Heavy Rain is an admirably ambitious creation capable of engrossing the mind and engaging the emotions like few games that have gone before. Visually and aurally it’s a decadent feast for the senses, but its frequent descents into ham-fisted schlock and downright broken storytelling ultimately make it a clumsy case of style over substance. It’s a likeable mess if you don’t think too hard, but nevertheless, a mess it remains.

Let’s keep it good and simple: Modern Warfare 2 is this year’s must-buy first-person shooter.

Taking place some years after the original title, BioShock 2 features the first Big Daddy returning to Rapture to stop the Big Sister and her ilk. Also, some long-awaited multiplayer has been added to the series.

God of War is a mighty tough act to emulate and Inferno clearly isn’t in the same league, but though this copycat is flawed it’s a guilty pleasure for those who can’t wait for the real thing.

Kudos to Zipper for being trailblazers in terms of how many people you can cram into a game but beyond this USP, MAG is a fairly generic affair. It all works well but it isn’t mind-blowing. And with a full-price tag, minus an offline campaign, it’s hard to see where the value for money lies here.

Using the PlayStation Eye camera, EyePet interacts with users in their own living rooms. It’s a little too creepily real, and also it isn’t much of a game, but it is a nice distraction.

If you’ve got serious time on your hands or are velvety-tongued enough to convince three other douches to get involved online, then this repetitive port of a PSP game might at times be classed as so-bad-it’s-good. And we guess that’s a start, if nothing else.

Bigger, bloodier and far more epic than its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed II is a must-play for anyone who loves adventure, swordplay and climbing around on classical architecture.

In spite of lifting nearly every gameplay element from other, often better games, Darksiders still succeeds at bringing these disparate threads together into a brutally satisfying whole. It’s also a blast to explore even at its low points, and if the idea of a Zelda with a more “mature” bent and better combat catches your interest, you’ll want to check this out.

Dragon Age: Origins is high fantasy role-playing at its finest. Its detailed world, memorable characters, meaningful choices, and engrossing combat system makes Dragon Age the sort of game you’ll want to replay from start to finish several times. RPG fans won’t be disappointed by this truly epic adventure.