Most ordinary sports games seem to tick along with incremental updates each season, but NHL is different. Despite a legacy stretching as far back as FIFA, they completely offed their tried and tested control scheme last year, replacing it with a radical twin-stick method that played smoothly, despite making it a bit difficult to score... at least at first. ...

When you launch a new product range, your first game/cheese/film/whatever has to embody everything that’s good about the brand. SSX was the perfect launch game for EA BIG because it captured everything the label stood for; that is to say exciting, extreme and over the top. Unfortunately for EA Freestyle, flagship title FaceBreaker couldn’t be a bigger mismatch if it tried. ...

While EA are busy making sports games like Fight Night, NBA Street Homecourt, FIFA and NBA Live among the best looking titles ever crafted by the hands of man, Tiger missed the makeover bus. It’s a sad state that Links 2004 on the original Xbox STILL looks better than the latest Tiger title. Sure, Tiger has the animations and the resolution, but Links is prettier, less synthetic, and somehow richer. ...

Whoa. This is a next-gen game? The first impressions of Mercenaries 2: World in Flames aren’t going to be dislocating anybody’s jaws in amazement. Do not adjust your sets and all that, but this looks like a buttered-up PS2 game on first booting up. But then a friendly airstrike kicks in, and that subtitle, World in Flames, comes alive. ...

Fans and journalists alike have pegged Infinite Undiscovery as an attempt by the stagnating JRPG genre to jumpstart itself with new ideas and make a grand entrance onto the next-gen stage. Well, we appreciate the gesture, but Infinite Undiscovery really only goes halfway. ...

Tales of Vesperia is everything you’d expect from a Japanese role-playing game: sprawling dungeons, monster encounters and stuff about saving the world. It’s also everything you’d expect from a Tales game: epic story, angsty anime characters and drop-in, drop-out co-op. But this isn’t your granddaddy’s Tales of Symphonia with its namby-pamby plotlines and romantic relationship system; this is the Tales series all grown up and in living color. ...

If Eidos had their way there’d be a sixth Beijing mascot: a disturbing clothed monkey who appears every few seconds to cartwheel in front of the athletes during the world’s most important sporting event. ...

Apparently trying to drum up anticipation for the release of Fable 2, developer Lion Head has spewed forth this mini-collection of minigames. While designed to be passable time-wasters, these three games, including Keystone, Fortune’s Tower, and Spinnerbox also have a nefarious hook. ...

Don’t feel too bad if you’ve not even heard of the film this game has been tossed off to accompany. It’s not Pixar, and it’s not Dreamworks – they’re doing very nicely with Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda, thanks very much, and Space Chimps, with its so-so animation and C-list voice talent, is never going to be able to compete with either movie. ...

Look at that for a title. It could only be more bombastic if they tacked ‘BITCHES’ on the end. It makes absolutely no secret of being the most hardcore, epic, extreme, uncompromising real-time strategy game around. And playing it at last on 360, you start to wish they’d compromised a bit. ...