No one makes worlds like Rockstar, but at last it has produced one without compromise. Everything works. It has mechanics good enough to anchor games of their own, and a story that is not only what GTA has always wanted to tell but also fits the way people have always played it. It’s a remarkable achievement, a peerless marriage of world design, storytelling and mechanics that pushes these ageing consoles to the limit and makes it all look easy.

Buy into Arma 3 now and you’re buying into many promises. Bohemia’s pledge of a coherent campaign, its promise of a wider array of military toys to play with, and its intent to tweak and update AI errors, scripting issues, and pathfinding problems. But these promises are backed up by thousands of the world’s most dedicated players, people who’ve spent years crawling through Arma 2’s rough terrain to find the comparatively even ground of Arma 3. Buying Arma 3 at launch is buying a promise, then, but few games are so meticulously realised, or show so much promise.

The Chinese Room’s temporary stewardship of the series has resulted in an undoubtedly slicker experience, but one that comes at the cost of some of The Dark Descent’s memorable urgency. But there are as many gains here as there are losses.

Lucid is carrying on the spirit of its PGR days with this sim-arcade hybrid, but where Bizarre Creations’ driving games pushed their platforms’ boundaries, 2K Drive is incapable of breaking through the limitations of iOS.

When directing death from above, Strike Team offers a glimpse at what might have been, but when it’s time to go loud, the whole thing collapses as limply as the enemies you’ve dropped.

When the offscreen narrator, voiced with arch-Britishness by Stephen Greif, welcomes you to “the magical theatre of the strange and fantastic”, his adjectives are right on all three counts. And you rarely get magic that feels quite this immaculately handcrafted.

A Disney game that finally lives up to the name.

Outlast’s combination of stealth, platforming and horror is exceptional, the benefits of the diverse experience of its highly talented development team always in plain sight.

It is, in other words, a competent handheld version of Killzone, and those who bought a Vita on that promise will be amply satisfied. Others will squint, line up their sights on a speck in the middle distance, squeeze the trigger and hope for the popup confirming their aim was true, and wonder if this is really what handheld gaming should be.

Unlike iOS title The Room, here intricacy proves a weakness, and Open Me doesn’t have the rich atmosphere of Fireproof Games’ award-winning puzzler to compensate for its mechanical awkwardness.

It’s big and beautiful, but it’s also too swollen, too slow, and too buggy to sustain its lofty ambition.

It’s perhaps easier to admire than to enjoy, but those who are prepared to meet its bracing challenge may find themselves hooked by one of the smartest iOS games in some time.

Diablo still contains enough impulsive monster-slaying to entertain, but the trek from its home on PC has left it diminished.

With Suda we’ve come to expect the unexpected, but the most disappointing thing about Killer Is Dead is that the unexpected has become predictable. By adhering too rigidly to its creator’s esoteric template, it gives us pretty much exactly what we were anticipating.

Try and play Shelter as a perfectionist and you’ll fail, the victim of a cruel world and occasionally clunky, unclear rules. Better to simply do your best, allow Might and Delight’s fantastical art to enthrall, and let nature take its course.

It may well have been a great game at its initial deadline, but the staggering level of detail in its amplified incarnation helps it run rings around its already estimable predecessor.

In its current form, Payday 2 is a slog, and it’s no fault of the game itself but all the bloat that surrounds it.

If Race The Sun’s tracks remain as consistently well-paced and tiered as the raft of stages we’ve experienced to date, then it can be considered a success rather than an experiment: a confident genre hybrid worthy of your time and patience because who knows, today could be your day.

Games have mastered action – the amplified and instant reward – but Papers, Please finds satisfaction in the tedium of bureaucracy, and twins it with genuinely human stories and an underlying, dread-filled tension. It’s rare to play a game about something, about a time, a place and a theme, and for a game to embody those ideas from meaning right down to mechanics.

What had the potential to showcase to the uninitiated what makes fighting games so special has become a game aimed too squarely at those who already know.

It’s a slick slice of B-movie alien blasting, in short, but we’re glad it’s standing alongside a more authentic take on XCOM rather than wearing its visage but not quite acting the same.

The Wonderful 101 draws on ideas from Kamiya’s previous games – Viewtiful Joe’s cartoonish charm, Okami’s brushstroke mechanic, Bayonetta’s setpieces – but in concert they’re messy, hamstrung by cluttered visual design and a clumsy central mechanic. Stretched over a large frame, they wear thin quickly. There’s a good game in here, but it’s smothered by the need to conform to its host platform’s feature set, and a distorted concept of value for money.

Perhaps Gone Home’s greatest surprise lies in the apparent ease with which The Fullbright Company has joined the game’s subject and its medium: it’s a domestic tale of girl-to-womanhood told with the tools of an action game. As a statement that games can express emotionally resonant stories, Gone Home is a triumph. But that’s not why you should play it. Engrossing, touching and rewarding, it’s well worth the experience on its own terms, too.

That player-considerate attitude is offset by less reverential treatment of its inspiration, however. Ittle Dew isn’t really a parody, more a loving pastiche, but its gently sassy mockery of Zelda’s conventions ties with the beautiful, vibrant art to ensure that while this really is mostly block puzzles, they’re some of the best presented ones you’ve ever played.

By the time you reach the end of Blacklist everything has grown so big and so explosive that you’re left exhausted but not entirely satisfied, and maybe after all that incoherent action you’ll recall the time when a single flashlight in Chaos Theory’s Panamanian bank made you hold your breath.

If some activities are variants on familiar parlour games, they’re enlivened by creative twists and side objectives, while others are brimming with invention.

One thing’s for sure: it’s the one we’ve been waiting to play.

Europa Universalis IV is the game you graduate to when you’re tired of Civilization. That’s ultimately also why all those numbers are there, beneath the surface: because you never graduate away from Europa Universalis IV. It drops you in the deep end before you’re ready, but if you can swim back towards the shallows during those first five hours, you’ll unlock a game so rich, it’ll be helping you tell stories for years.