Nintendo serves up another bumper blink-and-you-lose blitz in WarioWare: Move It!, but the package is let down by the need to fumble with often-fussy motion controls.

A gorgeous fantasy journey enlivened by some thrilling rock-climbing.

Teyon blends bloody linear shootouts with light open world action for an entertaining, if unadventurous, RoboCop experience.

In its quest to be the most meta game ever made, Alan Wake 2 becomes a spectacle about writers and writing that badly needs an editor.

Moonring adds modern convenience to a classic Ultima-style RPG to create an approachable and appealing adventure with a huge amount of depth and discovery.

An endless cascade of ideas in a game that takes Mario to some wonderfully strange places.

Respectable platforming and classic Sonic elements are undermined by inconsistent new ideas.

At once a little simple and a little over-stuffed, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is still above all a game of immense charm and fluid, free-form style.

A thrilling arcade pool game with a lot of leeway for making your own blend of rules.

A serviceable, sometimes-engaging official Star Trek version of Stellaris that makes sense for generic space war fans, but flounders when it comes to narrative logic and Trekkie authenticity.

Missing the elegance of FromSoftware, Lords of the Fallen is let down by Soulslike clichés and performance woes.

A crew searches a watery world for a missing friend in this evocative game of exploration and conversation.

Dull warfare mars a fascinating battle for supremacy during the late Bronze Age collapse.

Developer Harebrained Schemes returns with an evocative and pulpy tactical adventure, where enjoyable turn-based combat just about offsets some woeful real-time stealth.

A shallow shooter that doesn't offer anywhere near enough bang for your ill-gotten buck.

Detective Pikachu Returns is a straightforward mystery adventure whose strengths lie in its Pokémon setting and breakout star.

Golden Age Baghdad, along with a return to a more focused, stealth-based design, makes for a rich and characterful adventure.

A generous and lavish racer, with thrilling driving, that wants you for the long haul.

It's a short game, and quite a painless one, then, but it feels dense: rich and imaginative and the result of some insatiable curiosity for putting things together in new ways. Even at the end of the adventure, five or six hours in, Cocoon was happy to introduce a new mechanic. By which I mean, of course, it was happy to wordlessly teach it, complicate it, turn it inside out and then twist it into something almost unimaginable. I'm sorry to be vague, but you need to see this for yourself. There are no easy words, but also seeing it, witnessing such clarity and ingenuity, is where the pleasure lies.

There are improvements, and there are problems - business as usual. The era of EA Sports' FIFA may be over, but the game goes on.

Demake visuals are the perfect match for a game that's both direct and gloriously weird.

2021's groundbreaking Wikipedia ARG returns with new art and fungal sidestories – and a superb execution of its multi-layered, misinformation murder mystery.

Mortal Kombat 1 envisions an exciting future with fluid combat, a fantastic story mode, and superb visuals - but receding features, underbaked mechanics, and a dated online experience keep it in the past.

An open-world Hawaii and a generously spirited racer, chafed by always-online irritations and a lack of originality.

A wide range of systems make Dune: Spice Wars an enjoyable 4X, but the depth of Frank Herbert's world-building is largely lost in translation.

Arkham-esque combat and lovely platforming combine in this joyous and colourful game.

Lies of P has strong enough foundations in its edgy tone and tweaked weapons to provide an enjoyable experience for those in need of a FromSoft fix.

Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes. But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there's nothing to bind it together.

Crack a handful of languages and then wield them in this mesmering adventure game.

Lorenzo Redaelli follows up 2020's uncompromising The Milky Way Prince: The Vampire Star with a pulverising, shape-shifting visual novel of friendship, post-COVID trauma, and horror in the blistering Italian sun that's as artistically dazzling as it is emotionally raw.

In summary, I'd say there's good news and bad news with Starfield on PC. The quality of the game is clear and unlike, say, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, we're not seeing disruptive problems that ruin the experience. However, there's clearly work to do. The options menu isn't descriptive enough or helps the user in any way in tailoring the game to their hardware. Basic features like field of view control, HDR, gamma and contrast controls need to be added, as well as official DLSS and XeSS support...Tackling the disproportionately poor Nvidia and Intel performance also needs to addressed, while there's the sense that the game isn't properly tuned for the major CPU architectures used in today's PCs. Optimised settings clearly yields large performance dividends though, suggesting some degree of scalability, while the DLSS mod is a must for RTX users and can help both performance and image quality for Nvidia owners - but let's hope to see some genuine improvements from Bethesda in Starfield's first major update. [Digital Foundry]

Part visual novel, part rhythm game, part interactive animated movie, Goodbye Volcano High taps into the sacred relationship between music and coming-of-age in ways that would be impossible in any other media format.

Eerie and loving by turn, Bomb Rush Cyberpunk is a gloriously haunted video game.

Micro-developer Lunar Division melds scientific rigour and faithful devotion into one, creating an entirely singular game about the depths of space, the limits of your own mind, and the divine beauty of mathematics.

There's so much of this stuff, from the elegant unspooling tutorials to the steady introduction of new ideas. New skins! New colours! There's an entire separate mode I haven't had time to mention yet, which takes the basics of the game and makes it musical, which actually means adding a time pressure and a sense of an ending to things.

Sea of Stars' well-considered inspirations are shot through with smart, modern sensibilities, creating a more-than-welcome addition to the contemporary throwback RPG club.

FromSoftware delivers a superlative action game that builds on its Soulslike pedigree while staying lean and laser-focused.

With a slow burn opening that lays the groundwork for a potentially brilliant sci-fi thriller, Fort Solis initially shows plenty of promise - but its story loses momentum in its later chapters, and fails to stick the landing.

Mixing repetitive, imprecise combat with annoying characters and a landslide of nonsensical, proper noun-stuffed lore, Immortals of Aveum is almost so bad it's good. If only.

A delightfully macabre homage, this asymmetrical horror could finally threaten Dead by Daylight's crown, if you didn't spend more time fighting the servers than Leatherface himself.

An enchanting, emotionally charged visual novel with a new take on deck-building and tarot divination.

With excellent stagecraft and meticulous detail, Baldur's Gate 3 conjures the illusion of perfect freedom - and then it disappears.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a cerebral but hugely characterful stealth tactics game filled with creativity and depth. And fun pirate stuff.

Wholesome, harmonious and completely unwilling to settle, this is one of the most generous games in years.

Frontier's annual management sim offers some small refinements over its predecessor but a lack of major upgrades means it doesn't snatch pole.

Absurd, unrelenting and endlessly creative, Turbo Overkill is a masterfully composed symphony of violence.

Atlas Fallen echoes other mid-00s slashers with fun melee combat and cool ideas, trapped in a run-of-the-mill open world.

A fascinating but flawed experimental musical game that fails to live up to some heavenly potential.

Food and family converge in this beautiful slice-of-life tale.

Remnant 2 is an ambitious sequel stuffed with delightful - and deadly - surprises.

An expressive, characterful entry point for metroidvanias.

A standard management sim with a coat of cosy paint lies under the short-lived novelty of using love as a resource.

Bullet hell games bust through into wild new territory with this fidgety arcade treat.

Pikmin 4 fills itself and your time with a rich array of things to do, things to find, goals to chase and places to explore. It may start slow, but when it all comes together, it really does sing. It preserves the series' oddities - it doubles down on them in some regards - and yet opens the series up in a way Pikmin has never managed previously. It's a fine reward for a decade of fan patience and a lot of thought by Nintendo's top brass on how best to continue after Pikmin 3. It's a skillful evolution of a series which has been left feeling a little overlooked for too long. Is this Pikmin's true breakthrough moment? Who knows. But without a doubt it's one of Nintendo's best games in years.

While crafted from familiar pieces, Capcom's latest shooter is an enjoyable combination of mechs, dinosaurs and general silliness.

It's interesting. By the end of the adventure, Oxenfree 2 has tied up a lot of mysteries. It had for me, anyway, and with a web-like game such as this there's always reason to go back in, make different choices, and see what else is waiting in there to be solved. But there's this other feeling to everything too, just as there was in the first game.

A beautifully written and illustrated tale of young people trying to change their world, which comes alive on replay.

Ghost Trick remains the delight it always was a decade later. Even on a second playthrough, this unique mystery firmly held your interest until the very end. Some occasional puzzle frustrations and control adjustments can't mask the witty humour, clever premise and unforgettable cast that rivals Ace Attorney. I quickly realised how much I'd forgotten after 12 years, so rediscovering this adventure was an utter joy. Second chances don't come around often, so I hope it finds that wider audience this time. This remaster is easily the definitive way to play.

Trails into Reverie is a fine epilogue for Crossbell and Cold Steel arcs, offering necessary closure and clear hints about the series' future.

A neon-lit murder mystery unable to uncover a deeper core.

Limited enemies and environments don't hamper some of the best VR blasting out there.

Prepare yourself for a mixtape of lurid brilliance.

A smart combat system straining under the weight of a characterful but ponderous pseudo-medieval soap opera, with some of the grandest bosses and dullest sidequests in FF history.

Despite making an excellent first impression, Park Beyond ends in a downward spiral that's exciting in a coaster, but lethal in an economy.

Improving old features, alongside introducing new ones, results in a delightful reimagining of a classic farming simulator.

Aliens: Dark Descent is an occasionally wayward but on the whole, inspired movie adaptation, and a suspenseful real-time tactics game.

Don't Nod's latest adds a near-revolutionary twist to choice-based narrative games.

Mask of the Rose is an incredibly ambitious dating sim - for better and worse, as its complexity is its greatest constraint.

A beautifully crafted side-scroller with a restless puzzle imagination.

Like the Blizzard hits of old, Diablo 4 is a designer's game at heart, built on intricacy and depth. A sense of fearful overcompensation holds it back.

30 years after the arcade original debatably debuted the bullet hell concept, Toaplan's best shooter is back in an imperfect port of a port.

Amnesia: The Bunker corrects the missteps of its predecessors and adds in a sense of invention, creating a truly unsettling adventure.

A serviceable tactics game lumbered with an uninspiring setting and narrative, brought right down by bigoted stereotypes.

A brain teaser that borrows the aesthetics of PS1 horror, The Tartarus Key's repetition sadly dulls the impact of its spooks.

Street Fighter 6 rights the wrongs of its predecessor while dragging the famous fighting game franchise kicking and screaming into the modern era.

SHODAN is what makes parts of this game truly special, even with some warts. Thankfully, the original's impenetrable Excel sheet menus are gone. But Nightdive doesn't take the Capcom or Square Enix approach with this remake; they're actually pretty uncompromising in their mission to update the original. As a result, there aren't any wildly dynamic abilities or playful ways to move around the station (a la Prey) that some newbies might expect. But ultimately, the System Shock remake faithfully recreates a classic, retains most of its appeal, reframes everything with a horror tilt, and as a result, makes it more playable for everyone.

Really, Lego 2K Drive was prefigured in 2019, with the Lego Speed Champions DLC for Forza Horizon 4, where Playground Games plugged its wondrous driving into a surfeit of visual jokes. The best of which was how well the British landscape, with its greebled turf and boxy clouds, responded to its toyish transformation - all those skittering dry stone walls you had ploughed through seemed right at home in Legofied form. From there, I guess, the idea grew and grew, but I can't help wondering if it should have stayed put.

A strong sense of character is let down by poor controls, fiddly implementation, and bugs.

Boltgun's boltgun earns a place in the pantheon of great video game weapons, but the rest of the game's arsenal doesn't quite live up to it.

Cor, this is all lovely. And I need to tell you that outside of the campaign there's a level editor, which is terrifyingly powerful, and a near-endless supply of user-made levels to work through, many of which require thinking that is utterly, hopelessly beyond me. There's also a VR mode, which Ian will be writing about on Sunday. I haven't been able to test it.

A terrific Breath of the Wild follow-up with some brilliant new systems, amazing views and more dungeon-type spaces, plus a slightly deadening emphasis on gathering resources.

A copious and often brilliant, if not quite unmissable reworking of a powerfully grim fantasy. [Eurogamer Recommended]

A beautiful but rather hollow and one-note trip to a familiar world of wonder and misrule.

The follow-up to Mothmen 1966 is another fascinating, spooky treat. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Arkane's vampire thriller is muddled and deeply compromised, but has moments of real charm.

Cassette Beasts is classic Pokémon expertly remixed for those who feel they have aged out of the series' target audience. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Taking inspiration from RPGs breathes new life into Age of Wonders 4, which balances exciting breadth and surprising approachability. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Some subtle improvements to the grind and flexible turn-based tactics mean Honkai: Star Rail's off to a fine start. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor remains fundamentally really fun. Cal's platforming skills expand even more, and Jedi: Survivor's set pieces have become even more elaborate. There's a whiff of Force Unleashed at times, with the angsty but wonderfully over the top sense of action and melodrama. It is always enjoyable to ping yourself around runnable walls and ziplines and now grapple hooks (I know) like a human pinball. It is much more desirable that Star Wars games have a little goofiness, from genuinely funny companions like Greeze to the sheer amount of Jedi Suspension of Disbelief you have to harness throughout, than it is that they become too self-serious or stoic. UItimately this is the almost impossible tradeoff Respawn has with Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. Its lack of focus is what holds it back - and also what makes it such a blast.

Maybe, of course, I'm not giving the game enough credit. Or, to put it another way, am I critiquing the game when I should be critiquing myself? This is a generous, elegant, efficient tactics game that I still take great pleasure from, that I can still lose hours and hours to, and it's also one which, if you step back, absolutely allows you to realise that you're frequently doing ugly things beneath a cheery facade. This might be another layer of its design. When are things ever simple? Maybe, this is a complex game that a person can meet on a number of levels, and the levels change as the person does. [Eurogamer Recommended]

If you've somehow yet to play an undead-themed action-RPG or you have an appropriately on-brand mindless hunger for the subgenre, Dead Island 2 might be worth your while. It's certainly got the zombie disassembly part down pat. If you are neither of those things, all the sturdy design and flying organs in the world can't hide the shortage of lingering excitement here. Dead Island 2 isn't a bad game, but it does feel superfluous, which is a sad thing to conclude about a project that's been in development for almost a decade. Still, at least they spared us the zombie booby merchandise this time.

Minecraft's blocky charm is present and correct, but the rest of Minecraft Legends is only as deep as the skins it wants to sell you.

The thing is, weird as all this is, I suspect that nothing in Mile 0 is as weird as totalitarianism in the first place. I'm tempted to say that Mile 0 can get away with any flights of fancy in a world that has seen a president's attorney give a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, an establishment which is located, inevitably, next to a sex shop and a crematorium. Is Mile 0's stranger elements a reaction to that, and to the strange shapes that authoritarianism contorts people into? I don't know. But I will keep puzzling away at what I've experienced, I think, and trying to make sense of what I've witnessed here.

What a game. A tangle of motives, rendered all the more thrilling by memorable characters, some of which slyly subvert stereotypes, by moments of whimsy, by static art that has a particular flair for eyes, and for the way that eyes can reveal the interior life of a person. And that setting! One night, and one grey, drained-away day in Tokyo, the buildings sheer walls of bleached concrete, the sky latticed by power lines, telephone lines, by the webs of all that information zinging about. [Eurogamer Recommended]

The reverse city builder is trickier than it appears, but utterly committed to its environmental vision, taking the genre - and every level - to new places. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Blending fishing with Gothic horror and Lovecraft is a fine hook, but Dredge is too defined by simple loot-and-upgrade rhythms to reel you in.

A glorious spell of island hopping, with some surprisingly nasty moments. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Keeping what works while reimagining what doesn't, this is about as good as remakes get. [Eurogamer Recommended]