From the developer of The Banished Vault, Amberspire is an equal-parts frustrating and intriguing eco city-builder set on a moon that was built as a mausoleum.

John Carpenter's Toxic Commando blends Left 4 Dead-style zombie blasting with systems borrowed from Saber's back catalogue. The results work well enough, but are undermined by flabby mission design and unnecessary meta-progression.

A vast world and even vaster array of MMO-like activities mix with glittering fidelity in Crimson Desert, but what good is it without much character, texture or charm?

It's a fun distraction on your mobile, giving you a few hours of entertainment to rack up a high score, finish all the stages, and gawp at the tremendous graphics. Like I said, worth a bob or two.

Despite some truly awful sections to put up with, enough of the old magic remains to make it worth sticking with if you loved the original. The real puzzle is how Telltale let it out of the door in this state.

The sequel to Squanch Games' detestable FPS demonstrates significant improvement, though its biggest features remain its weakest - and technical issues hinder the progress made.

With nothing to aim for other than a slightly higher score, Food Processing feels like one of those apps which burns brightly and briefly before you move on to something more involved. That's a guaranteed few million sales, then.

Like so many plying their trade in 2D action adventures, Rogue Sky wins the day through eye-catching art and simple, effective mechanics that always manage to avoid straying onto the wrong side of the challenge/frustration divide.

With tactile controls, Shadow Runner would be an excellent, original platform puzzler, but it doesn't quite come off on touch-screen devices. Nice try, though.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is enjoyable enough, and has glimpses of vintage Metroid shining through, but this game could and should have been so much more.

A shift away from single-player leaves Call of Duty with its most lopsided and homogenous entry in decades, though what it does offer is consistently good fun when accepted on its own terms.

Lumiose City could do with work, but Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a much more tightly focused - and delightfully goofy - return to better form. At least by modern Pokémon's standards.

Supermassive's decision to play it safe means too many familiar frustrations, but impressive artistry – and a mid-game uptick – makes for a grimly compelling adventure all the same.

I love crime fiction. On principle, I will, to paraphrase one of Death on the Nile's main characters, go absolutely bald-headed for an Agatha Christie game, with the full understanding that reimagination and reinterpretation are crucial parts in keeping stories alive well beyond the existence of their creators. But while there is eccentricity and tension and vitality (however subdued and English) within the pages of Christie's decades-old books, my first lesson in playing Death on the Nile is to accept comical lifelessness in the modern world's most interactive media form. And it is a different creature entirely.

Kyle Crane is back, and looking for revenge on the evil scientist who's spent 13 years experimenting on him in this enjoyable if sometimes uneven romp through Techland's greatest hits.

A fun arcade karting experience is often too chaotic for its own good, but a tight handling model with a high skill ceiling offers surprising depth.

Sucker Punch's sequel offers more great swordplay and heartfelt storytelling, but would be better served as a linear action game, freed of its poor sidequests and dated open world.

Borderlands 4 brings a more sensible script and a true open world to its pseudo-cel-shaded gun-show. But these moderate improvements are undermined by frustrating exploration and combat that takes too long to properly shine.

Hell is Us is an absorbing, nightmarish meditation on the horror of war, but divisive design choices prove tedious.

Mafia continues to feel a tad dated in its design trappings, but there's a fascinating mix of beauty, efficiency and nuanced performances here that are well worth your time.

Familiarity stalks you at every turn in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, a competent, cool and pretty soulslike with a nice twist on death but few true surprises.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream offers luxurious cutscenes and a focused twist on stealth by remaining intentionally inflexible, but doesn't quite pull it all together.

What a bizarre, improbable thing this is. If Control was all about a fairly standard action game with world-beating set dressing, it feels like Firebreak has worked backwards from that set dressing to build all its actual ideas from. It really is a game about fixing furnaces and picking up Post-its, but it wants you to do it with strangers, and, heck, why not have a little interference from the Hiss as you go? It’s pretty much Control fan fiction - and I mean that even if you don't get the mission in which you're fixing giant fans.

Part of me has always thought that Nintendo doesn't really care about technology. The company's made games that look like they're made of paper and felt, and when it dabbled in VR it did it with cardboard. So it feels a bit weird to see Nintendo banging on about HDR and, in the later moments of the stamp rally, diving inside the Switch 2 console itself and letting you walk over its battery and its heat channels and all that jazz. It feels like Nintendo spends a lot of time pretending that this isn't technology at all. It's just imagination and playfulness.

A wondrous dreamlike world to explore in or out of VR, but a story that doesn't always hit as hard as you might want.

A zany, knockabout co-op action adventure that's kaleidoscopically colourful but wears you out before you get to the good stuff.

Stronger emotional stakes and faster-paced drama promise an explosive climax that ultimately pulls its biggest punch.

Clearly the aim here has been to make something broad, to bring this story and its amplification of southern culture to as many people as possible. But in the process the joy of more rewarding interactivity, or more uniquely defined identity beyond the familiar platforming and fighting patterns, has been lost. So, again, the overwhelming sense here really is one of disappointment. Not that South of Midnight is a disappointing game - far from it - but that it's such a shame for it to get so close to being something so genuinely special. This is a game of just remarkable craft - we've not even mentioned the stop-motion style of animation! It's lovely - and likewise remarkable attention, thought, and care. If only just a little more of that care had been afforded to the playing of it.