Can a top-down shooter ever truly be scary? People have certainly tried to light us up with frights over the years; Larva Mortus is a solid recent attempt from independent developers Rake in Grass. Demonic faces come screaming out of the screen, while your sword and shotgun make short work of zombies. ...

The first things that’ll strike you about The Last Remnant, after its perplexingly long install process on Steam has completed, is that the menu system is a confusing mess. All the information is there, but navigating is a pain in the posterior. We even resorted to plugging in an Xbox 360 pad, which promptly failed to work. ...

The last few years have seen Defense of the Ancients devour millions of man hours, both in its original incarnation as a WarCraft III mod, and in its refined DotA Allstars evolution. League of Legends, by the original team, is here to provide the definitive version. It’s a multiplayer-only RTS battle between two teams. ...

Rescue is here - after a long, bloody battle with countless zombies, you and three fellow survivors have made it to the rooftop of a ravaged hospital, where a helicopter lands to evacuate you to safety. In a blaze of gunfire and guts, you and two of your companions fight your way to the helipad and climb aboard the chopper, but the fourth member of your team is wounded and limping behind you. ...

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 ...

On the surface, Legend: Hand of God seems like a shamelessly derivative, punishingly unimaginative isometric action/RPG...

Oh, were you expecting a second, more positive part of that sentence? Sorry, no dice - this game is pure surface. ...

Were we a sniffy historical type, we might point out that it wasn’t Pandora’s Box at all, but rather a jar. Are jars more or less dramatic than boxes? Either way the mislabeled box in Legendary is one that contains not all the evils of the world, but generic monsters and one awesome rubble-golem the size of a block of apartments. ...

Who is Batman to you? The violent lawman of the modern comics? The wink-wink star of the 60’s TV show? Tim Burton’s gothic icon, perhaps? The point is this: Travellers’ Tales have never had a subject so open to LEGO interpretation, and with it, playful experimentation. And boy, do they love it. Did you feel that Indy was a tad shackled to his tombs and dusty continents? ...

How can a game that’s identical to the brilliant LEGO Star Wars in almost every respect not be as good? Simple - the setting. The Star Wars universe is vibrant, colourful and fantastical, while Indy’s real-world ’40s setting is more subdued. This works in the context of the films, but recreated in LEGO it has none of the outlandish flair of Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. ...