There is no doubt that Village is a great Resi entry, with more variety and sheer bombast than its predecessor ever delivered. In prizing its many made-for-Twitch-and-YouTube moments over tone and consistency, it falls short as an evolution of the franchise. Village is still a bold, silly and beautiful thing, but there’s no avoiding a murkier focus and a less compelling story resulting is a slightly mish-mashed “Best Of”. One that’s easy to love when you’re caught between its vicious gothic claws and a little forgettable once they’ve relinquished themselves.

Look past its old-timey foibles and Ghost Of Tsushima absolutely has its merits. It’s the prettiest seven-out-of-ten we’ve ever played, with a world that begs to be seen and explored, despite never providing the reasons to make that exploration and time feel entirely rewarded. While the technical and artistic achievements on show here are undoubtedly high notes for the end of the PS4’s life, the mechanical underpinnings that bring this world’s missions and story to life could’ve been lifted wholesale from generations past.

The result is a game that, while achingly beautiful to look at, seems to be creaking at the seams. Bigger levels don’t mean richer or more interesting ones, and the expansion results in a game that feels more empty, rather than one that feels more epic in scope. The grass is always greener, and this exodus to the surface proves it. Let us go back underground already.

I am so glad Death Stranding exists. It’s serenely beautiful and conceptually fascinating, while also being frequently tedious and at worst, completely laborious...An experience of visual wonder and quite incredible ideas; an impossible elevator pitch, somehow brought to fruition; something that you have to experience for yourself, just to see if you like it. All brought down by the underpinnings of a game isn’t refined enough in its core mechanics or coherent enough in its narrative delivery to justify the hubristic run-time.

Delightfully weird.

Despite these various issues, which I’m presuming (and hoping) will be fixed with a patch, Valhalla is a game I want to explore every single inch of and that’s something I didn’t entirely expect. It’s funny, sprawling but focused, varied but consistent and it’s probably the best Assassin’s Creed game to date. Even if I’ll need another lockdown to finish it...

Chiefly, it’s the writing and characterisation that makes Guardians more or less work. It delivered laughs, surprising moments of pathos and has some unpredictable twists that caught me totally off-guard, including a dog that shows up when you least expect it in the most hilarious way. Unfortunately these moments usually arrive when you’re not pushing buttons on the controller, having control wrenched away and to show you a gorgeous MCU-inspired cut scene. If emotional beats and smart storytelling are what you’re looking for, come right in. But the game is pretty rote, and, at that point, you wonder if this should have been on Disney+ and not your PS5.

So yes, I spent the majority of my weekend just downloading the game. And no, I don’t think that’s anything close to excusable for any release, let alone such a mainstream, big-budget game. But Modern Warfare’s slower, more deliberate pace leads to an experience that feels very different to and more intense than the slew of recent Call Of Duty iterations. Just be prepared to spend a long time staring at a download bar.

Despite a promising premise, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order fails to meet the ever-high expectations of Star Wars games – and it even feels unfinished, as if rushed to market ahead of next month’s new film.

That’s the biggest issue with Detroit. Whether you’re playing as Connor, Kara or Markus – the latter of which forms the bulk of the central storyline, but is by far the least intriguing character in the game – the game only scratches the surface of the themes it explores.

Borderlands 3’s script is stuck somewhere in the past, a place we’d rather not revisit, and it makes no apologies for it. I sort of admire it for that, but I think that’s only because the rest of the game makes up for its loudmouthed pitfalls, and because I can – unlike that annoying friend who thinks they’re funny – turn its volume down when it all gets a bit much.

But those A-listers simply can’t offset the core frustrations. I wanted to know more, was desperate to progress and its story had its hooks into me, but the harsh time restrictions made Twelve Minutes often feel like a chore. If you can stick with it then its story is weird, violent and, at times, pretty shocking, but this is a game I think perfectly sums up how a time loop would actually feel: annoying, frustrating, pressurised, claustrophobic. As a game, it’s just not as entertaining or – ironically – as time conscious as it needs to be to succeed. In the best time-loop games, you have the freedom to experiment with one thing before trying another. Offsetting the repetition is easier. In Twelve Minutes, stuck in those same four walls, those same dozen minutes can feel like as many hours.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a time and a place for a game like Far Cry 6. There were brief stretches of time I began to sink more willingly into its simple brand of mindless monotony. But there are just too few examples of the game’s mechanics coalescing to deliver memorable, crazy, unpredictable action. With so little dynamism in the world’s AI and its systems, missions aren’t just identically structured, they’re fundamentally limited in potential outcomes. And in a world this enormous, with characters that are this intent on destroying the status quo, it ends up feeling like wasted space. If only overthrowing an evil tyrant was as simple as amassing a hundred collectibles. Viva la repetición.

Combat is so well constructed that it really serves to highlight how much could’ve been done to streamline Rage 2 into something more disciplined – not necessarily a linear shooter, but something more contained so that the superlative heights of its wild gunplay cut through the comparatively tame open-world filler more consistently.

I hope we see a sequel. A bolder direction like this deserves recognition versus the many carbon copies of other games, even in Ubisoft's own roster of franchises. With a bit more bite, a follow-up could be – as we say in London – the dog’s bollocks.

A disappointing dud among the litany of quite remarkable recent PlayStation exclusives. After epics such as God Of War, Spider-Man and Horizon Zero Dawn, this is a game that wavers between boring and frustrating. A game that’s had more than enough time in development, and which has such uninspired design choices at its core, that more time probably wouldn’t have solved them. Days Gone simply doesn’t offer anything sufficiently fresh or interesting to carry it to the finish line.

I hope we see a sequel. A bolder direction like this deserves recognition versus the many carbon copies of other games, even in Ubisoft's own roster of franchises. With a bit more bite, a follow-up could be – as we say in London – the dog’s bollocks.

There’s always self-doubt involved when you savage a game like this, but Volition had a second chance – to reboot a truly barmy franchise and do whatever they want with it – but any potential here has been squandered. A combat system with no satisfaction. A world with no immersion. Missions with no imagination. It’s a shame that this is what they came up with.

These developers missed the fact that Crackdown’s genius wasn’t in providing an almost endless number of arcane things to find, but in the reward for finding them – namely, wonder-giving abilities. The plague of collectibles has, in recent years, had a wearying effect: never have video games felt more like work.