Super Time Force hands you a super weapon that feels super – one that gives you the impression you’ve hacked into the game’s code to gain the upper hand – and then dares you to try to break the game with it. That it never buckles, despite allowing you to continually rewrite history as a horde of player characters and hundreds of projectiles fill the screen, is nothing short of remarkable.

Mario Kart 8 is yet another overwhelmingly powerful argument in favour of the company’s idiosyncratic approach to design.

Come to terms with its idiosyncrasies and you’ll find a unique and wonderfully characterful action game; it’s well worth suffering those early scratches for the moments where it really begins to purr.

As a game, it has problems. Indoor spaces will struggle to contain more than a few players (the maximum is seven) and with no rules governing conduct, smaller players are at a natural disadvantage if competition escalates. Still, as a statement of intent it is extraordinary, and feels characteristic of what Sportsfriends sets out to achieve – a realisation that simplicity and good company are the root ingredients of enjoying games, and that far from being decisive, visual sophistication might actually be entirely irrelevant.

Baffling design decisions and over-reliance on the same tricks further mar this already unpleasant journey.

It has, through painstaking effort, upgraded the card duel into a thoroughly modern form. It has resisted the dark lures of free-to-play, and has made deep systems simple to parse without neutering them. In short, Hearthstone is borderline alchemy, turning physical systems into digital gold.

Players who seek the traditional fantasy MMOG experience may find something of value in TESO, because it has evidently been built with them in mind. But it is difficult to imagine many others investing hundreds of hours in a place this bland, in a formula this familiar, and in a game this demanding of both your time and your money.

It’s a game that, for all the intricacy of its systems and the charm of its painterly world, feels oddly empty.

As it is, his 3DS debut is too uneven to be essential, but too charming for fans to miss.

This inability to decide where World Tour lies among the many paths the series has taken previously is the game’s true problem. It demonstrates both why Camelot is so trusted by Nintendo, and why it has been stuck making sporting spinoffs for so long. Camelot seems unsure of whether it would prefer to be held by the hand or simply set free, and ends up putting the player in that same awkward middle ground.

It’s a cheap thrill, a shallow way to connect input with outcome that doesn’t, in the end, compensate for Pocket Football Club’s lack of responsiveness elsewhere.

NES Remix 2’s superior selection of games means it should maintain your interest longer than its predecessor; only rarely will you curse the controls that mean the more exacting platforming challenges can be infuriating to master.

It can be too obtuse at times, but the rewards are quite unlike anything else in games: the music peaks, a laser beam rockets off into the sky, and you turn, heading off after that distant synth, in search of your next project deeper in the neon unknown.

While it attempts to blend FMX, quad bikes and more familiar Trials action, the new elements sit uneasily with the old. Trials has always been about precision and skill, traits that are blunted or obfuscated by four-wheel drive and fussy inputs.

Rivals’ biggest problem is that its chances of success are inexorably bound to the performance of the device around which it is designed.

Free-to-play works when you earn the trust of your players over time, but RedLynx instead prods you at every opportunity to remind you that you haven’t paid for your game yet. Even so, once dredged from beneath the cloying mass of microtransactions that suffocate it, Trials Frontier isn’t a bad game as such. It is, however, a very bad Trials game.

As a whole, Mercenary Kings is a case study in the perils of Early Access. The need to provide a steady flow of content to early buyers has birthed a glut of superfluous systems and a swollen set of missions – the wrong sort of substance to accompany Robertson’s style.

As an enigmatic whisper of a narrative concludes in delightful, uplifting fashion, you’ll likely be left wanting more.

Banished is a rare technical achievement, pure in design and of purpose. Its many deaths almost always feel fair, and the battle up to self-sufficiency is gripping. But the absence of a long game beyond this early toil makes it hard to find reasons to settle down here, except for the views, especially if you’ve established yourself on these frosty plains before.

This may be the age of the single-screen brawler, but TowerFall is among the most feature-rich of its kind.

It’s a thoroughly successful evolution of the twitch shooter, broadening its scope both upwards and outwards as well as expanding its toolset.

As an open-world game, Second Son feels emaciated. There’s little to do in the way of side missions, and what is here becomes repetitive, unlikely to sustain interest beyond a single playthrough. Approach it as an action game that just happens to be set in a nonlinear environment and it makes more sense, but its not-inconsiderable achievements take effort to uncover.

If it’s a demo, Ground Zeroes is the best demo ever; if it’s a prologue, it sets up the story so well you’ll spend the next year thirsting for revenge; and if it’s a tutorial, the systems it teaches are so intriguing that the prospect of spending an entire game with them is irresistible. Ground Zeroes is a resounding success in every respect bar its price tag, but value is relative. Fourteen hours in, we’re still learning.

Though the necessities of catering to two different audiences mean that it perhaps never quite reaches the heights of either of the pair’s best individual outings, as the credits roll, you’ll likely experience a hollow feeling, the emptiness that only the best stories leave behind.

It’s surprisingly tactical.

Basic combat is dismal, turgid stuff, yet accounts for almost all the action.

Though the stage design is carefully plotted to the last pixel, there’s little room for deviation – and none for the ultimate three-star prize. As such, it’s a case of brute-forcing the solution over dozens of repeated attempts, a process that feels less engaging here than in some of its peers.

Arzest has laid an egg here, but not of the golden variety.