Super may lack the impact of its immediate forebear, which grabbed headlines with its heady combination of brilliance and novelty. But this is the very best sort of evolution, a perfection of detail, one that diminishes its faults and amplifies its successes.

Playground Games delivers yet another gorgeous and enveloping pocket holiday, smartly restructured but reassuringly unchanged. [Eurogamer Recommended]

I wanted more strange possibilities from the spaces I lived around. With Blue Prince I get that. What an extraordinary game this is.

The game also does a lovely job of framing your relationship with other players and nurturing them.

The bottom line for us is that it has morphed into a dumbed-down experience that is no longer anywhere near as gripping and compelling as it once was, and while the multiplayer does bail out the overall value of the package to a large extent, it can't mask the decline elsewhere.

It's not hard to see us looking back in five years time and seeing FFXII as a pivotal, changing moment in how RPGs are designed; a game which drew on the experience of Final Fantasy's branches into tactical strategy and massively multiplayer, as well as on the more mature storytelling of other mediums, and folded it back into the number series, to wonderful result.

Threes! is at once nicotine and soul food, magnificent and deadly, a machine for playing. It is flawed and broken and perfect and you must start playing it today.

An exotic cocktail of entertainment for Nintendo fans, who will slurp up every last drop, and if you want to talk about longevity, I've had this game on import for about six months and I still haven't finished it.

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

Much of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is more of the same gruelling beauty - but a shift to explict storytelling and signposting means its essence as a living, evolving shared text is lost.

In any real-time strategy game you'll fight desperate battles against hopeless odds, but here, thanks to the strategy side, you know the precise cost of loss will be. It's a magical, beautiful synergy and there's nothing quite like it in the entire gaming lexicon.

Turn 10 has sacrificed flash for a faultless 60 frames a second, and understood that in simulation, what you feel is far more important than what you see. It has diverted all of the 360's resources to giving you the smoothest, most believable, most physically rewarding drive you've ever had.

There's friction between the original and this lavish remake, but this is a scintillating launch title that shows off the PS5's strengths. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Fans of the caped crusader really shouldn't hesitate - this isn't just the best grown-up Batman game, it's the best superhero game, bar none.

The sheer variety in level design and objectives will keep you coming back for more even if you think you're bored.

It's just so massively detailed, so thoroughly improved and so gloriously playable that we have to recommend it. We haven't even touched on the multiplayer aspect, which we'll be doing in our PS2 Online review very soon, but to be honest it wouldn't have to be good - the rest of the game is enough on its own.

For the vast majority of the gaming world, this is quite easily the best 3D beat 'em up ever made.

This is a special game. The kind that makes you stop and think for a long time about whether it's ever been done better.

I never got into the original game, yet I find AoE II enchanting. The sheer depth of the technology tree and evolution of the civilisation are always a surprise. I particularly like the intuitive logic that makes battles more tactical.

The PAL conversion with its enormous borders is a big disappointment, but the strength of the story, the battle system and the combination of clever dialogue, visuals and soundtrack conspire to captivate the player.

The graphics are a match for anything else on the market, and the game doesn't need a supercomputer to run it.

Smash is still too unrefined to be the choice of the Nintendo connoisseur, perhaps, but as long as you don't take it too seriously, it is riotously good fun.

For me, Guitar Hero's real genius was its universal appeal, its ability to cater for any taste and any ability with its varied track list, infectious enthusiasm and unique immediacy, and that inclusiveness is - arguably, I must stress - not quite so present here as it was before.

Karaoke and guitar specialists certainly won't want to throw out their SingStars and Guitar Heroes, but with the peripheral set-up now established and regular infusions of downloadable content, the future's bright for Rock Band - and the present's pretty rocking too.

Chrono Trigger is a masterclass in RPG design, its execution so far beyond the quality and poise of contemporary JRPGs it's embarrassing. It represents the work of a company at the very top of its field, a team of designers so confident with the rules that they helped establish that they felt free to subvert and invert them to glorious effect.

If Journey is about God, then God has played an awful lot of video games. One of the most fascinating things about thatgamecompany's sand-blown chunk of spiritual eye candy isn't that it reinvents gaming, or extends the medium's reach: it's that it takes old ideas - sometimes very old ideas - and repackages them in clever, stylish, and unexpected ways.

It's a game that invites us to reassess an entire genre, pointing to a bold future while nodding its respect towards the past. It's a towering triumph.

More or less every concern and complaint we had about the original game has been addressed, the new tracklist is very much to our taste (with 20 more free songs to come, remember), and with the rebalancing of difficulty, modes like Battle of the Bands and the No Fail modifier and Drum Trainer, Harmonix has completed the awkward job of broadening the game's appeal at both ends of the skill spectrum successfully. It's an excellent, measured sequel that should appeal to all.