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. ...

The urge to look for a door never quite leaves you. Which is hardly surprising, given that the regular gaming protagonist, carrying an arsenal that would embarrass an army, still can’t circumvent the flimsiest wooden obstruction. Yet in Red Faction: Guerrilla, Alex Mason makes his own entrances. With a hammer.

There is nothing in this game, aside from its mountains, that cannot be smashed to bits. ...

As a rule of thumb, superhero games are, almost without exception, complete rubbish. We’re talking the officially licensed ones here, not stuff like Freedom Force or City of Heroes. You know, ones that have often have “The Game” tacked on as a subtitle. Would Batman: Arkham Asylum have been as good if it was riding the back of a big movie license? ...