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99 problems but a witch ain't one. It's unfortunate that Witch Hunt, the latest in BioWare's long but less than illustrious DLC campaign for the original Dragon Age, arrives at the s...

Asari state of affairs? Nine months after launch, and Mass Effect 2 finally has a DLC offering to compare with Dragon Age: Awakenings. Not in terms of size – Lair of the Shadow Broke...

Spidey-hi! Despite its multiverse-spanning conceit, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions lacks the one thing you might be expecting from it: genuine variety. While Beenox has trawled the...

Arty essence. Like any well-planned operation, this article begins with a mission briefing. Here's the wording from one of R.U.S.E.'s one-off scenario missions: ...

Sleeping Beauty? Almost ten years into Square Enix and Disney's marriage, and the tensions have only grown with time. Not that the union, first consummated in 2002's Kingdom Hearts, ...

Thanks for the memories. Boy does Amnesia nail running away. It nails running away like Mirror's Edge nailed running away, which is a bit of a damning indictment of the latter game, ...

Elastic! Shank! Racers! Balls! Witches! Welcome to a slightly watered-down Download Games Roundup where the quality of the offerings is not quite as tip top as it usually is. But the...

Hackneyed. The problem is one of expectation. Players assume that Dynasty Warriors and its impersonators - of which Ninety-Nine Nights II is one - have to behave realistically. ...

The hour of bewilderbeast. There are moments during And Yet It Moves that snap you right back to the very first time you started playing videogames. When everything felt fresh, surpr...

A wing and a prayer. Air combat games are contradictory beasts. They offer the most freedom of movement of any game genre, and yet are constrained by the emptiness of their aerial ar...

Vertical slice (and dice). After half an hour of knocking the undead around with a trashcan, I suddenly realised that "zombie" would be a pretty good word to play in Scrabble. It's n...

Anyone for bocce? What does it take to be a sporting champion? Along with physical prowess you must show grit, dedication and determination. You must be willing to make sacrifices and stay focused. On ...

Move along. Hey everybody! It's party time! But tonight we're not gonna party like it's 1999, oh no. That's because it's 2010! Today's parties aren't about drinking, dancing and stan...

Malice in Wonderland. Lanseal Academy is a Disneyland boot camp. A 200-foot spire at the centre of the military school's grounds jabs at the clouds, while far below a moonfaced clock...

Morph or your money. For the first 20 minutes, Metroid: Other M does a decent job of confirming your worst suspicions about just what Team Ninja might do to if it ever got its hands ...

Blaze of glory? Despite being the most popular 2D fighter in Japanese arcades by a mile, it's fair to say that in the west, Arc System's fledgling BlazBlue series is still living in ...

Crime doesn't play. The remarkable thing about Mafia II is not that it's bad, but that it masks its awfulness so well. The game opens with striking visuals: the backdrop of Empire Bay (Mafia's stand-in...

Quarterback once again. EA Sports has come to perfect the 12-month development cycle with titles like NHL and the FIFA series, but of all of its properties, none is as derided by gam...

Muzzled toughs. I can't help wondering what the atmosphere in the IO Interactive office was like when EA announced details of Army of Two: The 40th Day. Both sequels were revealed wi...

It takes tomb. Squeezing an entire new Tomb Raider game into a downloadable nugget – admittedly, a rather chunky one, at just over 2GB – has necessarily involved some downsizing. Gua...

Desktop tower attack. Tower Defense is gaming's youngest genre and it shows: endless waves of clones clog up iTunes, many as irresistible as their inspiration but few displaying much...

Things of the wild frontier. Nine new maps make up the meat of this multiplayer sandwich, the second batch of DLC for Rockstar's Western elegy, the first to demand payment. Ranging f...

Breaking the waves. The average title on Xbox Live's Indie Games service stays on the 15-strong New Arrivals list for all of 10 days - if it's lucky - before it's forced to give way ...

School of Gogh. Nintendo's quest to make us all better people continues apace. The game giant has been all about self-improvement lately, and whether you're training your brain, gett...

The bob-omb? Scott Pilgrim is one of us. While Hollywood's zeitgeist-chasing writers and directors clutch at game references in an effort to appeal to those born into videogames, Sco...

The splice is right? BioShock, eh? Moody, thought-provoking stuff. Troubling stuff. Deep stuff, allegedly. How about adding a challenge mode? ...

The RTS takes flight. "StarCraft II is fast." The first words I wrote about Blizzard's real-time strategy sequel, almost two and a half years ago, may well have been an exercise in s...

All the wrong notes. The two-faced mansion from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night endures in players' memories because it's the perfect venue for adventure. You never stop pushing i...

There's no need. If you were in the Headstart week of Need for Speed World, in which early birds could tour the world a week early, you'll have experienced a discouraging sense of is...

The end is the beginning. Alan Wake is best when it's ending. That's a compliment. The game hits an aesthetic high whenever one of its episodes draws to a close, with a stark title s...

Buoyant. If Limbo, last week's inaugural Summer of Arcade release, aspired to the art house aesthete's choice - Braid through a glass, darkly - Hydro Thunder Hurricane is a hyperacti...

Ta-ta to Tartarus. Shown to a steadily flagging and slightly nonplussed audience at E3, Sony's new PSP marketing campaign focused on the portable's library of "full-sized" games, as ...

Life in black and white. Limbo, the moody, monochromatic game that kicks off Xbox Live Arcade's Summer of Arcade this Wednesday, looks gorgeous. Any screenshot will tell you that, an...

10 ports to fish from the download pool. We furnish you with five mini-reviews of downloadable titles every Friday, but it's never enough. The world of downloadable gaming never slee...

Love all. The RPG-ification of mainstream videogame genres has been the defining design trend of the past three years, with experience points and levelling a key feature of everythin...

Plastic fantastic? Time makes liars of us all, and I knew I was tempting fate when I wrote that LEGO Harry Potter would likely be the best kids game of the year. Playing Toy Story 3,...

Smack my witch up. There's a lot of crap in DeathSpank. I've counted three separate faecal inventory items, two other items that cause ene...

When Korean MMO and Welsh mythology meet. Saying that Mabinogi looks like a Korean free-to-play MMORPG from 2004 isn't an elaborate insult, just a statement of fact. It was originall...

Angel of the East. A young woman who works tirelessly to honour her father's memory by making the inn she inherited a success. A knight caught in purgatory under a witch's spell that...

But not Seven Up. Blacklight has arrived on the FPS scene with unusual swagger. Kicking in the door, it slumps in your favourite chair, puts its blood-crusted combat boots up on your...

Matthew, Orc, Luke and John. I'd love to be able to start this review by telling you about the time in Mission 4 I was held hostage by a talking codpiece, or the bit in Mission 7 whe...

Heads you lose. Sniping is a lot like driving a car off a ramp. Both tap into some primal thrill mechanism, leapfrogging our critical thinking and making us have fun whether we want ...

Super Shoot Fighter II. G.Rev's, Senko no Ronde was a curious shooter/fighter hybrid that was brought to the UK in 2007 under the pseudonym of WarTech. For those who've never played ...

Ping! It's powered, and powered brilliantly, by some big fat contradictions. Crackdown 2's built from an epic move set, with every jump, roundhouse and ground-pound crafted to make y...

Maximus pain. So often in history it has fallen to the 3D fighting game to establish the appeal and capability of a console in its formative days. Tekken communicated the pace, pluck...

Any cop? Initially, I blamed the weather. The hottest week of the year, with the blazing sun promising lazy afternoons in London parks with cold beers to hand, is a pretty uncharitab...

Would Woods, or wouldn't he? Here's a curious nugget of Hollywood lore: when someone is called in to polish up an existing script, they only get an on-screen credit if they replace a...

A certified cricket coach writes. Sports sims give me big problems. A very large question looms into view: Why? Role-playing games exist b...

Dun and dusted. Speech given by Tim Stone to army of potential Operation Arrowhead buyers, on 30th June 2010 (with apologies to Tim Collins and the Royal Irish Regiment): ...

Dood, where's my star? "That man has ten arms!" "He's a cosplayer." I've played enough idiosyn...

So you're back, from outer space. Forget being the best: Puzzle Quest is a testament to the fearsome power of clever mediocrity. With the first game in the series, Infinite Interacti...

Good God. As you may know, we withdrew our original review of Age of Conan: Rise of the Godslayer shortly after publication last month. In short, we didn't give the original reviewer...

Nursery crime. Naughty Bear is a 12, according to PEGI. In it, you can grill faces, eviscerate with swords, fatally electrocute, detonate ...

Bot summer nights. A student banquet: that's what this premium downloadable content pack offers to long-standing Bad Company 2 players. It's when you can't afford to go to the superm...

A kind of magic. LEGO Harry Potter is enormous, which is no mean feat given that the title character is two centimetres tall. And plastic. ...

Black hole fun. When did it stop being OK for first-person shooters to be silly? Once upon a time you just rocked up, ran down some corridors with increasingly powerful weapons and s...

It's on like Cybertron. Despite Transformers' three-decade history dovetailing almost exactly with the rise of home gaming, it's been a constant source of frustration that Hasbro has...

Space port. During the World Cup, whilst the English have been distracted, the Scots have been busy - as have the Irish and the West Indians. ...

Round table discussion. It's the 5th Century. Or maybe it's the 6th. Nobody can really be sure, and it doesn't matter - the legendary tales of King Arthur might as well have taken place in another univ...

Good lord. Overlord, the latest and largest of the Mass Effect DLC packs, is a mixed bag in the best possible way. It's a medium-sized adventure that never lets one gameplay element dominate for too lo...

Traction and reaction. Last year I felt sorry for American bikers. Not only did crippling noise and emission regulations result in their YZFs having less top-end compared to our pokier (and probably sh...

Shine on. If you discount the 1348 counts of grievous bodily shovelware to date, the iPad's a pretty decent gaming platform. Where else can you re-purchase shiny "HD" versions of all...

Walking the line. "We love you, Snake. Don't come back," I wrote at the end of my review of 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I felt that the mad, glorious indulgence ...

Punk chore? The timing is a little unfortunate, perhaps. Green Day make their raucous stage debut as a videogame headliner this Friday, mere days before Rock Band 3 is expected to st...

Cycle of violence. Motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel once said of his promoters, "they thought my bike had wings". Motorcycle daredevil Joe Danger's bike does not have wings, but it ...

Gets everywhere. Once you POP, you can't stop. So seems to be the case as far as Ubisoft's concerned, anyway. More than two decades after the original game's debut, the Prince of Pe...

Crippled. Every one of my Sundays between mid-August and early February consists of waking up at or around 11am, catching the pre-pre-game and the pre-game show, and lazing out by wa...

Ten picks for Google OS. I was an early Android phone adopter, which means I've spent even longer than most people boring my friends with reasons why Google-OS-powered devices are be...

Generation Killstreak. Have you ever repainted your living room? I haven't, but I watched my Dad do it once, so I got the gist. Essentially what happens is that you get a bit bored w...

Sliding doors. The slide puzzle: crutch of every tired, lazy or creatively bankrupt game designer. Used to bulk out countless adventure games, these pictorial conundrums - in which y...

Soccer and see. Pure Football has a theory. The theory goes that somewhere out there in the wild, gated communities of Esher there exists a sub-culture of professional football playe...

Caving in. If you're unaccustomed to the turbulent world of PC upgrades, the idea of your system not being man enough to run a game is probably entirely foreign to you. Outside of th...

Reboot = the boot? When Sports Interactive announced it was resetting the Football Manager Live servers and ostensibly re-starting the game from scratch, there was understandable upr...

Hit or myth? As soon as I heard that they were remaking Clash of the Titans, I knew there'd be a videogame. Obviously. So I booked a flight to South America, chartered a boat up the ...

007/10? The legendary agent whose presence looms over Alpha Protocol's Michael Thornton isn't Bauer, Bourne or Bond - although the game is eager to invite all these comparisons. It's...

Through a glass darkly. You may not remember Black Mirror. I reviewed it, and I still couldn't remember a thing about it. But then, it was seven years ago. It was a peculiar Czech po...

He thought of cars. Project Gotham Racing may have long since disappeared into Bizarre Creations' rear-view mirror, but from Blur's first brooding, synth-infused stabs of keyboard - ...

Kick and mix. All sport is a metaphor for combat. The team games - football, rugby and so on - are sprawling battles; attackers and defenders ebb and flow up and down the field in a ...

Medical miracle. Uniquely, the Trauma Center franchise almost has an entire genre to itself. Seemingly content that Atlus has the 'surgery sim cum fantastical bioterrorist soap opera...

Baby universal. Nintendo hasn't released a straight-up sequel to a Super Mario game in almost two decades. Ignoring nominal sequels Yoshi's Island and Wario Land, Mario's own adventu...

Spawn to be mild. Let's talk a little about meaning. Meaning's important. Take the word "chronicles", for example. What does that suggest to you? An ongoing saga, perhaps. A record o...

Melody maker. Nintendo of Europe has received plenty of stick in the past over interminable delays to PAL releases and other titles never getting a release on these shores. In recent...

Norse nonsense. Zangeki no Reginleiv is a terrible game, but don't hold that against it. Some of my favourite games are terrible, like Sumotori, or Michigan: Report from Hell, or Raw...

Insane in the membrane. It's been a long time since the Cerberus jumped through the window, but ever since the popularisation of the survival horror genre some 14 years ago, I can ho...

Bomb the race. Here's the elevator pitch, Mr Bruckheimer: a brutal racing TV show, a merciless media motorsport in which contestants have to dodge traps, explosions and stage-managed...

Forgiven. A few hours after disembarking the dusty train that winds into Red Dead Redemption, reformed bandit John Marston meets a smart young journalist from Manhattan. His assignme...

A hard shoulder to cry on. Tow trucks. Proud whales of the highway. Gruff weightlifters of the road. Tanks in the war that is everyday life. Read more... ...

Is this the first true iPhone MMO? My hands hurt. They hurt in a way they haven't for years, not since my long days in Azeroth circa 2006-2008. Oh Lord, it's happened again. I have W...

Shred & Grind Inc. In Skate 3, as the old T-shirt slogan goes, "skateboarding is not a crime" - and even if it were, it would be a white-collar crime. Departing from the anti-establi...

Heir worthy. Smoke-wreathed Sicilian vineyards are my sky, Prussian-blue firmament studded with black flak flowers is my ground. I'm upside down, hurtling along at 300mph, and there's a big juicy Messe...

Heavens above. It is, perhaps, the most expensive videogame ever made. Not in the financial sense: Treasure, Japan's small yet consistently brilliant boutique developer has nothing like the resources o...

Dig for victory. Hurrah for Nippon Ichi. Not only do they tirelessly serve the needs of niche enthusiasts with games like Disgaea, but they understand the cathartic value of letting ...

Final Fright. Yesterday, I saw a goose reading a newspaper on a train. Okay, maybe I didn't. Maybe yesterday I stayed indoors and played Z...

Rediscovered country. Jun Takeuchi wasn't exaggerating when he described this sequel as "almost a totally different game". Unlike the lonely, icy adventure that constituted the origi...

Everything in moderation. Well, I managed to resist it. In all the hours I spent toying around with ModNation Racers' fantastic suite of creative tools I restrained myself from makin...

The big sleep. "It's ready when it's ready." Developers must love being able to say that. It means they're so rich and successful they don't have to worry about trivialities like rel...

Marks out of tin. There's a decent game lurking somewhere in Marvel's superhero, Iron Man. Maybe it's even a brilliant game. Sure, those palm-mounted laser cannons mean that he's goi...

Thought so. Alan Wake creator Sam Lake has spoken openly of his game's debt to Twin Peaks, referencing David Lynch's ground-breaking TV series in interviews and paying subtle tribute...

What? There's a sensation familiar to anyone who knows adventure gaming well. It's that moment when you've cracked a puzzle, and the game opens up. Suddenly there are two or three ne...