It’s brilliant. Don’t buy it. The copy protection of Assassin’s Creed II requires you to be connected to publisher Ubisoft’s servers every moment you play. Any interruption to that connection kicks you out and erases all the progress you’ve made since the last checkpoint. …

It’s games like this that make Relic one of the best PC developers operating today. When I reviewed the outstanding Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, my chief criticism of the campaign was the excessive repetition of simple “fight from point A to point B, then fight a boss” missions. …

Appropriately enough Bad Company 2 begins by kicking the doors in and unloading a shotgun blast of thrills in your face. Following a brief, straightforward prologue you’re pitched into the snowy wastes of Alaska (not to mention 24-style intrigue) as the Bad Company boys stumble across a Russian plot involving a terrifying experimental weapon. Given that almost every gun you can pick up here doubles as a grenade launcher, that’s quite a threat. …

Deep breaths everybody: Star Trek Online doesn’t let you explore uncharted space, doesn’t conjure intriguing, brain-taxing mysteries, doesn’t let you come up with last-minute pseudoscientific ripostes to alien threats. And the celebrity voice work is a bit bland. They’re developers, not miracle workers. …

The best tactic we’ve come up with is the Cybrannosaurus Bubblebath. A hovering triangle wafts into your base and drops a dinosaur on you. The dinosaur is large, about the size of a dinosaur, and has a robotic head that breathes fire. A moment later, 25 translucent spheres pop up around it. …

When Grenadier Francois-Joseph Jacquin, writer of Carnet De Route D’un Grognard, returned from the wars in 1815, his father and brothers hadn’t a clue who he was. When he walked into the kitchen and embraced his mother, they pounced on him shouting “Let go soldier! What are you doing?” A decade of Napoleonic conflict had changed him beyond all recognition. …

Our favorite sound, probably out of all of them, is the ones made by aliens when they’re being horrifically slaughtered in their second film, Aliens. It is, we think, based on a heavily distorted recording of a trumpeting elephant, sped up to make it absolutely terrifying in a way only the panicked, high-pitched scream of a flailing pachyderm can be.

In second place it’s the dense, tinny shred of a pulse rifle. …

As the captain of an interdimensional craft, you crash your ship, lose your crew, and then get lost yourself. To put it right again, you must explore the collapsing VVVVVV dimension, where you move by upending gravity.

VVVVVV is a 2D platformer where you can’t jump. Instead you flip gravity on its head and fall upwards (by pressing ‘V’ – or space, or Z), then flip it back. …

Global Agenda is a unique, genre-defying multiplayer action game. Yes, we realize we just called it an “action game” but that’s just so you don’t think MMORPG and have your eyes get all milky like a zombie’s, while your mouth hangs open as your brain shuts down. Global Agenda is an MMO. Sort of. It’s a shooter. Sort of. And it’s also slightly RPG-ish. Whoops, did we lose you there? Hold on, come back here! Everyone gets a free jetpack! …

First, a confession. We thought BioShock 2 was a mistake.

As much as we worshipped the original, we worried about the possibility of a sequel. Though we longed to experience another game with that level of mature, masterful storytelling and with that number of unique, unusual ideas, we seriously doubted such brilliance could be captured again. While we desperately wished to revisit the haunting underwater dystopia of Rapture, we …

Most fighting games demand precision, dexterity and dedication to get the most out of them. Robotic ragdoll fighter Sumotori Dreams needs none of that and turns out just fine. Take up to four robots, which have the ability to right themselves if they fall over, and pit them against each other in a shoving match. …

The console version of this WWII flight-not-quite-sim was blessed with an IL2-Sturmovik prefix, but the publishers clearly knew they’d be playing with fire if they waved that revered title around willy-nilly on the PC. Sturmovik is the first and last name in combat flight simulation. …

Like the first two games, STALKER: Call of Pripyat is a game of contradictions. At times it’s glorious and exciting, a further refinement of the now age-old STALKER template. Yet, as ever, most of the idiosyncrasies that define the series are still present and correct, making this pretty much the same game you’ve played twice before. …

People play games for many different reasons. Some enjoy driving a car in a circle, while others prefer jumping around collecting shiny baubles. Then there are the miscreants who love nothing more than pointing and clicking on whatever they want to die. These are all admirable pastimes, and the games industry has become expert at packaging such experiences into a package best described as “cinematic.” …

Groan, groan, groan to the high heavens. Is this truly all we have to look forward to for the next 10 billion years? Do we just have to watch some guy who looks pretty much the same in every single game trudging about scenery rendered in Unreal Tournament 3’s engine? Are developers deliberately failing to come up with anything new whatsoever to shape their games? …

It’s a little hard to take a game about surviving the undead apocalypse seriously when it slavishly follows seatbelt laws. No, sorry Mr. Fifth Survivor, we can’t give you a lift to safety – this taxi only legally has room for four people. What do you mean you could squeeze in? Don’t be ridiculous. And for goodness’ sake stop crying. …

No, wait! Dragons, come back! We didn’t mean it! Without you, any excitement inherent in this Russian roleplayer’s narrative is dispelled! Too late, they’re gone. And so is any real engagement with A Farewell to Dragons. …

Twin Sector plays like an amateur dramatics performance of Portal. That might sound mean, but we’re actually a little bit in love with this game. A fun first-person environmental puzzler, its conceit – investigating a disaster in an underground bunker – sees you with a pair gravity manipulating gloves. …

Amazing. Ambitious. Avant-garde.

These are reactions that The Saboteur, in concept alone, first inspires. When we heard about the free-roaming 1940s Paris setting, we dared to dream of an open-world epic with class and style in place of the usual crime and sex. …

The key to streamlining a concept is knowing when to stop hacking at it. Sacraboar has stripped too much from the RTS template, to the detriment of its one-on-one capture the flag action.

Two opponents face off over a symmetrical map, each of their bases stocked with a castle (for troop spawning), a power station (they speed up construction) and a pig (your bacon flavored flag). …

The end is here, the series that could so easily have been a thundering disaster has turned out to be a pleasant surprise, on the whole. Despite having perhaps some of the lowest lows of any major Telltale series, it also has the highest highs, averaging out somewhere in the “ah, that was nice” zone when you finish all five episodes. …

It doesn’t seem to be possible for PopCap to release a bad game. Sure, they’ve had a few partial misses in the past, but since Peggle exploded, they’ve just nailed that treble 20 each time. Zuma’s Revenge is just the next game off their conveyor belt of fiendishly addictive, quality casual titles. …

In 2001, Paradox Interactive released Europa Universalis II, a grand strategy game where players managed a country in a Eurocentric vision of the world from 1419 to 1820. The community immediately set to work increasing its already preposterous girth. Their AGCEEP mod (Alternative Grand Campaign Event Exchange Project) ended up adding more than 10,000 true-to-life historical events. …

If you’ve managed to get to level 60 in The Lord of the Rings Online, the chances are that you like it. That’s the entry point for this download-only second expansion (which also includes the original game and the first expansion), which after whacking goblins in the gloomy Mines of Moria sees you whacking goblins in the mirky woods of Mirkwood. …

Judging an RPG by its towns is usually a safe bet. Does the urban intrigue come so thick and fast that you get anxious about skipping a single house? That’s good. Or are they a porridge of stone walls and side quests? That’s bad. …