Sadly, I found later levels lost a lot of the game's early steam, as too much of the old "pixel perfect" platforming starts to creep in.

Sea of Stars deserves to be played, and almost everyone who does play it will enjoy it. It’s a JRPG made for JRPG fans by people who truly love the genre. There’s even something admirable about how steadfast it is in being a classical homage. The sad reality is that most pastiches that lack the self-awareness to break free of being pale homages are doomed to fade while the classic works they ape remain eternally relevant, but for now, in 2023, if you’ve got some time to spare you could do far worse than Sea of Stars.

Even if you love The Last Of Us 2. Even if you think it’s the Citizen Kane of video games. Even if you think that Shakespeare himself would have thrown in the towel after seeing this game, realising he could never compete with it as a storyteller, you must surely realise that a game that is four years old and is readily available on your current console doesn’t need the remaster. Surely you understand that this is a ridiculous excess, done purely to milk revenue out of fans, and that it’s particularly frustrating given that Sony is sitting on dozens of incredible properties. That it would rather leave all of them on ice and inaccessible to release this indulgence just isn’t acceptable.

The creative team needs to find writers willing to back up the narrative context with a story that has meat, and the gameplay designers need to dare do things differently to what has come before. Horizon is a remarkably refined and technically brilliant game, but Guerrilla has yet to prove that it can take that next step and produce a genuine classic.

Another decent, if unspectacular effort from Nintendo. The series needs better balancing if skill is to ever become a factor again and the single player mode may be a total slog, but Mario Kart is still a hit where it always mattered: with friends.

I left Metroid Dread feeling quite conflicted about it. On the one hand, I do think it is fundamentally well designed, and the main gameplay element - the robot stalkers - are woven into the Metroid formula beautifully. On the other hand, that Metroid formula is getting long in the tooth and Dread doesn't do nearly enough to revitalise it. Dread is fine. It's not just nearly memorable enough for a game that fans have been waiting so many years for now.

To be clear, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is good fun. The presentation is spot on, and it’s an example of how nostalgia can be traded on in a way that is fun, rather than desperate. But as a video game, it’s yet another example of how the AAA blockbuster end of the market is totally incapable of breaking away from the overly safe and familiar, and the inflexibility of these “video game design best practices” means that no property is allowed an identity of its own anymore. Every gameplay feature, character, environment, item and puzzle needs to be the exact clone of the successful examples we’ve seen before and in the end, even punching Nazis starts to feel too rote for the joy that it should provide.

Finnish studio Housemarque have produced in Nex Machina another game to sit alongside its well-received titles of Alienation and Resogun, and that showcases the serious pedigree it has built since their start in the early nineties with Stardust. It is a rush of colour that delivers a satisfying experience that’ll steal your calm and let you imagine a future where the robots don’t wipe us all out.

Injustice 2 is a very solid fighting game that has not changed a whole lot mechanically from the last offering. Visually it is a step forward, but the narrative is a step back. I cannot entirely share the feeling that this is going to be a title that is meant to milk out additional money via a combination of microtransactions and DLC, which is a bit of a turnoff, but the variety of modes and quality roster do help to take the sting out of that, because there is already so much content available.

Which brings me back to that question: what is the point of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, really? Sure, Lost Legacy is a wildly enjoyable adventure in classic Uncharted style, and even Uncharted 4, for all my complaints about it, is a game a lot of people clearly loved, and they'll love it again here. But when the only thing these "remasters" have over the PS4 originals that you can already play on PS5 are modest technical upgrades whose practical and aesthetic improvements are marginal at best, what purpose do they actually serve? When even someone who's never played either game before and is breaking in their brand new console and can get an identical experience for half the price by just buying the existing PS4 bundle, what is this Legacy of Thieves Collection other than a half-step in a pointless technical arms race and a chance to cynically sell some unnecessary version upgrades? We would all be served better if Sony focused on bringing us some of the incredible games that aren't readily available on the console already.

Saros is a good game, and I need to be clear about that. The sheer speed and kinetic energy of the combat, the visual design, and the moreish nature of the roguelike loop come together to make something that is, by any objective measure, well-made and something that consumers clearly like to play. But on the other side of the coin, I really can’t stand Saros because I look at it and all I see is the cynical Sony studio formula slapped over the top of what was, a half-decade ago, a pretty fine game. In fact, I think I’ll dust Returnal off for a replay.

Super Mega Baseball 3 feels like the baseball games I used to love from a few generations ago. Liberated of the "depth" of modern sports games, there's an efficiency to the action that is appealing, and the gameplay modes that it does offer are all compelling. On the pitch, the difficulty curve is perfectly tuned, and while the game doesn't innovate and is ultimately destined to be the kind of thing that you pick up for short bursts of play at a time in multiplayer, the accessibility makes this one so much more appropriate for that than most other sports games out there. It's good, honest and clean entertainment, and that's something a lot of sports game developers have lost sight of in their efforts to monetise every moment of their content.

There are a few minor further issues with the collection – the music is almost shockingly low resolution and difficult to hear, and the interface was clearly designed around touch input so the controller is a little clumsy, but those fade into the background quickly enough and are easy to ignore. What rises above and beyond for Sorcery! is the quality of the writing. My recommendation is to play this like you would read a good book. Forget the in-game music. Put on a pair of headphones with some meditative ambient sound (I like rain “music” myself) and lose yourself in the words. Do that, and the minor irritations along the way will feel rather irrelevant.

Ghost of Yotei achieves what it set out to, in that it wanted to take what makes Ghost of Tsushima so popular (the visual engine, the combat, Sucker Punch’s open worlds) and transport it to a “barely settled” location where they could give us a rip-roaring, all-American Wild West story. So… good on them for achieving that, I guess. But, as I brace for the inevitable comment moderation job ahead, I gotta be honest and say I just didn’t care for any of it. Or the way it capitalises on the Japanese/Ainu setting rather than tries to work with it.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is a game that really struggles to find the new voice that Resident Evil so needs as a franchise. It’s incredibly well designed and executed, and you’re not going to find a game that does VR better than this one. But it’s a confused game, sending out all kinds of mixed messages that suggest the development team - and especially the writers - have a better idea of what makes for horrific imagery than they do of horror as a storytelling genre. As a real fan of horror, and someone who has studied it for years, this is what doesn’t sit so well with me.

With Armored Core VI, FromSoftware has demonstrated, yet again, that it has few peers when it comes to intelligent and thought-provoking action. You’ll need to be faster on the draw and quicker with the reactions to survive this game’s bullet ballet-like approach, but you’ll also need to be smart and precise, and there’s elegance to complement with the visceral sound of metal rending. Sadly, that’s all FromSoftware has delivered this time around, and for a company that has mastered the ability to give truly memorable context to its worlds, characters, and battles, the shallow hollowness of this experience is truly disappointing.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't highlight that this game wants you to keep investing in it; the dreaded loot boxes and other monetisation models are present in the game, and are proving to be quite controversial. In fairness, the game does almost get to the point where, like in mobile free-to-play games, you'll feel an urge to spend real money just to speed progress up a little. That said, while that kind of grinding isn't really acceptable for a premium-priced game, the loot boxes are just on the side of "optional enough that you can still have a blast without investing in them.

People will be talking about the first two Doom games for decades more – those two games may well be remembered as true classics of the gaming medium a century down the track. This Doom won’t. This new Doom is terrible...Like the greedy organisation that unleashes hell on Mars, this is the product of exploitation; the developers at ID Software and Bethesda are playing with fire in treating a property as valuable as Doom this way.

Monster Train does indeed deserve to be noticed; it's the epitome of something that is better than it looks. Underneath that blandly homogenised aesthetic and equally bland promise of yet more roguelike lies a game that offers players some deep, invigorating, challenging and rewarding turn-based strategy. You may well find this one very difficult to put down.

The Witcher 3 tells an excellent story and offers a massive, epic adventure, but the compromises made to this Switch version mean that this is a (significantly) lesser version of one of the most respected blockbusters out there. In doing that, a little of the magic and prestige behind The Witcher itself has been scrubbed away.

Two Point Hospital is wildly entertaining, with a great sense of humour and production values that pop with light-hearted, satirical style. It's worth playing through if for no other reason than to see what zany diseases and treatments you'll need to deal with next. It's just odd that for a game with such strong nostalgia for Theme Hospital it would neglect to recreate the challenge that was such a feature of those early-era simulators. Still, that's me showing my age, I know, and I can't imagine anyone failing to come out of Two Point Hospital with a giant smile on their face. If nothing else... it's a great cure for boredom (okay, I'm sorry, really. In my defence, I did resist getting that stupid joke out until right at the end).

Mind you, apparent lack of confidence aside, Rogue Legacy is still an essential game, and it's good to see the roguelike still getting so much traction, because it is a wonderful, versatile and ultimately entertaining RPG sub-genre.

Still, the beautifully crafted world teaming with life and and almost never-ending sequence of quests is an alluring hook to keep players coming back, in the same way that it doesn't seem to matter how empty a Hollywood blockbuster is, so long as the explosions get bigger and better every time, the audiences will keep flocking back to them.

Digital Eclipse is onto something special with its “interactive documentary” approach overall. Atari 50 has become the standard against which all retro compilations should be judged. Additionally, I appreciate the intent and effort that went into Tetris Forever a great deal. I just hate, so much, how licensing has let everyone involved with this effort down.

I was absolutely wowed by this game the first time I played it through because I was paying so much attention to the cut scenes and redesigned Lara Croft was a joy to behold...But having had a year to sit and consider the game's broader meaning, the second time around the game's flaws are all the more apparent.

A handful of technical hiccups mixed with an aggressive monetisation strategy could very well leave a questionable taste in peoples' mouths.

Has F1 2018 done enough to render last year’s (excellent) title redundant? Probably not. But if it has been a few years since your last F1, absolutely give this one a go. The racing market is a crowded one, but F1 is pure racing, and the sport doesn’t get much more exciting, or strategic, than this one.

Ticket to Earth is not a book by Sartre. One need not spend too much time assessing it in depth. However, the player is clearly not going to suffer the dreaded death by PowerPoint; the theme of the rich and powerful exploiting everybody else creates enough interest (and, sadly, relevance) to lift Ticket to Earth into more than just another tile based mobile game. It even meant yours noobishly had no problems whatsoever going through the grind required to upgrade my character to a level I could actually make progress with. I needed to know what’s going to happen!