One of the most striking things about Aion is its grand visuals and fantastic environments. The azure skies, fantastical fauna, and floating cities in Aion make for a nice break from the boars and dusty castles you’re used to seeing in fantasy MMOs. But it’s the highly detailed lore that really helps create a vibrant and believable fantasy world. ...

Where are you hiding it Order of War? Where’s that nugget of novelty, that pinch of personality that sets you apart from the rest of the Company of Blitzkrieg set?

It’s certainly not in your two nine-mission campaigns. They’re as predictable as they come – dreary slogging matches with almost no room for tactical experimentation. ...

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising doesn’t have save points - it uses checkpoints. Whoa there, hold on a minute. Don’t go slouching off, grumbling about consoles and whatnot. It’s not that bad. These checkpoints actually work. They don’t always work, but they do the job better than the solitary save game in the first game did. ...

The difficult thing is trying to describe what AI War actually is. It’s an RTS with turn-based combat. It’s tower defence with spaceships and wormholes. It’s galactic conquest where the silliest thing you can do is try to conquer everything. It’s a skirmish game where the AI has no interest in pretending it’s a human player. ...

Having spent a considerable amount of effort collecting every herb and mushroom we could find, we must confess that we began to question our sanity. The giant vultures, porcupines and killer butterflies that harassed us as we made our way across the island suddenly seemed a little suspicious.

Were they merely hallucinations? ...

Heroes Over Europe takes an almost Michael Bay approach to World War II. While some of the missions, locations and aircraft manage an educated nod to the events of history, accuracies take a back seat for the benefit of gameplay. ...

We hated every moment of this second combat-orientated Watchmen game. Bad guys get hit. Lots of bad guys. And then blood flies everywhere, and Rorschach punches people in the groin and, like, Nite Owl breaks arms in half or something. A ‘Rage’ meter keeps track of their anger and makes them go crazy when it’s full. ...

How would the Civil War have been different if you’d been there with a modern machine gun? I’ll tell you: It’d have been much more awesome. In Darkest of Days, you play as a 19th-century American soldier plucked out of his own time moments before becoming a casualty at General Custer’s Last Stand. ...

Every once in a while, you have to reassess what you think you know about something: using animals for medical research, representative democracy, Sinead O’Connor - anything. You have to acknowledge that circumstances can change over time, and that you could benefit by giving things a fresh look. That’s what Capcom did when it decided to renew its efforts to make PC games as if the PC was the only platform it developed for. ...

No doubt about it, drafting in British developers Slightly Mad Studios has revitalised the series and turned it into a serious contender. Of course, it helps that Need for Speed SHIFT has clearly used last year’s king of the road, Codemaster’s brilliant GRID, as its benchmark.

Gone are the police. ...