Velocity 2X

Fast and furiously good.

The first Velocity, which began life as a PSP Mini before getting tarted up for an Ultra Vita version, was rightly lauded for its courage and innovation. Rather than simply go again with this full blown sequel, Brighton-based Futurlab has clearly striven to inject new ideas. Strip the whole thing down and you’ve got a tight, responsive vertical-scrolling shooter. It’s atop this sturdy foundation that a genre powerhouse is constructed, with innovation as the mortar and iconic and frankly gorgeous comic book visuals as the building blocks. There’s even a proper story in there.

Diablo III : Ultimate Evil Edition

Get suited and looted for a Beelzebub bombshell.

Blizzard has an unfair reputation for plugging its fingers in its ears when good times go bad. For all its immediately apparent quality, the original PC release of Diablo III was marred by a real money auction house that even the big B admitted had fudged its intricate loot systems.

It also had always-online requirements infamously coupled with crippling connectivity issues. Compounding those missteps was the kind of immense fan expectation that can only come from a game baking in the development oven for over a decade. It’s pleasing then that this Ultimate Evil Edition proves that actually, not only is Blizzard capable of listening and acting on fan feedback, but that it’s a studio that really does understand that oft rolled-out opinion that games nowadays are more of a service than a single out-of-the-door-and-be-done-with-it product.

Hohokum

Honeyslug opens its own can of worms.

This is a game about surprise, exploration and discovery. More so, in fact, than any other game we can immediately recall. Developer Honeyslug, who previously made oddball compendium Frobisher Says, offers little in the way of direction other than to tell you that X makes you go faster, and Circle does the opposite.

There’s not even any instruction on what to do to exit the opening hub level and find the first one proper. And for this reason, while we’re loathe to turn you away, if you really want to enjoy this game to its fullest we’d recommend you avoid reading anything about it. Before you go, though, just one thing: it’s definitely worth playing.

MSI X99S SLI Plus

The X99 SLI Plus is the cheapest board in this test, although its £160 price is still high compared to many boards for cheaper and older platforms – a problem of buying new enthusiast-level technology so close to launch. The name suggests that this board concentrates on multi-GPU setups, and that’s true to a point. But, as with MSI’s more expensive Gaming 7 board, while the SLI Plus can technically support four graphics cards, you could only install three cards with dual-slot coolers.

Of course, harnessing the power of three graphics cards is an effective use of Haswell-E’s 40 PCI-E 3 lanes, but every other manufacturer offers support for quad SLI with four dual-slot cards on its boards.

MSI X99S Gaming 7

The MSI X99S Gaming 7 is half the price of the Asus Rampage V Xtreme, but it’s almost as goodlooking. It has a similar red and black theme, with black heatsinks banded with red metal, while a glowing MSI Gaming Series is illuminated on the chipset heatsink.

It’s a good start, and the Gaming 7 ticks most of the basic boxes too. It supports up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM, which is twice the capacity of some rival boards, and it has ten SATA 6Gbps ports, a SATA Express port and one M.2 connector – a storage specification that’s on a par with much more expensive products. As usual, using the M.2 socket knocks out a couple of SATA ports.