World of Goo is breathtakingly fresh while built on the foundations of genre classics. It offers a gentle challenge as you make your way through its seasonal chapters the first time, and then a fiendish one as you try to fathom quite how it's possible to attain the OCD targets.

Modern Warfare 2 balances the spectacle and silliness of its single-player campaign with a deep, enduring multiplayer core, carefully covering its bases for players of all persuasions. But there is no denying it seeks merely to build upon the successes of its forebear while doing very little to expand its scope or redefine them.

Perhaps not the deepest of games, revolving as it does around slaughtering demons and finding the appropriate key-substitute to open the next door, but it's certainly one of the most stylish and downright entertaining I've played in recent months.

It's a role-playing game in the most literal sense of the phrase, a game in which you're encouraged to give in to the fantasy, and to see what life is like when it's composed of rooftop brawls and zip-line getaways. Animations, traversal mechanics, takedowns: they're all building towards the same thing. In Arkham City, you become Batman.

This game is one of the greatest things that video games have ever achieved.

Is BioShock the greatest game of all time? I honestly don't know, but it's one of the most interesting and immersive experiences to grace our beloved medium.

It transcends the very genre it once created.

If you want to gorge on a next generation audio-visual feast then Gears of Wars is a king's banquet. But what of the gameplay pudding that Peter Moore so often reminds us that he likes? The proof, he says, is in the eating, and in this case Gears of War sticks to a well-worn recipe.

A staggeringly ambitious game that successfully unites some of the best elements of RPG, adventure and action games and fuses them into a relentlessly immersive and intoxicating whole.

BioShock Infinite doesn't blur the lines between your reality and the game's to quite the same extent as its predecessor, but it's a more complete and polished story, and that's the thing you'll remember.

It succeeds not only for being consistently spectacular, but for the way it has been crafted into something that keeps you engaged right to the very end.

The best game yet in one of the best FPS franchises of the era. Better than either of its predecessors, Halo 3 still can't quite escape the category of flawed masterpiece - but this time around, the flaws are so minor that even the most churlish of reviewers would be hard pressed to mark the game down.

As it stands, it's the offline arcade racing game to end them all, with an online implementation that falls frustratingly short of expectations.

The important thing, above all else, is that it's extremely good fun, a fantastic showcase for the technology (particularly on iPhone 4) and comfortably the most rewarding mobile driving game money can buy right now.

If you've never played MGS3 before it's a must-buy. That's what we've made our final judgement based on; while this may not be great value for someone who paid full price for the game previously, for collectors, online gaming fans or people who haven't played MGS3, this is absolutely the definitive version of one of the finest games on the PlayStation 2.

Modern Warfare 2 balances the spectacle and silliness of its single-player campaign with a deep, enduring multiplayer core, carefully covering its bases for players of all persuasions. But there is no denying it seeks merely to build upon the successes of its forebear while doing very little to expand its scope or redefine them.

Guns of the Patriots is a frustrating, fractured game that turns Metal Gear Solid's world upside down several times over, but never changes it.

Stands out as an absolute colossus that towers over the competition - on any format.

The best Star Wars game since "X-Wing" and/or "Tie Fighter," if not ever. Unless something entirely unbelievable descends from the heavens, it's the RPG of the year. If the remaining major players fumble even slightly, it's game of the year.

It’s good. Damn good. In fact, I’ll certainly go as far as saying it’s the best pure strategy game I’ve played this year, and that’s good enough for me.

It's consistently satisfying over long periods, fulfilling its usual role of dominating a willing crowd's evening into the early hours, and now allowing you to sustain that after everyone's gone home using the Internet.

It's beautiful, though that's entirely the wrong word. This is a war game, so the word should be "visceral" or something. Models are hugely detailed for an RTS, physics implemented impressively and so on. But relevantly, it's a functional sort of beauty (or - er - viscerality).

What's immediately apparent is that it's been balanced incredibly carefully.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a triumph, not just in terms of bringing a difficult game to a new platform intact, but because it actually improves it in the process, and demonstrates a mastery of DS form and function.

To say that this is a must-buy is doing it a disservice; it's a game you'll want to instantly evangelise to anyone with even the vaguest sense of what makes a game good.

Epic has created the mother of all first-person shooters with this game - over a hundred maps, a selection of diverse and extremely well balanced game modes, built in voice communications, intelligent bots, a great offline play mode, good network code, a superb server browser and a solid graphics engine. Onslaught alone is worth the price of entry, but the game as a whole is a stunning package.

Braid is beautiful, entertaining and inspiring. It stretches both intellect and emotion, and these elements dovetail beautifully rather than chaffing against each other. Still wondering if games can be art? Here's your answer.

Maybe the one notable down-side of this incredible sequel is that it is 'just' the second part of a game we all loved two years ago, and even die-hards like myself have to acknowledge that. As such, as refined and honed as the gameplay is as a whole, you can never quite replicate the wow factor of the original - even if it ends up being a better game.