adams, for fans of British TV comedy. It's going to occupy you for a limited amount of time - maybe 3 hours or so, possibly more if you go through the Wikia to find all the secrets - so you'll have to decide if you think that's worth it. I and many thousands of others did, and we regret nothing.

You'll have heard a lot of negativity about this game. Personally, I expected little but was very pleasantly surprised. I strongly advise you to avoid guns as much as possible to get the best out of the gameplay. If a bad story upsets you, by all means avoid this game because the story and characters are not good. If, however, you're happy as long as you feel engaged by the immediate situation of the mission you're playing at that moment, you'll be fine. Frankly, I find it a bit strange to knock WD on story as if games are a medium that excel in telling stories - after 40 years, there's still a long way to go - and given the number of games with AI that simply hides behind walls and plays Whack-A-Mole, the AI is a lot better than it's been given credit for by some. The AI will flank, it'll try and bring you out of cover with grenades, and that's a lot more than can be said for many open world games.

At first, this looks like a simple bit of fun, a bit like those lightgun arcade classics, but it reveals itself to be a lot better than that. Yes, there are plenty of FPS games out there that allow greater freedom of exploration, but there are many that don't come close to nailing down an enjoyable mecvhanic, whereas CoJ:GS has many. There are FPS games with greater visual quality but whose lack of artistry falls short of the prettiness that Gunslinger provides. There are FPS games with gritty stories, but none of Gunslinger's wit and smarts. This was one of 2013's best surprises, especially after the missteps of the CoJ series of late. Buy it.

A superb indie game. It's a light puzzle game, and many of the puzzles are even optional - in discussions with friends, I've discovered that I fixed some problems that they did not. In fact, it's better to call it a "problem-fixing" adventure than a puzzle game, because this is a story about a journey of healing. It begins with the severe sickness of the father of the two protagonists, and as they search for the rare medicinal plant that can cure him, they find more people in need of their help. It's a thing of beauty that works hard on your emotions, despite telling its story without the use of words.