IGN

Halo 4 is a masterstroke everyone can and should celebrate, and its two guaranteed sequels instantly make the next-generation Xbox a must-own system, with Halo 5 its most anticipated title. Halo has been rebuilt. It has been redefined. And it has been reinvigorated. The Xbox’s original king has returned to his rightful place on the throne.

I didn't have much hope for Harvest Moon: A New Beginning going in, as I suspected it'd just be another of the franchise's annual revisits to the same old series staples. The same tried-and-true fundamentals.

For a downloadable game, Pid provides a lot of bang for your buck. There are collectibles to find and secret areas to uncover, a hard mode to play through once you beat the game on normal, and more. And while Pid can be frustrating and even obtuse at times, its unique approach to the puzzle-platformer – most reminiscent of the underplayed PSN game Rochard – is worth taking a look at.

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation is a simplified version of the Assassin's Creed franchise. The moves and kills you'd expect are here, but the story is boiled down to be easy to jump in and out of. That takes away some of the excitement in playing through it.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I wanted to like Ragnarok Odyssey. It was one of the PlayStation Vita games I was most looking forward to. But when all of its deficits stack up on one another, Ragnarok Odyssey comes precariously close to being a bad game. It starts out fun, quickly falls into an endless loop, and never goes anywhere. That’s a huge problem.

Okami is one of the finest games to come out of Japan in the last decade, and Okami HD is absolutely the best way to experience this epic adventure. Its re-release is rather timely too, given Japanese game publishers are currently preoccupied with creating games that will appeal in the West. Okami, in contrast, represents a pure, resolutely Japanese vision, and is all the more appealing for it.

As someone who counts myself among their ranks, I've never particularly enjoyed SFxT, but I know plenty of people to whom tournaments, strategies and nuances mean nothing, and they tend to have a good time with it. That doesn't magically make its faults disappear, but it does mean you could have a perfectly good time with it, provided you're the right type of player.

Lopping off appendages in gory displays of warrior aggression makes Chivalry: Medieval Warfare's up-close and personal melee combat a gritty and fulfilling on a primal level. Though the lack of complexity sometimes works both for and against it, getting caught up in the flow of battle yields many hours of man-stabbing amusement. Like its competition, Chivalry hasn't quite perfected the formula for medieval warfare, but it's a violent, fun time nonetheless.

The game may take somewhat longer than usual to find its stride, and sliding the stylus simply isn’t as fulfilling as tapping it when it comes to world exploration, but the game’s accomplishments far outweigh these trifling complaints. Puzzle lovers young and old should make it a point to unravel the mysteries of the Miracle Mask.

Hotline Miami’s momentum of mystery builds right up to its finale, where snarling cynicism is offered as a justification for why all this machinery of neon fuzz and thumping bass, bright blood and fractured identity was started up in the first place. Yet the justification is also disarmingly simple, the same reason why quarters were dropped into arcade machines built during the late ‘80s era Dennaton Games so clearly reveres.