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. ...