Very few studios would ever view halting development on a game midway through and rethinking the things that aren’t working as a viable option.

Doing so for many is not only financially impossible and a technical struggle, but it could very easily risk the entire studio’s future. Not many would deem the potential rewards worthy of the trouble.

It’s interesting then that Ubisoft decided Future Soldier not only needed additional time but also an entirely new direction.

Before going quiet, Future Soldier was a narrative-heavy squad-based shooter chronicling the Ghost’s place on the world stage as Russia and America squared up for a fight, goaded by extreme ultra nationalists intent on causing WWIII.

Using advanced weaponry of the near future – exoskeletons, shoulder mounted artillery and the like – the Ghosts were headed towards an explosive set of missions that hoped to combine the team play they’ve become famous for, set-pieces utilising their future tech and a narrative overlay that hoped to flesh out the realities of a conflict that spanned the entire globe.

Ambitious stuff, but it’s not a Ghost Recon game. It’s a hybrid of the modern shooter, influenced by the Call Of Duty zeitgeist and dressed up in the Ghost’s tactical edge.

A new vision mode picks out anything metallic, highlighting enemy positions by recognizing their weapons. 

Ultimately, it would have taken players in an action direction and away from what many see as a more authentic Special Forces experiences (albeit with a focus on the military toys of the future).

Credit has to be given to Ubisoft for not only recognising that this was an issue, but for having the gumption to do something about it. What this creative decision has resulted in is a game that, while containing elements of its previous incarnation, embodies the Ghost Recon formula in a much more coherent fashion.

For fans of the series that joined with this generation’s early GRAW, much of Future Soldier will be largely recognisable. The squad template, near-future setting and its penchant to gear its action towards stealth are all clearly marked as Ghost Recon’s core pillars.

But, unlike GRAW, Future Solider has built its experience exclusively around co-op.

To be fair, this is something that was offered in Advanced Warfighter; a collection of co-op missions that were light on narrative and heavy on action, it utilised the multiplayer engine to deliver a glimpse into gaming’s future and it’s this mode that has given Ubisoft its starting point for Future Soldier.

Setting itself up as the happy medium between the single-player thrills of GRAW and the co-op engagement of its multiplayer, it’s clear a Gears Of War action-heavy direction would have ultimately diluted the series beyond all recognition. Thankfully, Ubisoft’s choice to refocus its design has paid off.

Approach any situation with a cautious mind and you’ll find things much easier.

That’s only in a gameplay sense, though. In terms of narrative, Future Solider is as confused about its characters and story as the best shooters in the genre – nothing new there then.

Between the gung-ho theatrics of COD and the serious politics of Clancy’s books, there’s every reason to ignore the story that’s awkwardly forced down your throat.

Where Future Soldier begins to excel at storytelling is the moments of pure co-op joy it’s able to establish throughout its levels.

Bar a few early set-pieces that establish the setting, Future Soldier thrusts you and your friends into expansive, multi-tiered affairs that do a fantastic job of keeping you on your toes.

Early on, the blistering heat of Africa’s savannah sees you and your Ghosts infiltrate a bustling refugee camp and it’s here that many of the new toys make their strategic worth obvious.

Predator-style camouflage, though slightly less sophisticated than Arnie’s ugly friend’s version, gives you an enormous edge when approaching enemies.

You’re never invisible when it’s active – move too fast and the illusion is lost and you’ll be spotted easily – but it does give you a huge amount of room to manoeuvre.

The glamorous world of the Ghosts isn’t always booze and parties.

With the four of you sneaking through the sandbox-style levels, Future Soldier’s arsenal feels like tools at your disposal, instead of set-piece-driven distractions from the usual gameplay that many modern shooters have turned them into.

Future Solider not only manages to inject each level with the appropriate levels of stealth, action and unique moments that are required, but also does this across a huge range of locations.

Each one furthers the nonsensical plot while simultaneously providing you and your co-op buddies with an experience unlike any other.

The inclusion of civilians really does make each place feel grounded in the real world, upping the tension during firefights and generally giving the impression you’re hunting your prey through an actual place and not just a set, as Mexico City in GRAW often felt.

What’s also noticeable is Ubisoft’s insistence that Future Soldier is primarily a stealth shooter, often going so far as to enforce it. Get spotted during certain sections and it’s a mission restart.

This adherence to genre doesn’t damage Future Soldier’s carefully managed gameplay, in fact it should be admired.

Played in this way, the co-op experience is even further enforced and when levels tend to balance themselves as ‘quiet in, loud out’, it’s hard to grumble that it’s scrimping on the action.

Don’t think it’s all sneaking around in bushes; there are some massive moments throughout Future Soldier.

When it does occur it’s usually followed by something impressive exploding – like a jumbo jet or the Ghost’s new walking tank pet, the War Hound.

The reason Ubisoft’s co-op focused gameplay works as well as it does is due to Future Soldier’s acceptance that players will want to approach situations however they like.

Helping them do this are a number of tools and toys that grease the action wheels providing you with the logical answers to many of the gameplay questions.

Need to scout ahead? One player can send out the drone providing you with an enemy head count and their positions. Need to take out a group of guards without being spotted? The Sync-shot allows each player to mark up the available targets; letting his fellow Ghosts get into position and when the dust has settled, the bullets can fly.

It helps that Ubisoft then tests the boundaries of the co-op players, giving them situations that are far beyond the simple ‘four guards, four Ghosts’ takedowns of the early missions.

We’ve seen so many games attempt to marry this co-op ‘single-player-aping’ experience that we were wondering if it was even that good of an idea to begin with.

Left 4 Dead is more multiplayer than single-player. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City doesn’t know what it wants to be and Lost Planet was overshadowed by its massive enemies and zero plot.

Your camouflage can get you out of a pinch, but it doesn’t mean you’re totally invisible.

Future Soldier, though its narrative is its weakest element, still manages to produce a story and characters worth following into battle. That your friends will ultimately be the ones who’re behind you is something that’s never lost in its design.

Played alone, its AI even manages to surprise with the characters behaving, if not realistically human, then at least sensibly, never committing the cardinal stealth sin of getting you shot.

This might not be the game Ubisoft promised all those E3s ago – there have been far too many changes for that – but that’s a good thing. That you can occasionally catch a glimpse of its previous incarnation in a wayward line of dialogue should be enough to you convince that it would have been huge misstep.

For fans of the Ghost Recon series, though, this shows exactly why you fell in love with its tactical focus and stealth designs in the first place. This isn’t Call Of Duty: Ghost Recon Edition and that’s the best reason you should return to Clancy’s longstanding franchise. 

Have you played Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning yet? If you’re an RPG fan you really should. It’s wholly unoriginal and its presentation is a bit patchy, but it’s nonetheless a masterclass in thoughtful, deliberate, purposeful game design, in exactly the way Dragon’s Dogma is not.

While ‘The Elder Scrolls meets Dark Souls’ is a useful way to describe what Dragon’s Dogma tries to do, Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning is a much better reference point when it comes to explaining how it does so much of what it tries to do wrong.

Where everything in Reckoning has an immediately tangible and demonstrable meaning in terms of its purpose within the game and its impact on your experience, Dragon’s Dogma plonks a tangle of different ideas down at your feet, tells you they’re all very important and will make a big difference to how the game unfolds, then just sort of wanders off without proving any of its claims.

Our suspicions were first aroused during a training mission in which we had to destroy a bunch of scarecrows with the help of our newly recruited ‘pawns’, which is a fancy name for ‘non-player party members’.

Our drill instructor insisted that if we failed any stage of this mission it’d almost certainly be because our party was poorly balanced and that the solution would be to recruit different pawns.

Sure enough, we failed the final challenge on our first attempt and, even surer enough, we were told our party balance was to blame. We weren’t told how it could be improved at all, though, and it seemed pretty balanced as far as we could tell, so we just tried it again with the same party and did it really quickly.

Aiming a fire spell at a pile of red barrels makes this happen. There was an ogre in the middle of that.

This incident gave us the distinct impression that a lot of the things Dragon’s Dogma presented to us as unique, clever, in-depth features actually made little to no difference to anything much that happened. It was an impression we were never able to shake off.

At the heart of Dragon’s Dogma’s fallacy is its pawn system. You create two characters early in the game. One is your player character and the other is your main pawn.

Both are permanent members of your party. Your two remaining party slots are filled by two further pawns, who can be switched in and out by spending recruitment points. You can choose these secondary pawns either from a large pool of ready-made, built-in preset characters, or – and this is the theoretically cool part – you can recruit other players’ main pawns through the magic of the internet.

This is certainly a clever premise, but its true worth hinges on just how different each player’s pawn really is. Dragon’s Dogma tries to persuade you that they are unique and individual – they don’t just have stats and traits and skills; they have a complex range of behavioural parameters that gives them a personality, they have a unique knowledge base regarding enemies and quests, and they can learn, adding to their knowledge as they go.

You’re reminded of all this almost constantly though pop-up info boxes and frequent claims made by the notably vocal characters themselves. But you’ll rarely, if ever, see or feel any real evidence of any of it making any difference to your progress.

Wearing a pointed hat makes you better at magic, as has been the case for thousands of years.

The insight and advice they give you rarely adds anything to the quest briefing and map marker you’ll inevitably already have, and we never saw any of the AI behave in a noticeably distinct way.

Overall, it’s quite decent in terms of making itself useful, but it’s also fairly erratic and quirky so every character, regardless of the lengths of their various personality bars, was generally solid, but occasionally quite daft.

Like all of them, without fail, will frequently remind you that it’s no good just swinging wildly in combat, but you’ll often see them apparently doing just that.

Calling Dragon’s Dogma ‘open world’ is a bit of a porky too. It’s certainly far from open in the way Skyrim is. It’s more ‘linear but not uni-directional’ in that the occasionally branching paths are open to you trudging back and forth along them repeatedly, fighting the same groups of respawning enemies again and again.

Quests often demand that you do this, and there is no fast travel feature other than the one that involves spending a rare item to return to the main city hub. So it gets really tedious.

Dragon’s Dogma has plenty of good ideas; it just fails to make any of them work properly. It’s still pretty solid and substantial on a basic level, though.

The combat is usually pretty satisfying, if sometimes clumsy to the point of being unfair, and even if the ‘unique’ stuff falls mostly very flat, RPG fundamentals like exploration, character development, customisation, looting, crafting and storytelling are executed to a decent standard. The problem is that there are several much better RPGs around right now.

As Cave continues to make Xbox 360 its second home, we’re into the second wave of shooters from the legendary studio. With the likes of Deathsmiles and DoDonPachi now available, can we expect something even fresher from the somewhat unknown Akai Katana?

The answer is no – sorry for ruining the surprise – although Akai Katana is still an enjoyable shooter. Akai Katana’s main gimmick is in its shield Summon.

Building up your green bar buys extra time for how long your Summoned ally stays out. When called, the Summon locks into place firing out its own beam of death while your ship raises a shield, blocking dangers (each bullet knocks a chunk of time from how long your Summon stays out).

When the time drains, your ship reverts to vulnerable form. This is your main defensive tactic, as each Summon completely drains your bar, so you have to judge the right time to blow your meter so you can safely navigate through the bullet storm ahead.

Cleverly, it can also be used as an offensive tactic, as the Summon beam is the easiest way to rack up combos. Initially a desperation measure for panicked newcomers, seasoned players will learn to turn the gameplay mechanic into a tool for chasing high scores.

The problem with Akai Katana, even with its three variations in Origin, Slash and Climax, is that there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen in other shoot-’em-ups on Xbox 360.

When Summoning, you can absorb some damage without losing a life, although this eats into your time in Summoned form.

It doesn’t have the puzzle tilt of Ikaruga, the quirkiness of Guwange, the enchanting design of Deathsmiles or back-to-the-wall bullet hell of DoDonPachi.

That’s not to say that Akai Katana doesn’t have those elements, but rather that it can feel like an indistinct blend of the genre rather than something with its own standout identity.

The closest it comes is with large, military bosses such as tanks and helicopters, but even they feel as though they’ve stumbled from Metal Slug into a more serious game rather than something unique to Akai Katana.

Akai Katana is also, bizarrely, rather easy – a complaint rarely heard in the genre. Bar the Origin variant, the challenge doesn’t scale up significantly until the last two levels, where use of the Summon mechanic to survive switches from optional extra to necessary bullet shield.

A big part of the genre’s appeal is learning how to survive, then how to thrive, then how to pick the largest score possible from the menacing, snarling teeth of each wave of enemies. The muted difficulty here renders a huge chunk of that process void.

Even so, the saviour is that the Summon can be used offensively and that will draw you back for your leaderboard runs. This is what demands you learn Akai Katana inside out, when you should gamble, the best way to beat bosses and how to combo through waves of enemies.

It’s never easy redefining an old hero for the current age or bringing back a former favourite in videogaming. All too often, changes in both the culture at large and gaming itself make it hard for something to retain its relevance without major alteration to the template that made it successful in the first place.

It’d be easy to take it for granted because the originals are so beloved, but Max Payne is arguably a videogame character so steeped in late-Nineties gaming tropes that his return could have easily been handled the wrong way.

While the original games were elevated by the way Remedy wrapped its technology-driven action shooters in a clever pastiche of hard-boiled action cinema, crime noir and Norse mythology, that approach could arguably never have worked in 2012 – it would simply come off as cheesy or, worse still, feel like a tired re-tread of old ground long since covered.

Thankfully for the tortured New York detective’s fans, Rockstar is clearly aware of the double-barrelled challenge it has set itself in bringing back Max and his particularly bombastic – and often imitated but never really matched – style of shooter play for Max Payne 3.

This isn’t quite the same manically grinning, gun-toting detective we all remember; he’s being reflected through a far more modern lens. It’s a brutal revenge drama in the style of Man On Fire and unmistakably a Max Payne adventure, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

Max Payne 3 is simply no-holds-barred when it comes to its level of violence.

It certainly means the story beats are quite different, as we join an aged, fat and alcoholic Payne, lured by old friend Raul Passos into working in San Paulo, Brazil as a bodyguard to the decadently rich Branco family.

Of course, things quickly turn sour as his boss Rodrigo Branco’s wife Fabiana is kidnapped by a ruthless favela gang called Comando Sombra. And when Max and Passos attempt to rescue her they’re thrown into a whirlwind of murder and deception that puts them up against both the favela gangs and the corrupt Brazilian police.

Max – voiced by returning glass-gargler James McCaffrey – is forced to rely on his gunplay skills while being increasingly pushed towards the edge of reason.

As ever, Rockstar is not only playing with storytelling as you bounce in and out of Max’s life at various parts of the narrative – there are several welcome flashbacks in New York – but also making its standard wry social commentary.

The contrast between the gleaming world of the San Paulo jet set and the poor of the favelas is slowly revealed to only be skin deep, as the ugliness under the surface of both bubbles to the top.

The narrative eventually becomes unbelievably harsh, although old Payne fans may feel Max himself isn’t quite personally tortured as much as he has been in the past.

Its wealth of modes make Max Payne 3’s online content an excellent addition.

But what really shines is the return of Max Payne’s stylish and bloody third-person shooting. It’s gratifying how much Rockstar has retained the feel of many Payne staples – like the now ubiquitous Bullet Time and his classic shoot-dodge – but has also given them a new flavour, mostly thanks to the best use of Euphoria and NaturalMotion yet.

The swanky physics make combat in Max Payne 3 simply jaw-dropping. Bullets strike enemies with furious impact, sending blood spiralling into the air and bodies spinning to the ground in spectacular fashion.

As you’d expect, combat is all about forward motion; where other third-person shooters would force you into conservatively using cover, Max Payne 3 demands you dive in with gusto.

Bullet Time takes centre-stage, triggered either by shoot-dodging, which sees Max launch himself into the air at enemies in slow-mo, or by clicking the right stick.

There is a new cover mechanic but relying on it too much often sees you swarmed. And besides, you feel far cooler diving through the air and blazing away at enemies – especially when you kill the last man in the room, triggering a final kill cam that tracks the bullet in agonising slow-mo as it enters their body, and lets you keep pumping bullets into them.

With such a focus on aggression, it’s a good thing you’ve a slew of hard hitting weapons, and switching between single or duel-wielded pistols or SMGs and bigger weapons like rifles does feel tactically different.

Combat is a frantic and often bloody affair in Max Payne 3.

While you feel deadly, Max Payne 3’s difficulty level is slightly old-school; its health mechanic, based again on taking pain pills – that classic crunching sound is back – and the amount of damage you take from hits can quickly put you down.

It makes for an interesting risk/reward system as you tackle foes, and makes its polished, stylish moment-by-moment combat extremely gripping.

Some clever design, especially later on in the favelas, means that combat works on several levels, and the freedom offered in the heat of battle breaks up any feelings of linearity.

Yet for all its polish, it often feels like there’s a bit of an internal struggle going on in Max Payne 3, as it attempts to wow with its bombastic combat while telling its gritty story.

Sudden, staccato shifts from gameplay into cut-scenes occasionally feel imposing, especially in very quick succession, and the way Rockstar blocks out encounters makes Max Payne 3’s checkpoint system occasionally frustrating – you can battle through an entire slew of enemies, only to fall prey to a lone gunman and have to replay a large section of the game.

Worse yet, it can sometimes feel like you’re simply moving from one ‘kill box’ to the next. To be fair, Rockstar has tried to counter this issue by offering players additional pills after multiple deaths, and injecting a great deal of variety into stages with set-pieces based around Bullet Time or particular story moments, and the approach largely works.

In a nod to previous games Max Payne 3 often uses moving video panels with a mobile camera like filter.

Having Max fall off a scaffolding or zipped up a pulley in epic slo-mo as you painstakingly take out an entire group of enemies, for example, is a real thrill, as are the vehicle chase sequences that have you defending yourself against chasing hoards of enemies.

One such sequence, which throws Max into the middle of a boat-based chase-and-shoot at the end of the game’s first disc, is particularly spectacular, and moments like this very much fit Max Payne 3’s modern action movie vibe, meaning you can’t help but get caught up in the immediacy of the moment.

Ultimately, none of the story beats or polish mask the fact that Max Payne 3 is very much a modern refinement of an old formula, and if you’re looking for something brand new or revelatory it just isn’t here.

However, what is amazing is how Rockstar has fallen back on its trademark production values and sublime attention to detail to update the franchise in a very compelling way.

Motocross should be cool. It’s high-octane, dangerous and it demands a considerable amount of skill from its drivers. It’s the perfect fodder for videogames, a congruent blend of style and substance that could line-up among the racing genre greats.

But where Forza or DiRT have careened down radically different paths to their success, MUD never quite manages to gain a similarly strong grasp on its central conceit to effectively provide much in the way of thrills.

It’s too po-faced to be considered arcade, too flimsy with physics to be anything approaching a sim; MUD finds itself in a strange no man’s land of dithering focus.

To begin with, the handling only inspires indifference, the bikes so encumbered by the slightest bump in the track that it truly does feel like you’re battling through thick lumps of the brown stuff with every turn and hump in the track.

Yet launch off a ramp and you’ll oddly find a lithe machine that’ll twist and turn unnaturally before landing with a jerky thud – it’s an alarming disparity that can be, initially at least, disorientating.

A midair trick will provide a quick boost but inside the standard races found in Championship and World Tour Mode (the latter the game’s anaemic take on career mode) there’s no other need for such extravagance.

There’s a few customisation options but a lack of bike tweaking is sorely felt.

Flair is reserved for MUD’s Tricks mode (or Monster Energy Drink Trick Battle - groan), where certain button combinations pull-off a series of acrobatic manoeuvres to hit a designated score.

It’s one of the better additions to the event roster but it’s decidedly half-baked; the tricks requiring little to no skill and you can break the mode by simply performing front and backflips repeatedly until the timer hits zero. 

But breaking this side mode is of little consequence when you’ll have seen all the game has to offer after only playing a few of the event stages within World Tour.

Here Trick events are clearly the highlight, but you’ll find Elimination adding a touch of tension and Checkpoint injecting some energy into the stilted formula, but it’s not enough to rescue MUD from its flabby handling, confused outlook and crushing banality.

It’s unfortunate that the game seems more concerned with hawking energy drinks than actually refining its gameplay, but rather handily these cans of neon-coloured compressed energy serve as something of an appropriate analogy for MUD: a short kick of adrenaline that leaves a regrettable sour taste in the mouth.

You know, we’re of the considered opinion that any gamer that has complained in fury about idiotic NPCs is lying with greater conviction than a particularly lazy sloth. On pillows of eiderdown.

After all, one of gaming’s great charms lies in those seconds of superiority one feels over digital soldiers who appear about as unprepared for global conflict as they are to button up their own trousers in the morning.

There are times at which leading the poor sods to their untimely deaths seems more a philanthropic act than a murderous one. Put yourself in the shoes of a German Sniper Elite conscript for example, stood defiantly in guard of his crumbling 1945 Berlin.

Chatting to a comrade about sweethearts they’ll return to when the war ends and mother Deutschland rises to power across Europe, he spies a small rock, conspicuously skidding across the pavement.

Clearly, in defiance of years of anti-rock training, the time has come to stop what he’s doing, wander casually into open ground and pick the offending object up, being careful to expose his cranium sportingly for any passing snipers.

Damn. On the same day he quit smoking as well...

What is it with these people? Surely if you’re at war and spot flying masonry, it’s either nothing at all to worry about or definitely, absolutely evidence that a nasty so-and-so is about to, in street parlance, ‘split your wig’?

Poking around the debris swiftens the war’s end, turning your death into a hammy pratfall and, most importantly, smashing the fourth wall into tiny, craggy pieces for any on-looking player.

An overly laboured point maybe, but one that accurately surmises the battle that players must labour through to squeeze fun from Sniper Elite V2’s emaciated frame.

First, though, a little context. We join expert sniper Karl Fairburne here for a near-perfect remake of Rebellion’s 2005 title, er, Sniper Elite. The principle change to have occurred in the past seven years being he’s now clearing out the last remnants of Nazi military personnel in order to stop some of humanity’s greatest scientists falling into evil commie hands, as opposed to nuclear secrets.

Scrabbling through Berlin’s crumbling labyrinth – though a version lacking its many narrow side streets or opening doors – he’ll call upon a steady trigger finger and several rudimentary booby traps in pursuit of various high-value targets.

It's a drab game, but it fits the setting well.

The experience is certainly a unique one, forcing players to methodically plan at the proverbial snail’s pace. A stage’s first few minutes is typically spent in blissful preparation for the events to come, tagging enemies and placing booby traps in positions to which they’ll likely converge.

Sadly, once you’ve sniped the first skull open, things move downhill rather quickly. Should you execute a clean shot, quickly ducking down into whatever hidey hole you’ve commandeered for the occasion, it’ll be a matter of some disappointment to find the enemy – numerous and belligerent – immediately aware of your position.

Yet this is what repeatedly occurs, throwing any plan to steadily pick off enemies – as a sniper would – completely out of the window. Perhaps even the one you’re crouched behind, in fact.

Enemies remain in an alert state once their first comrade falls – not so much of an issue when you’re crouched high above the streets among Berlin’s ruins, where they can still be steadily eliminated, even under fire. A little more unreasonable at street level, where you’ll be quickly surrounded and annihilated. 

There’s inconsistency, too, in enemies’ more general reactions. A cover mechanic is included so that budding snipers can scamper around the landscape without fear of being clocked by their prey.

Sadly, enemies appear to have developed the ability to peer around corners, such is the regularity with which crouching snipers will be impossibly spotted from seemingly perfect vantage points. Which kind of makes a mockery of the ghostly outline that supposedly indicates the last position the player was seen by an enemy.

Every shot counts.

Struggling to catch his breath behind a row of bricks, your avatar will already know he’s done for, facing an enemy that seems to have borrowed a geth-like collective conscience.

More frustrating still, should you find yourself killed to death, Rebellion has the cheek to dump you back into its environment after the point your sniper was initially seen, resulting in a gritted teeth street gunfight that – shall we say – doesn’t exactly show the studio’s AI routines in their best light. We’re talking lining up so one bullet might kill them all, here.

Ultimately, Rebellion’s title succeeds for one, entirely unsatisfactory, reason. It chose a niche, threadbare genre in which to compete, manufacturing combat situations where player and AI routine rarely collide.

That isn’t inspired development, it’s winning a three-legged race, tied at the hip. Players will find themselves walled into linear routes, entirely at odds with a sniper’s need to nuzzle for secluded nooks.

They’ll find enemies reacting in a fashion that varies wildly between triangulated precision and comic stupidity. Sometimes adopting a slightly more offbeat approach – stalking known choke points with a machine gun – is more successful than attempting to co-operate with sniping at all.

Clearly, this isn’t an ideal situation. There’s certainly some entertainment on offer here, provided by the thrill of impossible acts pulled off under heavy enemy fire. Or hearts literally exploding before your eyes, if you’re a bit wrong in the head.

Just don’t expect its production values to match Karl Fairburne’s body count, or some anywhere near the ratio of stalking to generic third-person shooting you might expect of a videogame about being a sniper.  

We’ll admit, as we booted up Telltale’s tie-in for the first time, we were filled with tension, fear and perhaps even a sense of dread. But it wasn’t because of the zombies.

Oh no; it was because of the dinosaurs. After an extended period of consistently achieving excellence with its output, the leading light in adventure games completely jumped the T-Rex with its recent Jurassic Park travesty, and we were beginning to worry that the team had misplaced its usually dependable ability to recapture lightning on cue. 

We were fools to lose faith. The first episode of The Walking Dead is easily one of the strongest efforts the Telltale team has delivered so far, and will stand as a real eye-opener for anyone who believes the point-and-click genre has nowhere left to go.

Beginning handcuffed in the back of a cop car – as all hell speeds past you in the opposite direction, straight towards a citywide zombie holocaust – players take on the role of Lee Everett, a man with a heavy heart who is on his way to prison after supposedly murdering a senator.

It’s a subdued start, with little for the player to do except look around from a fixed back-seat position and talk to the cop in the driver’s seat, but it perfectly captures both the overall tone of the game and Telltale’s gameplay focus throughout this and the ensuing four episodes.

As the cop digs into Lee’s life, so the player is free to give up as much information as they wish to – to play the conversation as cagey as possible, or to be open and honest about the character’s history – and it’s a level of freedom that carries through every interaction undertaken in the game.

Even simple chats with strangers are deeply rooted in character, with everyone you meet reacting to each dialogue branch and continually re-evaluating their opinion of Everett.

It leads to an unusual level of human interest and pathos, and instils a desire to remain true to the outward character of Everett as defined by you, rather than judge each conversation in isolation.

With the player’s previous experience governing every decision made, The Walking Dead doesn’t need to pander to its audience or lose itself in self-absorption in the way that caused Heavy Rain to elicit laughs rather than tears from a portion of its audience.

And, after Everett befriends orphaned girl Clementine and the two set off to find sanctuary, meeting new survivors at every step of their journey, so these decisions become more important and all-encompassing, to the extent that choices relating to the fate of others far outweigh the importance of simply staying alive.

When the shit hits the fan, and a group of marauding zombies breaks through the group’s picket-fence safety, choosing who to save in the spur of the moment has consequences either way, leading to character deaths or varying outcomes that will almost certainly still cause ripples in future instalments.

The graphic novel art style works well.

Moments such as these, which punctuate the quiet, sombre silence of The Walking Dead with scenes of sudden, brutal violence, carry a genuine weight and power to them, not just because of the game’s strength of character but also due to Telltale’s gameplay decisions.

The developer innovates with first-person sections that see Everett struggling to load a shotgun with shaking hands or peeking over a wall to find a way through a zombie-heavy parking lot, while the few puzzles that are included manage to bridge the gap between mechanical point-and-click solution-wrangling and actions that stem directly from the human needs of the survivors.

Only a few technical issues hold back the proceedings; some sound glitches mean lines of dialogue get stepped on or are delivered with jarringly poor timing, while some signposting and trigger annoyances lead to a couple of possible point-and-click dead ends about halfway through this two-hour episode.

However, it’s easy to forgive a game as involving as this, while the Robert Kirkman-faithful art style, worthy voice-acting and extremely expressive cast of characters bring the game’s world to life in a way that sidesteps the Uncanny Valley issues that regularly plague pretty much any attempt to meld videogame characters with honest-to-goodness human emotion.

A return to form with a vengeance, then, Telltale hasn’t just refound its mojo here; it has created an affecting, innovative and tension-filled adventure that finds new ways to blend the point-and-click and interactive movie experience genres, and more than does justice to its source material in the process.

Worshippers at the altar of Sam, Max or Strongbad might be turned off by its methodical, languid pace, relatively small number of puzzles and mostly humourless tone, but a season pass is recommended to anyone who enjoys seeing the adventure game’s boundaries pushed, or has even a passing interest in new ways of delivering narrative.

What Telltale has created here is a narratively-driven game that‘s as much about people as events, as much about inaction as it is putting walkers out of their misery, and as much about what cannot be changed as the countless choices the player is forced to make.

If the fact that Crash Time I, II and III went completely under your radar has you worried that you’re losing touch with games, then calm down.

Like its predecessors, Crash Time IV is the videogaming equivalent of a straight-to-DVD film: low budget, low production values and low quality.

Unfortunately, while the first game in the series might have got away with it in the early proving grounds of this generation, £40 is a big ask for this hammy Hot Pursuit knock-off.

Given the name and the nature of this large open-world, the first instinct we have isn’t to follow the GPS down busy autobahns and city streets, but to try smash some stuff up and put the physics engine through its paces.

It’s actually more robust than we’d expected, given the laughable VO, dialogue and ‘state of the art graphics’. Crashes are pretty ‘brutal’ when they happen, but that’s mostly because every vehicle we drive is made of tempered adamantium, apparently.

We plough through other vehicles like they’re hollowed out of Monster Munch while any road signs or bus shelters are made of flakey pastry, flying apart the moment our exhaust sputters within two feet.

We crash head-on with a lorry and trailer and, as you might expect from a physics-driven racing game, it shears the roof straight off and sends the remains of our crumpled car spinning off onto the embankment… wait. No it doesn’t.

Driverless cars - it's the future.

What actually happens when our one-tonne performance saloon collides with 40-plus tonnes of oncoming articulated vehicle at speed is for the lorry to stop dead and subsequently blow up, while we back off with a crumpled bumper before accelerating away to our next destination.

We’d talk a bit more about what we’re supposed to be doing in Crash Time IV, apart from tearing around the city with complete impunity, that is, but we’ve finished several hours of play only slightly less clueless than we were going in.

There’s a main mission involving us investigating the criminal activities of a underworld crime syndicate and a series of optional-side missions, including track days and chasing criminals.

But instead of driving seamlessly from one mission to the next using a mini-map, completing one mission leaves us back in the limbo of a menu screen, with a selection of different parts of town to explore and no indication of where we can pick up the next thread of the main mission or indeed, if there are any missions in that area at all.

Long and monotonous chases are followed by smaller missions where the protagonists hunt for clues without ever leaving their car – presumably because if they did, it would mean twice the workload for the studio.

And to top off a catalogue of problems too numerous to list in this review, upon closer inspection we realised that not a single vehicle in the game, apart from our own, has anyone driving it. It’s completely soulless, much like Crash Time IV itself.

For Alex Mercer, the ouroboros-esque superpowers that granted him the ability to turn his fingers into 10-inch blades and elbow-drop armoured tanks with nary a scratch to his person were both a mystery and a burden – something to moan about as he searched an infected New York landscape for the answers behind his mutation.

James Heller is less coy. Filled with an incandescent rage over the death of his wife and daughter – which he blames on Mercer – the powers are nothing but a means to an end.

He’s a shape-shifting, blade-swirling, tank-tearing torrent of white-hot fury and non-stop swearing; a one-man apocalypse that could give even Kratos a run for his money in his vengeful rampage across a newly-infected New York Zero.

He’s not trying to solve a mystery. He’s not trying to come to terms with what he’s become. He’s trying to stab anything that moves, and then stab it some more.

As laughably awful as Heller’s overly-aggressive, curseword-riddled dialogue is, he’s a far better centrepiece for Prototype 2’s anarchic approach to open-world destruction than Mercer.

After all, who cares about mystery or introspective soul-searching in a game where you also uppercut helicopters?

You don’t have to work hard to conjure up chaos. Thanks to a streamlined control scheme and a bevy of impressive-looking attacks, encounters with Blackwatch troops are gloriously anarchic affairs that feel like several superhero games all rolled into one.

If you manage to grab onto a vehicle you can "weaponise" it by tearing off a rocket launcher.

You’ve got Wolverine-style claws, ground shaking Hulk fists, and an arm blade that looks like the T-1000’s with a nasty case of gangrene.

Replacing some of the first game’s less useful powers are inventively enjoyable additions like the bio-bomb and tendrils – the latter of which secures sinewy strands of elastic goo to whatever’s in the environment, and then sends it snapping back to the foe in the middle in a messy splatter of red.

Thinking up your next crushing act of murderous violence is easily done on the fly. One second you might be tearing off a tank’s TOW launcher and turning it on itself; the next using tendrils to launch cars at an overhead helicopter; and the next slam-dunking an arm blade into an infected beast’s skull – all with very little effort on your part.

Darting around such battles comes with a healthy and gleeful dose of empowerment. You may be swatting down enemies as if they were flies, but it’s all done with a visceral, thumping sense of impact.

World navigation is similarly seamless. Little has changed from Prototype’s first outing – indeed, some of the animations look very similar to those of 2009 – but little needed to.

You can bolt up the sides of buildings, bound across entire blocks, and transition between rooftops with a glide move like some kind of maniacal flying squirrel.

It’s not a precise science and you’ll sometimes find you miss the rooftop you were aiming for, but the unabashed joy of careening free and easy across the landscape is impossible to deny.

You can control both attack helicopters and tanks.

In terms of progression, Prototype 2 is far better structured than its predecessor. You take on narrative missions from various characters across New York’s three separate zones, completion of which will reward Heller with new core mutations.

However, it’s wise to keep up with the supplementary Blacknet missions as well. Completing these side-quests grants extra mutations that work outside the standard levelling system, granting bonus range or damage to certain powers, greater locomotion abilities, upgraded defensive capabilities and more.

These can also be obtained by hunting down the black boxes hidden around the city or clearing out hidden Blackwatch squads and underground lairs teaming with infected – all of which can be easily located by using the map’s welcome hint system.

There’s plenty to distract you, and the constant doling out of new upgrades and mutations ensures you’ve always got a new toy to play with every couple of hours.

But still, Prototype 2’s intense action still manages to burn itself out before the game’s end. There’s only so many times you can be sent on a mission to wipe out the same platoon of forces before elbow-dropping a tank starts to feel about as exciting as flopping yourself down on a couch.

Radical does its best to mix up the formula with much improved stealth missions and time trial rooftop challenges, but by and large you’re fighting the same fight over and over and over again.

Blackwatch and Gentek are evil to the point of absurdity.

A compelling narrative might have helped matters, but the story feels like little more than a series of character names used to prod you towards the next waypoint marker.

There’s also the feeling throughout that you’ve played this game before – not just in less bloodthirsty titles like Crackdown 2, but in the far less-refined original game.

Prototype 2 isn’t a great deal different from its predecessor: it’s by and large the same experience with the bolts tightened and the kinks ironed out.

That makes it unoriginal, sure, but not necessarily undeserving of your attention. The refinements may not add anything particularly new or inventive to the formula, but they have nevertheless resulted in a sandbox as anarchically entertaining as any since Just Cause 2, and that’s high praise.

This sequel may not be a genuinely innovative product, but it’s more than a prototype: Radical Entertainment has moved on to proof of concept.

We know what you’re thinking. UEFA Euro 2012 is a cynical FIFA 12 reskin, valuable only as an exercise in how to prise the money of a fool from his or her wallet?

Well no, actually. In feel and flow, this bears far more relation to the wonderfully slick World Cup 2010 than EA Canada’s more stubborn recent offering.

Once again, the fact that a tournament-specific title need only be supported for a mere handful of months has left the studio free to experiment with a more adventurous brand of football.

Players seem thinner and somehow smoother, removing friction from most physical tussles, which can now be escaped with the slightest of directional shifts.

This being the case, there’s a far greater incentive to run with the ball than perhaps ever before, placing emphasis on speed as a potent attacking weapon. 

Defensive changes, too, initially seem to favour low-scoring games but are in fact more concerned with keeping eleven men on the pitch than balls out of onion bags.

We like Gavin Belth. Do you like Gavin Belth?

A small handful of additional slide challenge animations have been slotted into place for example, which help to turn bone-crushing challenges into considerate near misses. Successful attempts tend only to delay onrushing attackers though, with mistimed lunges sending a defender to ground without hindering their targets at all.

Misplaced passes and shots, too, seem far more likely to land back at their originator’s feet should defenders get a block in. In fact, it seems the only potent weapon in a centre half’s armoury is now a well-timed, early standing challenge – as by the time a striker is standing with his back to goal, leaning into your defender, there’s little that can be done to prevent him turning and getting a shot on target. 

Taking Euro 2012’s noticeable more plodding midfield pace into account, we’d be surprised if most online matches didn’t proceed in the following fashion.

Step one, gamer receives possession and sprints down either wing, until their opponent brings a defender over and they’re stalled, level with the edge of the eighteen-yard box.

Step two, the ball is passed repeatedly across the edge of the D, Arsenal-style, continually using FIFA’s one-two pass prompt to flood the attacking penalty area with men until it’s pretty much impossible to misplace a forward pass.

Step three, the attacking gamer continues to either be patient or benefit from ‘lucky’ deflections in attempting to thread the ball through until one pass reaches its target, their player swivels inside the box and either scores or wins a corner.

That......was a goal.

Though some sweeping wing play is possible on the counter-attack, we feel this is the exception that proves this rule, forcing players into adopting the plodding and occasionally annoying loop detailed above.

None of this means that there isn’t a highly entertaining knockabout to be had, of course. Just be sure to expect matches to be a lot higher scoring than those of FIFA 12, more goals to result from the underlying physics routines suffering an internal disagreement and play to be much slower from back to front than any EA title in recent memory – possibly ever. 

As a package it’s substantial enough, if a little weird. Expedition mode extends the life of an otherwise slight experience by questionably combining FIFA Street with Carcassonne.

After taking control of a rag-tag band of squad players randomly assembled from Europe’s smaller nations – captained by a star of your choice - you’ll embark on a quest to defeat every UEFA-affiliated national team.

Victory brings a chance to steal a player from the opponent, with an also-ran on offer with a team’s first defeat, a substitute with their second and a first eleven player with their third.

After each victory, there’s a chance to construct a road between the nation you’ve defeated and another in their Euro 2012 qualifying group, allowing players to travel to their next fixture.

Said highways can disappear with losses though, meaning they must be re-earned before play can continue. If this is beginning to sound a little like busy work, that’s because it is.

Dominate Europe like a war faction on the march.

The fact that gamers earn a mosaic they might reasonably knock together on the internet in about ten minutes for slogging through its post-150 game length just adds further insult, really. 

Challenge mode on the other hand plays it incredibly old school, offering a collection of ‘missions’, updated as the days pass by, that can be completed for the reward of FIFA 12 XP.

While the chance to rewrite history will doubtless be as fascinating as it was the last time we did it, the reward again short-changes those who invest time into it.

Online play fares a little better, as Euro 2012 adopts the structure of FIFA 12’s cup mode – recreating the real-world tournament at ‘random’ by presenting players with three group fixtures and three knockout rounds against players searching for a match who are also at that stage of the competition.

It’s a natural and entirely sensible evolution, ensuring the tension ratchets up as each round passes and players face off against an obviously higher class of opponent. It’s surprising how much gameplay depth you can create from simply filtering one set of players from another.

Despite our gripes on how it’s sure to be exploited online then, the decision by EA to offer this update as DLC only has ensured excellent value for money.

Not through its range of threadbare sideshows, but the opportunity to interact with a series of tweaks designed with fun in mind, rather than addressing the complaints of internet trolls for the next twelve months. 

You might not think it, but it’s time you played another big RPG. Yes, we know Skyrim took over your life, that you blasted through Kingdoms Of Amalur and were hit hard, one way or another, by Mass Effect 3, but trust us, playing The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings will totally revitalise your inner RPG nerd.

It’s rather fitting that developer CD Projekt Red’s epic RPG centres around the hunt for a murderer of kings, because quality-wise The Witcher 2 arguably slays many of its higher-profile peers. We honestly haven’t played a narrative RPG of this depth since Dragon Age.

Everything in The Witcher 2 is about nuanced layers, each of which slowly peels back to reveal greater depth and surprises. That starts with its story, which is a mature tale of noble intrigue, conspiracy, sex, murder and vengeance.

You play Geralt of Rivia, a witcher who finds himself blamed for the death of his patron, King Foltest of Temeria, and escapes to clear his name, and if this were a book, ‘page-turner’ would hardly describe it.

So many RPGs’ attempts at using sex, bad language and violence to be mature – yes, we’re looking at you, Dragon Age II – are often gratuitous or clumsy.

But here they simply serve a well-written story of a believable fantasy world, one plagued by greed, racism – a major subplot revolves around the uprising of non-human races like elves and dwarves – and self-interest, much like our own.

It really helps that the game world is similarly nuanced, and while not completely open, each of its hub cities – the rebel-infested forest town of Flotsam, the disputed area around upper Aedirn, and the elven city of Loc Muinne – are filled with characters and atmosphere in their shops, taverns, brothels and castles.

Mass Effect-style conversations and real-time third-person combat are the order of the day, but both have surprising depth. Many of the characters you interact with feel realistically motivated; no one is entirely good or pantomime bad.

They all have reasons for what they do. It means quest conversations often aren’t bare-faced ‘good’ or ‘bad’ choices, but something in between – and the game isn’t afraid to grant or deny a quest or reward because of your choices.

Pivotal decisions often have serious narrative consequences; at one point the game actually branches in two entirely different directions depending upon one.

It’s a depth reflected in both its third-person combat and hardcore RPG mechanics. Your bag of tricks is really deep, and we found the key to success was mastering its system of hard and fast attacks with either your silver monster-killing sword or normal blades, and combining it with a multitude of secondary weapons like bombs, knives and traps and your five witcher ‘signs’, or magic spells.

The game’s circular command wheel, which slows down the action as you pick powers or weapons, lets you place magical traps so you can kill shocked foes, turn their attacks with your magical shield, or set them ablaze.

Another makes them turn on each other, and stunning them either knocks them down Force Push-style or allows spectacular one-hit kills. But preparation is just as important as combat management.

You need to equip the right armour and take status-affecting potions to survive really tough battles, and potions can only be made and taken while in meditation outside of battle.

Combat isn’t easy, as all this takes a while to grasp, but once you do you become a whirling dervish of death, and it’s extremely satisfying. Geralt can be customised as you level up, mixing and matching swordsmanship, alchemy or signs skills on your progression tree, and your growing combat prowess ties back into the story.

You feel very much like the hard as nails yet often compassionate witcher, and both NPCs’ responses to you and your narrative choices, good or bad, make more sense.

What makes The Witcher 2 so compelling is that you rarely get genuinely mature themes and a willingness to have complicated role-playing systems in modern RPGs, especially with this polish.

Even quest puzzles are often clever in surprising ways, like having to investigate a murder scene and follow multiple blood trails through a forest with your potion skills, or solving a deadly riddle while several NPCs give you conflicting advice.

The Witcher 2's action set pieces are no less jaw-dropping as you’re in epic sword battles, heroic escapes and fights with monstrous boss creatures right from the get go, and it has great pacing for such a big game.

Its adventure can span up to 50 hours across its two discs, but you’re never bored, driven by both the story and a love of its combat. It doesn’t hurt that The Witcher 2 is a beautiful game either, CD Projekt Red getting a surprising amount out of the 360, and loading times are impressively short.

All this said, The Witcher 2 isn’t perfect; its inventory system is slightly cluttered – something not helped by having to manually discard unwanted items – and your map/quest system often highlights some objectives but not others, making for too much needless wandering.

Throughout The Witcher 2, checkpoints can be a pain too, occasionally leaving you stranded, unprepared, on the wrong side of a major battle. Still, none of its rough edges as a PC port prevent this from being an epic, atmospheric and demanding RPG that you should play right now. 

Eight games. One disc. Bargain. Go get it. Review’s over. You can all go home.

Oh… You want more? Well okay, then. First of all, you should know that there aren’t actually eight games on the disc as advertised. Capcom Digital Collection contains – deep breath – Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, 1942: Joint Strike, Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, Wolf Of The Battlefield: Commando 3, Rocketmen: Axis Of Evil, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Flock and Final Fight: Double Impact, which also includes Magic Sword hidden within it. So that’s nine games on one disc. Bargain. Get it. Review over. Go home.

More? Okay, well, there are a couple of things we’d change about this collection if we could. It’s not as complete as we’d like, for a start. For example, it’s strange that Bionic Commando Rearmed isn’t here while its sequel is.

And the absence of Mega Man 9 or 10 is a great loss to the collection. The implementation is a little sloppy too; it really is just eight XBLA releases on a disc with no frills.

Exiting a game even drops you back to the Dashboard rather than the disc’s menu – although each individual game can be accessed from the Dashboard if you wish, as long as the disc’s in the drive, so it’s not that bad.

So… Nine games. Some conspicuous absences. Still a bargain. Still get it. Review still done. Get out.

If you’re looking for a serious Star Wars experience that takes advantage of Microsoft’s motion controller, we suggest you stop reading. If the thought of Jar Jar Binks, midichlorians and Hayden Christensen sends you into a rage of Tim Bisley proportions, you should probably stop reading, too.

Now, you might ask who that could possibly leave reading this review, but that’s partly the point we’re trying to make. This is one for the kids and though that doesn’t excuse a number of its design choices and truly bizarre gameplay, it does at least go some way to explaining them. 

Kinect Star Wars is essentially a collection of mini-games set in and around Episode III; so you get all the weird new trilogy messiness and its attempts at original trilogy integration with bespoke Star Wars theatrics.

Broken into strict disciplines, Terminal Reality has quite wisely kept things relatively simple and for the most part gets a lot of mileage out of motion control.

You’d expect that, given that this is a Star Wars game and there are a number of blindingly obvious uses that have been at the top of fan wish lists since 1977, but Kinect Star Wars’ best work isn’t the lightsaber action you’d expect. 

When faced with opponents that also carry the iconic weapon, Kinect is woefully unprepared to present the action as anything other than binary. Taking on foes that carry blasters, as you do in its more substantial adventure mode (this carries actual characters and a story), and Kinect fares much better.

Sorry, is that Rancor giving people the clap?

Using the Force to throw enemies and objects is easy and slicing them up and deflecting their shots is surprisingly intuitive and responsive. Kinect Star Wars’ colourful visuals do a great job of presenting Lucas’ world and the gameplay present here is among the most action packed that Kinect has ever been able to be part of.

The same can also be said of the pod racing. Picking up where LucasArts’ own Episode One: Racer left off (on the N64), Kinect not only presents the controls realistically, but the gameplay is strong enough to warrant a standalone product.

That leaves the largely forgettable Rancor smash-’em-up mini-game, and the dancing. Using a set-up similar to Dance Central, its bizarre choice of music and Holiday Special-bad depictions of the Star Wars characters will have fans crying into their Boba Fett duvets the world over.

But, this really isn’t for them and technically, Kinect Star Wars manages to drop the ball in only one of its disciplines and presents some of best motion control gaming we’ve yet to see. 

This isn’t designed to please everyone, clearly. Its mix of gameplay shows exactly where Kinect’s strengths and weaknesses lie and though you might question the depiction of Star Wars’ beloved characters, there’s enough here that technically rises above what Microsoft’s controller has ever offered before and shows there is scope for growth.

If you know your games then you’re here to read about Devil May Cry 2. You already know that Devil May Cry has cemented its place in gaming history as a classic and you also know how Devil May Cry 3 was the peak of the genre’s evolution.

But what of the much-maligned Devil May Cry 2? Is it really that bad? Does this heinous title deserve a reputation on par with other evils created by man like Jedward and the Star Wars prequels?

In short: yes. In slightly less short: it’s maybe even worse. Devil May Cry created the kick-the-crap-out-of-things-with-style genre with Dante, a silver-haired swordslinger stuck in a gothic mansion full of demon puppeteers and the like.

The difficulty was perfectly pitched, the combat allowed gymnastics no other game offered at the time and everything was seemingly borne out of a creative mind that was part over-active imagination, part cheese-fuelled nightmare.

It’s a formula since bettered – even within this collection, let alone the likes of Bayonetta that would come later – but the gameplay remains engrossing, compelling and fun.

Those are three words you wouldn’t use for Devil May Cry 2, even if they were the only three adjectives left in the English language. Wide open areas replace corridors; tanks and choppers replace giant lava spiders and monstrous griffins; the difficulty is neutered to the point where it’s so easy that nothing is exciting or interesting.

Weirder still, it’s uglier in HD than its predecessor. Being held under the high-definition microscope exposes how grey, lifeless and boring it is. It’s astonishingly dull.

This collection would be worth it for Devil May Cry 3 alone, though. Four different playing styles, all with a surprising amount of depth, married to difficulty that will make you weep tears of blood unless you master your chosen style.

It’s tough but never alienating, as you always feel you can improve. Mercifully, this is the special edition, which allows you to continue from the start of the room you died in rather than the start of the level, meaning the difficulty isn’t quite as crushing as the original. Two great games and a poor curio. Definitely worth the money.

Last time we reviewed a Warriors game – namely Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 – we expressed a hope that its “technical improvements spread across the entire brand”. But it was only ever a slim hope, and rightly so.

Warriors Orochi 3 sees the Warriors franchise slip unapologetically back into its old ways. Of course it does.

This is essentially Dynasty Warriors 7 but set in the Orochi strand of the Warriors universe, which sees an unlikely alliance between all the various factions of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors facing off against an unearthly invasion of serpent demons.

There’s a ton of content and some of the systems and mechanics have been tweaked for the hell of it yet again, but underneath it all it’s much the same thing.

And, well, the sense of familiarity is why we enjoyed it so much. We hope that standing up and admitting that is the first step towards recovering from this terrible affliction. But at the same time… we don’t.

See, playing a Warriors game is a bit like going on an alcoholic binge. You know it’s wrong, you know there’s no end to it and you know the more you do it the more of a distance you put between yourself and those around you.

But to hell with them. They don’t understand you like Lu Bu, Zhao Yun, Honda Tadakatsu and the gang do. This was supposed to be a review, but it has turned into a desperate cry for help. NowGamer sincerely apologises. 

CyberConnect2 has really made a name for itself with the Naruto franchise. With 2010’s Ultimate Ninja Storm 2, the Japanese team expertly fused the intense action of the anime with robust fighting game mechanics to create something with universal appeal; a QTE-laced brawler that frequently impressed and clearly planted the seeds for Asura’s Wrath.

But what happens when the flashy set pieces are axed in favour of a 70-strong roster that spans both the main timelines of the series? Well, let’s just say that if you’re not a fan of the franchise, you can pretty much stop reading now.

Where previous games have made a concerted effort to retell the story of the ninja boy’s rise to power as closely as possible and, as such, have enjoyed a degree of accessibility, Generations instead opts to pick out only key fights from each of the character arcs and fill in the blanks with anime footage and stills.

It’ll feel quite stilted to anyone who doesn’t already know how the tale goes – it’s more arcade mode than story mode in fighting terms, and it cries out for the varied and exciting gameplay of the more involving retellings that have come before it.

The real shame here is that, mechanically, the series has never been better. Substitutions (defensive teleports) are now handled with their own gauge rather than just consuming Chakra, which is a clever solution to the last game’s problem of being able to spam the button to escape more or less anything, and one that promotes tactical decision-making.

While the wandering camera might not suggest it, this is a surprisingly competent fighter, albeit one that thrives on simplicity rather than depth.

But with such an extensive cast of characters and so much to unlock both through the in-game shop and by playing each character’s storyline through, it’s a comprehensive celebration of all things Naruto in which fans will delight.

Rise Of A Ninja and The Broken Bond do a better job of telling the story, sure, and Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 better captures the magic of the anime’s most explosive showdowns.

But for existing fans who just want to pit their favourite characters against pretty much any other star of the series, Generations is an easy recommendation.

EA Tiburon has certainly done a better job than last year of catering to newcomer and veteran alike in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, mainly because the over-eager caddy is now off by default. But once you start digging down, the overall difficulty curve proves surprisingly and severely on the bumpy side.

The problem isn’t one of overall difficulty suiting players of varying skill – there are sensible difficulty presets and plenty of customisable settings to fine tune, should you require. The issue is that some kinds of shots are disproportionately much harder to perform properly than others.

Thanks largely to the new Tempo meter, which takes the speed at which you push the analogue stick forward into account as well as how far back you pull it, no shot type is immediately easy in Tiger 13.

But while a knack for drives and other full-strength shots will soon develop, and putting, while initially frustrating, does start making sense with time, chip shots prove utterly nightmarish from start to quadruple-bogey finish.

Tiger 13’s highly organic, multi-faceted, analogue-based means of determining power forces you to rely far less on on-screen indicators and far more on muscle memory.

So we didn’t get to grips with power shots and putting by understanding exactly they worked as much as we just developed an intuitive feel for them after a bit of practice. They work pretty much the same way every time, so you tell your thumb to do the same thing each time.

But controlling exactly how much partial power you’re giving a chip shot is infuriatingly hard, as is attempting the diagonal swipes required for draw and fade shots. Bunkers and roughs can be a serious pain too, but at least they’re supposed to be punishing.

This means that as long as you’re getting your basic shots right, you can be consistently holing pars and birdies for a while, then one slight error can land you in dire, suddenly much more difficult, straits.

This lurching level of challenge spoils what is otherwise a characteristically solid, if rather dry, iteration of the long-running series. Oh well. Maybe Tiger will strike a happy medium next year.

Reinvention breeds irrelevance. Namco Bandai’s Ridge Racer series has bowed to genre trends before, of course: the last entry in the series introduced fully customisable mods, the one before that featured wacky alternative cars, but with Ridge Racer Unbounded, the series makes the most significant deviation from the established formula since its inception.

Inspired by the new wave of everything-must-be-destroyed racers (you know, the one that usually gets a studio canned), Unbounded expands its enduring drifting mechanic to incorporate a heightened level of unsophisticated bombast with an eye on a wider market.

Not that we’re cynical; it’s a wise move. The series was looking worryingly non-committal in its aspirations to take on more serious sims, and injecting a little silliness and verve is exactly what the increasingly monochrome franchise needed to drag itself away from its image as the booby prize of console launch line-ups.   

Finnish developer Bugbear Entertainment fundamentally understands the franchise potential – primarily that drifting can do much more than just provide a swift boost. Here, it’s an all-out destructive force.

Drift around a bend and watch the power gauge sour, before activating the boost and punching a hole through some office block (making for a quick shortcut), or alternatively just sack that off and smash into a nearby opponent, sending them careening off the track engulfed in flames. Congratulations: you’ve just leapt ahead three places, let off some expensive fireworks, and everyone feels a little bit warmer inside.

But this initial tummy-fuzziness is only ephemeral, because Unbounded lays its cards firmly on the table from the very first race. You will charge through lots of bricks, glass and vehicles in your time cruising around Shatter Bay (replacing Ridge City as the prime capital for the racer for no reason whatsoever), and whether playing Dominate, Destroy or Frag there’s barely any disparity between the modes.

Car choice is restricted at the start of the game, making drifting round corners an exercise in frustration.

It becomes a rinse-and-repeat service: hit the drift button, gain some torque and then charge through the next obstacle/vehicle until the race closes. It’s spoon-fed spectacle, the explosions just catering to an ideal that Unbounded can’t quite seem to stay on track with.

As much as it would like to be, this is not Split/Second, Blur or Burnout. This isn’t even the Bugbear of FlatOut fame. This is an indie developer clearly wading a little out of its depth.

You don’t have to look far for evidence to support the claim, as everything from the subtle imperfections of the handling to the identikit track design exemplifies exactly that.

Cars fall down an awkward crevice between sim and arcade – heavy, often unwieldy in some form or another depending on their designated purpose (some are specifically for drifting, others for straight racing) – and there’s never a huge sense of accumulated speed, a problem that may be more to do with the erratic AI that spends much of the race in slightly faster cars.

The track design fares a bit better than the strange non-balancing of vehicles, but each new district unlocked as you progress feels invariably like those you’ve already raced across.

It’s with a lack of identity across its various courses that Unbounded never really leaves a lasting impression. And it’s not particularly surprising that course design is so uninspiring, given that the heavily-touted level editor is, at its core, the biggest Scalextric set ever (and we don’t need to tell you how vibrant those interconnecting blocks of fabricated tarmac are).

This truck-based ‘Frag’ mode is a rare deviation from the standard race types. 

Every single segment from any of the courses can be neatly slotted together to create a unique track of your design. Which, in theory, should raise a problem: transitioning between a freeway segment and the dense inner city should be stark and alarming.

Yet it barely registers, which only further typifies the insipidness to the environment at large. It begs the question: what’s the point? Most user-generated tracks just feel like slightly mixed-up iterations on a course you’ve already played, and the only real freedom of expression granted is to place ramps and explosive barrels.

But perhaps in the grand tapestry of badly implemented ideas and overlooked design flaws that is Ridge Racer Unbounded, Bugbear’s biggest single mistake was failing to adequately reward racers.

Within the arbitrary ranking system, there’s no real design to unlocking new vehicles, and stage unlocks are far too linear – you require points to open up new areas but they usually follow completing the previous mission.

So does Ridge Racer Unbounded do anything right? Well, yes. The formula has been stripped back to some success, with controls as minimal as necessary, and there is a pervading sense that underneath it all there is a thrilling racer just waiting to bolt from the starting line.

But it’s confused, showing a huge lack of confidence in its reinvention to be much of anything, not representing enough of its inspirations or its lineage. 

Ultimately, it’s a quick thrill – a little bit of fiery eye-candy and raw destruction to pass the time – but as its explosions grow more tiring, there’s little else to see among the streets of Shatter Bay, and its focus is clearly muddled.

It’s a measure of Kinect’s inadequacy as a piece of technology that developers are still struggling to piece together a mother tongue; a basic set of conventions upon which all interactions rest.

As gamers, we’re conditioned to equate jumping with a stab of the A button. To fumble the right analogue stick when looking to dodge or modify. To hammer B at the moment it all goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Kinect titles, though, remain in an embryonic developmental state, with interpretations of the most basic of activities continuing to vary in an array of disappointing fashions. Like a box of Quality Street lacking those little caramel discs.

Despite its relatively lowly status as a set-piece heavy slice of make-believe aimed squarely at youngsters, Kinect Rush offers many genuine pointers on the future of motion-controlled platforming.

Sure, it may not stray too far from the comfort zone, but if we’re all leaping imaginary obstacles and terrifying the household cat in years to come, this will be one of the reasons why.

The central conceit here is pretty delightful, depicting a fictitious suburban Pixar theme park, populated not with rides and attractions but other imaginative children, whose imaginary adventures transform into gameplay stages as they set about describing them.

Featuring three ten-minute stages covering five movies, it finds elegant solutions to various control challenges – constructing meaty boss battles, tense chases, reasonably intricate puzzles and more from mere leans and arm wobbles.

It certainly has that Pixar vibe about it.

Walking’s the true step forward (ho, ho), achieved simply by waving one’s arms as if setting off on a purposeful stride, twisting one way or the other to turn.

Though Asobo wisely refuses to place players within constrictive environments or under harsh success criteria – either of which would still ruin its appeal – this is the closest to Kinect parkour we’ve yet come. 

Perhaps the excellent characterisation, attention to detail and navigational brilliance on show tempts us to take an overly holistic view, though.

It’d be remiss not to point out, for example, that Kinect Rush would be roundly panned were it a regular controller-operated game. Its success comes from the skilful blending of around half a dozen or so gameplay segments, sliced and diced to replicate a variety of situations.

None of which would be remotely entertaining if you weren’t giving yourself a hernia in pursuit of them, nor demand anything more of youngsters’ minds than slotting battery A into slot B.

In short, Kinect Rush is only in any way remarkable because it’s interestingly presented and Kinect itself doesn’t instantly ruin the experience, as it so often does.

We’re prepared to admit this is potentially a groundbreaking fact, but we can’t claim to have been entertained nearly as much as we were impressed. And surely that’s the point?

Armored Core has always been one of those series for the initiated. If you love tinkering around in the garage before taking your personally customised AC into battle then this is the series for you.

Everyone else has either looked in from the outside, wondering what all the fuss was about, or simply shrugged their shoulders and ignored it. But after the breakthrough success of From Software’s Dark Souls last year, perhaps it’s time to give Armored Core another look.

Perhaps From Sofware has taken some of the bold innovation found in Dark Souls and completely turned the mech combat genre on its head. That would have been nice wouldn’t it?

Sadly, extensive online modes aside, Armored Core V stubbornly sticks to the same basic formula it always had. Think about that for a minute. Armored Core began life on the PlayStation. Not the PS3, or even PS2, but the original PlayStation, way back in the mid-Nineties.

Back then a third-person shooter with customisable mechs was a novelty. Now that novelty has grown old. At its heart, Armored Core is still a very basic third-person shooter – a game of duck and cover, and endless circle strafing.

Sure, you can mess around with hundreds of parts to tailor the AC to both the mission and your tastes, but it’s still based around gameplay that dates back to the dawn of the genre. 

It's rather dull-looking, isn't it?

In a post Call Of Duty world we’ve come to expect more from our action games. Where are the memorable set-pieces? The imaginative level design? How about a structure that takes us on a journey, rather than selecting yet another humdrum level from a map screen?

Are these things too much to ask? Back on PSone, it was enough to make a game that just functioned. But in the modern age we’ve come to expect a bit of design, something that surprises us or gives us something to look forward to.

Bits you talk about with your friends for weeks to come. That’s what separates a great game from a functional one. Armored Core V offers none of that. It’s almost as basic as Space Invaders – avoid and shoot – with none of the window dressing or interesting choices that modern games use to disguise those origins.

If you’ve always been into Armored Core then part V will no doubt appeal. After all, it’s more of the same with just a few minor tweaks to the UI and some new custom parts thrown in.

But those additions aren’t worthy of praise. From Software has played it safe with this sequel, and in doing so has left Armored Core V hopelessly stuck in the past.

When a series like Silent Hill, Resident Evil or Alone In The Dark is updated to the current generation, you can be sure you’ll hear the droning of people who bemoan the changing of its formula.

Refreshingly – depending on how you look at it – Konami and Vatra Games have decided to pander purely to the fan; to those who want a Silent Hill just as it once was. Which is a risky strategy, when you think about it.

Because games change over time, just as do people’s expectations. It’s not generally considered acceptable these days to have a game whose map offers no hint of where to go, that asks the player instead to take a blind step out and explore the thing.

Nor is it generally considered okay to hide the solution to progress as an innocuous-looking weapon that is in all ways much like any of the hundreds of other weapons littering your game, but should you randomly happen to do so, shows itself to have the ability to slide high ladders ground-ward and open the way forward.

No longer do games have you run around a foggy town with absolutely no clue where you’re going nor why. They don’t present you with numerous puzzles; coded lockers whose six-digit numbers are hidden within riddles or within incidental detail that’s given no more ‘look at me’ significance than anything else in the game’s world.

Hunk?

And games these days certainly do not send half a dozen enemies at you when you’re armed with a broken twig and are crawling about the streets with about as much health as a swatted fly.

Turning back the clock, this was the kind of thing that would happen to you in Silent Hill 2 – the game still considered by most as the best in the series.

So the question is: by sticking so hardily to the series roots, has Vatra Games succeeded in something refreshing in its stalwartness, or has it just churned a game out that’s already past its prime? A bit of both, actually.

The game follows the convicted felon Murphy Pendleton, whose story we join as he is transported from one prison to another. The coach crashes into something near Silent Hill and, as is traditional for the series.

Through exploration, the economic meting out of weapons and a steady supply of screaming banshees, amorphous ceiling climbers and the occasional boss type creature, must face echoes of his harrowed past and find out what it all means to a moody, twangy guitar soundtrack.

Also as is the traditional, there are various characters hanging about that don’t seem in any way bothered by the fact that the place is littered with murderous abominations.

Not bothered, or maybe not even aware. Like so many elements of story in a Silent Hill title, where it’s all going remains unclear until its end, and even then we’re almost assured to be none the wiser.

Wonder what this lever does?

So we play Silent Hill not for its story. And in the case of Downpour we certainly aren’t playing it for its tetchy combat, which ranges anywhere between hand-spasmically easy and just plain impossible.

Neither are we really playing it for its equally bipolar puzzles, some of which are so hard that you’ll be stuck for hours. Yes, stuck – and we haven’t been able to say that about a game for what seems like a lifetime.

No, we play a Silent Hill game to be scared, and in this much, Downpour falls pretty much flat. It’s not scary. Atmospheric? Oh yes. Pretty? In its own way, but definitely not scary.

It only has itself to blame. Unlike Isaac Clarke’s numerous and infamously horrible ends in the Dead Space series, ends that give us something to dread, Murphy’s end is more like a drunk bloke falling over – nothing scary about that.

The screen turns red, he keels over, and we’re sent back a few minutes of gameplay. But that’s it. So it doesn’t matter what might jump out at us, nor how many enemies there might be to overpower us; dying just isn’t as big a deal as it should be.

In a kind of odd way, it’s for this reason that we sometimes wished it was even more traditional and punished us with a good half-hour lost. At least that way we’d learn to be a bit more careful; to step more carefully and to be more creeped out.

There are other oddities, too. Puzzles whose completion serve no function or reward other than a few Achievement points. They feel out of place, and since there is nothing to denote that they are of any less significance than the ones that progress matters, they also feel a bit of a time-waster.

Nevertheless, once relaxed into its meandering pace, Silent Hill: Downpour remains a must for series fans. Kudos to Vatra Games for keeping it real.

Modern shoot-’em-ups have lost their way. As much as we love the bullet hell shooters popularised by Cave and their peers, the term ‘shoot-’em-up’ hardly applies at all, since in most cases these games can be completed without shooting any enemies.

Weaving in between curtains of bullets is the order of the day in the modern age, to the extent that ‘avoid-’em-up’ may well be a more suitable name for the genre. Sine Mora feels like an antidote to that.

Horizontally scrolling shooters, with their limited screen space and obstacle-laden backgrounds, have always been more tactical than their vertically scrolling relatives for a start, but Sine Mora takes that quality even further thanks to its clever health mechanic.

Rather than a health bar or stock of extra lives, Sine Mora uses a timer that sits right at the top of the screen. Let the time run out and it’s game over. And there are so few seconds on the clock that they really will run out if you just try to coast through the stage not engaging with the game. 

The timer can be topped up by a few seconds for every enemy you destroy but will also drop with every hit you concede. Which is a clever little mechanic because it forces you to play Sine Mora the way a shoot-’em-up should be played, meticulously trying to take out every enemy while also protecting yourself.

The action is frequently hectic.

Doing so is far from easy, even on the lowest difficulty setting, so most levels will have to be played repeatedly in order to learn and master every detail of the stage.

All this would be for nothing without some decent level design, of course, but Sine Mora thankfully has that in spades. Enemy and obstacle placement is so tight that the design borders on puzzle game, requiring thoughtful strategies or solutions to navigate, while some sections are so demanding they’re like playing an electrified steady hand game, each wall collision deducting precious seconds from the clock.

Enemy design too is exceptional. It feels like everything about the enemy waves – the direction they come from, their bullet behaviour and formation – has been expertly fine tuned to get you moving around and making intelligent use of your limited arsenal.

The incredible boss design takes this to the next level – these screen filling monstrosities not only showcase some of the best visual design seen in the genre but spew out unique, even memorable, bullet patterns while pulling out special tricks that make things that little bit tougher and ensure that you’re not left to deal with the same repetitive attack patterns for minutes on end.

They’re tough, sure, but tough in a good way. One that forces you to really get to grips with the game design and have some fun with the tools at your disposal.

The visual style is superb, throwing up a slew of arresting backgrounds.

The presence of a Time Capsule power-up, allowing you to very briefly go into a bullet time style mode, is a great asset for getting out of a tight spot, though limited enough that you’ll have to rely on experience and skill first and foremost.

Getting through the story mode is no easy task, but once that’s done it’s fair to say that the real Sine Mora is only just beginning. Progress through the story unlocks content for arcade, score attack and boss practice modes and it’s in these, particularly arcade, where the designers really get inventive.

For a start, there’s the sheer number of ship combinations available to you. The story mode jumps between a number of different storylines with each chapter in order to keep variety high, and in doing so, puts you in control of a different ship and pilot.

In Arcade mode, you’re able to mix and match these in order to come up with weapon and sub-weapon combinations that suit the level you opt to take on.

Careful consideration is a must at this stage because the normal and challenging difficulty modes of the story are completely gone and replaced by hardcore and insane modes – the latter being so difficult that enemy ships explode into even more bullets when destroyed.

Furthermore, a real-time adaptive difficulty level is employed while you play, assessing your performance and moving you in-between theoretical ‘ranks’ that are trickier but reward a higher score.

Navigating this perilous moving construct is a highlight.

Sine Mora’s visuals are some of the most impressive the genre has ever seen. Though it plays completely on a 2D plane, the entire game world is modelled in three dimensions and looks stunning as a result.

So few old school games have this level of production value lavished upon them and, even better, the 3D visuals improve the gameplay, the perspective used to bring enemies in from all angles just to keep the player on their toes.

Just completing Sine Mora’s Story mode is an exercise in dedication, requiring hours of practice, comprehension and self-improvement, so the supplementary modes easily add weeks more play time.

It’s fantastic to see such an overwhelming amount of content in a downloadable shoot-’em-up, especially given the high prices traditionally demanded by such games on the import market.

But, ultimately, it’s depth and not breadth that makes Sine Mora so special. Its risk-reward mechanic practically trains you to understand shooters and puts game mechanics front and centre without shrouding them in obscurity as certain other members of the genre family tend to do.

The ageing shoot-’em-up is far from dead when viewed on quantity of releases alone, but when it comes to quality Sine Mora has practically zero peers this generation.

If you’ve been craving a true modern classic since the days of Gradius V and R-Type Final then Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality have provided the best possible reason we can imagine to return.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Granted the previous quote is the philosophy of fictional character Ferris Bueller, but it’s certainly relevant for Team Ninja’s latest game.

Tomonobu Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden reboot was released just eight years ago, and was arguably the best example of its genre at that time. Eight years is a long time in the world of videogames though, and the athletic, visceral combat of Team Ninja’s flagship title has long since been surpassed by Capcom’s Devil May Cry 3, Platinum Games’ Bayonetta and Team Ninja’s very own sequel. 

Ninja Gaiden 3 simply pretends that the past eight years ever happened, making it a victim of its own ignorance.

With Itagaki no longer working at Team Ninja, ninja extraordinaire Ryu Hayabusa has been placed in the hands of new director Yosuke Hayashi. Sadly Tecmo Koei’s trust has been misplaced, because Ninja Gaiden 3, in an attempt to forge a brand new identity, ignores everything that made the franchise so great in the first place.

This is most notable in Ninja Gaiden 3’s combat, which constantly feels wooly and unsatisfying. The first two games had elegantly designed combat mechanics that really made you feel like a powerful ninja.

The new Ninja Gaiden has misplaced waggle support courtesy of PlayStation Move. Enemies were just as powerful as Ryu, so that even two or three foes could be a suitable challenge for the hardened sword master.

There’s no such intelligence on display in Gaiden 3, with Ryu’s foes simply attacking en masse and continually respawning until you can push forward to the next encounter.

As with past games in the series, the camera often fails to catch up with the fast-paced action.

Interestingly, there are no items to pick up, or ways to refill your energy bar. Instead you’re simply given an energy bar of a specific length, which changes in size as you start each new encounter.

It’s an intriguing mechanic, as it effectively creates a standalone combat sandbox for you to play in, but as you’re not actually rated like in past games, there’s never any sense of satisfaction when you complete an encounter.

The hollow victory of battle is further compounded by the complete lack of skill required to defeat most enemies, the lack of new combat moves and the workman-like way in which the vast majority of enemies can be bested.

Gruesome attacks fill Ryu’s magic bar, which enables him to unleash a powerful flaming Ninpo magic attack. This is normally strong enough to decimate all current enemies onscreen, instantly refilling your health bar. You can then simply spam attacks until you can repeat the whole process all over again.

It makes combat an exercise in attrition rather than skill, which is a real shame, as the bloody combat is nice and frenetic, even if it lacks the trademark dismemberments and flair of past games.

Additional combat mechanics revolve around Ryu’s cursed arm - a key part of Ninja Gaiden 3’s ludicrous plot – which gives him incredible strength and the ability to fly around the screen killing enemies instantly when powered up.

At other stages your arm massively weakens you; distorting the screen, slowing down your actions, but still allowing you to dispatch enemies with a single slice of your sword.

The bosses of Ninja Gaiden 3 are surprisingly generic, with most of them putting up very little resistance.

Yes, it looks cool, but it’s again at the expense of skill. There’s never any actual sense of satisfaction from playing Ninja Gaiden 3; it’s the gaming equivalent of the trophies children now get from simply participating in a sports event at school, rather than actually winning them.

The decision to remove Ryu’s weapon arsenal (aside from a powerful auto-locking bow) is also an odd one. The steady introduction of new weapons in past games brought with it brand new combat patterns to master and learn, often forcing you tackle enemy assaults in brand new ways.

There is no such learning curve here, no joy in discovering new moves, or combo patterns; just a monotonous, endless supply of respawning enemies that lessens your will to live and makes you realise just how integral Itagaki was to the franchise.

This dull, soulless approach spills over to other aspects of Ninja Gaiden 3. Every wall run, every back flip, every Kunai Climb – Ryu can now grip onto or climb certain surfaces – is met with a helpful prompt.

Turn these off, and you also turn the quick-time prompts off which sounds ludicrous until you realise that the window of opportunity between pressing buttons is so vast that you can simply randomly press buttons until you get the required effect.

Yes, you read that right; there are quick-time events, and they are for the most part awful, because the set-pieces and close-up kills they are attached to simply aren’t exciting to watch.

And this is Ninja Gaiden 3’s biggest flaw; it just isn’t entertaining to play. It certainly tries hard, with a variety of exotic locations, one-off battles and numerous boss fights, but they always lack the zany charm of the original games.

One new addition to Ryu’s fighting repertoire is stealth kills. 

You always got the impression that beneath all the bloody shenanigans of previous games that Itagaki knew his games were just harmless silly fun, but Hayashi’s reboot doesn’t get this, creating a melodramatic plot involving a young girl, an unmasked Ryu, moral dilemmas and dragon blood DNA that feels just as at odds with past Ninja Gaiden games as Hayashi’s ropey new combat mechanics do.

Pre-order Ninja Gaiden 3 from Amazon.co.uk

• Ninja Gaiden 3 (Xbox 360)
• Ninja Gaiden 3 (PS3)

When you see comments from a developer of an upcoming game, suggesting that the over-the-top, arcade aspects of the title it’s creating will take a back seat to more realistic elements, you might let out a bit of a sigh.

If the game they are talking about is a new entry in the FIFA Street series – one that built itself on over-the-top arcade action – you’re likely to let out a whimper of confusion before retreating into hibernation for a few months to allow your brain to come to terms with how odd a decision this seems.

This new FIFA Street isn’t exactly a simulation, but it’s a lot closer to the real game than we would have expected – even hoped. It is still at heart a game that values tricks and flamboyance over simple pass and move tactics.

A good thing, of course, as that’s what it should do. But it offers up such a confusing blend of the two styles and an inconsistency in its own logic that it’s hard to get any real enjoyment out of the game, at least not for prolonged periods.

There are bursts of fun, but the confusion quickly sets in.

Whack it on for half an hour here and there – especially in multiplayer – and it can be a fair bit of fun. But in single-player, in World Tour, in the exhibition matches, it falls apart.

Using the same engine as last year’s FIFA 12 means you get all the physics and physicality of the big boy game, thrown together in a situation that doesn’t entirely suit at least one of the two.

While it’s great to use the ball and wall in concert, showing off the nigh-on perfect spherical kicking object’s physics, the physicality between players creates some issues.

The smaller arenas – while differing in size, they’re all more compact than full-size pitches – mean players closer to each other, and anybody who’s done even a cursory search of YouTube will have seen what happens when a few players get a bit too close on FIFA 12.

Safe to say there will be a lot more videos added of Street, and a lot more opportunities for people to laugh at the Keystone Kops moments that will inevitably pop up.

AI is another questionable element – again, some issues carry over from FIFA 12, like opposition players slowly running in one direction for no reason, or managing to maintain possession after being tackled eight times in a row.

YEAH!!

Then there’s the mentally sub-normal goalkeepers who infrequently come off their line unprompted and the manner in which the AI simply ‘turns it on’ when it feels the need and scores exceptional goals with no chance of you stopping them.

But probably the biggest irritation of FIFA Street is the implementation of the trick system. On one hand it’s fine – a simple mix of triggers, bumpers and the right stick pulling off ‘beats’ and adding skill points to your tally. Fine. Great. Just how it should be.

But the inconsistency and sheer unreliable nature in which these tricks are applied goes some ways towards ruining the experience for all those playing it. The panna, for example, is a nutmeg followed by running around the beaten player and retrieving the ball.

More than a lot of times we saw the ball bounce off the defending player and head back towards the attacker’s goal before being retrieved by said attacker, only for them to be awarded a panna bonus.

Similarly for ‘beat’ scores popping up when the defender simply was not beaten. Then no score being awarded after tilt-a-whirl rouletting around a defender, standing on the ball, lobbing it over another opponent and scissor kicking it through the net.

Tricks are often awarded to the wrong player, almost at random.

It’s a flawed system – not broken, but not as accurate as it needs to be in a game so reliant on rewarding players for flamboyance. There are also questions to be raised when it comes to what players are rewarded for.

A game-saving tackle or block is not rewarded, whereas running blindly into a corner, past a defender but away from goal, is. A screamer from the halfway line gathers no more base pointage than a tap-in from two centimetres out.

It’s totally understandable, the need to push attacking football as the real draw here, but would it be so bad to reward players for actually playing football too? It’s not too much of a push to suggest that FIFA Street could have, in the time of gaming we currently inhabit, been released as DLC.

As a sizeable, reasonably priced expansion pack it would be hard not to recommend the download. But as a standalone package – one charging full price, no less – it stumbles.

Playing with and against friends you will have fun, and that is the only reason we would really say you should pick the game up. If you intend to play FIFA Street alone for any real stretch of time… just don’t.

It’s not worth the frustration, the inconsistency of rules, the scripting, the boredom. It’s a seriously missed opportunity and, just like SSX, makes us question just what EA Sports is doing. 

In a way, we’ve had our expectations managed for Blades Of Time through three decades of video gaming, even though it’s a blank slate for us.

It has barely registered on our radar and all we know is that it’s an action-adventure game, with some generic foxy protagonist on the box who looks like she’s trying to be another Lara Croft.

And she is, probably. Think of a buxom Amazon in khaki shorts showing ample midriff, invading temples and smashing vases while performing mostly unnecessary acrobatic feats, and you’re probably going to think of Ayumi second to Tomb Raider’s heroine.

But here she is, distinguishing herself from Lara and her adventures by actually being different. Having jumped into a portal guarded by some Illuminati-type folk, Ayumi teleports to Dragon Island where she gets stuck in some turgid storyline with infuriating unskippable cut-scenes. 

Fortunately, combat is good. A well wrought, tactical and tactile experience, probably because it’s a lot like God Of War and nearly a direct lift from Darksiders.

Mashing the X button results in a Ayumi unleashing a flurry of attacks with her twin blades. Right Trigger to dash; Y to jump and then bring a spinning blade attack crashing down; RB to execute stunned foes, we can target remote enemies with her rifle; and by jumping and hitting B, we can grab onto flying nasties and gut them, mid-air.

You’re not seeing triple, that’s three Ayumis for the price of two time-rewinds.

Even Ayumi’s special attacks remind of War’s ever-upgrading Chaos Blade: by building up Rage through three tiers, Ayumi can hit multiple enemies with various elemental powers, combining them to compound the damage. 

This works well for Blades Of Time, which has compensated for being adventure-light with a combat system that adds further layers for every magic altar you visit, to a surprising level of complexity.

Its real distinction is the time rewind, a cooldown-regulated effect triggered with LB that enables Ayumi to create a clone of herself and rewind time to complete puzzles, but more intriguingly, set the stage for a tactically diverse field of combat.

Using time rewind, you use your clone to distract baddies while flanking them, or to get out of tight spots with otherwise overwhelmingly powerful enemies.

For some bosses it even feels like we’re breaking the system by using time rewind: one tough mech-type baddy required several RB execution moves to finish him off.

But instead of attempting an unimaginative and difficult grind, we simply rewound time several times in succession the first time he was stunned, performing an execute move each time so that half a dozen Ayumis were prancing over its prone body, stabbing and gouging away until it died.

Blades Of Time has a hammy plot, a camera that occasionally goes awry and combat badly needs a lock-on. But despite the lack of polish Gaijin has got what’s most important right, so though the idea of it being a cross-between Tomb Raider and Darksiders should be taken with a pinch of salt, it’s a more engaging game than some of the bland adventures we’ve had with Lara recently.

Birds Of Steel is a spiritual successor, if not officially a sequel, to 2009’s IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds Of Prey, but we’re disappointed to report that it isn’t as good.

Birds Of Prey had its issues, sure, and it could get a little dull, but if you were of a suitably patient disposition, it worked. Birds Of Prey seems to have tried to put itself in more console-friendly position, but appears to have had no idea how.

The mission structure is the big problem. It’s as if Gaijin thinks that we console players get bored with long, continuous missions, and figured the solution was to divide each mission into smaller chunks, bookended by cut-scenes.

The trouble is that the chunks are generally really boring because it’s the action-heavy bits that have been cut short and not the dull, ‘fly over there in a straight line’ bit. And the cut-scenes are just crap.

Here’s how it usually works. You take off and fly towards a marker. That takes a while and isn’t much fun. Then, at some point, loads of red and yellow markers appear on your radar.

You fly towards them – this gives a sense of anticipation, but still isn’t much fun in itself. Then, finally, you get to shoot and/or bomb them, and this can be quite fun.

Trouble is, unlike most games of its ilk, including Birds Of Prey, Birds Of Steel doesn’t expect you to keep fighting until you’ve completed the job. Instead of you and your squadron having to destroy all key targets, you have to just destroy a few of them – sometimes only one – before a cut-scene is triggered and both time and location jump forward to the next bit of the mission.

This was the best bit of any cut-scene we saw in Birds Of Steel. Yeah, that bad.

Bizarrely, it seems Gaijin is afraid you’ll get bored of spending too much time doing the one thing in the game that’s reasonably good fun, so combat invariably comes to a jarring end just as you’re getting into it.

This robs missions of flow and of continuity and, most importantly, of any organic sense of your actions turning the tide of battle. You just don’t really feel involved. You don’t even feel valued. Surely that’s the least a World War II pilot should expect?

The accurate simulation, attention to detail and clear passion for its subject matter will make Birds Of Steel appealing to a narrow audience. But as a game, it’s too poorly designed to be much fun.

For many fighting game aficionados, Street Fighter X Tekken is more than just a clash between two fighting franchises; it’s almost symbolic of the struggle between the 2D and 3D fighter for genre dominance.

Not everyone in our post-Street Fighter IV era remembers, but in the early Nineties the emerging 3D fighter genre seemed to herald the death of its 2D forefather.

With the 2D genre declining, the 3D variety offered a ‘wow’ factor that it couldn’t match. Casual fans were, ironically, put off by the more evolved 2D fighters’ demand for accurate commands and projectile-based zone control.

Instead, they turned in droves to the often more accessible combo strings and flashy juggle-based play of early 3D fighters – and games like SoulCalibur, DOA and Tekken took centre stage. Only Street Fighter IV, generations later, brought 2D fighters back from the brink.

There’s always been a rivalry over which fighting genre is superior, explaining why, at least emotionally, Street Fighter X Tekken is such a big deal. Remembering that, and the inherent differences between the two sub-genres helps underscore Capcom’s accomplishment here.

The action often gets wild and insane.

Capcom has not only crafted a fun, mechanically sound 2D fighter with characters that evolved under two different systems, but made it both accessible to casual fans and deep enough for the fighting faithful. Part of that success lies in its roster of 38 characters from across both franchises, giving a huge variety of choice.

As you’d expect, mainstays like Street Fighter’s Ryu, Ken and Chun-Li and Tekken’s Kazuya, Nina and King are here, but there are plenty of eclectic characters from both camps. They all retain their personality in its SFIV-based engine with its familiar six-button attack system, special attacks and three-bar Super meter that supports the EX attacks and Ultras, here called Super Arts.

Despite tweaks, like a faster pace, SFIV players will slip right in, and Capcom has successfully translated many of the Tekken characters’ familiar combos and command throws into the SF framework.

There’s a far greater emphasis on combos and air juggles in Street Fighter X Tekken’s tactical tag-team battles – unlike Marvel vs Capcom 3, you lose the round if any character is defeated – and a new launcher attack is the basis for myriad juggles and team specials.

Attacks that would only hit once or twice in Street Fighter IV can easily be linked together here, and punctuated by devastating Super Arts. You can tag in your partner after a launcher to extend combos and, with three bars of meter, pull off spectacular Cross Arts in which both characters use their Super Arts in turn, stylishly pummelling their foes.

It's colourful, mad, and best of all, plain good fun.

The action in Street Fighter X Tekken is a visual delight as fists fly, partners tag in and out and Super Arts fill the screen with all manner of pyrotechnics, but unlike its zanier cousin, Marvel Vs Capcom 3, no matter how crazy things appear on screen they still feel grounded.

Despite all these new layers of play, Street Fighter X Tekken is more accessible thanks to forgiving inputs and Boost Combos, which let you string together core combos simply pressing the Light, Medium and Heavy buttons.

For a bar of meter you can even use canned ‘Quick combos’ by pressing LP/HP. Street Fighter X Tekken's Gem system lets you choose buff-giving crystals that use meter to do things like make specials easier or give stat boosts – a boon to beginners. Its final new addition is Pandora mode – a massively powered-up state you enter by sacrificing one of your characters with low heath.

The remaining fighter does massive damage in this state, but you’ve ten seconds before you collapse. What’s impressive is that despite being more accessible, Street Fighter X Tekken still has real depth – everything has a check and balance.

Launchers put foes into juggles, but need to be comboed or they leave you vulnerable; there are canned combos, but they devour meter that more experienced players will use to greater effect. Various juggles and Cross Attacks require skill to really master, and even gems require certain conditions to activate.

Poison is destined to be a fan favourite, but she's not easy to use.

Street Fighter X Tekken just gives players more ways to be imaginative and the end result is a fun, fast and accessible fighter. If this seems complicated, don’t worry.

There are in-depth tutorials covering everything from the very basics to every nuance of the Super Arts, Gems and Cross Arts system, together with character challenges and a training room in which to hone your skills.

As with any fighting game you’ll only get the most out of Street Fighter X Tekken playing with other people either locally or online – if you flying solo with there isn’t quite enough meat here to satisfy despite an enjoyable, homage-filled Arcade mode.

Street Fighter X Tekken isn’t perfect, of course, and the eccentricities of its heavy combo focus, speed and various systems won’t appeal to those with more simple fighting tastes, and Tekken fans might feel their representatives are not quite as polished as their SF chums.

On the 360, the omission of special guest characters – the PS3 is getting four, including Pac-Man and Mega Man – is an almost criminal offence.

But gripes aside, Street Fighter X Tekken is a thoroughly enjoyable iterative twist on both Street Fighter IV and the crossover fighter formula.

Capcom has showcased the inherent strength and flexibility of the 2D fighter through the success of its translation of core elements of Namco’s 3D franchise into 2D, and we’re not sure it could be done the other way round. We certainly don’t envy Namco its task with Tekken X Street Fighter.

It was four years ago that we first set down on Eden Prime in search of a mysterious alien artefact, but we remember it like it was yesterday. It was on the far-flung human colony there that we first took on the mysterious zombie-like Husks; where we first encountered an indoctrinated agent; and where Commander Shepard received his first glimpse of the Reaper invasion that wiped out the Protheans some 50,000 years prior.

It all seemed so simple back then. Stop Saren Arterius and save the galaxy. Little did we know that BioWare’s ambition stretched so much further than that, across two more games that would unfold a sweeping and adaptive narrative across the swirling arms of an entire galaxy. Mass Effect is nothing if not bold.

And so here we are, the Reaper cycle has come back around and humans are in the crosshairs, our homeworld under a devastating and nigh-on indefensible assault from the deadly machines themselves.

It’s time to head out into the Milky Way once again and bring to a final, definitive end to the events that kicked off in that lonely human colony all those years ago.

The jump between Mass Effect 2 and 3 feels less pronounced than it was between the first game and the second, largely because there’s less to fix this time around.

Mass Effect 2 remedied the dodgy combat and convoluted RPG mechanics of the first game, while also opening up areas of the world that were previously confined to the pages of the codex. Mass Effect 3’s job is one of refinement rather than evolution, and BioWare polishes its ideas to a mirror sheen.

Hardcore Mass Effect fans have plenty to look forward to.

On a structural level, your mission is much the same: recruit and strengthen a team, and then take the fight to an ancient evil in a bombastic final battle that will go really well or really badly, depending on how much preparation you put in.

This time, though, you’re not just assembling a team, but an entire army. Each mission performed throughout Mass Effect 3 feeds into your collection of War Assets – side quests might add a collection of scientists or a small squadron of fighters to your cause, while larger missions will see entire turian fleets or salarian Special Task Groups join the effort.

The people, armies, weapons and fleets you accumulate are represented by a number that designates how effectively these assets will perform in the final battle – the higher the number, the better your chances of success.

Getting everyone on your side is simple undertaking, though. The krogan are aggressive and stubborn; the turians proud and domineering; the salarians self-involved and selfish.

Each culture has their own motivations and agendas, and as such getting them to see eye to eye usually involves doing something that they want before they’ll agree to kiss and make up.

It’s your job to play the intergalactic intermediary and reconcile centuries of resentment and antagonism. Getting the krogan to forgive the salarians for the genophage? Convincing quarian chiefs to re-evaluate their hatred of the geth? Good luck with that.

You’ll meet plenty of new characters throughout, but one of the most disappointing revelations is that none of these are quite as memorable as those introduced in ME2.

The Citadel once again provides a respite from the storm, with shops, refugee camps and clubs.

Thane Krios, Mordin Solus, Jack – these characters stick in the mind. The new characters introduced here are muscle-bound meatheads like soldier James Vega – or, even worse, big-breasted bimbos like Jessica Chobot’s news reporter Diana Allers – or little more than moral quandaries dressed up in space suits.

Interactions with turian or krogan commanders are thematically interesting, but they lack the personality found so liberally throughout the second game.

The ever-expansive dialogue trees are still riddled with humour and insight, so it’s always worth spending your time on the Normandy chatting to your crew, but it’s the returning characters that remain the most interesting and enjoyable to spend time with – if they made if through the Omega 4 Relay, that is…

The missions themselves are some of the best written and most explosive yet seen in the series. The direct path through the main quest is, as would be expected, the most exciting, with production values often matching the set pieces seen in linear triple-A games like Gears Of War.

Some missions take place on orbiting alien moons while the planet below is ravaged by a Reaper invasion, while others will see you take on the sentient machines on foot in gripping, face-to-face confrontations.

In fact, there’s so much exciting content packed onto the two discs that we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Prothean technology had been used in the manufacturing process.

But that’s not to say the extra-curricular elements aren’t just as engrossing. Side quests might take you to huge radioactive fuel refineries, abandoned research stations on icy snow planets, or besieged schools located on distant space stations, each graphically unique and offering punchier, smaller combat scenarios wrapped up in their own standalone stories.

In close quarters with an enemy, you can hold down the button to perform a class-specific heavy attack.

The overarching narrative may be pitched as a race against time, but you’ll find yourself wiling away the hours in these lesser-known corners of the universe nevertheless, seeking out new missions and new supporters for your cause.

The actual RPG mechanics are again scaled right back, perhaps even more so now that scanning planets for elements has been completely removed.

Now upgrades and weapons are purchased with credits via a terminal in the Normandy, with some extra depth added in the ability to augment weapons with items such as scopes, damage modifiers and thermal clip enhancements.

There’s a greater variety to be found in armour too, but it’s more based around enhancing and buffing your existing skills than it is making Shepard look like a badass.

Where Mass Effect 3 feels most discernibly improved over its predecessor is in the combat. The rhythm and punch of gunplay have been sharpened to such a point that even non-believers may find themselves convinced that cover-based action is as important a part of Mass Effect as trying to sleep with your sexy comms officer.

Weapons feel more powerful and direct thanks to some sharp and impactful sound design, while cover is much easier to navigate and vault if need be.

A nifty roll move has also been added, which comes in useful when avoiding the projectile attacks launched by a new and diverse range of enemies.

Catching up with classic characters is one of the better aspects of Mass Effect 3.

Some Cerberus soldiers carry shields that need to be removed before they can be damaged or shot through if you’ve equipped the right weapon upgrade, while engineers will set up turrets and repair their allies’ shields if not quickly removed from the battlefield.

There are also faster and more manoeuvrable ninja-like units who will dodge your crosshairs and make a beeline for Shepard when the opportunity presents itself.

Husks, too, come in all-new shapes and sizes thanks to the Reapers, who have meddled with the DNA of turians, batarians, asari and more in order to create a more varied and dangerous ground force.

Human husks still just run at you like brain dead cannon fodder, but the alien husks will utilise tactics and strategy that must be matched by the player – movement and an ability to pick out the most dangerous targets on the battlefield.

The RPG elements are still there, but they’re disguised far more confidently under the guise of the shooter, the stats never getting in the way of a good, satisfying headshot.

Tighter targeting, a heavier sense of feedback, and a new array of enemy combat tactics ensure that Mass Effect 3’s gunfights never feel like a chore. They expertly balance challenge with entertainment, and, most importantly, are as confident in making you feel like a tactician as a tank.

Unlike its predecessors, Mass Effect 3 doesn’t have a crutch to lean on in the form of a future game on which to hang each player’s choices. There is no continuation from this point; this is truly the end, so why should the players care who lives or dies?

Several elements have been removed entirely, such as the ability to holster your weapon.

Reason suggests that it should matter little if you decide upon the extinction of one species over another, or if the final battle results in heavy losses for your fleet.

As long as you successfully reach the end credits, you’ve won. Bad choices aren’t going to come back and bite you in the ass in Mass Effect 4. You’re not going to be missing any of your favourite characters.

But it does matter. You do deliberate over your choices. You do care who dies and who survives. You do want to build the best army possible and stick it to the Reapers right where it hurts, because you’re so invested in this universe.

Ever since we set foot on Eden Prime we’ve learned of histories, cultures and civilisations through the codex; we’ve formed and broken alliances with entire species; we’ve changed the fate of a galaxy at the press of a button. We’re emotionally attached, and playing the ending of Mass Effect 3 feels important.

Space-faring sci-fi can be difficult to get right. For every Alien there’s a Battlefield Earth. For every 2001, a Barbarella. For every Star Wars, a Star Wars prequel.

Considering that it’s full of alien space nymphs and such a bending of science that it would make Albert Einstein spin fast enough in his grave to power a Mass Relay, you’d think Mass Effect would fall in with the bad crowd.

But, in reality, there really are few videogame stories told with this much attention to detail, and this much love and care given over to fabricating a rich and believable back story.

Mass Effect 3 caps off a trilogy that is well constructed, imaginative, and even thought provoking. What’s more, it may play out the time-worn cliché of saving the universe, but BioWare has filtered that old chestnut through a story that feels genuinely new, even within the confines of a very crowded genre.

The ending might perplex and annoy as many as it satisfies, but it can’t be denied that there are no loose ends, no hanging narrative threads, and no irritating cliffhangers. All that’s left is the sense of a good story, well told.

So, so long, Commander Shepard. You served us well. You are dismissed.

Order Mass Effect 3 on Amazon

• Mass Effect 3 (Xbox 360)

It takes a certain kind of gamer to really enjoy BlazBlue. For one thing, it requires execution, precision and timing more than any other fighter on the 360.

Then there’s trying to get friends to learn it with you - many people would rather just mash out a few combos in Marvel Vs Capcom 3 than put time into learning character-specific combos and match-ups.

And with unique Drive attacks and functionality for every fighter, it can take weeks just to settle on a character that’s right for you.

But Arc understands. Extend’s lengthy and genuinely entertaining tutorial teaches you everything from basic attacks to spacing and mix-ups, lessons that will help you not just in BlazBlue but pretty much every fighter you play.

Stylish mode is another concession to that lofty entry barrier, remapping commands, not unlike Marvel’s Simple mode, so that mashers and beginning players can pull off impressive attack strings, while several of the new fighters cleverly bridge the otherwise-massive gap between different and often-confusing character archetypes.

And that’s not all. The front end would struggle to find room for any more options, which is refreshing at a time when many fighters are more streamlined packages aimed at online players.

And from the bonkers cut-scenes of story mode to the character-building of Abyss and the punishing difficulty of Unlimited Mars, it’s all really good too. As is all of Extend, actually.

Yes, it’s effectively just a rebalanced update of Continuum Shift with all the DLC and then some. But since when has a developer making a great game even better been a bad thing?

Ever since EA decided to inject a little misery into the SSX series’ pristine slopes, fanboy knives have been sharpening with enthusiasm. “No, Deadly Descents is simply an in-game mode,” EA has insisted at length. And the Call Of Duty palette is presumably just an attempt to entice John Q. Killstreak onto the piste.

Right. Despite such protestations, the impression has remained that this reboot is set to alter the staple elements of SSX beyond recognition. Transforming a series built on the solid foundations of masterful course design and rewarding yet potentially punishing controls into something unfamiliar, and unwelcome. 

For the same reason some might suspect a negative review of, say, Mass Effect 3 have more to do with a dislike of its evolution into a cover shooter than the game itself, cynical souls might suggest low SSX scores are themselves based on the gamer’s childish failure to accept that videogames change over time.

It’s important to note, then, that SSX is genuinely a rather poor experience in its own right, suffering from more failures in conceptual thinking than you’d think possible in a game about a board, a person and some mountains.

Yes, it says 'armor' in the bottom right  corner. When do we get the tactical nuke?

The fact that SSX will intensely irritate series veterans is relegated to a mere side issue. Seeing as they originally formed part of the game’s title, where better to start than with EA Canada’s suite of nine Deadly Descents? 

Created to imbue similar geological features with a degree of much-needed personality, each one offers a unique environmental factor for players to overcome as they tumble down each mountain range.

Be it ice or trees, avalanches or excessive snowfall, the theory suggests players should be entertained through strength of variety alone. In practice, things don’t actually work out this way.

Mainly because most environmental factors force players to adopt exactly the same response in order to survive, and occasionally because the gameplay concept in question shouldn’t have progressed beyond someone casually mentioning it in a meeting.

Avalanche is an example, which flips the camera around 180 degrees (you know, like Sonic Adventure’s snowboarding sections did), challenging players to escape a variety of pitfalls and obstacles they can’t actually see coming.

Or Darkness, which plunges boarders deep inside underground lava tracts, armed only with a helmet-mounted spotlight that obviously points wherever your character is looking. You basically need to avoid brown objects in a black environment. 

The killstreaks are ace. Nah, there are no killstreaks.

Even the gameplay modifiers that approach competence basically force players to ride as conservatively as possible, failing to engage with the central trick and boost mechanic at all.

With failure often instant and unforeseeable, it’s little wonder that this is the case. Ice, for instance, slaps a massive, game over crevice between two thin ledges of the slippery stuff, forcing players to tumble into that central abyss many times over purely because it’s impossible to see much further than a jump’s length ahead.

Cold, too, reduces the length of a player’s power bar whenever they’re in a patch of shadow or a tunnel – a fact that is intended to encourage players to trick for all their life is worth, earning precious boost juice, but instead results in them stopping to recharge every few hundred yards.

The fact that players are offered the chance to skip each of these challenges after a handful of failures, retaining any XP rewards the challenge might offer, certainly shows a notable lack of confidence on EA Canada’s part in their finished product. 

Though relatively damaging, all of the above could be forgiven if the second-to-second gameplay of SSX was an orgy of satisfying acrobatic brilliance. Sadly, this isn’t the case.

For those who don’t like words, its risk/reward balance has been broken beyond repair. For those who do, a selection of factors join forces to create an experience of particular boredom.

The mountain graffiti artist was a menace, but at least his messages were helpful.

First, no expectation is placed on players to adequately complete tricks. In order to successfully land the most complicated of manoeuvres, all you have to do is release all associated controls before landing. This is clearly far too simple a process, and consequently one robbed of any joy.

Second, trick inputs themselves are now available via the right analogue stick, using a series of directional tiles and quarter-circle turns far simpler than anything even Fight Night Champion demands.

Again, even the most chubby-fingered of oafs will be tweaking their Stiffys enthusiastically in next to no time. Ooh-er, missus, etc. Aside from the cheap guffaws, there’s simply no reward in pulling tricks off with such total ease.

Unfortunately, more well-established control issues also arise, such as the tendency for riders to carve off in bizarre directions when landing, and the in-game camera messing around with which direction is which. 

This simplification is, incidentally, a process with which the team’s course design gleefully joins in. Rather than taking the more traditional step of designing a set of feature-rich, original courses, the team has instead mined topography data from NASA (whoo), mapping sections of actual mountain ranges through which to board.

Said environments are hence not specifically built for the kind of high-octane trickery SSX demands, and therefore must be filled with an array of grindable red pipes, like it’s the secret sequel to Mirror’s Edge or something.

Again, these can make the act of stringing trick sequences together far too simple – so much so that the underlying code appears to bend the rules of physics to accommodate some pretty unlikely sequences, from time to time.

This is a real world location. Which makes it incredibly dull.

Why the development studio decided to retrofit real world locations so they can appear in a videogame that they’re entirely unsuited for is a mystery to us.

In terms of multiplayer, SSX’s approach to Xbox Live is certainly curious, technically featuring no simultaneous multiplayer play. What’s more, the surely vital inclusion of split screen fails to appear at all.

What’s on offer instead is a hybrid of Need For Speed’s Autolog feature and the Tiger Woods series’ online tournaments. Using an in-game currency system either earned via skilful play or paid for directly, players set each other speed or score challenges, each participant laying down a stake to take part in hope of winning an overall pot.

On the slopes, only ghosts appear of the times/scores to beat, besides ghosts of anyone currently on your course. While it’s still possible to co-ordinate your runs by all leaping from the start line at the same time, we don’t think this quite counts as multiplayer.

Though frankly, many of the key decisions that have been taken from the point SSX was resurrected remain a mystery. Please – ignore the pedigree, and leave this well alone.