Gear.Club for Nintendo Switch does offer split-screen racing, but again the core racing isn’t all that fun. The best bits are outside of the racing, collecting and upgrading cars, and remodeling and arranging your garage. Which, in case you were wondering, isn’t a good thing for a, you know, racing game.

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.

It just feels generic. It feels like they took what the original developers made and added a shiny gloss to it, ignoring what made it special to the time period it originally existed in. There's nothing that feels special about Nexiuz, neither changes that make it feel comfortable on its new home, nor any additional features to warrant a special purchase.

Even if it ran beautifully, Gotham Knights still feels pretty much unsalvageable. There’s a lot of game to be found in Gotham Knights, a lot of by-the-numbers repetition, and many meaningless tasks that make you think the project began as a live service game like Marvel’s Avengers. And simply shifted focus to become a co-op thing sometime during development. But then again, that’s adding justification to mechanics and progression systems in a game that doesn’t care to explain why you need to craft new gear all the time. There’s no “endgame” or persistent world to support the repetition either. The good news is that there’s quite a bit of story to dig into, and you do get to go head-to-head with several notable villains. But you’ll need to overcome a lot more than the death of Batman to see it through.

What SimCity offers is so much potential for so much expanded and persistent gameplay that its mindboggling. All I can actively offer you is what the game offers you upon firing up, and in that sense it’s a fricking addictive affair.

Combine the linear environments, combat mechanics and cut-scenes and it feels more like watching an animated show or even reading a book about it all. If you can get past all this and even find the right stride with the combat mechanics it does make for an interesting storyline and the game gradually expands slightly.

There’s still a lot to like about The Pact, it continues this season’s trend of improved animation and performance for the series. And with origin stories and background out of the way, it means that new ideas can take the front seat – as realised in the depictions of newcomers Bain and Harley Quinn. It also ends on a cliff-hanger, which will no doubt make the wait for Episode Three feel that much longer. Overall, a good but not great episode.

As a pure action-brawler Redeemer’s appeal is limited. Like the classic arcade game Double Dragon II there’s a sense of fatigue that becomes hard to shake after a few hours, something that very few games in this genre manage to overcome. But, if you’re a fan of punching things and stringing together combos and takedowns in a violent action game, then there’s a lot to like here. Any hey, any game where you can, mid-combo, rip the arm off a mutant and then proceed to beat it to a pulp with both severity and a severed appendage -- is worth checking out.

Through it all there’s just something about We Happy Few that keeps you coming back. It could very well be the quality of the writing, the characterisation, and the setting of a post-war London trying to forget its shameful past through medication and dystopian control. Or it could be that, and the weird blend of ideas and styles. In the end, whether that’s enough to excuse some of the bland fetch-style quest design or the repetitive nature of traveling from one side of Wellington Wells to another, comes down to personal taste.

Mad Riders has the feel of something whipped up between bigger projects to keep the teams at Techland energised. That's not meant to be an insult, mind, as it feels like the sort of game that would have been fun to work on and design, which carries over into the experience of playing it.

Ratchet and Clank Q-Force proves that after ten years, there is still life in the old Lombax yet that is worthy of consideration – if only there were more mission objectives and levels to enjoy.

Add to this a less-than-likeable Frey who barely manages to endear herself upon the player, and even less likeable NPCs and a bland, bland game-world I have no desire to learn more about, let alone live in (take me back to New York and my real-world troubles there, please), and you have a game that just… lacks.

RaiderZ feels unpolished and unfinished, plagued with a stagnant, passionless player base and a stack of now obsolete design tropes around questing, story, player progression and crafting.

The simplicity of 198X is endearing, and how it presents a compilation of sorts of an era is something that leaves a positive if not lasting impression. The story, although simple in its presentation does leave room for growth. We’re keen to check out the second part of the tale, and if the team Hi-Bit Studios can connect both the narrative and the individual games in a more meaningful way - then it has every chance to live up to its premise.

It is fun. A hell of a lot of fun, actually. But the inverse is, unfortunately, true when your team isn’t work together, or you’re being dominated by an opposing team that has its shit together.

King's Bounty 2 lives up to its name in the sense that it delivers abundance. Like an ultra-compressed version of Skyrim, it feels full of things to do even if it doesn't necessarily excel at any of them. The combat is solid. The role-playing is solid. The questing and adventuring and writing and everything else are solid, too. It's comforting and familiar and simply does what it does without a great deal of fuss. In many ways it feels like the ideal pandemic lockdown game. I'll happily load King's Bounty 2, pull up the covers and settle in for the weeks and months to come.

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.

For all intents and purposes, Call of Cthulhu should have been amazing. Every element is there and it’s clear the studio had lofty ambitions, in as much as it’s clear they were working to an incredibly tight budget. Give this studio a bigger budget and a project they believe in, and I’m confident they’ll break myriad ceilings but Call of Cthulhu isn’t the breakthrough I thought it should have been. And it’s not helped that it has emerged in the year of polish by way of a number of other Triple-As, lead ceremoniously by Red Dead Redemption 2.

Sonic Forces isn’t a bad game, nor the worst Sonic title in years. In fact, it’s quite fun and keeps up the series tradition of bringing a sense of speed to the forefront. But compared to say, Super Mario Odyssey, you get the feeling that it’s just another example of a fun and shallow Sonic game in a long line of fun and shallow Sonic games.

Fuse is what happens when someone had a great idea that got greenlighted in a meeting 4 years ago, before executives and VPs stripped it down during development until there was nothing left but a shell. It’s what happens when a developer, full of creativity, showmanship and excitement, feels like they need to play it safe because humour and wit aren’t apparently marketable properties in an industry that no longer feels comfortable taking risks.

Comic book characters, just as any work of literature, can be timeless. What Deadpool fails to acknowledge is that he does not fall in this category. While the likes of X-Men and Hulk have served, at times, as allegories, there is just too much toilet-driven humour in Deadpool to come off as anything more than droll shtick.

War in the North is also quite a lengthy game, which although sounds great on paper does work against the overall experience.

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.

Cities XL 2012 is even less of a complete title than its predecessor was. When the removal of a core gameplay feature isn't replaced with an effective replacement, what you're left with is a broken game. No effort has been taken to bring C:XL to "2012" standards in the way of a graphics overhaul, and it still runs like a dog with 3 legs to boot.

For a first outing, Counterplay has achieved something that's undeniably striking in the visuals department, though that's marred by sameiness and the odd, isolated framerate hitch. We also have an addictive loot game and a surprisingly deep RPG upgrade system here, though it's hamstrung by fisticuffs that don't nail down those all important fundamentals. I wouldn't label what's here as a complete Godfall, but certainly a sizable Godstumble that'll need a decent patch. Postpone your excited, just-gotta-PS5 leap of faith towards this.

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.

Riptide brings absolutely nothing new to the experience of the first game. If anything, it just piles on new frustrations.

A great game for Ferrari and racing fans alike, with enough challenge to really test those familiar with the genre, but unfortunately lacking in a more approachable set-up, even for those of us who found the history of Ferrari utterly alluring even after just a few hours of play.