Games

Visually beautiful and refreshingly accessible, DriveClub is an automotive sim with an arcade bent, and as such it’s a tad more fun than Forza. You start with a hot hatch and work your way up to better wheels. Racing solo, progressing from Rookie to Legend, takes some time to unlock the best cars – in multiplayer mode, you’ll make far faster progress.

Let's not beat around the bush, F1 2010 is easily the best Formula One game to ever grace a games console. Heck, why stop there - it's also the best attempt at capturing the motorsport in videogame form since the glory days of the Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix series.

Sun, sea and shooting are the order of the day in this superb first-person action game. Eschewing the genre's usual fondness for funnelling players down carefully-disguised corridors, Far Cry 3 gives you an open-world tropical island to explore as you try to rescue your chums from vicious pirates.

When it came to football games I was always a Pro Evolution Soccer man. However, since the dawn of the current generation of games consoles, like other fans, I'd suffered through several iterations of PES that failed to live up to expectations, struggling to come to terms with the graphical capabilities offered by the hardware and seemingly taking a step backwards in gameplay terms at the same time. And the ever-popular FIFA franchise was no solution, seemingly still stuck in creating a more arcade-based take on the sport that traded depth for special moves.

It’s now 15 years since the PlayStation release of Final Fantasy VII brought the Japanese RPG franchise to the attention of mainstream gamers across the globe. But the intervening years have seen a change of fortune for developer Square Enix, with the Final Fantasy brand becoming a victim of its own success and struggling to live up to former glories.

Surely nobody really expected that a franchise as lucrative as Microsoft's third-person shooter would end when Marcus Fenix hung up his gun at the end of Gears of War 3? After all, the Locust War established that there was a whole universe of narrow corridors and waist-high barriers for soldiers to battle through...

Okay, so Rockstar's latest isn't exactly enlightened in its depiction of women. And, yes, it contains a rather troubling torture scene. But these are ultimately small concerns when placed in the context of what is surely the most outstanding, exhilarating and multilayered open-world game ever.