Senran Kagura: Estival Versus is great fun, combining the rawest of Japanese-style raunch humour with a tight and mechanically sound combat system.

The game doesn’t stand up especially well by itself, and the Remaster has only addressed the superficial issues with the DS original.

Big Ant is, effortlessly, the world’s premier independent developer of niche sports, and Lacrosse falls squarely in its beat. It’s ace and I love it. Now.

If you're keen for one of the suspenseful thrillers manageable with just images and text, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc comes highly recommended.

Ultimately the success of Samurai Warriors 4 Empires rests on how well it has been able to merge action and strategy together, and while I feel this veers strongly on the side of action, compared with even the Dynasty Warriors Empires series, there’s still enough thinky stuff to do between battles to add nuance to the overall experience.

It was a great game back when it was new. It’s a great game still. Strong narratives don’t age, and this one has a strong story to tell. Throw in quality port work that gives the art direction the detail and clarity that it really deserves, and Twilight Princess is a classic that has scrubbed up well enough to be a worthy Wii U title in its own right.

I feel like I’m being very harsh on The Walking Dead: Michonne, but that’s only because I’ve been such a fan of Telltale games over the years, and this doesn't meet my expectations of the team. I do want to know more about Michonne’s backstory, I just wish she was working it out with more engaging characters.

Stranger of Sword City is a stellar, and surprisingly unique example of a dungeon crawler. It's dark, grim and gothic at times, and revels in the same difficulty that Experience Inc was able to throw at players in Demon's Gaze, but its unique mechanics and themes make it one of the most boundary-pushing dungeon crawlers we have seen in recent years.

With a core gameplay loop that is this utterly intoxicating, it's hard not to love AAC. It's an addictive and elegant score-chaser that has the power to bring newcomers into the shmup genre, as well as the legs and tail to truly satisfy shmup veterans.

Blast ‘Em Bunnies might be simple – no, it is simple – but it’s simple in the right way, and that’s something to be impressed with all by itself.

All in all, Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed does a really solid job of bringing colourful characters from the series into a new style of game.

Traditional where it needs to be, and wildly humorous when it wants to, this is the perfect follow up to the spectacularly successful original title.

There are better farming simulations and JRPGs on the Nintendo 3DS. I generally enjoyed my time exploring, harvesting and killing things, but I could not escape the feeling that I had done this all before, and that there were better individual examples of each genre out there for the system.

Fear. Pure fear. The most primal of emotions is the overwhelming one while playing Layers of Fear.

Screencheat is my favourite local multiplayer game on the PlayStation 4. It’s a nice, small, download that I’m going to leave sitting on the harddrive for whenever I have friends over, and while that might not happen on a weekly basis (I like my space, okay), each and every time I pull the game out, it’s going to more than validate its worth.

As a compilation, Legacy Collection thankfully makes an effort to be more than a sloppy pile of regurgitated code from decades ago.

Heavy Rain is very much the kind of game I like to play; it’s smart, interesting, different and highly focused. Cage might be a one-of-a-kind game director and thinker, and I do wish more developers paid attention to how he approaches his storytelling.

Rainbow Moon is not a good choice for people who are looking for a narrative, but for fans of the old school, punishingly difficult, hardcore JRPGs, this is a nice throwback with an awful lot of raw gameplay behind it.

In fact, it’s almost like a tech demo where the development team has come up with a brilliant combat system and has released that as a commercial project in the hope that a publisher will take note and throw them the money they need to make a real game next.

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

Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 manages to bottle up something magical and succeed a second time in a row.

I find that the complexity of its systems add a nice layer of strategy that most “Diablo clones” could benefit from. More than that, though, I find the narrative to be delightful in the way it revels in the Grimm Brothers’ sense of villainy, and then sticks you right in the middle of it and left to figure out for yourself if you’re comfortable helping a monster that completely evil.

My admiration of the game comes from its self-aware humour, traditional gameplay, and surprisingly unique story.

Fire Emblem Fates still approaches war from a largely idealistic standpoint, but it makes a quantum leap forward by representing a broader range viewpoints along the way. For a series that has changed incrementally over the last 25 years, this latest entry is a refreshing reinvention.

Minor issues aside, I do think this is the best Far Cry game.

If a player who stumbles upon this title on Steam becomes inspired to make serious educational reform after watching their students get dehumanised into tropical fruit, No Pineapple Left Behind will have all been worth it.

Street Fighter V looks and plays exactly like how you'd expect any instalment in the series to, but there's something unfinished about it, something that makes you feel the series has taken a giant step backward.

It’s not a very long game at all; I’d clocked it in about seven hours, but those are the best, most entertaining seven hours I’ve had with the PlayStation 4 controller in my hands for a very long time.