Know this, at the very least: I get the sense that this is it. This is now the The Legend of Zelda blueprint, and from here on out, we live in this version of Hyrule, and we couldn’t be happier about that. This is both a true sequel and a hoisted flagpole on what this series is and where it’s going into the future…

Redfall is disappointing. A moderately enjoyable co-op game set in a stylish and inviting game world marred by repetitive and bland design and a long list of technical shortcomings.

Star War Jedi: Survivor is slightly outlier in its foundational universe and in its pedigree and influences. It’s a mish-mash that somehow makes a whole, but for anyone keen on what that means, I can only say saddle up and enjoy the ride, because for its shortcomings and intimidation in size, scope and IP density, Survivor is one heck of a frontier game.

Delayed a bunch and certainly long-in-the-tooth in terms of its heritage, Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp is still worth signing up and serving for.

Dead Island 2 does leave you wanting more, in a good way. The simple combat is endlessly engaging and gory, thanks to the physics, the weight of each hit, and the next-level destruction that lets you shoot holes through zombies or leave a wound right where your blade struck. In co-op, it’s a blast and funny in ways that watching classic b-movies with friends that feature over-the-top violence. In the end, there’s enough here to make us want Dead Island 3. Here’s hoping we don’t need to wait ten years for the next one.

Dredge is a low-poly, low-fi experience that punches so far above its weight it feels like eldritch magic at times is behind it all. The game’s painted representations of its many characters is charming to a fault, and some of the best we’ve ever seen, while its score throughout, as well as the overall audio design, is perfection. It is a joy to move through, and its discovery and exploration elements are a cut above. It just suffers some gameplay balance issues and perhaps dries up in the activities department a tad too early. Otherwise this is an incredible debut for Black Salt Games and we can’t wait to see what the studio does next.

As a remake, I think Resident Evil 4 Remake kind of falls flat. As a game with shiny new visuals, a more cohesive on-brand story and a darker tone, that also doesn’t change much of what made it brilliant in the first place… well that’s the thing, it’s awesome. How you take that will fall directly into the columns of whether you wanted fundamental change, a basic Remaster (which is what I think this ultimately is), or something entirely new. For the newcomers, you’ll love this and it is an absolute buy. BUT. If you’re into the root of all things; how things started; what came before; genesis and that type of thing, I honestly think I’d recommend giving one of any number of the original re-releases or remasters a go. And if you don't first, and I get that because ‘next-gen’ and all, do yourself a favour and go and play the OG immediately after.

Even though your arms will tire of using pickaxes and rope thingies to climb up some truly imposing cliffsides and mountains, Horizon Call of the Mountain never loses its sense of scale, wonder, and sheer beauty.

The biggest disappointment - outside of the narrative, uneven combat, and characters - comes from the expectation and promise found in the art direction, combat, and Soviet-era Russian sci-fi style. There’s a school of thought that when it comes to a review, you should discuss the content of a game versus what it doesn’t have. The logic is sound, if all criticism comes from a place of unmet expectation, that would be unfair. But when something looks this good, you can’t help but wonder what’s missing. At least in those rare moments when the game shuts up long enough for you to think.

I could have written an essay on its brilliant design, but instead I let it take me on a trip down memory lane while also feeling lucky to be playing a game in 2023 with such gravity, that it sinks everything else around it. Metroid Prime Remastered is perfection.

I’ve avoided as many spoilers as possible and barely scratched the surface of what’s in store for those willing to reward the hard-working developers of Hogwarts Legacy. The game-world is HUGE, and not nearly as checklisty as many other games of this nature. And certainly doesn’t suffer so-called bloat. Rather it’s rich and rewarding and inviting to a fault.

As a remake, it solidifies the source material as timeless and iconic in ways that still feel relevant. Especially now, when it's wrapped up in one of the most visually stunning and immersive science fiction releases we’ve seen.

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.

Still, as far as challenge goes on the battlefield, Engage is right up there, and the game’s titular hook isn’t a be all, end all part of proceedings, serving as a functioning tool for combo experimentation as well as another source for that all-important nostalgia. All of which grabbed me far more than any other features of the game. And it’s something I happily engaged in for the roughly 45 hours or so I played and slaved and rewound. And as has become customary for this series, it comes highly recommended for die hard fans, while newcomers, in particular here, will get a lot from the game’s heady tie-in to Fire Emblems past. A great way to kick off Switch gaming in 2023.

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is a lot more than a retro game collection. Like its namesake, it's more of a celebration, but also an engaging interactive slice of history that adds real context to the act of firing up an ancient “1-bit” Atari 2600 game.

It’s still a relatively short game, about three hours or so if you’ve got your Portal brain switched on - but still a remarkable experience. The puzzle rooms and pacing toward the big GLaDOS reveal, and iconic end and credits sequence is still spot on. Portal is as finely tuned, deep, and fun as ever. Case in point, after firing it up I couldn’t stop until the epic “last room” was cleared. As a visual showcase of what a remaster meets remake can be, as a re-release of sorts, and as a reminder that classic design and pacing will always be just that, Portal with RTX is a triumph. Now bring on Portal 2 with RTX, and maybe some Half-Life 2 with RTX whilst the Source engine is still fired up inside NVIDIA’s labs.

From the outset, and playing on Xbox Series X, The Callisto Protocol is a genuinely jaw-dropping visual assault. It might have the most detailed interiors of any game I’ve ever played, and the variety in art that accompanies these is staggering. From the initial prison sequences through to deep underground spaces where you’ll be navigating an old, abandoned colony to the surface of Callisto itself, the game serves up a terrifying feast for the eyes.

Thankfully, the deep and rewarding combat more than makes up for the sometimes sexless superhero daytime soap opera and the sometimes engaging story you get to watch play out. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is at its best when it has all of the various superheroes do what they do best.

Ultimately it's the setting, art direction, and non-verbal cinematic storytelling where Somerville excels. But even here there are long lulls and a few sections that begin to feel bland. Like when you’re in a cave system trying to avoid attention in a way that feels like a homage to Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. And outside of the emotional notes touched upon when it comes to trying to reach your family in an oppressive situation, the ending and final act are too obtuse and abstract to make any sort of lasting impact. Somerville is a visually impressive, relatively short cinematic adventure held back by its ambition.

You won’t play a game like it this year, or even from the past few years lest you dabble in the narrative adventure field, and even then Obsidian’s new opus is pretty distinct. Its writing is among the best I’ve experienced for this style of game, while the cadence of its unfurling mystery is such that the game draws you into its world ever so slightly, you’ll barely realise how deep you are into it before it snags you in its binding. Just go into it with an open mind and the desire to sink yourself into a good book, then let the game do the talking for you and strap yourself in for one of the year’s most unique offerings, and one of its best.

The fact that there are several difficulty levels and the ability to fine-tune Sonic’s speed, jump height, and even damage recovery as part of the in-game options is not a great sign and is indicative of the mish-mash feel. In the end, the lack of focus and consistency makes Sonic Frontiers feel unfinished - even if playing in the solid 60 frames-per-second performance mode is great for capturing and conveying a sense of speed and scale. But even here there’s so much pop-in that you lose out on a true sense of awe when it comes to the environments and structures born from the mysterious Cyber Space. Another average, but ambitious, outing for the blue hedgehog.

Where does this leave God of War Ragnarök when stacked against its Game of the Year foundation piece? That’s a hard question to answer. Diehard fans will eat this up, no doubt, but we can’t help but feel it could have gone to another level. There’s just a lot of familiar content and not enough new, from a gameplay sense, to really elevate it above God of War (2018), despite there being room with this iteration of God of War as a generational franchise to do that… unfortunately God of War Ragnarök’s fate wasn’t to be that game.

Those diehards mentioned in the opener above will be happy to know that the level grading system is back, and locked to the higher difficulty setting, which ties into those that want to learn the intricate and subtly deep nature of things. For everyone else who’ll still be scratching their heads at the ludicrousness of it all, from go to whoa, at least you can rest easy on the idea that it’s okay to mash your way through here, and that for Bayonetta, this is all pretty standard stuff -- OTT served with a side of sass, sexuality and style.

No matter the task at hand, outside of aiming down sights to take out enemies, the campaign switches gears and tone and perspective and objective so often that you’d be hard-pressed to become bored with what will happen next on account of the where and how. [Campaign Review = 78]

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.

Visually the characters, animation, and cinematics benefit greatly from the use of performance capture, and it doesn’t take long for the physical ticks and mannerisms of the three main players to do that thing where they no longer feel like characters in the story - but, real characters. This is the best the franchise has looked from a purely cinematic level. In the end, New Tales From The Borderlands succeeds because it lives up to its namesake and presents the best Borderlands storytelling since the original Tales.

What you get in the end with Sparks of Hope is a lengthy Switch outing full of challenge and the ability to craft a game style that suits you. There’s lots of room to experiment with all of the micro on offer, but it’s conversely not a requirement you do. It does take itself a bit too seriously (to wit: Edge, the emo Rabbid once bad now turned good), but you can skip a lot of this and just get on with business, which is fun, engaging, modular and deep when you want it to be, and stunningly presented. If you’re a Nintendo Switch owner, this is a no-brainer and will hold you in good stead for the rest of the year, and then some. For everyone else, this isn’t quite go out and grab a Switch for, though if you were to package it up with the first two games, the recommendation quickly switches. Either way this is a fun romp in the Mario universe with Rabbids again, I just wish they never learned to talk.

When the game sings in its strongest moments, however, it’s a joy to play. Solving environmental puzzles, discovering workbenches to upgrade your gear, uncovering hidden Codex entries, evading the enemy in rewarding, stealthy ways that empower the player’s sense of agency, and in unfolding the next bit of connective narrative tissue, A Plague Tale: Requiem is great. Excellent even. But it’s fleeting, and Asobo crashes you down to Earth just as quickly as you might have felt on top of it, driven largely by hard-fail scenarios and situations, bolstered still by antiquated or arbitrary gameplay systems.