A planet ravaged by snowstorms, home to a load of angry reptilian aliens, with human colonies surviving on a mix of giant "mech" walking vehicles and hoarding thermal energy – Lost Planet's setting has always been fairly interesting. It's a shame then that this prequel so badly bodges everything.
The Saints Row series has always been something of a magpie, stealing liberally from other games. It started out as a cheap second-tier Grand Theft Auto clone. But here, it transforms into a very silly, but great fun knockabout superhero game - the most gleefully rampaging fun gameplay you'll see this week.
Hardcore First Person Shooter (FPS) fans have their own preferences for controlling their favourite 3D action games. This usually boils down to the little/big-endian dichotomy of analogue thumbstick controller or mouse+keyboard combo (WASD for movement and strafing, space to jump, click to fire.
It feels odd to consider cyberpunk - once the very bleeding edge of science fiction - as nostalgia, but what was once seen by some as an almost credible future is now to be found in the cultural dump-bin marked NINETIES, alongside the Tamagotchi, platform trainers and clamshell mobile phones.
In Deus Ex: The Fall you play Ben Saxon, a cybernetically-enhanced mercenary out for vengeance against a global conspiracy responsible for the deaths of his comrades. Saxon's plotline is a continuation of Icarus Effect, a tie-in novel to the PC/console game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The two games share background more than plot, but that background is well drawn and makes for an immersive world full of assassins, hired guns and cyberpunk conspiracy.
This curious strategy series popped out of the head of legendary games-maker Shigeru "Mario, Donkey Kong" Miyamoto when he started gardening. But beneath the verdant landscapes and gigantic primary-coloured fruits there is a darker, richer soil.
Just go and buy it and download it right now, OK? Gunpoint is fantastic for so many reasons. But primarily it's fantastic because it plays fantastically. It's easy to lose sight of that fact when you learn the back story behind the game, when it's put in context. But let's not lose sight of this – Gunpoint is great fun to play.
Among gamers, suggesting that Nintendo is not a publisher of brilliant games is tantamount to heresy. Yet here it is: Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros. would, if it were not published by Nintendo, receive a far worse critical reaction than it's likely to get.
At first glance, Rogue Legacy looks like a straight retro platformer in the vein of Castlevania or The Lost Vikings. You must negotiate a castle and other environs made up of floating platforms, floor spikes and fireball-spewing traps while collecting loot hidden in chests or inside the smashable furniture while being harried by varied enemies who mostly follow set paths.
Fusing the intensity of first-person shooters like the Call of Duty series with top-down strategy games doesn't immediately seem a good fit. First-person shooters work because you respond viscerally to bullets flying past your face and the fear of the battlefield as you sprint through mayhem, dodging and weaving. Strategy games, even the realtime modern videogame versions, rely on a cerebral strategising – often sacrificing men as pawns in a broader scheme. Yet fusing these two ideas is exactly what Company of Heroes 2 tries to do and mostly succeeds at.