Perhaps I am slightly biased because of the movies, but I felt as though the game was stronger during the latter portions of the adventure - just as I believe Desolation of Smaug was far better than An Unexpected Journey.

Buried Stars could have been a 5/5 game, easily. Unfortunately, the narrative thought behind the game really relied on me having a personal interest in the characters and their plight, and thanks to the inelegant and overly literal localisation, it became impossible to see them as anything but constructs and narrative tools. Buried Stars is still good enough to work as an academic thought exercise, but I do wish I understood Korean, so I could play the game the way it should be.

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.

E.T. Armies is a well-made indie FPS with a few caveats that occasionally detract from a mostly enjoyable experience.

This isn't my kind of genre at the best of times, and I don't think it's the finest example of the genre, not as long as its core potential - to offer strategic combat - is ruined by obnoxious players. But I do think this is a well-crafted game and it's a fair call to say it's the finest attempt at a serious, "hardcore", free-to-play experience out there is probably justified.

In terms of the gameplay, level design and overall pacing, The Old Blood has learned a handful of lessons and made the appropriate tweaks to improve the play experience from its predecessor. Unfortunately some of the spark that make last year's game oddly inspiring is gone, which makes it decent fun for shooter fans, but ultimately unsatisfying for anyone beyond that.

It's a good start to the franchise, with opportunities to expand upon the world there, add some story context and hopefully flesh out the experience further.

More a series of small improvements than anything major, WWE 2K17 is a great deal of fun for wrestling fans.

For players that have yet to play either of these two titles, this package is more than worth picking up as it comes at a great price for two separate titles. Whether either is worth a replay or not is debatable, however. This package came at perhaps the wrong time of year, given how many other great JRPGs (and Pokemon itself) have been released at the same time. These are fun little games, but they're hardly classics.

You've just got to persevere with Battle Brothers to really appreciate it, and it really is the epitome of the saying "it's a marathon, rather than a sprint". Once you've overcome the horrible excuse for a "tutorial" and onboarding process, you've then got to deal with some really repetitive quest design and an astronomically unforgivable difficulty curve. But, slowly, the game starts to open up, and before you know it, you realise that you're really enjoying this thing. It's expansive, it's complex, it's nuanced and it puts complete control over the story and quest in your hands. It's everything good about Mount & Blade, but in a more compact, turn-based format. It's no wonder the game has become a beloved hit on Steam, with fans pouring hundreds - if not thousands - of hours into it. It's not quite the same experience on Switch, and yet I can't see a scenario where I tear myself away from it, now I've pushed through its various walls. A truly fascinating example of a game that's just worth the effort.

Neptunia Riders Vs. Dogoos is frustrating. For fans of the series, it’s fun and hits all the right notes. It’s just over way too quickly and the developers missed a real opportunity to make this a dynamite multiplayer experience. It’s also so totally reliant on appealing to existing fans that it’s going to completely fail to find a new audience for the broader Hyperdimension property. It could have been so much more for all audiences, but as it is will simply be a fun little spinoff while we continue to wait for the next big step forward for this delightful series and its characters.

A Druid’s Duel was a very intense experience that had me growl like a grizzly more than once as a single mistake would be enough for the opponent to take me down. Overall, A Druid’s Duel is a solid and attractive experience that tactics strategy fans will find themselves losing themselves in for hours at a time.

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.

It's light, breezy, gorgeous, and a joy to play.

At one point above I described battles as a "love story to the past,” and that statement is at the core of all that Saturday Morning RPG is.

Planetbase is good, and I’ll never complain about having more simulators to play on my PlayStation.

For every positive thing that Kingdom Come does with its storytelling, setting, and themes, it then lets itself down with childish writing, and then doesn’t help itself out by being so ambitious that, even beyond the bugs, the game has structural issues that are difficult to ignore.

Does Liberation reinvent Elite in new and startling ways that will drive forward the space trading/combat genre? No, not really. But not every game has to be some big new innovative masterwork either. Liberation is shamelessly retro; while Miller claims inspiration from original Elite the visuals evoke (at least in me) more of a feel of the way that Elite II: Frontier had me badly hooked in its Amiga 500 incarnation back in my university days. Sometimes, being fun is enough, and Liberation manages that well enough as long as you’re already a fan of stripped-back space warfare.

Perils of Man provides a solid point and click experience that will immerse you into this fantasy story and definitely racks up enough game time to make the small price tag worthwhile.

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.

But for newcomers to the Warriors franchise, I can't think of a better title to introduce you to the history, characters and action, either on PlayStation Vita for Nintendo 3DS.

Red Goddess a great experience. Utilising strong emotions such as joy, fear, and anger could have been done with far less elegance than this, and the act of using them all to investigate and recapture lost memories is a worthy, enjoyable experience.

Clea 2 is a confident step forward for a developer that has an original, interesting idea and set about turning it into something playable. It might lack the intensity of some of the horror games that it resembles, but its quiet moodiness and subtle challenges make it an interesting curiosity for those with a few hours to spare.

An odd package. It has got the finest game of all in the series in it, but that's backed up with reminders for why I'm fallen out of love with the franchise with the way it has progressed.

If by some chance you missed this game before and enjoyed other tactics game, or you're just looking to take on real people to see how good your strategy really is, then it's easy to recommend nabbing the update.

Any good wargame should provide a sense of historical authenticity to the player, and helps enlighten them about the military strategy of the era. Gettysburg achieves that with clear authenticity and understanding of the tactics of the era, and while the iPad doesn't lack for quality wargames on it, this is another one worth adding to the playlist.

The escalating difficulty from one level to the next means that any given game of Funghi Explosion only lasts for a few minutes. That's to its benefit. It's an ideal light pick-up-and-play puzzler that it will be on high rotation on my Switch for quite some time to come. It's also an excellent example of a "mascot game", as something of unique cultural and social relevance to Japan.

The whole effort is leaps and bounds ahead of Mighty No. 9, perhaps owing to the lack of fanbase threatening to withdraw their support if the game wasn’t at least 90 per cent similar to Mega Man. Mighty Gunvolt Burst suffers some early shakiness trying to find its own voice, but it’s not long before the game will win you over.