Navigating a tonal minefield with just enough confidence, Company of Heroes 3 is a big, refined, and beautifully textured addition to an already brilliant series. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Intriguingly, the presence of an all-encompassing online mode called Conquest ties up all the various strands of multiplayer game into a coherent whole.

The long overdue samurai spin-off is classic Yakuza under its period dressing but also underwhelming as a current-gen remake.

It's a 9-flavoured 8, but again the mechanics of the court sequences are often so stupidly frustrating that it would be wrong to mark any higher.

Stellar Blade has a fair bit of weirdness, but its killer tunes and vibey, flow-state combat - plus a transformative hard mode - are enough to leave you entranced.

It's another small step forward for the series, but that's not quite enough to dispel the suspicion that Codemasters' F1 team doesn't have the resources to create iterations compelling or different enough to justify the annual churn. F1 2012 is a good game, but it's some way off from being the classic it could be.

Veteran trainers, on the other hand, need to ask themselves if they want more of the same… again.

What we have here essentially is an exceptionally polished product with a smattering of new additions that, Xbox Live aside, don't make an especially significant leap forward after last year's return to form.

It's a scope and scale that can be daunting, but it allows for an unparalleled level of player agency within an RTS.

I'll be totally honest. After Slay the Spire I thought I had the only card battling RPG I needed for the time being. But I should never bet against the SteamWorld team, and so it proved here. Wit, warmth, smart mechanics and a surprising challenge all make SteamWorld Quest a delight - and then there's Orik, of course. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Competent strategy pastes flat-footed, surface-level sci-fi over a genre that lives and dies by its nuance.

Action-packed dungeons make Lost Ark's early stages a real romp, but without a convincing hook beyond the combat, things get a little stale.

By simply making sure that absolutely everything in the game is designed to remove the usual restrictions on fun, Sumo's created something that practically transcends rivals like PGR3 and Burnout before you even done anything.

For a game that's entirely happy to plunder the past and repackage it all with a nod and a wink, this cheery portion of nostalgic blasting is well worth dusting off your neglected PSP for.

Despite - or possibly because of - its simple premise, Critical Mass is a game that's hard to put down once you get into a groove, and its a game we're likely to see a lot more of on handheld platforms once word gets around.

Of course the idea with Deluxe is that even if that's beyond you so much has been brought together that there's enough to entertain regardless.

It might look cuter than a kitten, but Rotating Octopus can be just as savage when it wants to be. And we still love it, fools that we are.

With the gameplay mechanics reduced to a largely predictable run of conversations and (in)appropriate use of objects, The City That Dare Not Sleep feels stuck in a rut much of the time.

Its dramatic and spectacular boss fights just about keep Black Myth: Wukong afloat, but behind all its glitz and glamour is a frustratingly hollow and rudderless action game.

As with the first Puzzle Quest, then, the concept is what's truly brilliant - the one-more-go aspect of spatial challenges threaded into the reward schedule of an RPG. While the middling implementation's been somewhat improved this time around, the result is still a game that's supremely effective rather than genuinely brilliant.

Unfortunately, AOE3's ship has sailed for most folks, and this just isn't exciting enough to quite justify also splashing out on the original game if you don't already own it.

With the trademark sharp witticisms layered onto challenging and inventive puzzles, this is the best possible start to the new season.

Although decent fun in short bursts, Age Of Zombies is a little too relentlessly repetitive to enjoy over the longer term, and this general lack of variety makes the inflated price seem a tad questionable.

The platforming fluency is seductive, but it's a language of indifferent thumbing yawned through timing windows as wide as a house. The crushing thing about Prince of Persia, however, isn't this. It's that we're faced with yet another poor game planted in a bed of fantastic technology and interesting mechanics, which, rather than empowering the player to solve interesting problems in new and exciting ways, merely sends you for a long and elaborate stroll through a beautiful world devoid of challenge or variation, and marred by excessive repetition.

Hellblade 2 continues Senua's story with grace, confidence, surprising brutality and thundering conviction.

For all its ambition and the obvious effort put into creating a fun and somewhat original title, Ghost Master doesn't have a lot of life in it past the initial novelty of scaring the crap out of people.

May not be the best-looking tactical shooter ever made, nor does it bring anything to the genre in terms of progress, but there's little else on Xbox worth looking at in the genre until "Rainbow Six 3" shows up.

Playtonic tightens up its nostalgic take on platforming and turns its eyes to the future. [Eurogamer Recommended]