Are wonderful visuals, brilliant sailing mechanics, and fun activities like playing music and throwing up on your crewmates after drinking too much grog enough? For a few hours sure, but probably not in the long term. What’s here is extremely polished and wonderful to look at. And if the simple joys of sailing through Sea of Thieves gorgeous world clicks with you as it did me, then however long you spend visiting outposts and islands and strange wrecks – will be time well spent.

No matter the art form, there’s always room for a good sci-fi story. The Station, from a team of veteran developers who worked on titles like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and BioShock Infinite, offers a great sci-fi ending. One that is both memorable and, in a way, fun. The only real issue is that outside of the narrative there really isn’t much to the puzzle solving and exploration. Reading emails, listening to audio recordings of conversations, and taking in a space bedroom or two. Stuff we’ve seen and handled more intuitively before.

There’s something about it that keeps you coming back, whether that’s the fun exploration or simply going on a quest to clear a few houses of infestations and then loot all the cupboards and drawers for goodies. But above all that it does nail the combat side, where headshots feel great as does getting up close with a machete. Gruesome and fun zombie-apocalypse survival, but also bug-ridden and poorly optimised.

In the case of Jettomero: Hero of the Universe, either the presentation strikes a chord hidden deep inside you or it doesn’t. If it’s the former then of course it’s an experience worth checking out. If it’s the latter then, well, it might feel as empty as the space between all the different planets Jettomero travels to.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is a mess of a game. That’s not to say that it’s nonfunctional or bad to play, rather, it loses sight of its core principles and eschews an amazing opportunity with the advent of our transition to next-gen, as well as being the first true IW CoD sans Zampella and West, through poorly constructed (and utilised) tech, half-assed delivery of modes and a single-player campaign that sets the series back more than a few years.

It has its pitfalls, and definitely serves up it’s fair share of frustration, but the point of the game is admirable, and with refinement in the control and camera departments, a beequel would be a very welcome addition to this hive.

Monster Truck Championship is fun and challenging, but frustration, a one-note near linear course masquerading as variety, and not nearly enough in terms of options and engagement leave this a bogged experience.

With everything above said, there’s an obvious draw here in it just being a Mario game, which alone will pull people to it. And there’s some fun to be had, and Nintendo gets a lot right with it, we just need the gimmicks and party favours turned down. Invincibility Star isn’t a number, so dialling the game up to that just isn’t something we can tune into on the reg. Especially given golf on its own merits is a game of strategy and patience, that can still be fast and fun without needing addressive rolling rocks impeding your path all the time.

You'll find moments of driving glory nestled among a lot of filler or arbitrary 'story', and it's these nuggets that make you wish for the series to return to its successful past. Or, if you're like me, you'll just look at the game as another entry in a respected series that perhaps takes too much unnecessary precedence over EA's better arcade racing franchise, Burnout.

Anarchy Reigns ultimately feels like a game that probably didn't quite feel right midway through development, which didn't have the same effort and attention lavished upon it as the developer's previous games. Still, when your very worst game ends up being this decent, you're clearly doing something right.

A bigger budget, more player-agency and a more expansive world are all that's holding this back from being groundbreaking. And a lot of learnings will be taken from this latest outing.

Unfortunately, the genuinely entertaining humour, strong cooperative play and a surprisingly great soundtrack of familiar tracks do more to make me wonder about what could have been than push Red River into 'must-buy' territory.

There’s value in narrative, if you don’t mind sloppy exposition, telegraphed characters and incentives as well as explosive quick time events that sit at odds with arbitrary quick time events, that sit even further at odds with ‘page-turner’ quick time events. When you get towards the game’s crescendo, which admittedly is handled excellently between the three main robot characters, and deal with ‘action’ sequences that take you out of your nanna or grandpa QTE slumber, the game feels interesting, but it’s smoke and mirrors. Acting, visuals and a relatively well-conceived future Detroit are the carrots on string here. The problem is our robot horse needs QTEs as well to get going and without enough blue blood, bled by actual gamers, it’s a hard task and road to Maple Syrup ahead.

It’s a shame there appears to be components of the Kinect-only version of Ryse in the final product, which would account for the design that bounces between overly easy and challenging.

There’s value here for the matriculant willing to put in the effort, but you’ve really gotta want it. And even as a Fire Emblem diehard I found it a bit of a slog. Repetitive and more often than not caked in superfluous activity, Three Hopes is a mash of ideas drawn out beyond its measure, and if you take into account the option to play through each House’s own campaign, the target audience thins to a specific tine, and you might be confronted with an intimidating wall, looming convolutedly large.

Downpour is a pretty solid horror game, if not an exceptionally original or nuanced one. If it weren't for the crappy combat and frustrating exploration it would be a bit easier to recommend, but Vatra has captured the Silent Hill aesthetic well.

And if it's racing with a story that you're after, The Crew and Need for Speed franchisers have you well covered with their mix of outlandish, goofy storytelling and arcade style racing. Perhaps if Legends cut the story entirely, pared down the overly long career mode, and simply focused on being a multidisciplinary arcade racing game, it might find that niche it once occupied on the shelf, back when it was simply known as TOCA.

Strange Brigade from developer Rebellion, the studio behind the Sniper Elite series, presents a bright, camp, and vivid swashbuckling Indiana Jones-inspired world come to life. In a third-person shooter where teaming up with friends to take on hordes of supernatural creatures encourages experimentation. Oh, and it’s a lot of fun too.

There are a handful of decent ideas here, but nothing within is original. And there's a serious lack of excitement; of tone and transition.

It would be remiss not to mention The Streak mode, where players attempt to thwart the longest running undefeated series in the history of professional wrestling. Much like the rest of WWE 2K14, the fanfare is better than the actual gameplay.

Unravel Two is a fun physics-based side-scrolling platformer. And the addition of the blue Yarny, as well as co-op through him, or her, is enjoyable, but the team barely capitalises on having to use both for pushing through the environment and when they do, it’s usually elementary. In fact, outside of the game’s Challenge puzzles, which I’ll get to in a minute, Unravel Two is a far less challenging experience overall, especially in comparison to the first game.

The series just needs a massive boost, and adding a new physics playtool in different types of weather just isn’t it. What you play a Just Cause game for will determine whether or not you grab this and how much you’ll actually invest in it from a time and gameplay perspective, but as a product that is more than just the fun, silly physics experiments part of itself, it’s difficult to glow at it beyond the “sickly” fun I mentioned in the intro. At the end of the day, what we need from Just Cause is, well, just cause; purpose to play beyond tethering baddies to boosters, each other and exploding barrels. As fun as that is.

Without a majority of the characters, the time between the major story beats would be particularly dull without anyone to talk to or side quests to complete. To take the evil path and embrace the vampire side of Jonathan, is to kill what life there is in Vampyr. Although it is important that there are consequences to your actions, some of which do have an immediate impact to the world, there isn’t enough to balance it out and make being evil fun or interesting.

At the end of the day, Resident Evil 6 is packed to the gills with features and absolutely looks the part, no one can deny that, but its lack of gameplay identity leaves it as empty and vacuous as the higher brain function of any one of its zombie inhabitants.

Even though My Friend Pedro falters when it strays the furthest from the action-movie ideal of its premise most of the time you’re still a stone-cold killer with a suite of guns and a knack for shooting at bad dudes whilst upside down spinning in mid-air.

Fending off waves of zombies and walking along linear pathways broken up by the odd surprise of seeing an undead tank. As in a tank tank, not a heavy zombie to take out. It’s a shame because this in turn will factor into the need or want to replay it all at a higher difficulty level or simply to level-up rankings to unlock skins, perks, and other elements. ‘Let’s do that again’ plays an important role in the perception and longevity of a co-op game, and on that front Zombie Army 4: Dead War falls short.

Like every The Sims game before it, The Sims 4's success will hinge on the DLC that accompanies it -- what you have here is simply a solid foundation. The Sims team needs to do some heavy duty work on the automation side of things, but otherwise they've created a good place to build from.

My Time in Portia has its moments though and getting through the early milestones hint at the larger picture and more player freedom. As it stands it’s is a ‘life sim’ that could do with a little more of the former.