Let’s face it, you generally know what you’re getting into before you even boot up a From Software game. It’s going to be punishingly hard, it’s going to be semi-roguelike, you’re going to die a lot and you’re going to swear so much you’ll invent new cuss words without even trying.

It’s such a masochistically popular sub-genre that it’s no wonder many other developers have tried to ape the core mechanics in an attempt to get a slice of that rage-inducing pie. But determining which are worth your time and money, and which are just pretenders is tricky, so we’ve rounded up 5 of the best examples available today.

5: IMMORTAL UNCHAINED
Toadman Interactive | 2018

Developed by indie studio Toadman Interactive, Immortal Unchained is a far-future sci-fi that attempted to subvert our expectations of a Souls game by adding guns to the mix.

Despite some technical difficulties and the challenge of working with a low budget, Toadman have done a decent job here, managing to inject some real atmosphere – as well as a few cool ideas.

Sadly, its challenge comes as much from iffy balancing as from design, resulting in a slightly uneven experience. Still, Toadman’s recent updates, as well its overall likeability, mean it’s worth picking up if you’re a fan of the genre. Besides, who doesn’t want to run around like a ‘roided-up techno-freak for a few hours?

4: THE SURGE
Deck 13 | Focus Home Interactive | 2017

The Surge is a game about a bunch of really angry robots getting upset about essentially being slaves to squishy humies, and going uniformally nuts. As a result, it’s probably the most grounded game on the list, if you ignore the endlessly respawning enemies and homemade mech suits, that is.

While it’s easy to doubt the efficacy of a human smashing robots to death with bits of scavenged iron and steel, The Surge is actually a pretty polished experience – barring a few rare bugs that will kill your progress completely, if course.

As sci-fi action games go, it’s certainly an enjoyable enough romp; it just doesn’t quite capture the magic of the titles it’s aiming to replicate.

3: LORDS OF THE FALLEN
Deck 13 | City Interactive | 2014

City Interactive was one of the first studios brave enough to attempt to dip their toes in From’s pool, as it were, with Lords of the Fallen, a pitch-dark fantasy about Harkyn, a man with all of his crimes tattooed on his burly body as a reminder of his tragic quest for redemption.

He’s a miserable bastard for sure, but also pretty handy, as you can spec him in three very different skills that genuinely make you play differently. Although too short and not as clever or nuanced as From’s games, Lords did come close to the crown for a little while.

Minor gameplay tweaks like being able to “bank” your XP, so you keep it on death but earn less as a result switched up the dynamic just a little, and God, some of it looked really nice.

2: SALT & SANCTUARY
Ska Studios | 2016

Being a 2D action platformer reminiscent of something like Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, Ska Studios indie darling had everyone fooled – until its release, when we all realised just how Souls-like it really is.

Shipwrecked on a mysterious island and shit out of luck, your protagonist must make their way through the shadowed under-belly and across the monster-haunted surface, braving dark forests, deep catacombs and trap filled dungeons in an effort to, well, survive.

But it became apparent in mere moments that Salt & Sanctuary is every inch a Souls-like, even down to the respawning enemies, dropping XP and currency on death, and the timing-based combat. It was one of the best games available for the PlayStation Vita, may it rest in peace, and the perfect example of an indie studio playing to its strengths.

1: NIOH
Team Ninja | Sony/Tecmo Koei | 2017

Doing “Dark Souls in Japan” before Sekiro was an itch in From’s jockstrap, Nioh remains the best available Soulslike not actually developed by the progenitors.

The story of Westerner William lost in the shadows of an ancient, horror-story version of Japan, Nioh features copious amounts of Oni, lots of supernatural goings – on, spirit animals and, of course, that old familiar death mechanic.

If you’re a fan of the genre at all, you really should have played Nioh – it’s worth checking out for its incredible combat, often bonkers art design, and undeniably confident swagger.

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Futuridium EP Deluxe is the PlayStation 4 and Vita release of last year’s Futuridium EP, which was exclusive to mobile, and this time around you get a graphical overhaul, a handful of new modes and levels, as well as cross-buy.

For those of you who didn’t play it, Futuridium is a spaceship shooter in which you are constantly moving forwards. Your only input is to strafe up, down and side-to-side, boost, shoot and perform a 180. Using these tools, you have to clear each level of blue cubes before shooting the white ‘Core’ that appears. It’s a simple premise – with no story to worry about – but it hides a surprising amount of depth.

The main draw is Deluxe mode – which you must play through to unlock the other modes – a series of 50 levels split into five chunks. You have to beat each set of ten levels to unlock the next. To do so you must complete each level before your energy runs out; a glowing bar in the top corner slowly depletes, and is reduced further by dying but topped up by destroying cubes. Lose all of your energy and it will cost you a credit – a throwback to the arcade cabinet games that have clearly been an inspiration. Originally you’ll only start with a single credit, though as you progress you’ll unlock more.

Without a story to drive you on, Futuridium keeps you going via several incentives. First up is the scoring, with points gained from destroying cubes and multipliers from doing so quickly. It’s exactly as you would expect, complete with online leader boards. Next is a set of medals, awarded for finishing levels without dying or under a certain time, and finally a total of all cubes destroyed across all game modes unlocks new modes – such as Classic and Single Level options – as well as the extra credits and new skins for the levels.

For all the framework however, it would be nothing without gameplay to match, and luckily Futuridium has it. Racing across levels, dodging enemy fire and finding the fastest route can be glorious, made all the better by the vibrant colours and techno beat. It’s quick, instinctive and an almost primal gaming pleasure when it gets it right.

Later levels suffer from a steep difficulty curve – more frustrating than fun – and they lose focus somewhat, with no clear route to take meaning you’ll muddle your way through. Nowhere is this more prominent than in the square levels. With sideways motion limited to strafing while you race forward, it means an awkward zigzagging to find the final few cubes that you missed on your first pass over. It’s not game breaking, but it’s a definite design mistake.

Futuridium is also in the weird position of being easier to play on the PS4, while at the same time feeling more natural on the Vita. On a big screen it’s so much easier to line up on a cube and judge exactly how much space you have to do so, where on the Vita it can feel fiddly and even unfair. The flipside is that for a game on a £350 console and shiny HD TV it’s really basic – you won’t sit down for a session on it – while the “play a few levels on the bus” approach you can take with the Vita is perfect.

Futuridium EP Deluxe is a cracking little arcade game, best for playing a set of levels when you have a moment rather than a long gaming session, and while later levels can be a bit frustrating, playing it in small bites makes it much more enjoyable.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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Every year, the Skylanders team somehow surprise me. Even in the year 2014, I expect games aimed at children to be average, or worse, yet every single year, Activision has released a Skylanders game that is entertaining for all ages – and to hell with my street cred, those toys are still cool, I’d have loved them growing up.

Where they once relied on the Spyro name to sell a new franchise, Skylanders has taken on a life of its own, and with the new consoles now on the market, they’ve taken a visual leap, as Trap Team looks gorgeous. The colourful imagery is everywhere, and it’s the antithesis of so many modern games. It’s vibrant, and the action pops off the screen for all to see like an explosion of sugar and sweets.

But the basics of Skylanders are now set in stone. Since Swap Force introduced a jump button, there’s not a huge amount that feels missing – though I’d still like to see camera control and online multiplayer at some point in the future. You’ll still go to levels, move objects about, go up lifts, and attack everything that isn’t nailed down.

So really, it falls to whoever comes up with the toy ideas to create something new and interesting that will make us want to collect them all over again. Initially it seemed an odd idea, too. The ability to trap your enemies and have them fight for you? Requires a new portal? Uh-oh, this doesn’t sound good, right? Luckily, the joy these simple touches bring to a child are better in action than they sound on paper, and create a whole new way to play and explore.

The basic concept is that you have traps you insert into the portal, and you can capture enemies instead of killing them, and there are around forty to trap. Once captured, you hit the L2 button and your Skylander will be swapped out for the baddie. This is amusing, but it’s when you start taking down the big bosses that it gets really interesting.

Of course, the characters are all daft and are there mostly for comedic value, but the first boss you fight (a weird little man who controls the Chompys) is enough of a challenge that it doesn’t resort to simple button mashing, and it’s rewarding because you’ll get to trap him and then use him against other enemies. Speaking of difficulty, while it’s not overly taxing (there are hard battles, though), it’s not too easy either – it’s well balanced, as you’d hope.

Thankfully, traps are reuseable, and you can go to a larger trap and swap out villains at your leisure, though obviously only one character can be in a trap at any given time. The portal talks to you, as well, and the bad guys will comment on things as you play along. Having a Sheep Creep “baa” at you randomly doesn’t get old, and Chompy Mage never stops being annoyed that he is incarcerated.

You can’t play as them forever, though, and each time you swap one out, you can only use them for a limited time, with damage taken reducing that time. What’s especially interesting is that the variation in attacks means you can have a Skylander on the portal that shoots (thus has ranged attacks), then swap to a trapped villain that is more melee based.

There’s a raft of new toys to collect, then. New Skylanders (series four), and now traps as well. Each trap is specific to an element, so you can’t use a life trap to capture an earth enemy. It might seem cynical, but as with previous games locking off areas to certain elemental Skylanders, it’s merely an extension of that idea. And there’s no shortage of content, with wave based modes like Doom Challenge, and Arena battle giving additional things to do outside the main campaign. The hard truth is that you’re going to want to collect them anyway, I’m sorry you had to hear that, but you knew it deep inside. As always, your previous Skylanders work on the new portal, and they keep their levels and skills from the other games. It’s a small thing to note, really, but one that is continually worth mentioning.

Kaos returns, as you expect, and this time there’s a band of evil-doers possibly more villainous than him. His plan is to undermine them secretly, so they fail and turn to him as the one-true king of evil. Being a bumbling fool, I’ll let you guess how that goes. It’s full of charm, and the voice acting is excellent, with returning characters everywhere.

Like The Simpsons (well, older Simpsons, anyway) there is plenty for all ages to laugh at, and even some more cheeky nods to the older audience. Some of the toys themselves will make you laugh – for example, Chopper is a small dinosaur with a helicopter on his back, and Food Fight is a small green chap that has a gun which shoots tomatoes. It makes no sense, but it also makes complete sense. There are minis to collect, too, and the giant called Eye Brawl is now available as Eye Small. Such a silly name change, yet for some reason it really tickles me.

It’s weird to think that with the fourth game, Skylanders has fully earned my trust. Games aimed at children don’t have to be rubbish, and they can engage with them on multiple levels. As well as the game itself, the toys are highly collectible (still) and there are even trading cards that come with each toy. I harp on about this because it’s true, but as a kid, the Skylanders would have been the coolest thing I could have imagined in game form, and the quality every year stays high.

The toys still aren’t cheap, and jumping in here (the new starter pack only has two Skylanders, as it also has two traps) means you’re probably going to want to get a few extra toys right out of the gate. But Toys for Bob continue to hold fun in the highest regard, and that’s worth championing. But Lord only knows where they go next.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Challenge is good. In fact, many of us seek it out in video games, ramping up the difficulty slider or finding ways to play that enhance the sense of accomplishment that comes from surmounting the seemingly insurmountable. That being said, Natural Doctrine, a strategy RPG from Kudokawa Games, just feels mean spirited.

For a start, casual gamers will find it near impenetrable. The fantasy setting bares the expected hallmarks: humans exist within a fortress city – here called Feste – and must defend against other sentient races as well as staple monsters like goblins and ogres. You play as Geoff (no, really), a young warrior initially charged with slaying goblins that infest the caves and mines around Feste. Alongside a handful of companions, including sharpshooter Anca and trademark “loud giant friend” Zeke, Geoff finds himself facing tougher and tougher challenges in an attempt to keep his city safe.

To be fair, the story is the usual JRPG fare we’ve seen many times before, with different hairstyles, and for several hours I failed to read anything into it, to the point that I resorted to skipping through the reams of text to get to the next fight – which only left me frustrated for various other reasons. As stated, this is not a game for the casual. The combat system is borderline unfair and, while it may be the case that perseverance and a gradual increase in player skill and understanding will see you through, it simply doesn’t feel balanced.

I struggled to get through the first few missions (it took me four attempts to pass the first mission after the introductory rumble), and all I was facing was goblins – up until the end of the mission, whereupon I freed a huge troll from its prison, which proceeded to more or less one-shot my entire party. It’s all about synergy, and in theory it’s a solid system.

You move your characters freely within a predetermined grid arrangement, positioning them in such a way that they form a triangular link between any two of your fighters and the encroaching enemy. This increases your chances of critical hits and evasions, and actually makes battles look quite dynamic as your characters dodge, parry, block and strike alongside one another. Unfortunately, Natural Doctrine doesn’t want to really explain anything, and besides a couple of minute-long tutorials in the opening mission, you’re left to work it out on your own. Curatives are in short supply, which means you’ll spend half the mission with at least one of your party limping around at half-speed, adding to the frustration.

If a main character dies, it’s game over, and you’ll have to restart from a checkpoint. The problem with this is that most of the missions appear to take place in fairly confined areas, so the scope for tactical strategy is narrow. When you consider how much of a factor luck is in combat (this is a number-crunching RPG after all), it all becomes very frustrating. Fiddly, unintuitive controls compound the sense of overall underpoweredness (we made that word up) and turn missions into slogs of endurance and tests of patience that rob the joy gleaned from the oddly satisfying battle animations.

Each character has a decent sized skill tree, unlocked piecemeal by way of Ability Points earned through XP. There’s not a huge variety to the different abilities, but you are able to steadily build a custom party to cater more towards your personal style of play, even if it’s not always clear what a skill does and the menu is horribly unappetising. The UI in general is cluttered, in fact, with a quarter of the screen taken up by stark red and white battle text.

Characterisation is what you’d expect, too: lifted straight from the JRPG playbook, characters are either broody, sarcastic or irritating, while the sinister are needlessly hammy. None of it is helped by the relentlessly brown colour palette and stock visuals, or the teeth-shatteringly repetitive battle music. Natural Doctrine’s worst crime is that it does absolutely nothing to immerse you in its world or its systems. It’s combat is so needlessly, artificially difficult, that you rarely feel like you’re progressing smoothly, the story is uninteresting, the sub-par visuals are marred by the clunky, over-burdened UI and the music is impossible to like.

Certain elements of Natural Doctrine do feel new. The combat mechanics are interesting on paper, and – if refined – might even be considered original. Sadly, as they stand they’re simply imbalanced and combat feels like an uphill struggle every time, ponderous and one-sided. What could be an interesting story full of JRPG whimsy comes over as stilted and underdeveloped, and the simple joys of watching a goblin’s head get stoved in is drained by the fact that it takes so long to actually achieve that, and when you do it feels more like luck than skill.

Hardcore strategy RPG fans may find a decent experience here. In fact, it may simply be the case that Natural Doctrine’s blend of punishing difficulty and simple presentation don’t gel with everyone. One thing that is certain is that Natural Doctrine us not designed for the casual crowd, and unless you’re prepared to invest time and energy into learning its systems inside out – and then are still prepared to try and try again when you do know what you’re doing – you’d be advised to away from this one.

DECENT. A 6/10 indicates that, while this game could be much better, it still has a fair amount to offer the player. It might be an interesting title sabotaged by its own ambition, or a game denied greater praise by some questionable design choices. Don’t avoid it outright, but approach it with caution.

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“Definitive” is the latest buzzword to be introduced to an industry seemingly built on them, but what it actually means is “now on next-gen consoles”. As we wait patiently for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to fill up their catalogues with new titles, we’re being treated (and most of them are treats) to re-jigged versions of already-released titles, more often than not tweaked for 1080p and 60fps – a graphical upgrade which seems enough to justify a re-release all on its own.

CastleStorm, from Zen Studios (the team behind several awesome Pinball series, among other things), is the most recent title to make the transfer across generations, and it’s a welcome addition to the line-up despite the lack of significant change. A hybrid of RTS, Tower Defence, action and Angry Birds, CastleStorm is one of the more interesting titles to occupy that odd middle ground between indie and AAA, combining highly addictive gameplay with bright, colourful visuals to deliver an experience that is nothing short of charming.

The narrative centres on a fantasy world where knights and Vikings warred for centuries, until a Goddess cried two tears that turned to magical crystals. Each side took one, and peace reigned for decades, until the Vikings got greedy and decided they wanted both. Your part in the ensuing war is to defend your king and country as Protector of the Realm, a quintessential hero knight with blond hair, blue eyes and shiny shining armour. Armed with a sword and shield or a bow, you’ll be tasked with either heading out to meet the enemy head on, or leading the royal defenses to repel invaders.

Initially presented as a 2D physics game, CastleStorm gives you a meagre arsenal to begin with, affording you nothing but a ballistae with which to perforate hairy Viking skulls. As the game progresses you’ll unlock more, from huge spiked bolas to explosive missiles, and you’ll be able to deploy troops to defend you on the ground. The strategy element exists because troops cost food, and food costs time, so you’ll need to use your weaponry (all working on cooldowns) to keep the enemy at bay until you can field reinforcements.

From ground troops and archers to trolls, direwolves and champions, the enemy comes at you in steady waves, mixing it up enough that you’ll need to employ a combination of defensive strategies to stay in the game. If they take down your wall and make it back to base with your flag, it’s over. As with most games of this ilk, you can be riding high one minute and in a world of doodoo the next thanks to one bad decision or imprecise shot. If you do win the day, you’ll be rewarded with gold to spend on upgrades and new weapons or soldiers.

The targeting isn’t always as exact as you’d like, and sometimes the bright colours make it hard to discern exactly what’s going on during a fight or how much damage you’re doing to the enemy castle, but patience is usually the key to victory. Taking your time to line up a shot is way more effective than blind-firing, especially when you’re aiming to clean up on bonuses for, say, getting 20 headshot kills. The controls are simple enough, even during the missions where your plucky, chiselled hero heads out onto the field himself and you take total, single control of him. It’s an excellent change of pace, even if he does move a little ponderously sometimes.

The multiplayer mode ups the ante by pitting you against another devious and free-thinking human being, but besides this the core game is identical. The AI is tough enough during later stages that I never found myself hankering after a PvP game, but the option is there for those who prefer the challenge of out-thinking a person. If nothing else, playing against a player makes every match less predictable, and demands that you use everything you’ve got to win.

A castle building mode rounds off the package, allowing you to design your own base. There are plenty of options to fortify and defend your creation, but the controls can feel a little clunky and for some reason it never feels that satisfying to use your own base – partly because the pre-made ones are perfectly functional and, despite the inclusion of some half-decent buffs, all you’re really doing is adding layers and making it harder to bring down. Though, that’s the point, I suppose.

Although CastleStorm seemed right at home on the Vita, it fits the PS4 very well, too. The bright visuals pop and sing thanks to the increased power and the game runs as smooth as butter at all times. Addictive and entertaining, CastleStorm’s mix of fairytale whimsy and challenging strategy – as well as its mishmash of play styles – makes it a solid and enticing prospect whatever the platform.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Rhythm-action isn’t a terribly complex genre. Taking the most basic essence of videogames – the button press – and distilling it so thoroughly that it becomes engaging enough to form a game in its own right is no mean feat, but the product of said refining is always going to be a little one-note. And if you’re a one trick pony, that trick has to be bloody good.

Guitar Hero is rightly lauded because it got this theory spot on. Meeting the prompts had a tangible reward, missing them a clear punishment in the form of the bum-note in the middle of your favourite riff. Kickbeat though… well, Kickbeat doesn’t do any of this.

Transplant the chords from Guitar Hero’s instrument to the face buttons on your gamepad and the special power to L1. Instead of hitting scrolling notes as a rock-god, you’re now beating up goons as they approach from the compass points around protagonist Lee, all in time to music. Concept-wise it isn’t hard to grasp.

The backdrop for this is straight-to-DVD stuff. All of the music on Earth – housed in the ‘Music Sphere’ – has been stolen from the monastery of its caretaker monks. As a young Kung-Fu apprentice, it is up to you to get it back, fighting across a selection of songs that have been left behind in a handful of environments with four or five cutscenes fleshing out the narrative. It’s not a bad story, but there isn’t much there – aside from a Bieber gag that is so out of place with Kickbeat’s target audience it’s almost funny.

Enemies approach 90 degrees anti-clockwise from where they will attack you, allowing for a bit of forward-planning while keeping your view focused on the action, with Lee striking out in the direction you send him. Colour coding helps sort your rhythm, with Yellow grunts filing in one at a time, Blues striking in couples or triplets on alternate half-beats and Reds attacking in pairs.

Perfect hits build your Chi meter – which when unleashed adds points to your score – whilst your life will drop if you are hit too many times. Bonuses are also available from some enemies, either points or a health boost, claimed by double tapping the relevant face button when they attack.

It really is all very basic, and as such it should be tight as a drum – especially when you consider that this is a port of last year’s PS3 and Vita release. Kickbeat is not tight. For this genre, every successful button press should feel like a triumph. Instead you miss most of the action, focused as you are on the periphery rather than what Lee is doing: there’s no reward. Even worse is when you do spare a glance, you realise that his punches don’t always connect, and his kicks are just off.

Kickbeat’s cardinal sin, though, is that it doesn’t always get the rhythm right. Where Guitar Hero covers you when you’re a fraction late, here Lee isn’t tuned to the music, but to you. Press a fraction late, he’ll react a fraction late. It’s good in a sense that there’s generous timing, but it feels wrong.

Similarly wrong is the scroll in of your attackers. Coming from the left of the button needed to strike them, they approach in a perfect curve, before taking a tiny shuffle forward into the attack box. You’ll learn to adjust, but that direction change breaks the flow more than you’d imagine. It can also be a pain to work out what colour an enemy is on some of the stages – particularly the earlier ones – as they blend into the neon backgrounds, and the shaky camera zooming in and out of the action only makes things more frustrating, rather than harder.

Graphically, Kickbeat looks quite pretty, even if enemies are identikit clones, but some in-engine close-ups are dominated by muddy textures that you just don’t expect on this generation. With only 24 tracks (highlights include Pendulum and Marilyn Manson) there’s not much here in the way of longevity. Harder difficulties and a survival mode might interest you, but only if the track list as a whole grabs your attention. Sadly, the music importer of the Steam release isn’t included.

Kickbeat is a fairly generic rhythm-action title, hampered by loose core gameplay – something that really needed to be solid when there is so little in the way of content. It’s hard to recommend it when there are better examples of the genre out there.

AVERAGE. The epitome of a 50/50 game, this title will be unspectacular but inoffensive, charmless but amiable. We aren’t condemning a game by scoring it a 5, but we certainly aren’t championing it, either.

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The Wii U is increasingly becoming the indie developers (and indeed indie gamer’s) best friend, with an ever increasing number of once PC only gems finding themselves at home on the Wii U’s eShop. The latest title to make the jump from PC to Nintendo’s living room console is Teslagrad, from Norwegian dev team Rain Games.

Teslagrad can be best categorised as a 2D puzzle platformer, but that description only scratches the surface of what’s on offer here. After a moody menu screen backed by a melodic backdrop, Teslagrad throws you straight into its dark and unforgiving world. Rain lashes down from a dimly lit sky, pounding off every surface. A hard-nosed looking man darts from house to house, scaring people into fleeing for their lives. Most of them get caught, but one boy makes a success of running away. You take control of the boy, and the game begins.

Running and jumping across rooftops, the backdrop slowly changes from a scene that is dreary and residential, to the fiery heart of an industrial furnace. Teslagrad’s entirely wordless narrative is brought to life by the excellent art direction. The mixture of classic steampunk and 50’s style animation is absolutely gorgeous, and brings to life a fusion of the worlds of Limbo, Steamworld and Disney’s Pinocchio all at once. The story that unfolds shows us a world ruled by a ruthless king, who has suppressed a race of technological wizards that once resided in a massive tower in the centre of the city of Teslagrad.

So we know it looks good and tells a nice story, but how does Teslagrad actually play? From the offset, it’s obvious that this isn’t a pure platformer, as the way your character handles isn’t exactly genre-defining. Jumping can be imprecise and floaty, and it kind of feels like you’re running on ice most of the time. Thankfully, Teslagrad redeems itself by slowly ratcheting up the complexity, throwing in special abilities that you find along the way.

Early on our little hero discovers a pair of gloves that allow him to punch specific objects in the environment and turn them either red or blue. The red or blue colouring indicates that object’s magnetic polarity – and that is where the most of Teslagrad’s puzzling comes from. Being clever with magnetism is nothing new, however Teslagrad plays the magnet card very well indeed. You can use different coloured blocks to defeat enemies, open new pathways and create a magic carpet which you can use to cruise around the level. The use of magnetism isn’t restricted to objects in the environment, with your character able to take on a red or blue hue, allowing him to float above objects of the opposite colour. You take on the red or blue hue either by interacting with one of the many little robots wandering about, or walking through strategically placed plants (all of which are either red or blue in colour, indicating their polarity).

Another power afforded to you is the ability to teleport a couple of feet in front of the direction your character is facing, Dishonoured style. This power is the easiest to get to grips with, which is great, because it’s also the most fun. Darting around Teslagrad’s beautifully realised world is great fun, and does a good job of disguising the otherwise ropey handling. Put all of these puzzle elements together (something that happens early in the game), and you have a recipe for some real brain teasers. The deeper into Teslagrad’s world I got, the more out of my depth I became. This is coming from someone that has played 2D scrollers my entire life: Teslagrad is nails. You will flit from a real sense of achievement to unsolvable puzzlement, immense frustration and back again – and that’s just in the first hour or so.

Combat is pretty much non-existent, since our little dude dies at the slightest touch – adding to the games prominent “old school” feel. Level areas are bookended by boss battles – huge mechanical beasts that will push your skills to breaking point. You need to jump, dodge and teleport to avoid the boss’ attacks, all the while trying to hit it with a dose of magnetised death. In a world of one-hit kills, these are bosses that will test the most hardened of gamers. The difficulty here will really polarise (get it?) opinions on Teslagrad – 16-bit era gamers will love its unforgiving nature and will battle through to the end; as for everyone else? I’m not so sure.

Rain Games have created something beautiful in Teslagrad. Its opening scene alone should win some kind of award. Its mix of mind bending puzzles and unforgiving boss battles, not to mention some pretty hit and miss platforming, make it a game that will really split opinions. Fans of the genre will find a new hero in Teslagrad – but casual gamers should be wary.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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Starting life as a mobile game around the time that Temple Run’s popularity was first flaring up, Run Like Hell takes a similar theme and flips it onto a 2D plain, dropping you into the shoes of cardio legend and all-round coward Joe, who spends the entire game sprinting like a madman away from his pursers.

The set up, and indeed the execution, is simple. The protagonist never stops running, and all you have to do is hit the relevant buttons to make him jump over or slide under obstacles. As he legs it away from natives and, later, a yeti, the environment throws up a number of hazards to circumnavigate, and it’s not long before Run Like Hell really begins to test your reflexes. If you’re caught, it’s back to the start of the level. Sometimes it feels like you just can’t time those jumps right, and it can be frustrating later on when there’s so much to worry about, but overall it’s a hypnotic, even pleasant, experience.

You might be hurdling fallen trees or swampy pits, or sliding under killer bee hives and huge, swinging stone boulders; you might have to skip from crumbling pillar to crumbling pillar, avoiding deadly traps, pit falls and trip points as you go. You’ve also got a boost meter, activated by hitting right on the D-Pad, and power-ups scattered about the place aid you by granting you coin magnets or by zapping your pursuers. After only a handful of levels, Run Like Hell starts coughing up such a mix of nasties that mastering a course becomes a genuine challenge. It’s one that remains fun throughout, too – as long as you’re enjoying it in short bursts.

Commendably doing away with most of the in-app purchases of its mobile predecessor (though you can choose to buy coins if you really want to), Run Like Hell awards you money for completing arcade levels and bonus objectives, which allows you to buy new characters. While entirely aesthetic, these new characters are almost all nods to other games, with one named Laura and modelled on a certain Ms. Croft, and another called Hope who looks exactly like Mirror’s Edge’s Faith. Unlocking them all will take a serious amount of play, however.

Switching to Arcade Mode takes allows you to play endlessly to see how long you can last, or a version of each level with collectible coins. Online mode takes you to the Challenge menu, which has various multiplayer games to indulge in that change periodically. So far my favourite has been the straight race, which sees you sprinting against the ghosts of three other players. It adds another dimension to the game when you feel you’re not trying to stay alive anymore, you’re trying to snatch that gold medal.

Run Like Hell is an enjoyable little romp, with enough content to keep you coming back. The controls are responsive and it takes no time to get the hang of what you’re doing – though mastering each course will take considerably longer. It’s a shame that there aren’t more solo modes, and that the different environments don’t affect anything other than how it all looks, but what’s here will provide some short-term amusement on a commute or in a waiting room.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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If you were to give out awards for putting your best foot forward, Disney Infinity 2.0 wouldn’t be anywhere near even qualifying. A horribly long load time into the Marvel Super Heroes play set (included with the starter pack), and clunky, heavy-to-control characters dominate the opening mission which introduces us to Disney Infinity again.

The general idea is that our heroes have just unfrozen themselves and need to save Avenger/Stark Tower before it’s overrun by Loki’s Frost Giant minions. The combat begins and it’s pure button mashing repetition; everything is linear and you just go from corridor to corridor before ending the level, and choosing whether to continue the Marvel story, or be introduced to the Toy Box mode.

Thank God, then, that immediately after the dreary opening mission, the larger, more open area of the city is yours to play in. Suddenly you’re allowed to take to the skies as Iron Man or Thor and can explore the world with freedom, gathering all manner of collectibles, some of which add to the Toy Box mode, while others just unlock concept art. Interestingly, among the multitude of collectibles, there are crossover tokens, which, once ten are collected, allow characters to appear in each other’s playset.

Immediately, Infinity 2.0 feels a better game. Initial fears subside, and you start to enjoy the mechanics far more. Button-mashing combos are still prevalent, but as you progress through the skill trees and level up your individual heroes (the cap is twenty for all heroes, including ones from the previous game), more options become available. Super moves and changes to standard combos change things up, and you can improve core skills as well. One problem that rears its head early on is that the environments seem tailored towards characters who can fly. You can climb via jump pads and lifts, but overall, you’ll initially play more as Thor and Iron Man, just because they are more fun to navigate the world with – you’ll end up playing Black Widow mainly when you transition to the indoor missions, then later when you unlock a certain vehicle that lets everyone take to the skies. It’s an interesting way to add movement speed to the non-flying characters, because the motorbike you unlock first handles very heavily, and is best avoided.

There’s not a huge amount of variety to missions, either. There’s certainly an attempt to change things up, adding things like motorbike races or horde-style combat challenges – but they’re not enjoyable enough to make you want to come back and improve your time, let alone try and top the leaderboards. Indeed, most missions will involve going from place to place, beating up on some guys, then doing it all again in the next mission. The enemies do get progressively harder, but the techniques to beat them don’t really change.

Things are improved when playing with a friend (or one of your children), as you can both explore the world at your leisure, before joining up for a story mission. If you find it too easy, simply adjust the difficulty. There are also numerous mission nodes around the playsets that allow you to play competitively, and these are a surprising amount of fun. As Iron Man, facing off against your son as Thor is silly, especially when you both take to the skies in your enclosed battle arena, seeing who will blink and go to ground first, which is where the combat is really intended to be.

Thankfully, the technical issues that plagued the previous game appear to have been ironed out. The open-world sandbox area of the Marvel play set is hitch-free, and the frame rate is mostly solid, but prone to major drops in missions that take place inside. It’s not the most visually taxing game for the hardware, but it looks pretty when cutscenes play, and though the city itself is a little on the bland side, the colour comes from the characters. There are elements of humour, and occasionally the gags work really well, but there’s no mistaking this is a game aimed at children. That said, the voice acting is fun, and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury is a lovely bonus. Generally speaking, the atmosphere and character is there for all to see on screen.

Interestingly, both of my children jumped immediately into the Toy Box mode. This is a clean slate where you can add environments of your choosing, as well as characters, enemies and, well, basically everything that’s in the game. While the truly creative will go for the absolutely empty sandbox, you can choose from numerous presets to get you started. This time around, you can save and share your boxes with other people, and if you don’t feel like spending hours making missions and worlds for others, you can just download community created content. Some are better than others, and the devs have created a few to give everyone ideas. One platforming based level I tried was okay, but the controls aren’t precise enough to really make overly taxing jumping much fun.

Without question, the Toy Box is where Infinity still shines. A sandbox that truly lets your imagination run wild, only now you can share or download creations via the internet. But the play sets are a vast improvement over the first game and a lot of fun in their own right, while the technical performance is far better, too. Being able to bring your existing Infinity toys into 2.0 is a nice touch, but something you’d expect.

It’s going to cost you a fortune, though, because once you start to enjoy dashing through the air as Iron Man, you’ll want more of those pricey heroes to throw into your game, because they’re wonderful little toys that look and feel good. On that note, this seems an ideal time to remind you that we don’t accept any responsibility for any overdraft charges you may incur after playing Disney Infinity 2.0.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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Valvatorez is certainly one of the more memorable characters I have encountered in recent gaming history. When I checked out Disgaea 4 in its original PS3 incarnation, I was blown away by the wonderfully cowardly, sardine-gobbling vampire and the plot full of off-kilter political satire and humour. Being given the opportunity to return to the Prinny factory in an enhanced Vita port is an enticing prospect. Have NIS thrown enough extra content onto the OLED screen to make it worth playing again?

Three years on from the last time I encountered him, Valvatorez is as excellent a protagonist as you will come across. As per the titles of the whole D4 oeuvre, our hero is utterly driven by the concept of promises, namely an unfulfilled assurance from his past which led him to abandon his vampiric tendencies, and his current situation that sees a gaggle of his Prinny students penguin-napped before he can make good on his promise to teach them how to do their job. It’s a treat seeing Valvatorez slowly awake to the corruption and injustice going on around him, all the while encouraged by the dry humour of his loyal werewolf servant, Fenrich.

Excellent plot aside, the core mechanics of Disgaea 4 do not deviate far from the original 2003 classic. It is a turn-based isometric tactical RPG, with the same mental stats, seemingly endless levelling up and crazed variety of attacks. While it does give you ample opportunity to learn via a series of gentle, tutorial style introductions, there is no getting away from the fact that there is an almost overwhelming amount of complexity at play here. Learning all of the nuances of the play grid, the stat-changing, colour-co-ordinated Geo Block system, and the way everything interacts is tantamount to spinning plates at times, but utterly rewarding all the same.

As if you didn’t have enough to comprehend, there are some new gubbins to play around with when you enter the Netherworld this time. How about the cool ability to stack your allies on top of each other, creating a statistically and offensively more effective tower formation? You can also use a new version of the Magichange ability to Demon Fuse enemies together and put them to use for your own attacking ends.

NIS have done an utterly incredible job of transporting the entire PlayStation 3 release to the handheld. The lush hand-drawn art absolutely pops, the 3D pyrotechnics when you enleash the wide variety of spells and special attacks are as spectacular as ever, and the whole thing suffers from only very infrequent framerate issues. It is nothing short of astonishing how you are effectively playing a full-blown PS3 title in the palm of your hand. Nothing has been compromised in terms of content – the huge, territorial bunfight that is the Cam-Pain map system, the well-implemented online capabilities that enable you to share your experiences with other players, the wonderful customisable pirate ship.

Amazingly the main campaign is also backed up by the DLC from the original release, but is also complemented by a brand new scenario that is exclusive to the Vita release.

This is undoubtedly the finest handheld version of the Disgaea-verse that you could possibly wish to own. It gives you a scaled-down, but not pared-back port of one of the highlights of the series, and offers a near-endless amount of tactical RPG fun. You are always learning when you take on the mantle of fulfilling Valvatorez’s honourable promises, and vicariously helping him on his crusade against corruption and wrongdoing. While things haven’t moved on tremendously over the staggering eleven years of its existence, Disgaea is a thing of real beauty and depth, that arguably works at its best on the go.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Murasaki Baby is a dark, emotional journey that aims to make the most of the Vita’s touch screens. It’s a great aspiration to have, but sadly it doesn’t work out all of the time.

You guide Baby as she searches for her Mother. In fact you literally guide Baby, using the front touch screen to take her by the hand and pull her through the 2D levels. The journey takes you through a dark, twisted world, meant to represent a child’s nightmare, forcing you to deal with Baby’s fears to progress. The actual connection that you have to Baby makes you naturally protective of her (and you’ll want to keep her safe from harm), but you’ll also feel guilty when you upset her accidentally, or pull her too far and trip her up – it’s a bond few titles manage to pull off.

There are four chapters to guide Baby across, each with a character stuck in a situation that must be resolved, for example: a child stuck in a bunny suit given a nightmarish twist. Each is made up of a series of levels, fraught with hazards for you to negotiate.

Other than interacting with Baby directly, you have two other powers at your disposal. The first is moving the balloon that Baby clutches in her other hand, gently tugging it under spikes. If it pops, she’ll break down and cry, pushing you back to the last checkpoint.

More important are the interactions with the background. At first nothing happens, but popping other balloons found in each level unlocks a different backdrop. These can be swapped between with a two-finger swipe across the rear touch pad, and their unique powers are activated by tapping it. One power turns on a shop window of televisions, distracting monsters in your path, another allows you to zap lightening to power mechanisms. They’re quite varied, and the fact that they are tied to a specific chapter means that the puzzles stay fresh.

Theoretically this is all brilliant, changing puzzles making the most of the Vita’s arsenal. Practically, though, it’s haphazard at best. The most pressing issue is how to hold the Vita while playing. The standard controller-like grip is okay to start with, but certain sections require two fingers on the front to move both Baby and her balloon. Either both thumbs or both index fingers are required for this, but that means contorting your hands horrifically or resting it on a surface, which causes the background to go wild. Using two fingers also blocks a lot of the screen, making it hard to see what’s going on.

Even worse are the sections where you flip the Vita upside-down to change the gravity on a level. On the face of things it shouldn’t be bad, but try and imagine doing that while grappling with the controls as well, and you see the scale of the problem. Compounding the issue yet further is the need to quickly switch background to change power, but it could be several swipes away, and when you’re flipping the screen it becomes too difficult to keep track of what is in which direction.

All of this means that you’ll die frequently. Luckily checkpoints are generous, with one after every little challenge you face, but this takes away any bit of challenge. All the puzzles are solvable on the third or fourth attempt – with a bit of dexterity – and it’s almost as if Ovosonico knows that the control scheme was borderline unworkable. There are points the puzzles could have been pushed further, but the inputs just wouldn’t have coped.

The combination of a saving issue and a crash lost me a good twenty minutes towards the end of the story as well, meaning I had to replay some of the most frustrating parts again, and for reference, that twenty minutes is a sizeable chunk of Murasaki Baby – it might just about last you three hours.

Ovosonico have attempted to create an original, thoughtful title that takes you on a journey of discovery through the eyes of a child. It feels a shame to blame Murasaki Baby for the poor controls of the Vita, but it wouldn’t work on any other platform – it’s been tailor made for Sony’s handheld. While it would have lost the connection with Baby that the front touch screen gives, having the sticks control her and the balloon would have improved things no end.

DECENT. A 6/10 indicates that, while this game could be much better, it still has a fair amount to offer the player. It might be an interesting title sabotaged by its own ambition, or a game denied greater praise by some questionable design choices. Don’t avoid it outright, but approach it with caution.

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Originally released on the PlayStation 3 in 2010, Joe Danger puts you in control of the titular stuntman and has you charging through a selection of courses that will test your skill and reflexes, as well as your patience, with their lovably devious ingenuity.

While original developers and publishers Hello Games work on the upcoming sci-fi masterpiece-in-potentia, No Man’s Sky, porting for this and the sequel (due soon) is being handled by Four Door Lemon, and so far it appears they’re doing an excellent job, bringing over not only the original game but also all the DLC so far and a few new characters in the form of LittleBigPlanet’s Sackboy and Tearaway’s Iota and Aoti.

Being the world’s most dangerous and fearless mototcycle stuntman requires Joe, he of the impossibly square jaw and bright spandex, to hurl himself into some pretty lethal situations, and it’s your job to guide him through safely while turning enough tricks to rack up the biggest score multiplier possible.

The controls are deceptively simple, leading you to believe you’re in for an easy ride. The right trigger takes you forward, the left takes you back, Square ducks and jumps, X activated your booster and various combinations of Circle and Triangle cause Joe to perform mid-air holds to excite the crowds.

Courses begin with light obstacles like speed bumps, hurdles and loop-de-loops, but soon throw up rings of fire, shark tanks and rows of cars to hurl yourself over. Throughout each course are certain challenges that earn you the stars needed to compete in further levels. Where many games would simply allow in-app purchases to do the hard work for you, Joe Danger requires you to improve your own level of ability to move on. These challenges might be to collect all the silver stars, earn a certain number of points or find all the hidden letters, and make every course that much more dynamic.

Aside leaderboards and ghost races, there’s also a training ground to hone your skills and practice your combos, or an in-depth level editor, called the Sandbox, that allows you to chop and change every part obstacle in a course to develop and share your own challenges. Easy to use and great fun to play with, the level editor feels like a free gift they didn’t have to include when the package is already so content-heavy (the 80+ levels and 25 unlockable characters will keep you going for a good spell).

Bright and cheerful, Joe Danger has a charm to its aesthetics that make every stage a joy to play even when you’re chewing your tongue in frustration – and you will occasionally find yourself tested by the level design. Slapstick visual humour is the order of the day, too, adding to the undeniable likability factor.

Sometimes the physics can seem a little weird as your motorcycle almost magically reverses in mid-air or you land on your face and suffer no penalty, when hitting a hurdle face-on will end the attempt and restart the level, but the rules of Joe’s world are so wilfully bonkers that it doesn’t really matter.

VERDICT: Joe Danger is an absolutely perfect fit for the Vita, the small courses making it the ideal game to play either in short chunks or larger blasts depending on your situation. It looks vivid and colourful on the handheld’s small screen and offers a huge amount of content for a relatively low price. Challenging and addictive, Joe Danger is one cunning stunt that’s well worth undertaking.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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The Orochi series is a combination of several of Koei’s other franchises, but where, say, Dynasty Warriors is loosely based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Orochi takes place in a separate dimension and pits you against a demon threat. The “Ultimate” tag comes from the fact that this is the third re-release of Warriors Orochi 3, with a slew of new features and characters.

My first impression was much as I expected. You run around a battlefield, smashing square until everything on screen is dead, occasionally hitting R1 for a special attack. “Enjoyable,” I thought, “but a bit simplistic.” Take some time, though, and the nuances of Orochi grow on you. First up are the characters, of which you pick three to take into battle and switch on the fly. There are nearly 150 to choose from, although they are unlocked over the course of the campaign, and each has their own fighting style and special moves: some are quick, some have a long range, others have a knockback that buys you some space to manoeuvre.

Switching character in combat triggers a special power, contextually offensive or defensive, and there’s a rudimentary combo system as well, using triangle alongside square to dance through crowds of enemies. It’s rare that you’ll stop moving, and your kill count from each battle will regularly top 1,000. When not using your other team members they’ll retreat to heal, but you can get them to fight by your side by hitting down on the d-pad.

All of the above combine to create a solid core of fun, trying out different characters and combinations, before you add in the different weapon upgrades you can find or buy for all of them and the mini-bosses that dot the levels and require a bit more thought to defeat. Occasionally you’ll have to wrestle with the camera to focus back on the action, and boss fights can become a little chaotic – losing your target in the mass of bodies on screen is commonplace – but overall it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

The story mode sees you travelling back in time to recruit members for your army to tackle the demon menace – in the starting timeline they have all perished in the war by this point. It’s a little silly, but easy enough to follow. All the voice acting is in the original Japanese, and happily the translation job in the subtitles makes sense. The exposition during battles isn’t great though, as you’ve no time to read subtitles while ploughing through a press of bodies. This is even more of a shame because Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate makes use of the controller’s speaker to deliver dialogue – something I’m surprised hasn’t been done before – adding a layer of 3D into the audio. It sounds weird, but it’s a great feature.

As well as obtaining weapon upgrades, characters level up as you use them, increasing damage and speed, for instance. This could threaten to unbalance things, forcing you to use the same team as they are higher levelled, but spare points are accrued during each battle and can be used to level up any character of your choosing, freeing you to experiment with your team. And while the level cap may be 100, you can reset it back to 1 for a permanent bonus to that character, encouraging replayability.

Duel mode has you pick three characters and use them to fight another team of three. It’s almost a pseudo fighting game but, with only two fighters squaring off against each other in an arena, it highlights the looseness of Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate’s attacks and the camera difficulties tied to them: it’s just too hard to focus on one opponent.

Other modes include Shin Musou mode, which allows you to create your own scenarios on maps cleared in the campaign and upload them for other players to enjoy, and Unlimited mode, in which you use a five man team to clear a multi-levelled dungeon. In truth none of them are as enjoyable to play as the story mode, but experience and weapons earned from them can be brought back into your campaign game. For good measure, two player co-op is supported in most modes either locally or online, with the second player controlling another member of your team, or the other fighter in Duel mode.

As this is an updated version of a last-gen game, you won’t be surprised to learn that it won’t push the limits of your new console. Enemies – of which there can be up to 150 on-screen at a time thanks to the new hardware – are identically stamped from a handful of molds, and the stages aren’t visually arresting, although the playable characters are nicely detailed.

VERDICT: I’m sure fans will need no convincing to pick this up, but as someone new to Musou battle games I found this an excellent entry point. Getting a rhythm going as you charge across the battlefield can be quite hypnotic, and while it is easy for anyone to pick up and play, mastering it will take much, much longer.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Beginning life as a PS Mini, the original Velocity garnered such an adoring audience that it came to the Vita as a fully fledged title. FuturLab took the concept and added important touches to put the age-old concept of the shoot ‘em up into the hands of the modern-day gamer. Velocity 2X expands on those ideas and, even with a few hiccups along the way, produces a title worthy of adulation.

As Lt. Kai Tana, you are awoken on an operating table by the chattering of two unknown figures that have captured you after crashing your spacecraft, the Quarp Jet. With the help of new ally Ralan, you escape from the clutches of your captors and attempt to free the Jintinda from the imprisonment of the Vokh. By traversing the galaxy, picking up Jintinda scientists and collecting Rekenium crystals, Tana vows to free Ralan’s people from the Vokh’s incarceration and return to her homeland. We’ve seen many space tales like Velocity 2X before, but the lack of personality in the protagonist and her right-hand man make flicking through the short sequences before levels a chore. The art design in these story stills is beautiful, but sadly that doesn’t take away from the mundanity of the narrative.

Like the wonderful art direction in the pre-level story scenes, the frenetic gameplay of Velocity 2X is made all the more enjoyable by the wonderful pigmentation being thrown in your face. Like a fireworks display on the 31st December, explosions are happening all around you and you may find yourself gawping in awe at your telly. While the story fails to grab the imagination, visually, it’s inspired.

Velocity 2X is a spacecraft shoot ‘em up first, and getting behind the controls of the physics-defying Jet is a joy. Unlike your regular vertical scrolling shooter where it’s as simple as sending everything that moves to an early grave and reaching the finish line, Velocity 2X sees players having to teleport their way to their goal… on top of sending everything that moves to an early grave, of course. Each map will vary in its complexity, with some courses requiring you to pass through walls and that’s where you must utilise your teleportation capabilities. Holding square will allow you to use an aiming reticule and thrust your ship into another area, with ease. In the same way the Quarp Jet’s maiden voyage was a joy, the ship sections are bliss. Accelerating through space with an effortlessly maneuverable craft and downing the array of adversaries is as satisfying as pretty much anything you’ll play this year.

Many of the maps will require you to unlock gated areas by deactivating numbered switches along the way. By shooting them with your front-facing laser, or hurling bombs in their direction, you can advance past the once fatal blockade. This is also where Telepods come into play. At any particular point in a level, you can drop a marker you can return to at any point in that specific stage. As you progress, more elaborate levels will require deeper thought and extensive planning via the available map, because of deviating paths. This introduces a puzzle-like element and breaks up the play between more straightforward, aggressive action and a more measured approach.

The big addition to the series is Lt. Kai Tana’s desire to get out of her spaceship and attack the situation on-foot. FuturLab deserve a lot of credit for creating a platforming portion of Velocity 2X that is just as strong as the shmup element, bar one mechanic that slows gameplay to a snail’s pace and ultimately kills the enjoyment of certain levels. For the most part, Tana controls like the Quarp Jet. The twitch style gameplay works well in the parts where the Lieutenant is annihilating the Vokh with her rifle and features such as teleporting also transfer over with ease. However, where it all falls down is when you have to employ the Telepod technique.

Certain areas require Tana to fire a spherical telepod at a wall, so it bounces up to a higher platform that cannot be reached merely by leaping onto it. By holding Triangle, an aiming arc will appear on screen to dictate the throw of your telepod. This arc will also show the trajectory of the ‘pod after it bounces off an object, giving you an idea of where it’ll end up. In theory, it’s interesting, but the execution kills all momentum. In Velocity 2X, as the name would suggest, speed is paramount and platforming stages come to a screeching halt when Tana attempts to place a telepod in the location of her choosing. Aiming demands an uncomfortable amount of time due to it being so loose, and trying to fine-tune your throw is as frustrating as anything I’ve come across in recent memory. Stalling of this magnitude can hinder a potentially fantastic time on a level and see you picking up a silver medal rather than the much coveted gold.

Replayability is here in spades, though. You’ll eventually have to replay levels to gain more XP in order to unlock later levels anyway, but you’ll want to – it’s not a chore. XP is doled out for stellar showings in your recorded time, high numbers of Jintinda rescued (which appear as floating blue objects), the number of pink Rekenium crystals collected and your high score from eradicating enemies. Velocity 2X is incredibly moreish and you’ll find yourself constantly going back, repeating stages over and over until you’ve driven yourself up the leaderboards.

Another new aspect to this installment of the series is the inclusion of boss fights. These are excellently laid out and are certainly not just thrown in for the hell of it. At the very beginning, it’ll seem like a spray of bullets is all you need, but these boss battles are not cookie cutter. Some incorporate switches, some incorporate both flying and platforming – and they’re all terrific.

VERDICT: Velocity 2X is a sequel that takes the original idea and expands on it. Unlike a lot of follow-ups, though, it has added a whole new way to play the game. The greatest triumph is in how the spacecraft gameplay and platforming sections feel similar in parts, while also retaining some individuality. It’s disappointing that a number of factors cause Velocity 2X to experience a little turbulence, because generally, it’s a great flight.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (sequel to Trigger Happy Havoc) takes place on a series of connected islands. Even though you start out as a student gazing at Hope’s Peak Academy, you are quickly shown the reality of the situation. As with the first game, characters here are really great. It took me a few hours of playing to remember every character’s name and personality traits but progression through the game makes the character development really shine. The story is full of insane plot twists that kept reminding me it was one step ahead. I haven’t stopped thinking about the ending since.

You control the protagonist, Hajime Hinata, and try to find a way to escape the current situation with the other students. Since this is a Danganronpa game after all, that is not going to be easy and there will be despair involved. The game begins on a positive note with your teacher being a stuffed rabbit, Usami, who only wants you and the other students to have fun on the island in the “class trip”.

Each area also has a surveillance camera and monitor and after some time, a certain bear from the first game reappears. A silhouette appears on the monitor and a familiar voice tells you to come to the park in the middle of Jabberwock Island (the central island). This is where the real game begins. Monokuma transforms Usami, the loveable rabbit teacher, into Monomi who is apparently his little sister. Monokuma continuously gives the students a motive to kill and slowly you find the characters you like slowly getting murdered. This game teaches you not to grow attached to a character because you never know who is going to die next.

Danganronpa 2 introduces a few new mechanics to the core game. All the islands are connected to the central Jabberwock Island. The first game rewarded you with Monocoins for interacting with different things in the areas, but things work a bit differently here. There’s a level system in place that increases your level with the number of steps you take walking from one area to another.

You also have an electronic pet inside your e-Handbook that grows as you take more steps. This is a nice touch because you get rewarded for raising your pet successfully. It has its own Hope and Despair ratings that change depending on how much attention you give it in terms of cleaning it and giving it presents.The e-Handbook also lets you view your report cards for other students. Spending time with them and giving them presents will reward you with hope fragments that can be used to buy skills for trials all from within the e-Handbook.

The aim of each trial is to find the killer or the blackened and vote for them so they get punished. Selecting someone other than the true killer will result in the killer being allowed to graduate or escape and everyone else getting punished. The trials retain most of the good things from the first game and introduce some new mechanics like the Rebuttal Showdown and Logic Dive. Rebuttal Showdown involves you going head to head with a classmate and using the touch screen or directional pad to slice their statements. It takes a bit of getting used to. At the end of the showdown you are supposed to use a truth sword statement to cut their inconsistency.

Logic Dive has similar mechanics to the Snowboard segment in Final Fantasy VII. You use your board across a neon tube and path to answer three questions by moving in certain directions and avoiding obstacles. The game makes good use of the front touch screen for investigating and trial mechanics. When each chapter ends, a new island gets unlocked. Chapters also have Monokuma plushies hidden and you are rewarded with Monocoins for finding them. These coins can be used to buy things from the vending machine in the supermarket on the first island or a present from the monomono machine on the beach.

Danganronpa 2 is full of humour and the localisation is mostly great. There are tons of references to other games, stereotypes, pop culture, and even internet culture. I say mostly great because some of the spoken dialogue coupled with text is hit and miss.

Visuals are great. Character models are detailed and I absolutely love the user interface. Everything, from the main menu to the e-Handbook and maps, is solid. Barring a few places, you can’t really tell this was a PSP game. The character expressions and the animation sequences during trials are all fantastic. The soundtrack, once again by Masafumi Takada, is nearly as good as the first game. There are catchy songs and the trial music returns, but there’s nothing as good as Beautiful Dead here for me. There are also the segments involving Monokuma and Monomi fighting that are absolutely cringe-worthy. I played these sections out with both the English and Japanese voice options and honestly think they are the weakest parts of the game. Luckily they don’t waste more than a little of your time.

Island Mode is unlocked after completing the game. This is similar to School Mode from the first game. Island Mode has no killings and assumes Monokuma lost to Usami or Monomi. Danganronpa IF is a light novel with an alternate story that assumes Makoto gets the exit button in the beginning of the first game. This assumes you have already beaten Trigger Happy Havoc. In fact, you shouldn’t even be reading this review if you haven’t beaten that yet. Get on that now.

VERDICT: If you even remotely enjoy great stories and narratives, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is an absolute must-buy. The final segment in particular is magical. When you read about this series, Zero Escape meets Persona meets Ace Attorney gets thrown around a lot. I can safely say that it has earned a position next to those games.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Until now, the only moral dilemma in relation to pinball took place in California’s Bay Area, where the popular arcade staple was inexplicably banned by Oakland authorities, who believed it to be a youth-corrupting force of gambling evil. But that eighty-year old ban was recently lifted, and now we have this mind-blowing new virtual table based on the first season of Telltale’s Walking Dead, that gem of branching moral choices and harrowing zombie heartbreak.

Whether you have played the source material or not, the claustrophobia and cloying sense of fear and desperation are obvious in The Walking Dead. You undertake missions based on key moments from the original game, each of them involving a crushing decision to make – involving such doozies as choosing whether or not to reveal that infected bite, or deciding which person to leave behind. In pinball terms, these “missions” of course translate to the table by setting targets to hit, combos to rack up, or locking down balls – but there are also some other cool touches like an excellent sniper section that employs use of the flippers, face buttons and touch screen to pick off “walkers” in the distance.

The table is beautifully designed, too. There are some wonderful, wonderful moments – like the crushingly poignant minigame that sees the ball transformed into a football (of the soccer variety) and a task that involves Lee breaking up the continuous undead horror by having a kickabout with the kids. Sound effects and music are ripped straight out of the original game, with some new voice acting thrown into the mix to boot. The music is eerie, atmospheric and perfectly measured, and sounds particularly ace when played on your Vita through a set of half decent headphones. Yet again the physics, the wealth of options, the cross-platform play, everything is just sickeningly spot-on.

Never the most obvious inspiration for some flipper-on-ball action, the dark and sombre world of Clementine and Lee is nonetheless transferred effortlessly into the realms of Zen Pinball. Fans of the game Godisageek nominated as our GOTY will love this clever companion piece and be hoping for a similar treatment for Season 2. Everyone else will love this fine table for what it is, and probably get a craving for sampling the inspiration, the same way our zombie buddies crave braaaaaains.

VERDICT: We are starting to sound like a broken record here, but Zen’s mastery and understanding of both table design and expert use of a license put them right up there with the best that gaming 2014 has to offer. There are so many more gaming worlds for Zen to conquer, and we look forward to pinging a shiny silver ball through as many of them as possible.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Picking up immediately where episode four left off, No Going Back starts at a rate of knots, and never really lets up for the two hours it takes to get through. It’s full of emotion, showing humanity at its worst and, surprisingly, its most fragile, too. For all the talk that season two has been weaker, Telltale Games have saved the best for last, and created a triumphant finale.

The following review assumes you have played the previous episodes, though spoilers are (as always) kept to a minimum. Due to the cliffhanger ending of episode four, we’ve used screenshots from previous episodes so as not to risk spoilers.

Something that The Walking Dead universe revolves around (be it the book, TV show, or the game) is humanity. After a while, you realise the walkers themselves aren’t the real threat, but the ego, needs and wants of the people are the most dangerous. We’ve all struggled, transitioning from Lee to Clem – but finally, exhaustingly, episode five gets it right. Now, more than ever, this is your Clementine.

There is so much sadness here, such tremendous bleakness, that it’s painful to endure for the most part, but there are moments in No Going Back that, shockingly, made me smile. The gruesome action of previous episodes (though not gone completely) takes a back seat to the true brilliance: the characters. One particular scene early on is so out of character for the series, that it stands out – and that reminder of human vulnerability comes through; it’s the centre of it all. We’re all different; we’re all the same. A better writer might compare it allegorically to something else going on in the world right now. So much pain, so much trauma. But what if we just took a break and all got along, just for a moment?

Sentimentality be damned, there’s a little girl at my control, and her choices, my choices have the most real impact on the series that we’ve ever seen. Playing through this finale multiple times, it’s apparent that although some decisions don’t change the real outcome, they do change how Clementine is perceived.

One such choice dictates a stark shift in how a character feels toward our girl, and the larger decisions are incredibly bold on Telltale’s part, and will prove to be either a complete masterstroke, or something that’s almost impossible to please people with. Mark my words: by the time you finish with season two, you’ll feel more attached to Clem than ever. Her world has been shaped by you, forever.

Of course, there’s a moment where it all goes to shit, because there always is. Sure, Zombies will pop up here and there to permeate the world with the dreaded reminder that everything is dangerous and nobody is safe. Yeah, there are fight scenes, but the way it all comes together is like a delivery on a promise.

But let’s not pretend otherwise, often the choice in The Walking Dead has been illusionary. For the first time I can recall, this time, they’ve nailed it. The closing moments are drastically altered by how you play, by who you are. There are five different ways to end the season, three of which behold outcomes completely different to one another. What this means is that season three might just be the most ambitious project Telltale have ever set themselves up for.

VERDICT: Looking back over season two, there’s something odd about how we as players have endured a rollercoaster ride, just as our Clementine has. The swinging emotions have beaten us around the head, like we’re a boxer just waiting for the knockout blow to come, to release us. But we can’t close our eyes, because there’s work to be done.

It started nervously, almost scared of what it was, but at the end of season two, you’ll go to whomever you hold dear, and you’ll squeeze them just that little bit harder than usual. They’ll ask you why, and you won’t answer. There’s a little girl to be saved.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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On the surface, Counterspy appears to ape recent Metroidvania-style games like Shadow Complex and Blackgate, offering a 2.5D world to run through, shoot up and explore in little bite-sized chunks. While it certainly shares similarities with the genre, Dynamighty have made clear efforts to distance their game from the crop. For the most part they’ve succeeded, but sometimes originality can be a bit of a double-edged sword.

You see, Counterspy’s levels are short, procedurally-generated missions that have you moving from one end of a grid of rooms to the other, collecting launch codes, blueprints, formulas, and cash as you go. Every level harbours a load of hidden collectibles and plenty of enemies to stealth by or murder as you see fit. The biggest problem this set-up poses is that once a level is done, no matter what you may have missed, you can’t go back. There’s no gearing up and re-treading your steps when you can reach new areas, no way of going back and hoovering up what you missed. Instead, any blueprints or launch plans you didn’t get are reshuffled and repurposed for the next mission. The thrill of exploration and discovery is still present, but it feels less progressive.

The story puts you in control of a world class spy working for C.O.U.N.T.E.R, a global intelligence network. As two superpowers (essentially the US and Russia, circa the Cold War) fight over nuclear launch codes that will trigger a world war, you must infiltrate their various bases and misappropriate the codes yourself to avert a worldwide catastrophe.

You do this by slinking through each mission and reaching the terminal at the end, being careful at all times to avoid raising the DefCon level. Triggering cameras, upsetting guards and generally being an utter bufoon will all increase your DefCon level, increasing the number of guards and making them more likely to see and hear you. If you do get into trouble, hitting circle will slam your agent into cover, whereupon you can lean out like any other cover shooter and engage the bad guys in a shoot-out, or use your silenced pistol to perforate their heads all stealthy like. Points are awarded for pretty much everything, and go towards your online leaderboard placement.

Finding blueprints will unlock new guns to buy in the store, from shotguns to rocket launchers, while collecting chemical formulas allows you to brew performance enhancing elixirs between missions, which award special buffs like reduced camera effectiveness and a lower DefCon level upon mission start. It’s nothing overly complicated, but it is nice to unlock increasingly powerful kit as you play. Counterspy’s no-nonsense approach to level design is a breath of fresh air, though you may occasionally find yourself wishing for more complexity. That said, the randomised nature means things tend not to get boring – though more hazards and varied enemies would have been welcome.

Aesthetically, it’s a striking game. Geometric shapes and bold colours make for a beautiful presentation, and the pay-off of long loading times between missions is a smooth, fluid experience as you roll, sneak, and leap around the relatively small levels.

VERDICT: Counterspy is a solid game that makes up for a lack of immediate depth with solid over-the-shoulder combat, competent stealth and randomised levels. The collectible buzz might be tempered slightly by the lack of any real Shadow Complex-style character progression, but there’s still loads to look for and plenty of reasons to explore – and it’s gorgeous to look at, too.

Arguably a better fit for the Vita than the larger consoles, the cross-save function negates any need for favouritism and allows you to continue your fight against tyranny wherever you are. Humorous and well-designed, Counterspy is certainly worth investigating if you like your espionage in short, fast-paced chunks.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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There has always been a strong case that gaming should be considered an art form, as opposed to a mere recreational entertainment media. History is chequered with moments where titles have transcended their intended purpose and crossed over to be far more than just gameplay. Developers have never been more bold, brave and creative – giving us experiences that straddle the worlds of music, sensory immersion and artistic endeavour. It is an exciting time to be alive, if you are looking for something more than convention; something to get lost in.

Hohokum is the latest treat to ride this wonderfully artsy zeitgeist, and is another oblique, abstract charmer. It is another example of design that refuses to conform to accepted gaming norms. The structure is free-flowing, with no guidance or hand-holding. All you know is that you are in charge of piloting a swirling, snake-like entity through what is initially an inky darkness. Interacting with rune-like objects in the blackness trigger bursts of vivid colour and affect the superb soundtrack. You soon work out that by touching certain points, or swimming your way through certain areas of the ether, further serpentine pals reveal themselves and join your avatar, each one a different hue, eventually forming a squiggling, ever-moving, aesthetically pleasing formation.

For long periods you will find yourself enjoying the precision controls, the way you can alter the velocity of your movement, the way that tilting the analogue sticks create eye-popping patterns and thrilling changes of direction. When things happen they are genuinely surprising; the world you are thrown into does not reveal its secrets easily, and there is no way of predicting what will happen next. And just when you think that you are confined to the initial light/dark mechanic of the initial area, you begin to discover portals to new dimensions, and things become even more compulsive and spellbinding.

It becomes apparent that linking up with your fellow swirling, kite-like friends is the aim of Hohokum, but you are not alone in the seventeen different worlds, and have to interact with all manner of denizens along the way. Oddball characters ride upon your trail, seeking assistance for their own problems which then grant access to your unlockable snakey pals. You become embroiled in such diverse tasks as building a rollercoaster, working on a farm, seeking out collectibles, trying to initiate cloudbursting explosions of technicolour polka-dots, altering the palette and indeed the very fabric of the world you inhabit.

VERDICT: Your enjoyment of Hohokum will depend entirely on how open you are to the idea of immersing yourself in its ambient, unconventional nature. It is more of an exploratory journey as opposed to a signposted adventure. A place where you employ the smoothly animated tendrils of your craft to seek out the new, to trigger the next sugar-rush of sound and vision. It is the antithesis of what most blockbuster titles seek to achieve. It lends itself well to a pair of headphones and a complete disconnect from your expectations of what the artform – and yes, it is an artform – can bring to the table.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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First things first: Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment isn’t online, but it is an MMO. How? Well that’s all part of the story. Essentially, 10,000 players are trapped in a virtual reality MMO, and dying in-game is fatal in real life (after this I’m never touching an Oculus Rift). With nothing else to try, the players band together to beat the game, a sprawling 100 floor dungeon, and after defeating the 75th Floor Boss they discover that one of their Guild leaders is actually Kayaba, the game’s creator, who trapped them there. Kirito – the protagonist of the anime and the game – duels with him.

The first arc of the anime took the story to this point, but Hollow Fragment diverges: a glitch causes Kayaba to disappear and the players remain trapped. Still stuck and with their one lead gone, they decide to clear the rest of the tower.

Clearing each floor boils down to finding the boss’s lair, completing a certain quest and defeating a semi-boss monster in a dungeon area. Fetch, collect and kill quests are all present, along with a levelling system and unlockable skills, while the floor boss fights feel like raids, with a handful of other NPCs fighting alongside you to bring it down. It’s strange, because it has all the trappings of an MMO, but without the other players to interact with. Hollow Fragment makes up for this with over 100 companions, NPCs you can pair up with when you venture into the wilderness. They all have different skills, and will level alongside you as you use them.

They’re actually useful in a fight as well, and combat is simple but fun. The face buttons have an attack, dodge, stun and parry, which all use up the Burst bar at the bottom of the screen, preventing you from hammering “slash” with impunity. Holding L/R switches the face buttons to mappable skills, power attacks that draw from the SP bar. These become your mainstay, with some of the later ones able to dispatch most enemies easily. Your companions become part of this system; they’ll attack on their own, but will also listen to your orders – again mapped to the d-pad – and occasionally give you advice or calls for aid. Doing as they ask deals a joint attack, essential during boss fights, and you can even congratulate them if they perform to your liking, causing a short stat boost.

Kirito’s signature weapons are a pair of swords, but you can purchase new ones from the town hub on the 75th floor, including maces and axes, and equip your followers with anything you see fit. Unfortunately, changing weapon can leave you feeling massively underpowered, as Kirito – level 100 when you take control of him – is fairly far along the dual-wielding skill tree and at the first rank of everything else.

In fact, the starting point of Hollow Fragment creates a few problems. While it makes total sense in the context of the world, starting at level 100 makes it feel like you are picking up halfway through a story. Likewise, for the first few floors, enemies range from about 70-90, easy pickings for you and your followers, and it just lacks challenge. Followers themselves are hampered, as they too start at different levels. Kirito’s wife Asuna is the highest ranked, in the 90s at the start, while some of the others are as low as 60, making them useless.

Technically, none of the above is original – the story and gamplay is ripped from last year’s PSP outing Sword Art Online: Infinity Moment, but with some cutscenes swapped around and crisper HD graphics. To remedy this, Hollow Fragment introduces a glitch area of the SAO world called the Hollow Area, complete with new characters and powers. While the floors of the main game are largely linear, the Hollow Area is a sprawling open world, with different bosses to fight and a mixture of enemies drawn from the rest of the game. It can also be tackled with three friends, but only via ad-hoc multiplayer, which I imagine will be useless outside of Japan.

As I mentioned above, the graphics are crisp in HD, particularly the manga-style cutscenes, and enemies are vibrant and imaginative. Hollow Fragment also makes great use of the fact it is a gameworld to provide a range of environments one after another. Japanese voice acting underpins the story, but it’s let down by shoddy translation in the subtitles, to the point where you’ll find it difficult to follow what’s going on, which in turn put me off the story.

Things could have been polished up a little more across the board. For example, one quest wouldn’t let me complete it because I didn’t have room in my inventory for the reward. It took ten minutes of clearing it out – even though I did have plenty of space – then going back to turn it in later before I noticed that the reward was 6 potions, while I had 5 in a stack already. Nowhere did it tell me the limit was 10, and it didn’t automatically start a separate stack in a different inventory space. A small annoyance, but one that shouldn’t really happen nowadays.

The plot is introduced a little slowly as well. Hollow Fragment gets you straight into the action, teaching you the ropes, but this puts the story on the backburner – it’s over an hour before an optional flashback sequence tells you what’s going on.

VERDICT: If you’re a fan of Sword Art Online then this is a must buy, with it’s alternate reality separating it from the series. For everyone else, Hollow Fragment provides a decent RPG experience on Vita. Later levels become a little grindy, but it’s aided by solid – albeit a little easy – combat and carried along by an imaginative and occasionally humorous storyline.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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As multi-directional shooters go, Gravity Crash Ultra nails the basics. The left stick controls movement, the right your bullets while the right bumper fires your chosen special weapon. It may sound a bit bare bones, but it’s exactly what this type of game should be; easy to pick up and play, difficult to master. And you will have to master it. Gameplay sees you fighting across a 2D level, collecting or killing whatever the mission specifies, all the while struggling against gravity at the cost of fuel.

Enemies shoot at you as you race through spaces barely wide enough to take your ship, always on the lookout for fuel crystals or powerups to help you on your way. Plotting a route through the level becomes a series of quick course corrections, letting your momentum take you where you want to go rather than freely zipping all over the screen. It’s a delicate balance, but it means the short-burst levels feel engaging for the entire time – you don’t get a moment to rest.

The timer at the top of the screen emphasises this, the opening to each level giving you a recommended time to complete it in. It’s a neat way of adding that extra depth for hardcore players, but in the campaign it’s largely pointless. Made up of 30 levels in six solar systems, the campaign doesn’t really have an overarching story. Who you’re fighting and why isn’t explained, you just have to complete the objectives at the start of every mission, every kill adding to your overall score. Add in the beautiful neon wire-frame visuals on a black background and shots that genuinely go “pew pew” and you can tell that Just Add Water set out to make a game inspired by 1980’s arcade shooters.

Those 1980’s arcade shooters were hard. Not to be a cynic, but they wanted more of our money, they wanted you to pay for one more life. Gravity Crash Ultra is the antithesis of this. You’ve paid for the game, they can’t charge you more, so death becomes utterly meaningless. Yes, you lose your overall score after your lives are up, but you continue from the same point. The score itself goes onto a campaign mode leader board for all the world to see, but you’ll have to really care what random strangers on the internet think for that to be a selling point. In turn this scuppers the streamlined campaign mode – you certainly aren’t playing it for the story. Gravity Crash Ultra finds itself in an awkward halfway house between the past and the present.

The same can be said of the control scheme. While using the left stick to move and the right to shoot is a staple of the genre (and it does include a classic mode where one rotates and you can only shoot in the direction you’re facing), the default setting is a new Anti-Grav mode, added for the Vita release. If you can’t guess, this negates gravity’s effect on your ship – in other words turning off one of the main aspects of the entire game. And this is the default! I didn’t realise until I was halfway through the game, when I was looking at some old words on the original and wondered why they spoke about gravity being so integral. It’s not as if I didn’t check out the other control options when they were offered to me, but it had the same description as the Dual Controls, and I figured with it being the first highlighted option that it would be the way the developers wanted you to play it.

It might be forgivable if every level didn’t just devolve into killing almost everything on screen until you trigger the end. Yes, you do have to take fuel into consideration, but the crystals you blow up to get more regenerate quickly enough, and you’ll spend time scouring later levels working out how to unlock a door or reach a certain area far beyond the point where doing so was fun – including one where I had to blow up a wall to proceed, despite the game never telling me how to do this, how to differentiate one wall from the others or that it was even possible.

VERDICT: The original Gravity Crash didn’t do too well when it came out in 2009, not least because it launched so close to PixelJunk Shooter. Now, five years on, this re-release doesn’t improve anything that was broken, and arguably detracts further from the titles it wants to emulate by setting the default option so easy. If you’re desperate for a multi-directional shooter for your Vita, and have played Q-Games’ masterpiece, then you might want to check this out. Otherwise, you should know where to spend your money.

AVERAGE. The epitome of a 50/50 game, this title will be unspectacular but inoffensive, charmless but amiable. We aren’t condemning a game by scoring it a 5, but we certainly aren’t championing it, either.

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Despite the fact that it stars a WWE Superstar, a CGI raccoon, and Vin Diesel lending his guttural vocal talents to an anthropomorphic tree, Guardians of the Galaxy has been a wildly successful new entry to the Marvel cinematic universe, taking one of the more kooky, left-field superhero teams in their canon and slotting them into a well-received, good humoured old-school romp.

The same way other key Marvel-verse movies and characters have been transformed into kick-ass pinball tables, Zen Studios have released a tie-in effort, which takes choice elements from the source comic material, as well as the new celluloid treat. Serving as both a fine way to familiarise yourself with the oddball quintet, and a downright excellent game of pinball in its own right, this is yet another tick in the win column for Zen, and quite comfortably sits alongside the Infinity Gauntlet as the best Marvel entry yet.

Kicking off each game with an instant minute-long multiball is a hell of a bold move – but this shocking tactic works a treat – as you are immediately put in control of four balls, each one designed to identify with a corresponding Guardian, in a wild free-for-all as you bust the gang out of their Kyln prison, and even attempt to salvage Star-Lord’s cassette tape of 1970s chart toppers. It is an awesome way to open proceedings, grasping your attention and setting the scene with a series of excellently-voiced one liners courtesy of Mr Quill, the irrepressible Rocket and the rumbling tones of Groot. Even though the voice talent from the flick aren’t participating here – those that are provide an excellently cheesy script to accompany proceedings.

Once the action gets underway, incorporating an imaginative skill-shot mechanic, you enter a superbly designed table – tricky yet fair springs to mind – which entertains a number of cracking set-pieces including shootouts and hand to hand combat with Ronan the Accuser, a puzzling mini-table where you light up flags to help Gomora defeat Nebula, and defending yourself from a full-on Necrocraft assault. There are numerous opportunities for further multiball thrills, including a Collector-themed mode which can reap huge rewards if you manage to lock down three Guardian balls.

The table does get quite busy at times – with plenty going on, various animated characters hopping around, shooting and trading blows with each other – but it never becomes too much of a distraction, and it looks excellent as you would expect from Zen – whether you are playing in HD on one of your big consoles or on the smart OLED of the Vita.

VERDICT: Some may argue that having to begin each play-through with the multiball sequence becomes a bit of a chore, but the opportunities to rack up big points early doors should appeal to old school pinball heads, and hey: at least it’s something a bit different – just like the skill-shot that heralds the start of each ball is something we have never seen before. This is another brilliant table from Zen, who seem to have developed a knack for both innovative table design and how to put a licence to good use.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Review code provided by publisher.

The post Zen Pinball 2: Guardians of the Galaxy Review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

LEGO, as a corporation, have their fingers in some serious pies. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marvel, DC – and those are just the franchises outside of their own breeding grounds. Then you’ve got girl-pleasing Friends, anthropomorphic animal caper Chima and ninja-themed action-adventure Ninjago: Masters of Spin-jitsu. The last entry already saw the light of day in video game form with LEGO Battles: Ninjago a few years ago, and now returns in LEGO Ninjago: Nindroids.

Co-developed by Traveller’s Tales and Hellbent Games, Ninjago loops in characters from the TV show and throws them into an action movie-style conflict with the evil Digital Overlord and his army of Nindroids. Following the plot of the TV show’s third series, it sees you take command of various characters and take the fight to the enemy over the course of thirty-something levels, built around the central hub of New Ninjago City.

Fans of the show will find a lot to like. As with any LEGO game, the attention to detail is a premium concern – even more-so when the source material is their own franchise. Characters such as Nya, Sensei Garmadon, PIXAL and Cyrus Borg join protagonists Lloyd, Kai, Cole, Zane and Jay and a handful of supporting players both old and new. As with previous games, you’ll take control of different characters as the story requires, but will be free to revisit areas with other unlocked characters in Free Play Mode, accessible through the hub.

Aimed squarely at the younger fan, Ninjago: Nindroids is incredibly easy even for a LEGO game. Despite a predominantly isometric viewpoint, the tried and tested series gameplay mechanics are almost entirely untouched. The puzzles, while mildly taxing for younger gamers, are an utter cinch for adults, and the action is fast-paced but rarely challenging. That being said, this game is not exactly primed for anyone over the age of 12, and as such is tilted perfectly towards its target audience.

The levels are short, coming in bite-sized chunks that keep the pace high, interspersed with visits to the hub that are so uneventful as to be superfluous. This could have been a straight mission to mission adventure and it would have lost nothing. For players of a certain age, Ninjago will tick all the required boxes, but compared to other LEGO games it’s a fairly bland affair.

Puzzles might take the form of a rudimentary memory game, or will use the environment (such as asking you to destroy something so a harmless droid will come to clean it up and you can get through security), but they’re very straightforward. As with all games in the franchise, there is no fail-state, so you can die as many times as you want or fail a puzzle until the sun burns out and you’ll never see a Game Over screen or have to restart.

Each character has a skill – such as computer hacking or grappling – and switching between them when necessary is key to your success. Nindroids boasts a fairly small roster of playable characters, even with new folk added just for the game, but the relatively short lifespan means you don’t need that many. Also, this isn’t based on some sprawling franchise with scores of recognisable faces, so it’s not a big problem.

The trademark sense of humour we’ve come to expect from LEGO is present, as ever, but the script is fairly tame, filled with silly sarcasm and clichéd one-liners. Sadly the aesthetics are unremarkable, mixing dull, lifeless environments with characters that often seem interchangeable and distinguishable only by their colours.

VERDICT: LEGO Ninjago: Nindroids is a comparatively lifeless affair, clearly designed for the younger gamer but with little to hold the interest of anyone other than fans of the TV show. The rinsed and repeated LEGO mechanics become less and less compelling with every game, and Nindroids struggles to feel relevant as anything other than a money-maker. For younger gamers and show fans, it’s a decent enough romp; for anyone else, it’s not really worth the trouble.

DECENT. A 6/10 indicates that, while this game could be much better, it still has a fair amount to offer the player. It might be an interesting title sabotaged by its own ambition, or a game denied greater praise by some questionable design choices. Don’t avoid it outright, but approach it with caution.

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I’ve been looking forward to for Metrico for months. Most platformers released recently have either gone all out with a retro look, or tried to stand out by doing something unique, not always succesfully. Metrico caught my eye because it not only looks amazing, but because it apparently had levels that adapted to your play. This is a platformer about info-graphics. Most beautiful designs in the info-graphics department are limited to a few websites or as images on dribbble – but this is a game centred around them.

Metrico is all about exploring, persisting, and succeeding in a puzzle-platformer environment. Every level in a world is unique, and different mechanics are introduced as you progress. Each world has levels that are more or less visually similar, and you control a person who is running, jumping, and shooting projectiles to reach the goal of a level. Metrico makes full use of the Vita sensors like the gyroscope. In one particular level in the fourth world, I found myself having completed it while the vita was facing upwards, and I looked like I had just won a game of Twister – and this just adds to the charm. Some puzzles seem impossible at first, but taking a break and coming back to finish them in one go thanks to a breakthrough, makes the game very rewarding.

Controls are very straightforward at first. You use the left analog stick and D-Pad to move, and X to jump. As the game progresses, mechanics like tilt control, restarting from checkpoints, and even the ability to completely reset a level are introduced. It is great to see a developer actually use the touchscreen for menu navigation. I’m sick of the Vita getting ports where developers completely ignore the touch-elements. Metrico even uses the back touchpad in some levels to let you aim your projectiles, and it feels natural – a rare succesful use of the rear touchpad. The way different mechanics are introduced in levels is really great, because there’s no sense of feeling overwhelmed at all. Exploring and experimenting are the most important things to keep in mind while playing this. The unique mechanics in each world really make the game fun.

Metrico has a lot of eye candy. It is one of those games which was made for screen-grabs. There’s no two ways about it, the visuals are minimally stunning, and even the interface elements for menu navigation are perfect. Digital Dreams have managed to maintain a consistently great look in each world. Even the launch screen and game logo looks fantastic. On completing a world, you are taken to a room that has two doors on each side. There’s a pie chart in the middle telling you which door what percentage of players went through. Digital Dreams really love their info-graphics. Even the website for the game has counters and charts tracking your mouse pointer.

In terms of audio, the sound effects have been done very tastefully, but in some levels the music gets a little repetitive. In a game that involves the player spending a lot of time in a particular level, there’s definitely room for improvement here. Take OlliOlli as an example: I spent three hours completing one of the levels in the penultimate stage of the game and didn’t get tired of listening to the music one bit. Metrico’s soundtrack isn’t one that you will be listening to a lot outside the game.

The major drawback here, though, is the performance. There is huge slowdown as you go from one world to another, and even basic things like the developer logo appearing seem to drop frames. For a game that is exclusive to the Vita, I never thought I’d see performance issues that you see in poorly ported games like Borderlands 2. If you happen to switch to another app and return to Metrico, the game becomes borderline unplayable for about twenty seconds; I had to relaunch the game twice because of this. The loading times also seem to be quite bad sometimes, which is disappointing. There’s also a lack of a hint system,  which is either brilliant or horrible for you. I really wish there was one in some levels. One in particular took me a good hour and a half.

VERDICT: Barring the performance issues that will hopefully be patched, Metrico is a great example of a game that uses the Vita’s hardware properly. It is immensely fun to play and the puzzles never get monotonous. If you love platform games, you absolutely have to experience Metrico. And if you’re an info-graphic lover, this is your holy grail game.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Many gamers of a certain age will remember top-down racing classic Micro Machines, an ingenious little speed demon that saw you racing bite-sized cars around tracks built on bedroom floors, DIY workshops and kitchen counters. It was a novel take on an idea which, at the time, sorely needed it.

It was a similar ethos of fun rather than finicky simulation that led Playrise Digital – a company assembled from a good few genre veterans – to create Table Top Racing, a game that seems to share many of Micro Machines’ original elements, at least on paper. In it you control a vehicle selected from a roster of apparently randomly-chosen automobiles and race around, well, table tops, dodging cartons of juice, tins of woodstain and giant kitchen utensils.

For a game originally developed on mobile decices, TTR handles fairly well. Starting you off with a Winnebago and an ice cream truck, Playrise soon give you Jeeps and muscle cars to go nuts with, ramping up the speed and manoeuvrability. To begin with it can be quite difficult to maximise drift, but before long you’ll be cornering like you were born behind the wheel.

There is a decent variety of gameplay modes, from the standard career mode through to the challenges, which see you tackling the various race types to earn stars and more money. These include elimination events, drift contests, battles and straight races, and are an ideal place to grind for cash.

A major addition to the Vita version is the battle race, in which you pick up Mario Kart-style weapons with which to slow down your opponents. They aren’t the most imaginative of tools – a homing rocket, an area-of-effect EMP, a speed boost and a mine – but they help mix up the action nicely. Table Top Racing isn’t the fastest paced racer around, so the added danger of weapons makes it a little more exciting. The pick-ups themselves are handy, but only really offer an advantage if used tactically as they don’t slow your target for very long.

In-app purchases are still a thing, sadly, but as TTR isn’t free on Vita Playrise have halved the cost of purchasable bundles and made it easier to grind for them. Although it will take a while to earn enough money to unlock all the cars and all the upgrades, it is possible, and the pay-to-win factor is greatly muted.

Obviously, Table Top Racing on the Vita is a graphical improvement over the mobile original, but it’s not particularly stunning. That said, the environments are well detailed and there’s a certain charm to be found in racing around the over-sized household landmarks.

Yet despite the amount of content and the addition of tactical pick-ups, there’s something not quite there about Table Top Racing. It might be the lack of music during races, or the way the game rights you instantly if you crash or get momentarily stuck on a wall – it might even be that we’ve kind of seen it all before from a different angle in Micro Machines – but something is missing from TTR that can leave you feeling hollow after prolonged periods. It’s alleviated somewhat by the ad-hoc multiplayer, which enables a little local co-op with friends or strangers.

VERDICT: Table Top Racing is a charming little racer with a good selection of modes and race types. Sadly the better vehicles and upgrades will require either a monetary contribution or some serious grinding to unlock, but as it stands you have a solid, full game without having to pay an extra penny. Not the most thrilling racing sim available on the Vita, but certainly the best for its price.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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Indie games coming to major consoles were unheard of until a few years ago. Microsoft took the initiative in getting some really creative and great independent games to the Xbox 360 and it really paid off. Fast forward to now and Sony is doing the same. A platform once thought of as unapproachable and closed is hosting some of the most interesting games around, second only to Steam. Transistor from Super Giant Games launched on PS4 and PC at the same time; times are changing. There is a distinct group of gamers that only plays on consoles, however, and because of this, many games go unnoticed. Rogue Legacy launched on PC over a year ago and has now made the transition to PSN-based platforms, like so many others.

Rogue Legacy was always a controller game. I didn’t much care for the keyboard controls at all on Steam, and found myself using a controller to play it. The name comes from the fact that it is has roguelike elements in the truest sense, and because bloodlines are a key mechanic. At heart, it is a difficult platformer with excellent attention to detail. The aim of the game is to explore a randomly generated castle dungeon and defeat bosses. This sounds simple and ordinary, but this is where things gets really interesting. As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time playing Spelunky, I didn’t think it would be a big deal to die a lot, but it is. You have to defeat four bosses to unlock the final boss, and each boss is in a different and unique area.

In most games, once you die, nothing carries over. But Rogue Legacy builds on your legacy. Once you die, your descendants that have unique traits carry forth. These traits range from colour-blindness (making everything monochrome), far-sightedness (where a small area around your character is blurred), all the way to OCD, where you recover MP by basically trying to swipe at everything and more. The implementation is great and there is a bit of humour thrown in for every descendant, and each one also looks noticeably different. When you die, you see parting words from your character and are taken to the main menu. The only things that carry over are gold and the various upgrades you have unlocked.

Jumping, slashing with your sword, and magic skills are your main abilities. More unlock as your collect additional gold from within the dungeon. There are quite a few things to look out for in addition to basically not dying while exploring areas. You find blueprints that can be used to create new equipment by the blacksmith, and runes found in fairy chests unlock more abilities. Once you have enough gold to unlock the architect, he can lock the castle so you can continue playing the same dungeon over and over to finally have a chance at defeating the bosses. Gold found within the dungeon by hitting furniture and opening chests (among other things) is supremely important. This gold can be used to upgrade your own class, weapons, armour, and to unlock a plethora of new mechanics. There are also random health and mana drops from furniture and other items you slash with your sword. Your descendant will only be allowed to enter the castle after surrendering all gold to the gatekeeper, so spending as much as possible on upgrades is preferred.

The enemy design in Rogue Legacy is annoyingly good. Enemies often feel way too overpowered at first because of the sheer variety you encounter as you traverse the dungeon. Each type of enemy has unique skills, and some are just there to kill you and make you want to fling your controller at the screen. There’s a reason the difficulty is compared to the Souls series. The best part about the different enemy types is how your unique descendant character traits change the mechanics to some extent. There is also a training dummy before you enter the castle that you can use to see how much damage you do. Striking it will reward you with some funny dialogue, including “Do you even lift?”.

Rogue Legacy excels in the audio department, too. The soundtrack is great and it draws influences from early Final Fantasy games for boss battle music. Along with audio cues, visual icons are really important to tell which enemy is approaching or in the next area. The visuals of the game are not on par with the audio and overall design, but they’re serviceable.

VERDICT: Rogue Legacy is full of surprises. When you’re not attempting to kill a difficult boss, you’ll find yourself trying to solve a platforming puzzle to unlock a special chest, discovering seemingly hidden or unexplored areas, and more. The game is incredibly hard at first, but it rewards perseverance. Even with the old school design, Rogue Legacy is filled with a sense of discovery that helps make it so great. This is something that I will be playing for a long time, and you should too – it is that damn good.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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The PlayStation Vita is a really interesting device. It’s almost like an anti-backlog console. My Steam backlog is shamefully large at this point. The Swapper by Facepalm Games has been on my to play list for a long time and I’ve been told things like “I can’t believe you haven’t played this yet” and “why wasn’t this on your GOTY list last year?” Despite owning The Swapper for months on Steam, I never played it barring my usual 30 minute stint after installing it. I got really excited once it was announced for PSN, and I’m pretty blown away after completing it on Vita.

The Swapper is a puzzle platformer, and a very dark and moody one at that. It has phenomenal art and music. The visuals are unlike any other game, with actual clay models used throughout; subtle piano pieces played as you progress the story combine with dark synth patches to set the tone for the game. Unlike Fez, The Swapper doesn’t have any puzzles that require too much time to solve (remember that clocktower puzzle that required you to wait for a few days in real time?). It has puzzles ranging from easy in the tutorial to really hard towards the end of the game as new mechanics are introduced. Every puzzle feels solvable, and I never felt helpless.

You play as someone stranded on the damaged space station Theseus, looking for a way out. Some areas are behind locked doors that require encryption orb, which are the aim for almost every puzzle in the game. The Swapper makes you start contemplating decisions very soon with its mechanics. The first tutorial area takes you around a few rooms and finally gives you the titular gun. Creating clones of yourself, destroying said clones for your benefit, and using clones to get further ahead are things you need to get used to, and there are memory terminals scattered across areas that give you some backstory.

The game begins with a cutscene explaining very little of the story. Even towards the end of the game, your understanding of the narrative will depend on how much you have explored areas. The basic game mechanics involve creating a clone by pressing L and swapping to it by pressing R while targetting it. There are different light sections that make your life difficult. You can’t create clones in blue light, red light cuts off your swapper rays and purple light limits both. Puzzles involve using floor buttons and blocks to control the lighting so you can switch to a clone and collect the encryption orbs.

The game has very little dialogue and voice acting. Certain puzzle sections trigger voice over events and as you pass giant rocks in the background, messages are displayed on the screen while slowing down your movement. The story is very cryptic in nature and there are loads of discussion threads online for individual perceptions of The Swapper – at times, it’s perhaps a little too cryptic.

Thankfully, it’s a visually incredible game. The dark atmosphere and amazing lighting coupled with the PlayStation Vita screen make for a euphoric experience for your senses. Text scales well on the small screen as well. The audio design and overall music in the game are haunting. In Gone Home, the sound effects always created the sense of someone else being there with you, but in The Swapper, you see others in the space station but feel alone throughout thanks to the stirring piano playing in the background.

Having played The Swapper on PC, I was curious to see how the controls translated to Vita and PS3 with a controller. The use of the mouse is really important in the game since the curser is basically your target for the Swapper device, which you control with the right analogue stick – the Vita also has the advantage of a touchscreen, which really helped. Swiping along the touchscreen to move the cursor is really great, but I would have preferred a touch-to-target system more. There is a slight slowdown issue in some areas on the Vita but it isn’t particularly annoying.

The PSN version supports trophies and if you’re a trophy hunter, you’re in for a world of disappointment. The trophies are the same as the Steam achievements and all 10 are unlocked by discovering hidden terminals. The game supports cross play, save, and buy, and syncing your saves across PS3 and Vita is painless. The crashes I experienced 3 times in my complete playthrough were a bit disappointing, but hopefully these will be fixed in a patch.

VERDICT: I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the puzzles and story since I completed The Swapper. For a game so cryptic, I’m surprised at how much it impacted me. The ending in particular will stay with you for a long time. The Vita’s small screen did wonders for the immersion, despite the beauty of The Swapper’s unique art style. My advice is turning the lights off, grabbing a good pair of noise-removing headphones, and getting completely and utterly enveloped in The Swapper. It is the triumvirate of visual, aural, and mental bliss.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Season Two of The Walking Dead hasn’t been quite the runaway success that the first season was. It has come under some criticism for not deviating enough from the pattern laid down in the first series, for suffering from uneven pacing, and not delivering the same sort of really gut-wrenching decisions that really set the game apart for other titles. Amid the Ruins attempts to address as many of these issues as possible, but it doesn’t convincingly deliver in every way.

The following review assumes you have played the previous episodes, though spoilers are (as always) kept to a minimum.

Being the penultimate episode in the season, you’d expect that the seeds sewn in early episodes would be showing by now. And to some extent that is true, but the main issue that episode four seems to suffer from is the feeling that your decisions don’t seem to make much of a difference in where the story is going. Most of the decisions in this episode are skin-deep, and often proven to be only superficial within minutes of making your choice.

Amid the Ruins follows directly from where we left Clementine, when we were faced with a terrible decision to make regarding a bite. The consequences of that decision bear fruit immediately, which is pleasing to see, but it also seems to negate your decision-making somewhat, and feels as though whatever you chose doesn’t really matter. Whilst it does successfully show how Clementine has developed as a survivor, perhaps something slightly more unique would have been a more interesting development.

Throughout the episode, the pregnancy of Rebecca is at the forefront, and the group have to try and pull together to help bring a small ray of light into their very bleak world. As such, you might expect the pace of the episode to suffer, and this to become a more conversational episode. Episode four does manage to fit in some much-needed character development for some of the newer members of the survivors, but it also ticks along at a pretty good pace. In fact, I felt that a little too much happens in this episode.

There are a lot of difficult moments packed into this instalment (be prepared for a lot of grisly moments) but you might also need to be ready for the fact that you might not care all that much. You quickly realise that if a character seems useless and like dead weight, that will probably be the case, thus you might have written them off in your head to some extent. So if anything happens to them, its a minor development as you were already prepared for it.

Also, with such a large group of survivors there are inevitably some who you become more attached to, and others who you don’t. Deaths are always a big thing, but if it is an under-developed character, it comes as no real surprise and seems like an easy option. It is the surprise tragedies that hit home and carry the real weight. The Walking Dead season one was very difficult to predict and Telltale proved that they weren’t scared to take a risk – but season two feels far closer to a traditional Zombie story where the obvious expendable characters tend to bite the bullet, and some of the emotional impact is lost.

That isn’t to say that Amid the Ruins is bad, it’s just that Telltale have simply set high standards for themselves, narratively. The fact they flesh out the new character’s personalities more will allow for a stronger finish to the series, and perhaps the aim of episode four was to set up the grand finale, rather than be a strong entry in its own right. It should also be said that the game has never performed better, with the slow-down and stuttering problems that have plagued them for years seemingly a thing of the past.

One major issue, however, is the way in which Clementine is treated by the other characters. Of course she will be the focal point for the series as players have developed such a strong bond with her, but it begins to put a strain on believability when in every little decision, and every difficult situation, all of the adults turn to Clem for guidance. Yes, we know that she is stronger and more competent than the majority or adults in the series, but it becomes a little silly when each time a hard choice has to be made, Clem seems to be responsible.

VERDICT: Amid the Ruins has its fair share of shortcomings, but it also ticks most of the boxes of what we have been asking for in the past. It maintains a good pace throughout, and avoids getting bogged down with trivialities. It also manages to provide a mix of action sections, emotional scenes, and conversational passages – yet we also get some much-appreciated character development.

In the first season of The Walking Dead, you really had to worry about each and every choice, whereas here there seems to be a tragic inevitability about everything. It’s hard to say whether that is actually an issue, or a reflection of the harsh world Clementine finds herself in. Maybe by making it seem like everything will go wrong, despite your best efforts, Telltale are trying to show just how hopeless the situation has become. This might be a stretch of the imagination, but if it is intended to make us feel numb to the horrors of the world, then they have played a master stroke. Time will tell on that front.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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Forget the Gravity Gun, the Portal Gun or the BFG – if you want really interesting weaponry, you need look no further than Insomniac’s long-running Ratchet & Clank series. From guns that suck up and deposit pools of water, to mini nuclear rocket launchers and deadly plasma whips – if you can dream it up and put a trigger on it, there’s a safe bet that Insomniac have thought of it and tried to incorporate it somewhere.

Less well known than Jak & Daxter (which I find almost completely backwards), Sony’s other action-platforming duo totally out-performed the competition in the first three games, at least. While recent efforts All 4 One and Q-Force (or Full Frontal Assault to some) were less successful despite their attempts to integrate 4-player co-op and tower defence respectively, the original trilogy was near perfect in the PS2 days – a trend that continued through the subsequent releases right up until 2009’s A Crack in Time, often considered the last great Ratchet & Clank game.

Twelve years and over a dozen games on from the original 2002 release, Sony and Insomniac (in conjunction with Idol Minds and Mass Media Inc.) have brought the first three games (Ratchet & Clank, Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando and Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal) to PlayStation 3 and Vita. Quite unsurprisingly, they’re just as playable and just as likable as they were the first time around.

It’s a testament to Insomniac’s design that even the first game doesn’t feel particularly dated when played now. There are giveaways, certainly, like using Triangle to back up in menus – which always feels alien when we all know that Circle is the universal “back” button – and the cutscenes have a grainy and lethargic quality left-over from the PS2 originals. But the gameplay… Oh, my. The gameplay is still sublime.

The first game wastes no time throwing together the two heroes – defective robot Clank, created with more brains than brawn and wise-cracking mechanic Ratchet, always ready for an adventure – and from then on it’s a race to save the galaxy from the evil Chairman Drek, who plans to steal the best parts of inhabited planets to make a Frankenstein-like super-world. Yes, the premise is bonkers, but that’s the entire point. The sense of humour – sometimes puerile, often sarcastic and always aimed at players a few years higher than the age-rating would suggest – is a constant companion, wrapping itself around every facet of the series from the enemies and weapons to the script and characterisation.

The template remains mostly untouched throughout the trilogy: you take control of Ratchet and travel the galaxy with Clank completing side missions and pursuing the main story, while obsessively collecting the nuts and bolts that act as the universe’s currency. This is then used to buy new weapons with which to experiment and open up new areas. The puzzle element is kept light and unobtrusive, and the first two titles have a checkpoint system that make them both fairly simple endeavours. In Up Your Arsenal the checkpoints become slightly less fair to the point of occasional mild frustration – but it’s well compensated for in other areas, with improved aesthetics, tighter controls and more variety in enemies and locations.

Presented in a trilogy package, it actually makes good sense to play all three games as one continuous campaign. Each title is an evolution of the one before it rather than a great leap forward, offering newer, zanier weapons and more interesting predicaments for the heroes. For example, Going Commando introduces a levelling system for each individual gun, increasing their effectiveness with use. It adds a tactical sheen to the melee and ranged combat and resource gathering that can make it genuinely tough to decide between using a cool new gun and levelling up an old favourite. The core mechanics don’t alter much at all from one adventure to the next, mixing jumping and swinging with heaps of combat and side missions designed to break up potential monotony (races and arenas both feature as distracting highlights).

As with all great buddy-buddy action-platformers, the real stars of the show are the two leads themselves. The relationship between Ratchet & Clank begins out of necessity and grows into a powerful partnership, aided by a supporting cast of hammy evil villains and bumbling sidekicks (galactic hero Captain Qwark being a firm favourite). Their world is as media-driven as our own, and watching them become celebrity heroes living off the fame of their adventures is incredibly entertaining. The clever script and likeable cast combine as not only the icing on the cake, but also the creamy fondant that holds the whole glorious, sticky mess together.

VERDICT: Quite frankly, each game in the Ratchet & Clank trilogy is as charming and playable now as it was when first released. They won’t really tax experienced gamers, and there is a risk of repetition should you play often and for long periods, but overall there’s enough quality content here to keep you going for a good long while. All Sony need to do now is release a second trilogy bundle containing Tools of Destruction, Quest for Booty and A Crack in Time and my life will be complete.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Marketing executives have an awful lot to answer for. In fact, marketers of any kind have an awful lot to answer for. It’s quite easy to spin a line that hooks a certain type of person to a certain type of product, regardless of how accurate that line actually is.

Take the line, for example, that markets MouseCraft as a cross between Lemmings and Tetris. If you take the base concepts of both games as extremes and travel betwixt the two, then at some point upon the line between you will find MouseCraft, but it hardly uses the best parts of either.

In Crunching Koala’s game, you will be called, across 80 levels, to safely guide a trio of blind lab mice to a piece of cheese at the end of a small obstacle course. To aid you, you have a selection of blocks resembling Tetris pieces that you drop into the level to act as bridges, steps, barriers and safety nets for the mice, while collecting little bombs that remove blocks and a rare crystal substance that forms inside the test area.

Despite the cartoony visuals and the presence of a mad scientist cat named Schrödinger, there’s little context, or life, in what’s going on. It’s all very tame and straightforward. Quite why he has built such an elaborate machine is never entirely explained, nor is what it really does. There is a sinister undertone that never comes to fruition in any way, as the mice can only be killed by a handful of things, several of which are directly controlled by the player. It feels like a wasted opportunity not to be horribly cruel to the mice if you mess up, thus adding some kind of impact to your failures. As it is, being able to fail at all is almost totally moot.

You have as much time as you need to set a level up, and pressing Circle at any moment will undo your last move, or all your moves, meaning you can simply study a level and then use infinite retries until you get it right, at which point you’re graded on how many mice you saved and how many crystals you harvested – not the number of tries or how long it took. Obstacles are introduced as you progress, such as clockwork mice that will kill your rodent charges, and you’re given aids such as spongy blocks to cushion greater falls – but there aren’t a great many variables beyond these.

The four main zones aren’t particularly varied, and visual tedium sets in pretty quickly and then stays with you. It’s the same for the audio, sadly: if you play for more than a few levels a time it can all become quite irritating.

But it’s not all bad. The actual gameplay is somewhat idling, and despite the lack of a real fail-state. Some of the puzzles are very taxing, especially if you want to save all the mice and seize every single crystal in each level. Played in short chunks, it’s a nice time-waster for a commute, which makes it far better suited to the Vita than the home consoles or a PC.

If you do get bored, there is a level editor so you can build your own courses. It seems set up for PC and not all that slick to use with a pad instead of a mouse, but it’s pretty straightforward. As with many games of this type, you’ll probably end up getting more fun and challenge from community-made levels than those in the game.

VERDICT: MouseCraft is a likeable but simple puzzle game that barely touches the complexity of the two titles it claims to take inspiration from. Far too repetitive and too easy to work out, it’s better suited to a handheld than a larger console and isn’t likely to hold your interest for long unless you’re really hankering after a rodent-based puzzle game and can’t get hold of Lemmings. A little darkness and complexity would have gone a long way here, but as it stands MouseCraft just isn’t involving enough to heartily recommend.

DECENT. A 6/10 indicates that, while this game could be much better, it still has a fair amount to offer the player. It might be an interesting title sabotaged by its own ambition, or a game denied greater praise by some questionable design choices. Don’t avoid it outright, but approach it with caution.

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Indie games seem to be particularly ripe for the porting right now, what with Microsoft and Sony intent on plugging the noticeable gaps in their 12-month launch windows with the “Definitive Edition” of pretty much everything. This month it’s the turn of Drinkbox’s Guacamelee!, a side-scrolling metroid-vania-alike that’s hitting all the consoles – including last gen – in a new and improved Super Turbo Championship Edition.

Guacamelee! tells the story of Juan, a wannabe Luchadore who is tragically killed when the evil Carlos Calaca ascends from hell with an army of skeletons and starts laying waste to Juan’s tiny village. Resurrected by a magical wrestling mask, Juan sets off on his quest to rescue his love and bodyslam Calaca once and for all.

Progress through the game’s various environs is steady, regulated by the age-old rule of drip-fed abilities. As you pursue Calaca, Juan is granted new powers by a goat that turns into an old man (or an old man that turns into a goat), and the Combo Chicken, which is, well, a giant chicken that teaches you combos. Guided by a benign spirit named Tostada (who becomes your suplex buddy in co-op mode), you travel around using Juan’s various powers to destroy the colour-coded blocks that impede your way. As with other games of this ilk, the more powers you unlock the more paths you can open and the more power-ups you can find.

Controlling Juan is a joy as he sprints and springs and uppercuts and ground-pounds, comboing enemies and seamlessly switching between the lands of the living and the dead to solve environmental puzzles and circumnavigate obstacles. The platforming is tight and responsive and the level design is consistently clever enough to keep you thinking about where you’re going and what you’re doing.

For a more detailed breakdown, check out Adam’s glowing review of the original game, but it’s suffice to say that besides the inclusion of a tasty DLC bundle and a handful of new areas, the biggest change is the addition of the Intenso mode. Now, Juan has a new meter filled by defeating enemies, and activating it sends him into overdrive, bolstering his combo speed and damage. It makes an already frantic game completely bonkers for a few minutes, especially if you use Intenso on a screen-full of enemies all at once.

Elsewhere, new areas and bosses add freshness, and unlockable costumes – bought with silver coins found in pinatas – range from the snazzy to the absurd. You can also save multiple games now, which is handy if you have more than one person in your house who wants to play. An interesting tweak is the ability to switch dimensions independently in co-op mode, which makes fighting those pesky blacked-out enemies easier as you can work in tandem with your partner.

Graphically, the Super Turbo Championship Edition isn’t much different, though on PS4 it does seem to be much slicker. The aesthetic is wonderfully charming throughout, and works brilliantly in conjunction with the off-the-wall humour. None of the dialogue is spoken, but the sound effects and, notably, the music, do a great job of selling the atmosphere.

VERDICT: Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition doesn’t get much wrong throughout, and the inclusion of new levels and enemies adds longevity to an already great experience. It can be a little repetitive if played for long periods, but the unique and likeable art-style and effortlessly enjoyable combat carry it through.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Moto GP is perhaps the most entertaining of the major motorsports. Nascar involves exactly the same car turning left for hours and the occasional crash, Formula One is too reliant on the cars and not the drivers – but Moto GP features amazing machines with just as impressive drivers performing feats that, at times, look impossible. Recreating these feats in Moto GP 14 feels great, but hitting the perfect apex can be incredibly difficult.

In order to accommodate newer players, multiple physics and simulation levels have been included. The lowest setting is incredibly forgiving, and only truly stupid moves will result in you coming off the bike, whilst the higher physics levels scale quite well with the most extreme requiring almost perfect breaking and throttle control to stay on track.

For anyone who hasn’t played a Moto GP game before there will be a steep learning curve in order to understand the physics. Your first lap will probably result in coming off the bike more times than you will in any other race. If you do struggle with the physics, take some time to do some Moto 3 races, as coming off the bike is almost impossible on the easiest setting and it will help a lot. The steep learning curve was unexpected and really made the first hour or so quite unenjoyable, but once I started career mode and did some Moto 3 races the enjoyment levels shot up.

While the numerous physics options offer differing levels of simulation, there are some things that remain constant, which break the realism a little. If you come off your bike in the middle of a pack of racers, both you and your bike will clip through them, not affecting the other riders in any way. Although this stops massive pileups, it’s not particularly realistic. Going off track, regardless of the physics level, is also quite forgiving, and with the correct settings can actually give you an advantage. Again, it’s not game-breaking, but it’s not realistic, either.

The steep learning curve and questionable design choices may have somewhat of a negative impact, but the majority of the on-track action is a pleasure. The bikes handle incredibly well and the force of the accelerator can be felt constantly. Hitting an apex perfectly is no easy task but when you do, it feels amazing and it’s even better when you’re challenging for position at the same time. The AI isn’t the smartest, but it does a good enough job, and on higher difficulty levels provide an impressive challenge making races thrilling and a real fight to the finish.

As I mentioned earlier, starting career mode as soon as possible is a great idea as you begin as a newbie in Moto 3, which is much more forgiving than Moto GP. The bikes are easier to manage and the quality of competition is much lower, so it offers a great learning experience. Your created rider will sign to a team after partaking in a couple of wildcard races, and from there you’re free to climb the ranks of the sport, all the way up to becoming the Moto GP Champion. Career mode is probably where you’ll spend the majority of your time – getting to the top will take quite a few hours, but if feels very rewarding doing so.

The other game modes on offer include the standard Grand Prix mode, which allows you to set up a single race (or race weekend) and take part with any driver of your choice. There are also the predictable Time Trials and Instant Action modes, as well as the throwaway Safety Car mode, which sees you doing a time trial in a safety car that handles horrifically. Also included is the Real Events 2013 mode, which sees you try and recreate action from the 2013 season and challenge the champions, which allows you to take on former legends of the sport. Both split-screen and online multiplayer make an appearance as well. The game modes offer some variety, but for me the only real time-sink was the career.

Every track from the current Moto GP season is available to race around and, although they don’t quite have the same visual quality of other next gen racing games, they look and feel impressive, if not a little quiet around the outsides. The bikes and drivers (including ones from Moto 2, Moto 3, Moto GP 2013 and a slew of former champions) all look impressive and have incredibly high detail, and the drivers move around their bikes in a very convincing way.

VERDICT: Whilst Moto GP 14 is the closest many of us will get get to living out our dreams of taking a bike around iconic tracks such as Silverstone, it’s not quite a true simulation even on the highest physics settings. While to some this wont be an issue, others may find it irritating that it doesn’t match the sport quite as closely as it should do. However, that doesn’t stop Moto GP 14 from being a fine racing game once you get the hang of it. The on-track action is extremely satisfying and can be very challenging, making the reward of finishing first even sweeter.

The extensive modes offer hours of playtime and replayability (especially the career mode) and the inclusion of Moto 2 and Moto 3 not only offers even more playing options, but also a great way to introduce new players to the series. This is a game that will please the majority of Moto GP fans, but will also bring in a lot of new ones.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Oh Japan, you be so crazy. I have no idea what is going on with One Piece Unlimited World Red. The adventure starts when the Straw Hat pirates spot an island, set off to explore it and are instantly kidnapped. The main protagonist, Monkey D. Luffy, Captain of the Straw Hats, sets off to save them from the clutches of what I’m assuming are series regular villains – he seems to recognise most of them anyway. And that’s the first barrier to entry: you’re very aware Unlimited World Red is part of a wider series.

Introduction to each character amounts to a few lines of text that flash briefly during the opening cutscene, and with several anime seasons alongside a staggering 35 other games in the series you can understand why – Ganbarion expects you to know who is who.

This should matter, it really should, yet somehow it doesn’t. Perhaps as a legacy of the volume of content to draw upon, each character has a unique personality. All are a little bit silly, but you have the big, hulking idiot, the more serious samurai, the giant talking squirrel. The cast is varied and great.

All of which is tied to a really satisfying combat system. You’ve got two attacks, mapped to square and triangle, which can be combined in combos and with a jump to defeat your enemies, and while this may sound sparse, the ability to swap between two other party members – chosen before you leave the central town – means you never get bored. Luffy uses his elasticated body to bounce around a battle, while the shipwright Franky can lay down a turret for other characters to use. When you’re not directly controlling them the A.I. does a good job of managing them, and battles become chaotic, enemies flying across the screen, your three heroes’ focal points drawing opponents in and then knocking them away. It feels like you’re playing an anime cartoon.

As you fight you’ll build an SP bar that allows you to unleash a special attack by pressing R1 and a face button, either by yourself or with all three characters. This triggers a short attack animation and most enemies just disappear.

There’s a plethora of baddies to beat up as well. There’re the standard goons, alongside some knight-type guys and, for some reason, a race of desert-dwelling seals, to name but a few. Boss battles dial things up a notch, too. At one point a dragon casually appears, which Luffy attacks for something to eat (because he’s just badass) while at another point a mad scientist has created a giant jam monster. It’s imaginative to say the least. There’s also a levelling system and “power words”. The latter are basically buffs you can assign to a character, boosting attack or a particular resistance.

Ganbarion have also included a town-building metagame to sink your teeth into. Plunder you find on your adventures, plus a little money, can be used to redevelop the town that serves as the hub for all of your adventuring. First construction is the tavern, where you can pick up side quests, while other options include a pharmacy to purchase health capsules (read: potions), and a factory that can upgrade your items.

The items in question come in the form of a bug net and a fishing rod that you can use at specific points in the wild to gain new items. Each triggers a mini-game that’s usually a variation on rhythm button pressing which, while not hard, do provide a bit of a refreshing break from the normal gameplay.

One cool feature is the option for a second player to jump in and control another party member. They’re able to freely roam the same zone as you, and obviously help in battle. For some reason the screen splits into two windows rather than half and half, wasting about a third of the screen in the process. It’s not too bad, but I can’t see why it couldn’t have just been split vertically.

Gameplay-wise, One Piece Unlimited World Red is more than solid, a case supported by the visuals. Everything is rendered in 3D animation, with the rippling clothing particularly impressive, and everything is bright and slightly exaggerated. The environments are diverse, featuring lava, ice and desert locales to show off the game’s breadth. It’s not challenging GTA V or the Uncharted series anytime soon, but it does look good, and on the smaller screens of a 3DS or a Vita it should look fantastic.

The original Japanese voice acting has been kept, something I know a lot of fans will be happy with, but the subtitle translation is solid, and it perfectly fits the over-exaggerated nature of Unlimited World Red – an English dub just wouldn’t sound right. You do have to be a quick reader though: a second or two longer on screen for some of the subtitles would have been nice.

It’s not perfect – after a while combat becomes a little one note, with you simply button mashing until everything on screen is dead, and the wider plot is a little hard to follow – but Unlimited World Red is consistently enjoyable.

VERDICT: If One Piece is a series you follow, my words aren’t going to impact your choice to buy this. But if, like me, you’re new to the series, Unlimited World Red is surprisingly enjoyable. It’s all silly and over the top, full of daft enemies and exaggerated characters, and it positively screams “I am a game! Have fun with me!” Sometimes, though, that’s exactly what you want.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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To many Western gamers – particularly those more interested in the big mainstream titles – I imagine the Atelier series might come across as something of a curio. Even among other JRPGs, they’re fairly sedate, focusing on gathering and crafting as opposed to combat and adventuring.

Atelier Rorona Plus: The Alchemist of Arland is a re-vamped version of the eleventh title in the series, and is one of the more “traditional” games in terms of combat and characterisation. It focuses on the titular Rorona, a young apprentice alchemist thrust into a position of pressure and responsibility and tasked with twelve assignments over the course of three years. Like many games in the series, the mission structure is built around these assignments, and a persistent clock shreds days off your calendar with every journey you undertake or concoction you create.

After finding herself in charge of her master’s atelier, Rorona is told that she has three years to save the shop, and that she can do it by performing jobs for the Palace. Her primary contact is surly knight, Sterkenburg, but she also has other friends she can call on such as the snooty, mean-spirited Cordelia or weak-wristed shopkeeper Iksel. Each job entails gathering reagents and crafting particular items, then turning them into Sterk before the term ends.

Initially, it’s quite easy, and you’ll often complete objectives early and then have time to go and farm reagents with which to make combat items, curatives and weapon upgrades. All travel between areas is instantaneous, so going from the central hub town into a nearby forest or a creepy old ruin will cost you little more than a few button presses and a couple of days off your deadline.

Recipes are found in books or given to you by NPCs, but all ingredients are harvested from the field, whether taken from fallen enemies or gathered from the environment. Once you’ve found a new gathering area, you can fast travel to and from it as much as you like. The majority of monsters can be avoided, but some will block the way to needed ingredients or new areas and you’ll have to deal with them. Luckily, the turn-based combat is quite enjoyable.

Rorona can take two allies out into the field with her by hiring them and paying their fees daily. Each character comes with their own combat style and special skills, which is really as deep as it gets. When Rorona uses a skill attack, pressing a trigger will activate a support move from whichever ally is mapped to that trigger, causing them to perform a follow-up attack for increased damage. Likewise, many attacks can be mitigated by her team-mates leaping into harm’s way to protect her. The combat is serviceable and quite fun, and some of the special skills are impressive while not particularly dazzling. Failure will see you returned to the town, and force you to either use up precious curatives or waste vital days resting on Rorona’s couch.

Once you go back, using the atelier is easy. A journal allows you to save your progress, decorate the shop by adding useful items like containers, alter Rorona’s clothing, or change the background music. Approaching the cauldron will bring up a menu of concoctions, with the ones you can’t make helpfully crossed off. You’ll then select what you want to make and use the best ingredients to achieve the best results. For example, some things like explosives can be crafted from many different ingredients. Selecting the ones that will add damage or other effects is always preferable, and you can often add a bonus to a created item such as an increased trading price or improved damage to enemies.

The balance between crafting and gathering is spot on, and finding that you’re a few ingredients short prompts nothing more than a return trip to a specific area and a spot of foraging. Side missions are completed as you play, rewarding you for, say, using ten healing salves on other characters or gathering a certain number of ingredients. Additionally, the knight at the Palace’s front desk will give you contracts from NPCs who want certain things made and will pay for the service.

Compared to some of the other games I’ve played in the Atelier series, Rorona Plus’ characters aren’t particularly irritating. It still suffers from the almost atypical JRPG characterisation issues such as immature dialogue and a wildly inconsistent tone, but the storyline is decent enough and the voice acting isn’t as annoying as I found it to be in Atelier Escha & Logy. Most of the characters follow a certain archetype, which is almost expected: Rorona is the naive young girl thrust in over her head; Sterk is broody and foreboding, channelling Robert Pattinson while all the female characters swoon around him; Cordelia is horribly insensitive but hides a heart of gold, and so on. It’s mostly par for the course, but there are flashes of humour that stop it all from becoming too po-faced.

Notably, the subplot involving Rorona’s father, Ryan, and his apparent obsession with a beautiful widow in town is amusing, while Rorona’s master is a creepy, over-sexed predator who constantly flirts with her pupil, invites her to join her in bed and apologises for “what she did to you last night while you were sleeping”. It’s horribly creepy at times, and the fact that Rorona’s master is female makes it no less worrying. Some of it may be down to localisation losing the initial subtlety, but it can be weird.

The biggest change between the original release and Rorona Plus is the visual style. Characters are less cartoony, particularly in battle, and the whole aesthetic is more in line with Atelier Ayesha and Escha & Logy. A slightly washed-out, pastel-coloured palette adds a fairytale quality to the visuals, and the character models are well detailed. The music can begin to grate after a while, but the voice acting is decent – although not all the dialogue is spoken, even in dedicated dialogue scenes.

VERDICT: Atelier Rorona Plus: The Alchemist of Arland is an enjoyable adventure let down by its repetitive nature and the increasing constraints imposed by the time limit. While the initial few assignments are quite straightforward, the harder they get the further you have to travel, and the more you have to gather, and before long you’ll be wishing for an open-world JRPG without restrictions. That said, likeable characters and a more traditional approach to turn-based combat are welcome, and the improved aesthetic feels more in keeping with the recent additions to the franchise. Rorona Plus is not an instant classic, but accessible and enjoyable enough that it deserves to be more than just a curio.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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I wasn’t sure what to expect when Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection landed on my “to review” pile. My last outing with a JRPG was to review Mugen Souls Z, which didn’t go so well, and watching the trailer didn’t help; manga girls dancing around to Japanese pop songs while buzzwords flashed across the screen. Excite! Idol! CPUS!

It’s fair to say that I didn’t have particularly high expectations going into Producing Perfection, either, but it turns out I was wrong. While the rest of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series is a traditional (and from the sound of it, mediocre) JRPG, Producing Perfection is in fact a spin-off, based around managing a CPU and turning her into a pop idol.

What’s a CPU I hear you cry? Well, they are the goddesses of their world, Gamindustri. Each represents a console from the last generation, the Wii, PS3, and 360, as well as the cancelled Sega Neptune. In the main series they squabble for control in their realm, but here they’ve decided to team up as the monsters they usually fight have formed an epic idol group called MOB48 and have taken all the planet’s “shares” (basically prayers).

Rather than beat the monsters up, they’ve chosen to beat them at their own game – which is where you come in. Set in the real world, you take the role of a student settling down for a summer gaming marathon, before you’re unwittingly summoned through your TV and made to choose a CPU to manage.

Each has their own personality, though managing them boils down to the same actions. Neptune, who embodies Sega’s console, is childish and energetic, Noire, the PS3 CPU, is individualistic, doing things in her own time, Vert is the 360, intelligent but arrogant and Blanc represents the Wii, who gets loud and angry despite looking quiet. Once you pick one, the rest set off in competition.

As stories go it’s pretty original, the setting of the Console Wars a neat nod to gaming, with references made frequently in the dialogue, even if it is completely ridiculous. You’re given 180 days to accumulate the most shares, picking an activity each day to improve your Idol’s stats, boost their shares or relax to de-stress. For example, you can choose to do some publicity like a meet and greet, or go to vocal coaching to improve the singing stat.

Each action varies in its effectiveness, and the better it is, the longer the cool down: studying raises all of your stats, but can only be used every seven days. It becomes a neat balancing system, trying to raise your character’s level while promoting her enough and making sure she doesn’t get too stressed (if the bar reaches 100%, you lose the game).

Every other week or so you’ll also have the opportunity to put on a concert. These take the form of a mini-game, where you pick the song (each Idol has their own, which the others unlock as the game progresses, plus a final track when you win), the stage and the Idol’s outfit before applying special effects such as a spotlight, and controlling the camera during the performance. Apparently this is to increase your Stage Points, measured at the bottom of the screen, but I never noticed a difference between artful use and mashing the buttons wildly. Likewise, the proportion of new fans didn’t seem to vary depending on what I did.

To make the story more engaging, random events pop up, with basic dialogue choices to interact with the characters. It breaks the repetition of the story mode, but at the same time some of them take an entire day and can feel like a wasted opportunity to improve your stats.

In all honesty there isn’t much depth to the story mode. I improved my Idol’s levels but never felt that this earned me greater rewards during publicity events or concerts, and despite the 180-day timer I’d finished in half that time – roughly 4 hours of play. On the one hand this is a plus: as a portable title it’s perfect for those moments on the bus or train, completing a day or two when you can. But as a full price release it should be deeper than this. There is an option to form a group with the other Idols, but it requires spending a few days with them and becoming friends first. That wouldn’t be a problem but the day after the ability was unlocked I was forced to form a group with Vert. There’s no point giving you a choice only to make it for you as well.

There is a new game plus mode for when you finish, as well as three other Idols to manage, but once you’ve played through once there isn’t really anything you haven’t seen. At least Producing Perfection looks great thanks to the beautifully-drawn manga that makes up the bulk of the game. Even the 3D engine that powers the concerts looks good on the small screen, and the Japanese pop that accompanies it is nice to listen to.

As seems to be the standard for JRPGs, there is a bit of over-sexualisation of the Idols, complete with unrealistic jiggling physics, but not too much. Only one has overly large assets, and she is also clearly the oldest there; also, the premise kind of makes sense – for better or for worse pop stars are as much about their sexuality as they are their music. Sadly there is a viewer mode where you can touch the 3D character models, either on the chest, crotch or backside to force a reaction. It’s clearly only for one thing, and while it can be ignored, it still niggles that it exists.

VERDICT: Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection is a decent, if feature-light, management game. It’s helped massively by the premise, but the execution, from the cute graphics to the ease of use, might make this worth looking into if you fancy a management sim on the go. Just don’t expect hidden depths – like the generic pop the game asks you to sell, what you see is what you get.

DECENT. A 6/10 indicates that, while this game could be much better, it still has a fair amount to offer the player. It might be an interesting title sabotaged by its own ambition, or a game denied greater praise by some questionable design choices. Don’t avoid it outright, but approach it with caution.

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Let’s get one thing straight about PlayStation Vita Pet: its title is a bit broad. The focus here is clearly on pets of the canine variety. Seeing any screenshot from Vita Pets gives the instant impression that this is a carbon copy of Nintendo’s Nintendogs but, while that is true to some extent, particularly in terms of your basic interactions with your adopted companion, there is more to this than feeding, washing and playing with a pet.

But before you get to that, you’ll need to pick your chosen pet from four breeds, and it’s also at this point where the charm and cuteness of these cuddly puppies is negated somewhat by the fact that they speak – which instantly brings back memories of Look Who’s Talking Now (shudder – Ed). For those who are too young/don’t remember that 1993 cinematic “classic”, that’s in no way a compliment. I like my dogs without irritatingly chirpy American accents, please.

Once you’ve taken your pup back home, you go through the usual tutorials, showing you how to play and take care of your dog, including an unnecessary prerequisite where you have to take a picture of your face every time you start the game, which has absolutely no point whatsoever. You are encouraged to use the microphone to give your dog a name, and can use it to assign voice commands to tricks. Mercifully, this is entirely optional.

From then on, the real game takes a totally unexpected turn and becomes an adventure, wherein you must solve a mystery left by a long-departed king and his faithful dog, Cosmos. There’s a decent-sized map to explore, objects to sniff out and dig for, and relatively simple puzzles to solve (most of the answers are given to you, but this is a kid’s game, after all). There are also moments where you’ll need your dog’s skills to get past certain barriers, which leads to my biggest problem with PlayStation Vita Pets, and that’s its incredibly slow pace and grindy nature. You need to level up your dog’s abilities by taking part in various mini-games, but you’ll need to constantly replay these very limited and repetitive diversions in order to level up.

You’ll grind and grind until your dog is suitably levelled to get past one barrier, then you’ll soon come to another barrier which needs you to level up a different ability, and the cycle continues. It just feels like extreme padding to a game which, truth be told, wouldn’t be nearly as long if it weren’t for the endless grinding, as well as the incredibly slow pace of pretty much everything, from your walk speed to having to watch your dog’s animations finish before you can interact with things.

Also, I didn’t experience a single session of gameplay that wasn’t ended by some sort of bug or crash that required me to restart the game. There were times when my dog disappeared, or kept walking into a door and stopping me from interacting with anything, which became all the more frustrating when combined with long loading times. And, oh my God, those annoying voices.

VERDICT: There were actually moments where I was enjoying myself with PlayStation Vita Pets, because, for once, here was a virtual pet game that actually seemed to have a point – but in the end that just made the glaring issues all the more maddening. There’s a very good idea in here, but it’s buried under the monotony and the snail’s pace, and while it might be fine for a younger player that really likes dogs, I would hesitate to recommend this. It could have been so much better.

AVERAGE. The epitome of a 50/50 game, this title will be unspectacular but inoffensive, charmless but amiable. We aren’t condemning a game by scoring it a 5, but we certainly aren’t championing it, either.

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Kratos is angry. It’s his defining feature, like Dumbo’s ears or Kim Kardashian’s gluteous maximus. At no point in the God of War franchise is Kratos ever not angry for more than a few minutes, even when he’s rutting with busty wenches he has an air of quiet menace, like he’s just about to rip someone’s head clean off. If God of War was a film franchise, you wouldn’t root for that type of character – but because he’s a video game protagonist and violent rages against towering beasts in video games are somewhat cathartic, you find yourself getting behind the big bald psychopath all the way.

If you’ve ever played God of War before, you’ll know what to expect: Kratos comes out swinging right from the off. Beginning the first game in service to Ares, the dome-headed, ash-smeared loon is happy to destroy anyone who stands in his way – until he is charged to kill Ares and finally avenge his family. What follows is a murderous rampage through Greek mythology in the pursuit of Pandora’s Box, culminating in what was – at the time of its original release – an incredibly brutal showdown with Ares.

The action translates well to the Vita. Kratos’ movements are fluid and pacey, but the effects of compressing all that data down onto a tiny card are such that the visuals look slightly muddy and indistinct. The minute-to-minute gameplay looks far better than the cutscenes, however, and the frantic combo-based combat is just as satisfying now as it was on the PlayStation 2 back in the day.

God of War II tells the story of Kratos’ fall from grace. After being named Ares’ successor, he just can’t stop busting heads and snapping necks, and is subsequently banished from Mount Olympus by Athena. Before long he’s on another quest for vengeance, this time against Zeus and the entire Greek pantheon.

The improvements over the first game are stark from the off. Visually, God of War II is brighter and crisper, the animation slicker and the combat more involved and a little less chaotic. It looks markedly better on the Vita’s screen than the original, but feels almost exactly the same. The God of War series is known for its grand openings, and both I & II deliver spectacle in spades from the get-go, but it would have been nice to see fully remastered versions of both games included in the bundle. The controls are still set to the archaic PS2 layouts where triangle is “back”, which just feels alien nowadays.

For some reason, the guys responsible for the port, Sanzaru (they of Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time fame) have ignored the Vita’s touchscreen and instead allocated several contextual actions to the rear touchpad. For example, instead of pressing circle to open a chest, you have to hold the touchpad and then tap circle. It’s utterly bizarre and feels incredibly arbitrary, an almost half-assed attempt to shoe-horn at least some of the Vita’s modern-day functionality into the control scheme when it’s completely unnecessary.

VERDICT: Minor gripes aside, though, the God of War Collection remains incredibly playable, proving once again that Kratos is one of those rare, ageless creations whose mechanics never seem to age even if his visuals do. Still of a higher quality than many PlayStation 3 games, the pairing of God of War I & II is a decent – if slightly stretched – fit for the Vita, and a great shout for anyone who missed out first time around or simply wants to revisit the blood-soaked marble pillars of Kratos’ ancient Greece. A welcome release certainly, but not entirely essential.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Upon its initial release, SCE Japan’s Soul Sacrifice earned a name for itself as one of the Vita’s most unique and intriguing exclusives. A mix of dark fantasy, unashamed gore and baroque Gothicism, Keiji Inafune’s mature action RPG won a legion of fans in both the East and West. The almost immediate news that he had pitched a sequel to Sony was met with excitement among the game’s burgeoning community, and now a year on we have Soul Sacrifice Delta, part-sequel, part-definitive edition, offering the full original adventure with heaps of new content thrown in.

The broad strokes of Soul Sacrifice’s story remain intact: you awake in a filthy, gore-strewn cell and, after watching a fellow inmate get obliterated by your captor, the Sorcerer Magusar, you discover a sentient book called the Librom. Inside the pages of the Librom lie gateways into the past, and by interacting with it you supplant the body of the book’s former owner as Magusar’s companion in “Phantom Quests”, which you must relive in order to absorb enough knowledge and power to eventually challenge Magusar yourself. As the framework for a series of arena-based dust-ups it’s perfect, putting the individual nature of each quest in context with the narrative universe.

Soul Sacrifice is a relentlessly dark game, too. The world teeters on the brink of annihilation, and indeed appears to have been saved from destruction several times by an ancient artifact known as the Chalice, a grail that will grant any wish as long as the asker’s desire is powerful enough. The corrupting influence of desire and avarice is a prevalent theme in the plot, because when desire turns to greed and lust, the individual is corrupted and becomes a monster. In turn, these abominations are hunted with extreme prejudice by the Order of Avalon, a sect of sorcerers who derive their magic from often horrific sacrifice.

The main narrative sees you relive a series of quests alongside Magusar, eventually confronting him in the past before returning to your own body in your cell and preparing to face your now almost-invincible nemesis, but outside of that you can undertake hundreds of other quest-lines to farm for soul shards and Offerings. Previously you could only follow the path of Avalon, but Soul Sacrifice Delta introduces two other factions in the form of Sanctuarium (a sect diametrically opposed to Avalon’s indiscriminate murder) and Grim, who follow the teachings of an ancient sage and believe that Sorcerers have no right to meddle in the fates of the cursed. The most important change this brings is that now, depending on your faction, how you treat a vanquished foe earns varying rewards.

Following Avalon replenishes your offerings through Sacrifice, whereas Sanctuarium favours Salvation – but Grim allows you to hold both triggers and leave it up to Fate to decide. It’s another layer on the impressive risk/reward system that already asks that you weigh up every sacrifice with what you need most at the time. Additionally, Grim and Sanctuarium come with their own quest-lines, (in Soul Sacrifice, called Pacts), and introduce even more unique, eccentric Sorcerers for you to fight alongside. The new customisable right arm allows you to assume the look of your allies, too, for instance sporting Carnatux’s gold-encrusted arm, or Radux’s gnarled tree-branch.

If you fancy a further challenge, a new mode known as Alice’s Eternal Maze presents an endurance test of sorts, as you attempt to survive for as many battles as possible for greater and greater rewards. New enemies riff off of classic fairytales, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, enhancing the fantastical quality of the world, and a new merchant hub allows you to buy raiment in exchange for Offerings or criteria-fulfilment, as well as letting you purchase rumours that can be applied before a fight to increase experience gain or weaken certain bosses.

The Offering system is almost the same, as seemingly mundane items are sacrificed to create magical weapons and armour, but a handful of new Offerings mixes things up, and you can now create combos by, for example, casting a blanket of fire upon the ground and then summoning a weapon above it to imbue the weapon with fire. In solo games this is handy, whereas in co-op multiplayer it brings a genuine tactical element to the fore as you combine your spells with those of your allies.

Little details like being able to alter the top, bottom and hood of your outfit separately and being able to combine spell effects help Soul Sacrifice Delta stand head and shoulders above the original, aided by the sheer amount of extra content and some truly memorable new enemies. The integration of new story elements and factions with the original narrative is so seamless that you’ll forget the factions weren’t present before, and the challenge offered by the Eternal Maze just tops it off. While it hasn’t had a graphical overhaul, the improved textures and framerate are noticeable, and the rich colours of the new environments – all reds, golds and greens – pop on the Vita’s small screen.

VERDICT: This is a fantastic edition of one of the Vita’s best exclusives and only heightens anticipation for a possible full sequel. If SCE Japan continue to support Soul Sacrifice Delta with free content as they did with the vanilla game, it has the potential to run and run. If you found the original repetitious or unexciting, Delta won’t change your mind, but for fans of the first release this beautifully grim and wonderfully dark fantasy is one of the best action games available on the Vita.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Before the ultra-violence and moral wrongness of Grand Theft Auto, the studio that would eventually come to be known as Rockstar North had a massive hit on their hands with Lemmings. DMA Design (as they were known back then) created a strategic game like no other, introducing the world to a group of now-iconic green-haired, suicidal maniacs. Practically every console and home computer in the early 90s had a version of this game – it was everywhere.

That said, the 90s were a long time ago, and it’s entirely possible that there are people reading this who have never seen a Lemmings game, but thankfully Lemmings Touch is a very easy-to-digest version. Put simply, you must guide the furry nutcases from the entrance of a level all the way to the exit. Easier said than done, considering their predisposition for blindly walking straight ahead, only switching direction when colliding with a solid wall. The only way to interrupt their pattern is to assign them various abilities, and Lemmings Touch sticks to the tried and tested abilities from the original game, with Blockers, Bombers, Climbers, Floaters and more.

As you can no doubt imagine from the title, this edition adds a touch interface as opposed to the usual cursor-based play of the originals. While it’s a great idea and is successful for the most part, it could do with a little improvement. You can zoom in or out by pinching, and to assign an ability to a Lemming you simply touch it, which brings up a menu. This menu can be moved around manually, but it sometimes moves by its own accord, which can be incredibly irritating when trying to perform actions quickly to stop your furry charges from walking off the nearest cliff. If the icons were fixed in an area of the screen, there would be a lot less frustration.

The other big change is the occasional addition of Mischievous Lemmings. These red-hued doppelgangers sometimes pop up in certain levels, and saving them will instantly lead to failure. Trying to dispatch one of them while still trying to save your normal Lemmings adds an extra level of challenge, even if it’s not a game-changing addition.

While many of the classic Lemmings levels return, set over four difficulty levels, a casual way of playing has been provided, thanks to mobile gaming-style missions that will earn coins when achieved. These coins will earn various costume items that can be applied to your Lemmings, although they have barely any influence on the game itself, save for a few Trophies. Each level also has a 3-star ranking system, with stars being a requirement for unlocking later stages. The difficulty curve is spot on here, and if you’re stuck on a level, there are always others to tackle. At least you can still pause the game to give yourself time to think, which you’ll need as the action can get pretty frantic as you battle both the suicidal desires of your Lemmings and an ever-present clock. You’ll also need to rescue a certain number of Lemmings to succeed, and you’ll need to do it quickly for better ranks.

VERDICT: It’s almost comforting in a way, to see that the basic game hasn’t been messed around with too much, as this is a great reminder of a puzzling classic. Adding touch controls is a great way to reintroduce one of gaming’s forgotten classics to a new generation, and the added portability is a real bonus. But for fans, the familiarity may be a stumbling block, and it would have been nice to see some new abilities to play with, if only to make this more than just a re-tread.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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10tons may only be a small company, but they’re certainly singling themselves out as an outfit to watch. The off-the-wall King Oddball is a very strange yet highly-addictive physics puzzler, and Match-3 marble-shooter Sparkle is a unique take on a well-used template. Both games work excellently on the PS Vita or a mobile device, but would be less impressive if carried over to the PlayStation 4: their simplistic nature and minimalist design is at odds with the high-tech wizardry under the PS4’s hood. They simply aren’t big enough to fill a big screen, a fact proved by last month’s King Oddball home console port.

Sparkle 2 is the latest game from 10tons, and a direct sequel to the aforementioned Marble Shooter. Although it’s available on both PS Vita and PS4, it seems a little bit dwarfed on the bigger console, and sort of pointless unless you have no other option and really, really want to play it.

Following the path first carved out by its predecessor, Sparkle 2 sees you in charge of an Orb Launcher device, with which you fire a coloured orb at a snake-like procession of coloured orbs as they travel a simple grid, in the hope of matching three or more so they disappear before they reach a black hole at the end of the line and trigger a Game Over.

To a greater extent than Sparkle, the sequel follows a storyline involving a quest through a barren land. Although there are no characters or animated events, a narrator pops up as you reach certain areas to exposit the flimsy plot and offer bare bones justification for playing the next level. The ironic thing is that Sparkle 2 is so playable that the pointless plot and its rudimentary world map are superfluous.

The gameplay is wonderfully straightforward as you fire off orb after orb into the line by tapping the screen where you want them to go. The steadily increasing difficulty (enhanced by more colours and a faster line) is offset by a great selection of buffs unlocked after a certain number of stages. These include a faster launcher or various powered shots that can be used to decimate huge sections of the line.

Power-ups appear after a certain amount of consecutive clearances and include explosive orbs, the ability to reverse the flow of the line or a buff that freezes everything for a moment. During later stages when there are two or more lines to manage at once with more orbs sliding in constantly, you will need all the help you can get.  If you do get to the point where the main game is pushing you and you need a change, an added Survival mode stretches the legs of a game already offering around 300 levels. Incidentally, the inclusion of a colour-blind mode, where all the orbs have a visible motif, is a great touch.

The graphics are stark and pretty in places, as the stages have a gritty, fantastical look that adds to the quest-oriented story, but it’s the music that stands out. There’s plenty of it in Sparkle 2, and every piece is bursting with personality – the music is the perfect accompaniment to the often frantic action.

VERDICT: While its presence on PS4 is questionable (aside the rather excellent touchpad application), Sparkle 2 joins the likes of Surge Deluxe and King Oddball to further swell the Vita’s impressive line-up of indie puzzlers. Immensely playable and rarely frustrating, Sparkle 2 is a simple yet effective time waster that offers plenty of hours of fun before it inevitably starts to feel a bit repetitious.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Last time we saw Clementine and the gang, all manner of messed up things were happening. And let’s face it, that could be the description of any episode of The Walking Dead to date. What episode two was missing, though, was character, and more importantly, the ability to make the player feel any strong emotions towards the cast. Episode three fixes that with a bullet.

During the 90 minutes of In Harm’s Way, Telltale managed to get me entirely back on board with the series by doing what Season One did so spectacularly well. It made me care again.

If there was anything ambiguous about Bill Carver and his intentions, there are no questions left about him after the credits roll. In fact, I felt a murderous, brutal rage toward him that I don’t think I’ve ever felt towards a video game character before. He’s crazy, sure, but we’re talking The Walking Dead comic-book crazy – and as a fan of the books, Carver sickened even me. Michael Madsen’s performance is pitch perfect. In fact, the voice cast perform wonderfully throughout Episode Three.

Set in an enclosed area, In Harm’s Way features a horrifically oppressive atmosphere, and like the best parts of The Walking Dead, it proves yet again that human beings are far more scary than the potential walker attack that is ever-present.

But Episode Three is also about other characters, and honing in on them makes the entire thing feel more successful. Returning characters are fleshed out, of course, but for the first time in Season Two, some of the more peripheral characters – whom we previously may have even forgotten the name of – seem to have a place and purpose. New characters are introduced as well, and they seem immediately interesting and useful to the group.

Thanks to a new character, there’s even a slight bit of comic relief, and unless I am misreading things, there are even nods toward the stigma attached to mental illness, which is a new, welcome additional layer to the story that proves Telltale are always looking for new ways to engage the audience.

Interestingly, In Harm’s Way actually hosts a contained story all of its own that wraps up by the credits. As you are supposed to be reintegrating with the community that Carver lords over, there is an oncoming horde (and it’s massive) that is a secondary concern. Your gang is exhausted and circumstances mean they are basically prisoners here, and want to get out. While plotting to escape, you’re forced to do chores, and with every minute that passes, you learn more about your host.

There are some truly exceptional set pieces, and despite fears after Episode One that there would be excuses to gross us out, every time there is any violence it is in service of the plot and justified, even when it’s hard to watch.

The only real negative isn’t a new one: sometimes it can be slightly off-putting when you realise that you’re playing yourself, and not a young girl. During some of the key plot points my own instincts took over and I was playing as myself, not Clementine. That’s a disconnect I’m not sure there’s any way to solve, but it’s also the mark of a very emotional experience that drills into your primal instincts to survive.

By the end, I felt utterly drained, yet ready for more, because it’s all coming together nicely. Though you’d traditionally expect a slightly duller, more filler-padded middle episode, this is anything but. One thing to note is that the version I played was entirely bug-free, with barely any noticeable slowdown whatsoever. It could have been the press build I was playing, or it could be that Telltale have been working on their engine.

VERDICT: The Walking Dead is back on track, after a slightly dull Episode Two, this is exactly what the series needed. It will make you care again, it will make you angry and sad in equal measures, it will remind you that nobody is safe in this universe, but best of all it recaptures The Walking Dead’s brilliance. I cannot wait for the next episode.

SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it. Let’s mate and make beautiful Star Children together, so we can fight demons. Big, bloody demons.

Conception is just so damn weird. Starting you off as boy at an academic establishment that tries to keep demonic hordes from destroying the world (so far, so Persona), it is from then on you make social bonds with your classmates (so far, so Persona once more), which in turn, allows you to mate with them, spawning party members that you use in combat (so far, so “what the f*@k is going on?”). Yes, you see, Conception is about procreating with as many women as possible, or, as the game refers to it: “Class-mating”. You got it, it’s pretty much a dating game, complete with more rampant sexism and objectification than you can throw a huge, wobbly bosom at. I could waste this review criticising the entire Japanese culture for this stuff, but needless to say, if you’ve bought a Japanese dating sim, you know what you’re getting yourself into and you probably didn’t come just for the free food.

The meat of Conception II is battling through various dungeons, known as Labyrinths, plus a few sub-Labyrinths in which you can find better equipment and level up your party. Consisting of several floors, as you reach the higher levels, you’re occasionally able to leave the area to save your game, buy new equipment, make more babies, etc. You can then re-enter the Labyrinths from these exit points and carry on your progress.

It’s unfortunate that these areas have very little to differentiate themselves, other than a different repeated paint job in each one. There is a definite feeling of repetition as you tackle Labyrinth upon Labyrinth, eventually fighting (and hopefully) defeating the big boss of each one, before progressing through the story and eventually accessing the next Labyrinth.

In-between these excursions, you’ll be socialising with the students and faculty at the Academy, saying nice things and giving presents to the ladies so they’ll give birth to more powerful offspring, with different classes available. With three customisable teams available in combat at once, there’s a great number of combinations available to you, and part of the fun is seeing which Star Children work best for you. You’re also able to take one of your female colleagues with you, who also have their own abilities.

The combat is also sort of interesting, with turn-based battles introducing a mechanic where you can attack enemies from the front, left, right and rear, with different locations causing more damage via a weak point. A chain meter will also fill to varying amounts after each attack, eventually allowing combos that give you more Exp and GP. There’s a little depth to the combat, but once again it eventually gets a bit samey.

This repetition is Conception II’s biggest problem. The constant cycle of going to a Labyrinth, going back to the Academy, rinsing and repeating, becomes incredibly yawnsome. Even the social aspects lack any sort of depth, as the characters themselves only exist to give birth, which you’ll spend most of the game trying to make them do. Their interactions are immature, and the risque nature of the conceptions themselves (multi-coloured silhouettes of the teenage student writhing around, which are mercifully skippable) just means that the game as a whole is a rather hollow experience, with the narrative never hitting any sort of gravitas.

All of these negatives overshadow a game that has some solid JRPG mechanics as a base. It’s just that the way these mechanics are tied together is so incredibly repetitious, soulless and immature. Everything just feels like a skeleton with so very little flesh on the bones, feeling quite Persona-lite in places, but with none of the character that the superior series is so beloved for.

VERDICT: Putting aside it’s controversial nature, Conception II is okay as a JRPG. If you can handle the identikit dungeons and by-the-numbers gameplay (and if you haven’t played the many other great JRPGs on both 3DS & Vita), then you may find some enjoyment here, but it’s unlikely to last very long.

DECENT. A 6/10 indicates that, while this game could be much better, it still has a fair amount to offer the player. It might be an interesting title sabotaged by its own ambition, or a game denied greater praise by some questionable design choices. Don’t avoid it outright, but approach it with caution.

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In all fairness to Puppygames and Curve Studios, Titan Attacks is essentially Space Invaders by another name. You take control of a little green orbital defence vehicle and shoot the hell out of steadily descending alien invaders, while at the same time avoiding their bombs and lasers.

It’s hard to dress Titan Attacks up beyond that, despite a few extra mechanics thrown in to spice things up a little. For example, earning money during missions allows you to buy shields and smartbombs for your tank (the latter are particularly useful for clearing the screen of enemies), and little touches like capturing parachuting alien pilots for a bonus are welcome though not essential.

The various enemies require slightly different tactics to take down, and later stages present veritable bullet hells. You’ll need lightning reflexes and limitless patience if you intend to climb the leaderboards and stand alongside the best.

The retro aesthetics are almost facetious here, as Titan Attacks is Space Invaders reborn. It’s a tribute that wasn’t entirely necessary – though that’s not to say it’s unwanted. In fact, it’s just as addictive as any score attack shooter, and the simple gameplay is hard to fault – but we’ve come to expect more intricacy within the simplicity thanks to games like Thomas Was Alone and Stealth Bastard – though it’s important to remember that Curve only handled the porting of Titan Attacks.

VERDICT: Almost as simple as a shooter can get, Puppygames’ space blaster owes its success to our inability to be satisfied by a personal best. The premise and genre make more sense on the Vita than the PS4 (though options are always nice to have), but Titan Attacks is charmingly simple and hugely playable on any format.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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In the same week that JJ Abrams gave the sci-fi fan-iverse a list of acting talent for his forthcoming Star Wars sequel, we here at Godisageek are transported back to a galaxy far, far away thanks to Zen Studios and their latest clutch of generally excellent themed tables, completing their promised ten-strong lineup. With added PS4 crossover action on offer, there has never been a better reason to chuck the very reasonable eight quid asking price into your PSN wallet, and pretend you are stood bow legged in front of a real table, looking cool as I-don’t-know-what.

Just as the last time I investigated a Zen Star Wars collection, the arsenal of tables in Heroes Within kicks off with a beloved denizen of the movie mythology, concentrating on everybody’s favourite badass: wise-cracking smuggler, Han Solo. Wisely basing the table around the Mos Eisley Cantina and the iconic Millennium Falcon, the Han Solo effort is terrific fun, from the Cantina Band theme that backs up the action, to the rotating cutouts of various ne’er-do-wells straight out of Tattooine’s most salubrious nightspot. Everything is present and correct: the freezing carbonite chamber, copious blaster fire, glorious banter between Anthony Edwards’ C-3PO and the space pirate himself (“Never tell me the odds!”), and of course his sidekick Chewbacca. With fun side games based around Solo’s legendary craft, including negotiating an asteroid field, and a well-designed table with multiple flippers situated around the field, this is a fine way to open up.

A second table based upon the Star Wars Droids is another corker, set inside a representation of a sandcrawler, complete with a smelter, molten lava, and naturally a bunch of everyone’s fave diminutive scrap metal merchants, the Jawas. Revolving around salvaging and repairing various robot buddies, and shenanigans involving the hooded little scavengers, the table is a well balanced mixture of ramps and mini-games.

Although symmetrical in its layout, not always the best choice for a pinball table, the New Hope set-up works surprisingly well, despite what is (on the surface, at least) a basic design. The longer you spend in the company of Luke Skywalker, the more subtle additions become apparent, like a cool upside-down area hidden below the main playing field. The missions in this most traditional entry in the quartet are great fun, including a crack at destroying the Death Star, shootouts with Storm Troopers, the ominous worm-infested trash compactor and an excellent trench-run showdown with TIE Fighters. Ripped straight from scenes in the movie, the seven missions are challenging and diverse, and will keep your interest for a good while, even if you consider yourself a bit of a wizard.

The final table rivals the magnificent Infinity Gauntlet as being perhaps Zen’s finest virtual pinball moment. Masters of the Force is a wonderful-looking piece of work, the table split in half to represent the Light and Dark side of the force, emblazoned with the likes of Yoda, Qui-Gon Jinn and Emperor Palpatine. The top of the table features two diorama-like areas that can be opened up by hitting the required Holocron targets. Once this is achieved, you can enter flipper minigames set either in Yoda’s swampy homeland of Dagobah, or deep inside the belly of the Death Star.

Gameplay in the last table revolves around the constant struggle between the two sides of the Force, which is also true of the whole package – once you have downloaded it you can select which side of the fence you are on, and earn a Force Score based upon your efforts in the game both on or offline.

VERDICT: Heroes Within is a great way to round off Zen Studios’ work with the Star Wars franchise, which has given fans of both pinball and the long-running space opera a superb flipper-based treat, at a sensible and generous price point (especially given that most of the tables offer up hours of gameplay even as standalone one-shot deals). Whether you are a fan of the source material or not, the production values are excellent, there are plenty of options as to how you view and take part in the action, and the power of the modern game console allows Zen to do things that no traditional pinball cabinet could ever do. Excellent then, and well worth a look. May the force be with you.

 SUPERB. This is the mark of greatness, only awarded to games that engage us from start to finish. Titles that score 9/10 will have very few problems or negative issues, and will deliver high quality and value for money across all aspects of their design.

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Although Kickstarter projects promise to give power back to the fans, and attest to be working solely to please their audience, several high-profile problems and failures have rocked the boat over the last year. What once was the next big hope for independent video games now has a certain scepticism associated with it. So when Revolution announced that Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse would be split into two parts, fans were understandably worried that something more serious may be wrong.

Four months on from the release of Part 1 however, Part 2 has surfaced with no apparent issues in its development. Rather than something necessitating the split of the game into two parts, Revolution founder Charles Cecil cites excitement and their wish to get at least part of the game into the hands of their fans as soon as possible. Ultimately it may have hurt the game, because as stated in our review of Part 1, it seems like the pacing suffered due to the fifty/fifty split. It was all exposition and set-up in the first part, with little pay-off – so does Part 2 offer a bit more to get your teeth into?

Although the plot may never become quite as gripping or historically exciting as the original Broken Sword, Part 2 certainly benefits from a faster pace and more action-packed scenarios. We re-join George and Nico in Catalonia on the trail of the mystical artefact, the Tabula Veritatis. Following clues gathered in Part 1, the adventuring duo find themselves being shot at, trapped and dangling from perilous heights – all of which give the game a much greater feel of urgency and excitement than in the first half.

The only real negative is that everything seems to come to a halt rather suddenly, with a somewhat disappointing finale – but sadly this has been a bit of a trend for Broken Sword games, where the story is never wrapped up quite as neatly as the build-up deserves. There is still an over-reliance on long conversations at times, but this is definitely reduced in the concluding half – and it must be said that conversations about historical and/or mythical tales are a big part of the identity of the Broken Sword series.

That isn’t the only element returning to the series however, as there are even more nods to previous games in Part 2 of The Serpent’s Curse than there were in the first. A whole host of familiar characters are wheeled out, which might feel like a little too much fan service were this not a game born out of the generosity of said fans. Not only does the story seem to move on at a much more brisk pace, but the gameplay feels far meatier. Whereas Part 1was largely concerned with sleuthing and examining clues, players are treated to some real puzzles to wrap their heads around here.

There are a couple of code-breaking puzzles, along with some involving directing different beams of light and plotting points on a map based on clues you’ve uncovered. These all feel like much more challenging puzzles than anything the first part threw at you and therefore the whole chapter is a lot more satisfying. The hint system is once again robust enough that anyone who finds these a little too challenging can get subtle hints, all the way up to complete solutions, depending on how stumped you are.

VERDICT: The Serpent’s Curse certainly won’t set the gaming world alight, and it is somewhat doubtful that it can do enough to bring many new fans to the franchise. But it is a solid entry in the series that builds on the strengths of past titles. The game does a good job of replicating the atmosphere of the first two two-dimensional Broken Sword games, successfully integrating new 3D modelling with traditional hand-drawn backgrounds and old-school point and click techniques.

The Serpent’s Curse harks back to the end of the golden era of adventure gaming, but it manages to weave an interesting new tale that thoroughly fits in with Broken Sword lore. It may have begun somewhat cautiously in Part 1, but Part 2 really finds its stride and manages to build up to an exciting conclusion. Splitting the game did it no favours, however, and only makes the two parts look very uneven as a result. But played as a whole, The Serpent’s Curse manages to be more than just a nostalgia trip, but it is uncertain whether it will be the game to re-kindle the flame for future iterations.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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The first-person dungeon crawler is probably one of the oldest sub-groups of the RPG genre, and it’s certainly one of the first reasons role playing games became popular in Japan. So much so that while the genre is all but dead in the West, new games of this type are still rather popular in the East.

Demon Gaze is one of the few Japanese dungeon crawlers to reach our shores, and while its mechanics and portrayal of women are rather archaic, Vita-owning RPG fans who want something a little more hardcore will find plenty to sink their swords into. In fact, the Vita’s portable nature makes a game such as this far more palatable.

After beginning the game and customising your character’s aesthetics and class, you awaken with little memory and quickly find that you are a Demon Gazer. This title is given to those who are given the ability to seal demons’ souls, and are also able to hold a limited amount of dominion over these dark forces. Soon after sealing your first demon, you are taken back to an inn, which is the basic hub for most of the tasks that are required of you.

The slightly capitalist nature of the inn’s owner is swiftly discovered, as each time you leave the inn and return, you are charged a fee for your boarding. But fear not, for this inn happens to be completely inhabited by mercenaries, here to loot the nearby areas of treasures in order to pay their fee, and you are no different. A bulletin board informs you of all manner of quests, from the menial tasks given to you by the inn’s employees, to more dramatic endeavors. Meanwhile, the inn is also home to weapon and item shops that will provide you with useful equipment for your travels, although much better equipment is found out and about. It’s also possible to hire party members to assist you, although you’ll be expected to pay for their room rental as well, increasing the amount of money spent when returning to the inn after a successful day of slaying.

But the meat of the game is, of course, crawling around dungeons. The world you are in is split into six areas, although you won’t have access to every part of every area from the beginning. Played exclusively in first person, you are given an on-screen map that fills in as you explore. You move one step at a time, and while battles are displayed in the environment as large, ugly icons, you’ll also engage in the odd random battle. These aesthetically unpleasing icons also show up for items and Demon Gates, which you’ll need to track down in order to obtain the next powerful demon. You’ll also be able to sacrifice gems to these gates to call forth enemies. Upon defeat, you’ll get some loot and equipment depending on the gems you give up, and the quality of these are random.

Essentially, there’s a lot of going back and forth between the dungeons and the inn in an almost Metroid-like fashion as you find new abilities and items that allow you to explore more of each area. Each demon you find and equip has i’s own abilities, such as being able to display where hidden doors are.

Combat is of the turn-based variety and, much like the rest of the game, its presentation is very bare-bones, consisting of static, albeit beautifully hand-drawn, visuals, with no animation whatsoever. But it’s the game’s use of demons that is a nice idea: although you can summon them at any time, they can only be used for so many turns, as indicated by a demon gauge. Should this gauge run out, you will no longer be able to control the demon, and it will start attacking you in a fit of rage. Thus, you must be sure to keep an eye on the bar to make sure your greatest asset doesn’t become your biggest nightmare.

It’s a pretty tough adventure, although you are able to change the difficulty at any time. From the start, there are plenty of tutorials to talk you through your initial adventures, and there are plenty of features to keep things simple for players new to the genre. Being able to pick a point on the map that you’ve previously visited and auto-walk to that location is rather handy, for a start.

As mentioned early on in this review, Demon Gaze’s biggest problem is its archaic nature. While the Vita’s screen makes the mostly static visuals pop out, the lack of animation really starts to let the game down, much like the cringe-worthy way women are portrayed throughout. As you can expect from a JRPG, the female of the species is portrayed as either weak or in a state of unnecessary undress. It’s the sort of thing that makes playing the game an incredibly uncomfortable experience, and I can’t be the only one tiring of this overplayed trope. Still, this is more a casualty of Japanese culture than a problem that affects just this game. Sexism aside, this is an excellent localisation, with well-written and delivered English dialogue that is a cut above most localisation efforts – although the original Japanese vocal track is present for purists.

VERDICT: This is certainly a game for the role-player who fancies something a little different. While the presentation leaves a lot to be desired, there are plenty of elements that make Demon Gaze a good jumping-off point for the first person dungeon crawler. If you can stand the typically Japanese sexism, you might just enjoy this challenging, if repetitive, adventure.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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Baseball is a funny sport. Yes, it is about two teams trying to score more runs than the other in order to win, but not so much in the same vein as other sports, like football, basketball or hockey. In those sports, the two teams start off the same and must try to go to the opponents end and score baskets/goals. In baseball, one man throws a ball, while his opponent hits it and runs, while the other team tries to catch it and knock him out. As entertaining as it is to watch as a sport, that entertainment factor does not always translate into a video game.

MLB 14: The Show is like playing two mini games. You are either pitching or batting, pressing no more than two buttons at most. You do have control over your batter should he hit a successful swing. When he runs, which you don’t control, you can either tell him to wait at the base or keep going. It’s not a very entertaining mechanic to a game but there isn’t much else you can do when the sport is very compact in itself. The difference between this and FIFA, Madden, NBA 2K and such is that the latter feel a lot more competitive than the MLB. You don’t just press the X/A button to pass and the O/B button to shoot. There are many, many intricate ways to play and the fact that almost every game will be very different from the last is exciting – and it’s that factor that will keep you wanting to play more. MLB seems very, very linear with it’s gameplay – and very repetitive.

The game looks good though. The players, although not as good as some other sports games, can still stand on their own merits. The stadiums and fields are nice to look at, but the crowd suffers and dents the overall presentation. It is only a matter of time before developers invest some more time into the crowd – it’s a big problem that really affects the immersion. Crowd aside, the player models are done very well and, overall, the game definitely feels fluid when playing matches -apart from running, when Players look like they are jogging most of the time, rather than sprinting.

There are several modes to keep you interested: the beloved Road To The Show is back and lets you focus on one player specifically, while the other main mode, Franchise Mode, allows you to take control of a team and work them up to the top. While these modes do add more replay value to the game, it doesn’t help the matches when they are being played – every game seems so repetitive and, it’s all down to the in-game mechanics that make it seem like you are playing Mario Party mini-games.

It’s hard to become hooked on a game, or game modes for this matter, when everything seems to be like clockwork, and the sad part is it isn’t the game’s fault – it’s the actual matches. Although the modes are good in their own respect, playing the matches is the most important aspect of it all. If the matches don’t play well, it affects the whole mode.

While I do feel MLB is above average in most areas, I feel it is let down entirely by boring gameplay, which completely ruins the general mood and feel. Great modes, decent graphics, the licenses – although they are all there, playing MLB 14 feels like going through the motions over and over again.

VERDICT: MLB 14: The Show will more than likely go down well with fans of the series and big fans of baseball, but for others, not so much. When your mates come over for a few games, you won’t be sticking this on anytime soon.

AVERAGE. The epitome of a 50/50 game, this title will be unspectacular but inoffensive, charmless but amiable. We aren’t condemning a game by scoring it a 5, but we certainly aren’t championing it, either.

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Often overlooked in favour of Ratchet & Clank or Jak & Daxter, Sucker Punch’s Sly Cooper series has never really managed to set the gaming world alight. It’s a shame, because the Sony exclusive franchise is just as playable and, dare I say, more interesting than either of its more popular peers.

Casting you as the titular Sly Cooper, master thief and cat burglar extraordinaire, each game in the series asks that you complete various nefarious, nocturnal jobs such as breaking and entering, or theft and sabotage, made more palatable and kid-friendly by the fact that Sly and his crew only steal from other criminals, maintaining an effortless Robin Hood-style likeability at all times. The first three games made the jump to HD (sort of) at the start of 2011, but have only just been remastered for the PS Vita, possibly in the wake of the moderately successful Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, released last year.

Every game in the series follows a similar template of stealthy reconnaissance and night-time espionage, and it’s only the targets and the enemies that vary greatly between instalments. The first game, Sly Raccoon (or Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus overseas), has actually aged rather well. In it, we join Sly and his cohorts – tech-wizard turtle Bentley and brainless, brawny hippo Murray – as they attempt to locate and steal back five parts of the Thievius Racconus, an ancient tome containing all the secrets of Sly’s legendarily light-fingered ancestors.

Levels follow a set pattern of breaking into an area and locating a number of keys scattered about the place, which will unlock a boss fight with one of the Fiendish Five – the gang who killed Sly’s parents and stole his birthright. He’s pursued along the way by Carmelita Fox, a police officer whose love-hate relationship with the plucky raccoon is always a step shy of mutually flirtatious.

While the graphical overhaul is decent (if not revolutionary), Sly Raccoon shows its age in other ways – most notably its archaic use of lives. You’re given a certain number of tries, and every life lost (by taking one hit, usually) sees you bounced back to one of several widely-spaced checkpoints, while losing all your lives will force you to restart the entire area. Collecting 100 coins will award you with a horseshoe that negates the effects of death once, but it’s still a frustrating mechanic – especially when so many deaths are due to the stubborn camera or the fact it can often be hard to judge the distance between Sly and a lethal hazard.

Sly 2: Band of Thieves does away with such things, this time giving you a health bar and fully controllable camera. It’s still frustrating at times, mainly due to the sudden difficulty spikes and its low tolerance for failure during certain stealth sections. Controlling Sly feels very similar to the first game, though, and playing them back to back or even alternating between them doesn’t feel awkward.

The story this time revolves around Sly and his crew attempting to stop the Klaww Gang from reassembling the mechanical villain Clockwerk, pursued once again by Carmelita and her new partner, Neyla. It’s a little less engaging than the narrative of Sly 1, but then revenge and the reclamation of birthrights always carries a certain gravitas.

The final entry, Sly 3: Honour Among Thieves, is arguably the weakest of the three and only slightly more likeable than Thieves in Time. It’s not a bad game, but by the time you reach the third instalment the tried and tested mechanics are beginning to wear thin, as Sly 3 offers little innovation over the first two games. Searching for the Cooper Vault, a hoard of treasure and riches gathered over the years by his family, Sly, Bentley and Murray go up against the evil Doctor M, recruiting new characters along the way such as Penelope the mouse and a Koala known as the Guru. While Sly 3 doesn’t mix up the gameplay all that much, the additional characters are a welcome element. The visuals in Honor Among Thieves are, ironically, the most ropey. The odd cel-shaded style and Sly’s slightly creepy dialogue animations don’t translate well into HD, and by the time you hit Sly 3 the samey environments will begin to grate a little.

The Vita version of the Sly Trilogy does a great job of making the three games feel like one continuous adventure, adding uniform controls through all three such as tapping the touch screen to open the binocucom or hitting the rear touchpad to highlight your objective. You’ll be using both an awful lot, too, as the binocucom is especially useful for taking photos of targets and zooming in on distant points of interest. Reconnaissance is important in the Sly Trilogy, and adds to the sense that you’re the rodent version of Sam Fisher, planning your moves and using the shadows to your advantage.

Combat and exploration don’t change a lot from one game to the next, and collectibles are still a large part of the experience, as you hunt down coins and clue bottles in every area. Sly always feels slick and easy to control, and despite his sarcastic quips he never slips into full-on douchebag mode, managing to remain likable throughout. The supporting cast are always on hand to get him out of scrapes – and are occasionally controllable – so you never feel alone or unsure of where to go next, even in the more open Sly 2.

VERDICT: It’s no surprise that the Sly Trilogy is a great fit for the Vita. Fun and engaging despite occasional difficult spikes, the enjoyment only tends to wane after playing for long periods, and may become slightly tiresome should you decide to marathon all three games one after another. The interesting stories and well-crafted characters help elevate the Sly Trilogy above its better-known contemporaries, and the effortlessly cool gameplay means all three games remain eminently playable even now, almost a decade after Sly 3 was released. Even if you picked up the Trilogy on PS3 a few years back, this is still worth your time and money if you’ve got a hankering for some light-hearted espionage.

VERY GOOD. An 8/10 is only awarded to a game we consider truly worthy of your hard-earned cash. This game is only held back by a smattering of minor or middling issues and comes highly recommended.

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Given the success of LEGO: The Lord of the Rings and the continued appeal of the ongoing Hobbit trilogy, it was only a matter of time before worlds merged once more and gamers were treated to another foray into the block-built version of Tolkien’s fantasy universe.

It sounds trite to say it, but if you’ve ever played a LEGO game, you’ll know exactly what to expect. Returning to the world of Peter Jackson’s epic adaptations is a welcome move, but the gameplay mechanics are still sorely in need of a revamp. Following along with the events of the first two Hobbit movies delivers the same familiar sense of not-quite-nostalgia as we’ve come to expect from the series, but unfortunately unfinished source material means an unfinished story, something that only compounds the feeling of disappointment that pervades the experience.

Still, it’s not all bad. Far from it, in fact. This is a LEGO game after all, and remains as playable as any that came before it. The story mode sees you guiding Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Company of Dwarves on their quest to rid Erebor of the dragon, Smaug, passing through by-now familiar locations such as Bree, Rivendell, and the eponymous subterranean city itself. While the story dictates which characters you control at which point, returning in free play mode allows you to switch between the 100+ characters at will to use their abilities to reach tricky collectibles.

The world of Middle-earth, while oddly comforting, makes for a less focused hub than LEGO: Marvel Superheroes‘ New York City. Even with the fast travel, it’s a little too sprawling and the added graphical density of the next-gen versions makes finding your way around a bit of a chore in certain areas where the environments are simply too busy. It’s also worth pointing out that TT have had to dig deep to fill the character roster this time around. Besides big names like Legolas, Gandalf and Saruman, it can be hard to tell the figures apart – especially among the thirteen dwarves – and you rarely get the same level of unexplainable joy controlling, say, the fat ginger one, as you did slipping into Aragorn’s well-worn leathers.

As with all LEGO games, The Hobbit is a series of straightforward puzzles interspersed with button-mashing combat and light platforming. Picking the right character for each element of a given puzzle accounts for 80% of the challenge, which at least is made a little trickier because each of the main story characters has a unique ability. One of them can mine, for example, while another can use his sling to activate switches. Gandalf is the only one who can go into dark places (the dwarves rather amusingly run out of the shadows screaming), and Legolas is nimble enough to swing on embedded arrows.

Charmingly, you can use certain areas as foundations for a “dwarf stack”, which is exactly as the name suggests. You stack two or three dwarves atop one another, and allow a different character to climb up them. The Master Builder minigame also returns from The LEGO Movie Video Game, whereby you choose the missing parts of a large build from a selection wheel, with the aim of creating an environmental feature like a lift or a giant key.

Occasional set-pieces are enough to amuse rather than excite. Climbing the Stone Giants as they pelt one another amidst a raging thunderstorm, or out-running a pack of warg-riders as Radagast the Brown are among favourites – or there are always the floating barrels for fans of the second movie. Ultimately, though, this is a very simple game aimed at younger gamers – even the humour seems angled more towards the under-tens this time. Without the appeal of a universe like Marvel’s or the novelty of an original storyline, there’s little beyond the gentle comedy to truly capture anyone’s imagination.

But despite the negatives, the only real issue that holds The Hobbit back is that it is a LEGO game – a double-edged classification at best. The franchise barely changes more than its clothes from one iteration to the next, and the joke started to wear thin several adaptations ago. The mass appeal and wealth of characters found in source material like Star Wars, DC or Marvel can’t be matched by the comparatively small cast and plot of The Hobbit, and it’s becoming a little disheartening to see TT churn out similar mechanics with different skins so quickly.

VERDICT: LEGO: The Hobbit is not a bad game. It’s not even a bad LEGO game. In fact, it’s one of the stronger entries to bear the name for quite a while. It looks great, the gameplay has enough variety to remain interesting and the sampled movie dialogue (and that mesmerising score) add an air of gravitas to the whole shebang. But, it is still just another LEGO game and, as such, does little to make it stand out from its ever-increasing crowd of peers.

Although a decent jaunt for fans of either franchise, this is an example of a game created purely because the developers had the means to create it. This franchise is no longer essential, and there is serious work to be done if TT want their over-fed baby to remain fresh and current, and not merely soullessly lucrative. An enjoyable romp in of itself then, but by this point no one but kids and fans need really apply.

GOOD. A game that scores 7/10 is worthy of note, but unworthy of fanfare. It does many things well, but only a few of them incredibly well and, despite a handful of good qualities, fresh ideas and solid mechanics, it fails to overwhelm.

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Released to tie in with the PlayStation 3’s Invizimals: The Lost Kingdom, and an upcoming Invizimals television show and toy line, The Alliance is a return to the series’ portable roots. While comparison’s between Invizimals and Pokemon have always been easy and justifiable to make, Sony’s version of battling monsters has typically been based upon AR technology, and for better and worse, this latest entry takes this idea further.

The Alliance is a game of catching, upgrading and fighting monsters in order to win tournaments, wrapped in a similarly dull narrative to The Lost Kingdom: big, evil corporation doing evil stuff with evil robots, endangering nature, yada yada yada. Essentially, it’s all just an excuse for monsters to have a scrap, which I don’t necessarily have a problem with.

The main meat of the game is the battles, but before you can get to that stage, you need to catch some Invizimals to fight with, and it’s these sections that prove to be both the best and worst elements of The Alliance. There are multiple ways to catch Invizimals, all within the realm of Augmented Reality, and all of them absolutely impossible/inappropriate to do when outside of the house.

You see, as clever as the AR in The Alliance is (and it is very clever indeed), it all feels like an elaborate tech demo. Impressively, some creatures can be caught just by pointing the Vita at a table, floor or wall. Some require you to dust off your Vita’s AR cards and lay them out in front of you, while others require you to perform more annoying tasks such as making lots of noise, pointing your Vita’s camera at an item of a requested colour, or by waving your Vita around to follow a creature’s trail, amongst other tasks.

Yes, they’re all creative ways of using the admittedly underutilised capabilities of the system, but ultimately they only end up in prohibiting progress through the game. I mean that literally: there were days where I couldn’t progress because I wasn’t in an area with enough light or room to catch anything. I couldn’t even start the game when I wanted to, because the first time I booted up The Alliance, I was on a bus in the wee hours of the morning, so it was too dark to get past the tutorial.

But once you’re over the rigmarole of snagging beasts, the rest of the game feels quite flat in comparison, as you take control of your Invizimals in various 1 vs. 1 or Tournament battles. Each character has its own range of four abilities, which all have a cooldown when used and, in addition, you also have an endurance meter that drops when you use an attack or block. A depleted endurance meter will exhaust your monster for a little while, leaving you vulnerable to attacks.

Sadly, there is little depth to the combat aspect itself, with a player able to win by using the same tactics over and over again. If there’s ever a point where an enemy overpowers you too much, then simply grind some easier enemies for XP and try again until you succeed.

Still, the game is presented rather well, with simple menus and bold looking assets. Once you’re in the right location for some Invizimal catching, it really is impressive to see creatures interacting with the real world. Sharing many of the same cutscenes as the PlayStation 3’s The Lost Kingdom, they still feel rather disconnected from the game itself, feeling like an afterthought rather than tying the gameplay together. You can also expect more Brian Blessed narration, and when has that ever been a bad thing?

VERDICT: Invizimals: The Alliance is the perfect example of a game held back by the very elements that set it apart from its peers. The creativity and technology involved with the catching of Invizimals is great, but there isn’t enough of a game built around that aspect – other than the monster fighting, which can get rather repetitive. But even with its mildly tedious nature, it’s still infinitely more enjoyable than The Lost Kingdom.

DECENT. A 6/10 indicates that, while this game could be much better, it still has a fair amount to offer the player. It might be an interesting title sabotaged by its own ambition, or a game denied greater praise by some questionable design choices. Don’t avoid it outright, but approach it with caution.

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