There’s a lot to admire about We Sing. It’s a perfectly accessible karaoke game that comes with plenty of content and, in allowing ten people to play at once, it’s a perfect party title. Obviously your own mileage will depend on how much you enjoy singing, but hey, we all belt out some great performances in the shower, and this is just an extension of that. This is well worthwhile picking up if you've got a New Year's party to host, or attend.

Planet Coaster is everything I could want in a simulation game of this type. Good management tools, good building tools, and most of all, it is extremely fun to play. It's the best amusement park simulation we've seen yet, and any complaints that you might have with the variety of rides that it offers are mitigated brilliantly by the use of Steam Workshop to allow the community to broaden the experience. In this way Planet Coaster feels both nostalgic and yet eminently modern.

The unfortunate thing about Battalion Commander is that if it was one of those free-to-play mobile games, I’d probably have fun with it I could see some others even enjoying it enough to toss it a couple of coins in support. Sitting on trains or in doctor's waiting rooms, or standing in queues, I often go to my phone to keep me occupied and this kind of game would have fit the bill perfectly. But if I am to sit in front of my PlayStation 4, I’m not going to want to play something that requires minimal effort, no narrative and five minutes of my time. Simple as that.

The most disappointing thing for me, though, is what’s probably the least of Space Overlords' worries: it just doesn't feel right, on that primal level that action games generally tap into. Despite the title, playing the game made me feel small and weak – not just because of the mechanical hindrances, but because of the lack of any sort of feedback.

Most tellingly, though, the frustration of trying to find a green cursor highlight amongst dozens of balls of the same colour is quite possibly the most insane thing to overlook that I've ever seen done in a puzzle game.

Zen Studios is by far the most proficient developer of digital pinball out there. I don’t think there can be any debate about that. But the studio has utterly outdone itself with Pinball FX 2 VR, to the point where I can’t actually see myself playing pinball outside of VR going forward.

This game’s obvious new feature is its HD art, and, more than just being beautiful, the ability of this art to enhance the characters and world makes Shantae: Half-Genie Hero the most impressive take on the whole fantasy Middle East setting since the utterly brilliant Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Despite its short runtime, Feist feels like the video game equivalent of being pushed over and kicked repeatedly without respite.

Rome: Total War on iPad is an absolutely cracking game that further establishes the tablet platform as the go-to place for strategy gaming on the go. Now we just need to get a proper Civilization (perhaps a port of the second), and a Europa Universalis onto my iPad and I'll be one truly happy camper.

Crystal Rift possesses all the potential in the world, and I certainly hope the game performs well enough that the development team is able to go back to the drawing board and come up with a more comprehensive and nuanced structure for another crack at the VR dungeon crawler.

Laser Disco Defenders is missing a lot of components from being a phenomenal game or even a fantastic top down shooter. Some of the groundwork laid by the developers leaves room for excitement, but there just isn’t enough carefully crafted content to back up the solid mechanics. It’s a dance which ends too soon, and it comes as a hard recommendation.

Dead Rising 4 takes a few steps forward in terms of the gameplay mechanics, but also takes a giant zombie-infected shamble backwards in regards to the narrative elements. Taking away the ticking clock, making the maniacs nothing more than a mere annoyance instead of the stuff of nightmares, and having civilians easily rescued really pulled away from what I liked in the previous games. Dead Rising 4 is fun, but it’s also a little hollow and it’s lost a significant chunk of the series’ soul.

Like any sort of anti-art, it shatters the foundations of the medium so that we can look at those pieces, in isolation, and understand their value as a whole. It throws a spanner into the whole argument around games as art, paradoxically affirming the artistic merits of the medium in a way that few other games ever have.

SMT IV: Apocalypse is a really smart and thoughtful game on the wrong platform entirely, for what it wants to offer. It’s easy to spot the compromises to the vision that the development team needed to make to have it all fit the platform, and while it’s still an essential title, it’s difficult to sit back and not wonder just how much more it could have been.

There’s a premise with a lot of potential in enigma, but it’s squandered on cliche characters, uneven pacing, and rough localisation.

Clockwork Tales’ inconsistent tone, lack of self-awareness, and generally poor presentation let down an otherwise standard example of the genre, which means you’ll need to be a really big genre fan to derive much value from this.

There are dozens and dozens of different elemental monsters to discover, and that’s half the joy of the game. The other half is the bright charm and personality of Alchemic Jousts. It’s not the deepest strategy game you’ll ever play, but it’s one of the most charming that you’ll see for some time to come.

It’s also a horribly, horribly plain looking game. Because each level plays out on a single screen panel, there’s a lack of a sense of scale, which is generally appreciated in a strategy game. Environments look like they were done in ten minutes in Microsoft Paint, too. This kind of game flies by okay as a little mobile time waster, but a PlayStation 4 experience needs to offer much more than this.

All of this would be almost okay if 4 Elements also wasn’t one of the most unrelentingly plain-looking games, with terrible sprites representing enemies, and bland level design to back it up.

What Mario Maker on the 3DS has forgotten is that one of the key reasons to make games is to have other people play them.

Let It Die is of exceedingly high quality for a free-to-play title; it’s dozens of GB in download size and looks and feels every bit an example of a higher-end game from Japan. It’s also far too reasonable on the microtransactions and asking players for money. It’s possible to speed up progress through the game by paying real money, or preserve a favoured character that's just perished but the incentives for doing that are low, particularly when anyone who is inclined to enjoy a roguelike is not going to have any issues with a grind, or re-starting games from scratch after a character dies.

Calling All Units doesn’t set out to do anything new, it’s pretty much an online only version of Need for Speed: Pursuit. The new mechanics of chasing down others online with a group of others is indeed fun, and for the most part the online does work. The story does nothing exciting whatsoever, but it does teach the new mechanics and how they work.

The overriding focus of any point-and-click adventure game has to be on the excellence of the story, well fleshed-out characters, as well as puzzles that are germane to the story and enhance it. On all these counts, I believe Demetrios delivers, notwithstanding a few minor stumbles. It is particularly welcome on the Vita platform, which lacks a wider range of games in this genre. The game runs smoothly with minimal loading times, and the bubble icon looks very cool indeed, to boot.

Because I was so emotionally invested in the game, I started to lose time while I was playing it. I don’t think it’s an overly long game, but I do think that its length will be wholly dependent on how good you are at understanding its logic and puzzles. It wouldn’t matter if it was over in an hour, though. The game is deep, meaningful, and powerful. It’s reflective, different, and beautiful. It may well end up being more divisive than Ueda’s previous masterpieces, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a masterpiece, from one of the industry’s true auteurs. Play this game. Even if you hate it, it’s going to broaden your horizons around what games are truly capable of.

Fun, as the rhythm portions and the soundtracks that they use mesh well together. But let's not pull punches about this; this is a game that is going to be exclusively of interest to existing fans of Senran Kagura, and who are also fans of rhythm games. It's not going to convert anyone to the franchise, and unlike the likes of Persona 4 Dancing All Night, it's also not meaty enough as a rhythm game to appeal to people who aren't already deeply involved in the genre. It's pure fanservice.

This simply isn't true. The thematic depth and cultural context of the game make for a wonderful, complex, and meaningful narrative, and FFXV is every bit as worthy as a narrative work as Stand By Me, from which it draws so much inspiration. Couple this with the fact that it's a surprisingly traditional Final Fantasy game in the ways that count, and I've got to say I haven’t loved a Final Fantasy game with such raw passion in many years.

Experience the game with the mindset of wanting to get lost in a virtual world, though, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by Hollow Realization’s hidden charms.

Dragon Ball: Fusions takes a familiar tale and style of play and decides to mix the whole formula up. Some aspects of the formula work better than others, but the end result is still an enjoyable experience that takes an overly well-known property and manages to make it fresh in several ways.