Unlike most other shooters, Left 4 Dead hinges on cooperative multiplayer. You and three friends must shoot, tear and slash through an unrelenting mass of raging zombies. From the moment you leave the safe house to the final rescue chopper, you are completely dependent on each other and constantly hunted by special boss zombies that behave with their own aggressive, strategizing intelligence ...

Certain sports are tough to recreate in the “interactive digital medium,” cricket and rugby seemingly being the most difficult to pull off. Yet this effort is one of the best attempts we’ve seen, despite it looking rougher than a man in a sandpaper leotard. ...

While no sports game will ever properly recreate what it’s like to participate in the activity, they can at least make it look like you’re watching the sport on the TV. NBA 2K10 does this almost perfectly, with superb commentary and broadcast presentation making every game a big occasion. ...

And so, on to the fourth episode of Tales do we go, with the series progressing nicely. The end is nearing though and Telltale should now, surely, have begun to move on from merely being good to reminding us why we all loved the Monkey Island games in the first place. Whether they manage this is open to debate, sadly. ...

There’s an abundance of chrome, explosions, flashing lights and sincere-sounding commentators exuding a casual enthusiasm regarding the brutality taking place before them. Welcome to Metal Drift, a futuristic sporting arena that has a lot in common with the likes of Rollerball and Speedball, but with oh-so-floaty hovertanks. ...

In our first race, we took the corner too fast. As we smacked into the crash barrier, we saw the hood fly up and away. In the rearview mirror, about 20 cars thundered past in a billow of dust, and one of our wheels followed meekly behind them.

A lot of RACE On’s energies are devoted to letting you live your WTCC (World Touring Car Championship) fantasies. ...

As dream-walking, tough-talking psychologist Alice Drake, you must enter your patients’ nightmares to fight their fears. With a minigun. The world’s only First-Person Freud-’em-up. The 12 dream-levels are a series of lush set-pieces connected by short corridors; the diverse gallery of baddies is often functionally identical – either a little dude, a slow dude with rockets, or an enormo-dude. ...

Remember the smart, weird kid in your class? This platform puzzler is that boy: clever, but no looks or personality. It’s just you and a grapple gun, trapped in 22 levels of cuboid puzzlement. Reach a teleporter to escape each level, pick up the access codes along the way, avoid electrified panels. The trick is to use your grapple gun to hook onto the green areas dotted tactically around levels. ...

Imagine a game where you plant trees that grow on asteroids, produce seedlings that fly, and send these to new asteroids to grow new trees. What makes the resulting RTS so smart, beautiful and compelling is the neatness with which this astroscience fantasy is presented. Clear, logical relationships and a look halfway between Japanese inkbrush art and scientific insemination diagrams. ...

This is a fizzing neon vision of the scrolling shooter: a limited left-right arena in which waves of beautifully abstract baddies come whirling towards you, spitting bullets as they go, and turning into even more deadly enemies if you don’t deal with them swiftly. In other words, Astro Tripper is pure videogame. ...