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.

It’s easy to admire the developer’s evident love for the NES game – it’s clearly been handled with the kind of care only a genuine fan would provide – but after a few repetitive hours bouncing around DuckTales’ pretty but unremarkable worlds you’ll begin to realise that some treasures aren’t worth the effort of unearthing.

What’s left is, while smartly streamlined, a thoroughly orthodox game within a well-established type, a niche within a niche that’s getting smaller all the time.

It hangs together because its distinct strands feed into one another just enough, even if that relationship is as crude as a dialogue tree leading to you gaining a stat-altering card that you can play during the campaign phase.

In-app purchases, however, are handled with more nuance and kept pleasingly out of sight.

Compulsive and beautifully tuned, Pivvot is a tense, nervy challenge to relish.

With its best ideas exhausted long before the developer tires of them, some moments of real ingenuity are swamped by busywork. At times, you’ll admire the craftsmanship, but Sky Tourist is often too busy trying to be clever to remember to be fun.

You’ll never be able to play enough Dota 2 to totally master it, and although it’s an F2P game it can be too cruel and unusual for some. But persist through the tough start and accept the idiosyncrasies, and you’ll start to understand why so many have stuck with it for more than a decade. Why would they need something new when they’ve got this incredibly deep, rewarding multiplayer experience?

Atmospheric, tense, and sometimes unfairly hard, Test3′s roguelike is another welcome entry in a resurgent genre.

While the logic-based puzzles are never too perplexing, they can require a little too much back-and-forth travel between adjacent rooms, occasionally wearing out the good impression made by each gorgeously rendered setting.

While we’ll accept that Deadpool the character is an acquired taste, this is an indisputably poor game, one whose knowing winks and quips come off not as metacommentary but as tacit apologia for its litany of specific failings.

That’s what Shadowrun Return provides, of course: it’s not just a single tale of murder and techno-conspiracy. It’s a ruleset and a tileset, and a promise of more to come.

It only takes a couple of playthroughs for events to start recurring, and that severely diminishes The Yawhg’s spell, but it can’t take away the charm with which Carrol and Sommer’s game weaves together fairy tales.

Rogue Legacy offers the silly, slapstick cruelty of the best roguelikes, but twins it with something just as appealing: a tantalising hint of control over your fate.

Hexodius’ dungeon sections aren’t involved enough to offer interesting choices or exploration, but last just long enough to qualify as clunky menu screens.

Realmforge is clearly a student of the genre, but budget is king here, and the studio lacks the financial clout to even pierce the flesh of a crowded market. Despite being crafted with noble intentions, Dark succeeds only in sucking the life out of itself.

A Toyko Tale is brief and entirely linear – in the main, you’re simply walking between numbered waypoints, though you can unlock certain dialogues by losing your servant status – but Ayabe transports you so utterly to an unfamiliar time and place that it matters little. By the outlandish and oddly touching final act showdown, you’ll be a rapt spectator, cheering on the heroes alongside Sohta and his newfound friends.

Familiarity is both the worst and best thing about Pikmin 3. Twelve years after the original and nine after the sequel, little has changed – but little really needed to. It may not sell systems on its own, but it’s a fine addition to a sparse software library that brings one of Nintendo’s most vibrantly characterful series into the HD era and, critically, makes convincing use of the GamePad.

There’s nothing here that wasn’t done bigger, in more detail, and with more options, in Eidos Montreal’s game, while the story so far fails to introduce new ideas or themes.

This is a remarkable sequel, one that takes its predecessor not as a template, but a jumping-off point. And for all the justifiable concern about its chosen business model, its implementation of the free-to-play model prizes players’ hearts above the contents of their wallets.

Matches are brisk, varied and tense, but you might face a long wait to get one. An idle mode allows you to browse the internet or check emails until a challenge arrives, but alerts are sadly infrequent. Local play is a fine substitute if you have a willing partner, but Gun Monkeys is a two-player game too often lacking a player two.

Coming from the studio behind Wave Trip and Bad Hotel, Gentlemen’s sharp, stylish menus and app icon were always a given, but a conceptual curveball like this was hardly guaranteed to hit its target. That it does so emphatically is convincing proof that this Edinburgh studio is no one-trick pony.

The game is also lumbered with a tragic split personality. On one hand, there’s a lot to do, and if you like the look of one of the initial five heroes you can do all of it for free with a little grinding. On the other hand, Marvel Heroes is so eager for you to spend – and so keen to extract the most out of your wallet when you do – that the price tag of the game in real-world terms can soon become astonishingly disproportionate to its quality.

Following the excellent Inside Story was always going to be a big ask, so it’s hardly a surprise AlphaDream never quite manages to conjure up anything better than being Bowser. Still, while the comparison to its predecessor does it few favours, rest assured that Dream Team Bros’ additions and curiously entertaining battles do enough to reawaken the desire to see this adventure through to the end.

Scourge: Outbreak may seek to mimic the thrills and achievements of its blockbuster inspiration, but it serves merely to underline their superiority. Tragnarion has clearly put effort into polishing the game, but it’s fatally neglected to work on the underlying basics that were crooked three years ago.

Rather than developing the original’s ideas, it’s content to simply reuse them. Zipping around via a network of boost tiles no longer carries the same thrill, and though squeezing the shoulder button as a monster passes by a translucent platform remains one of the most deliciously cruel ways to dispose of an enemy, repeating the trick diminishes its impact.

Exploration feels clumsy and laboured, and it’s all too easy to be overwhelmed by a swarm, bumped from wasp to ant and back, stun lock preventing you from firing again as your health bar steadily depletes. We didn’t expect high art, but criminally, Bugs vs. Tanks doesn’t even offer low-budget thrills.