It’s uncompromising and involved and may not be for everyone, but you sense it’s the game Bizarre have been meaning to make for the last seven years, and for that alone, it’s precious. [Nov 2007, p.86]

Is 2010 about the show or the sport? It is, like the UFC itself, ready to be both. This confidence is what makes it such a complete and compelling package – a great MMA sim, a near flawless UFC sim. In a year, it’s made the kind of studious jump that took FIFA almost ten.

An ambitious and largely successful attempt to meld the accuracy of traditional firstperson battling with the extra spatial agility and awareness afforded by thirdperson movement. It does feel slightly overdone, but not to the point of obscuring its offering of intensity and flighty action. [May 2005, p.90]

It's a puzzle game and a strategy game as much as an action game, then, and like Rockstar's Manhunt, it will sicken you even as it provides its murky thrills.

The fundamentals of the game are intoxicating.

Nintendo has clearly been experimenting with how to better exploit its system's obvious potential, and its solution is a natural, graceful implementation of 3D that complements and even improves its games, rather than feeling tacked on.

The micromanagement is on a previously unimagined macro scale and yet is accessible and coherent enough to draw you in, making hours of concentrated playtime pass like minutes. [Dec 2003, p.101]

The triumph of SpaceChem is that overcoming these situations is more a case of inventing a solution than discovering one - creating a technique on your own terms that, once learned, you find yourself reusing in later stages. [Apr 2011, p.101]

Fight Night has tirelessly rebuilt itself when many expected retirement. Cautious improvements from Round 4 - the removal of the cut-man game and automation of recovery - have been confidently reinforced, while ring physics, ragdolls and cloth dynamics are in a different class to the chaotic Round 3. [Apr 2011, p.103]

Once again, Criterion still manages to stand out and offer something fresh, setting a new standard in open-world driving games with - that word again - a seamless feast of quality. [Dec 2012, p.98]

With such a focus, People Can Fly has made the best game possible: one which is smart enough to make a case for looking dumb. [Apr 2011, p.86]

A perfectly sized, expertly-crafted romp, Pacific gives other download games their marching orders. [Aug 2009, p.97]

To have been worth the wait for PC gamers it would have needed to considerably improve on the Xbox original. Put simply, it doesn't. [Dec 2003, p.109]

It can be a little basic in places, and it isn’t a ‘paradigm shift’ in any sense, but it is proof that games can love their roots and use the quality of being a ‘game’ to give form to their stories – and excel at it. [Feb 2008, p.90]

ODST doesn’t quite take Halo into unfamiliar territory, but it does show how robust and adaptable the core of the game is – and, more importantly, stands on its own two feet as a spin-off that’s better than the vast majority of original games.

SFXT successfully combines the best of the most popular 2D and 3D fighting games in the world, proves Capcom's most newcomer-friendly fighter, and boasts a combat system of bewildering depth. If any company was going to move the genre forward, it seems fitting that it's the one that invented it.

For a game with a premise as simple as kill the aliens before they kill you, Ziggurat's stylishly retro visuals, gleeful arcade precision and deeply interlocking mechanics trigger a chain reaction that kicks off like some interstellar combustion. Not the sound of a world ending. But the sort of bang that would make Richard Dawkins lean back, fold his arms and grin like a chimp.

While certainly being Treasure's most fragmented game, there’s a sense that the lack of narrative, character and even proper framework makes this its most raw, pure and delightful. [June 2008, p.95]

Complex but accessible, inventive yet familiar, a game that has gripped browser windows is every bit as troublingly addictive in the palm of your hand.

The action creeps up slowly, starting out like a gorgeous-looking but fairly standard shoot 'em up. However, by the middle of level two, it's pummelling you with a relentless parade of conceptual set pieces so audacious and inventive you'll laugh with delight as you gape in horror. [Sept 2004, p.94]

A fairytale comeback. Extravagance was one of the signatures of the graphic adventure: extravagance to bring them in, and a cracking story well told to keep them.Both tenets of the Broken Sword series remain intact here, and that's all the devoted fans could have wanted. [Christmas 2003, p.94]

Its prudence, that veil of simplicity masking a system of astonishing possibility and depth, makes it one of the purest fighting games on the market today.

It's a dazzling experience, combining carefree spectacle with careful score attack, a game that's as concerned with its looks as the precision of its underlying mathematical systems. [JPN Import; June 2009, p.94]

Halo exhibits a single-minded focus that the modern FPS, with its choreographed set-pieces and thrilling scripted sequences, largely disregards. This is a game about the arc of a perfectly thrown grenade, a game about tense games of cat-and-mouse with foes as powerful as you, a game about constant improvisation with the tools at your disposal. It's a game that always feels tactical, and a game that – even now – has the capacity to surprise.

From Dust's not magnificent because of its breezy intricacy and rugged grasp of geology. It's magnificent because it's designed with a playful deity in mind. It's built for a god who knows that to succeed is human, 
but to err – and to be creatively led astray time after time – is truly divine.

A fairytale comeback. Extravagance was one of the signatures of the graphic adventure: extravagance to bring them in, and a cracking story well told to keep them. Both tenets of the Broken Sword series remain intact here, and that's all the devoted fans could have wanted. [Christmas 2003, p.94]

Simply for the harrowing elegance of this risk-reward proposition, Impossible Road’s lone developer Kevin Ng deserves to have his pockets paved with gold.

This is far, far more than a nostalgic return to form - instead, it's a game so adept at exploiting its own heritage that it can integrate thorough modernity into its design without denting its retro appeal in the slightest. [Sept 2006, p.78]