This gorgeous microcosmic mech game just about survives its more frustrating moments. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Velan Studios transposes the sport of dodgeball into what's a fun, friendly shooter that bears no arms, though it currently lacks legs.

One of the best fighting games of all-time gets a welcome new run out, even if it's not quite as complete as it could have been. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Thanks to its adorable characters and a story that makes no excuses for how absurd it is, World's End Club is a lot of fun. [Eurogamer Recommended]

This is good nostalgic fun, in other words: a platformer where you can collect coins and buy better loot and work out the various nooks of the hub world before jetting off on a series of pretty adventures that all build pleasantly to a final boss. Asha is a decent platformer, handled with love and attention to the details, and it's a part of one of console gaming's most interesting lineages. [Eurogamer Recommended]

A 2D run and gunner that's as in your face as an 80s Troma classic, Huntdown matches its excess with brilliant detail. [Eurogamer Recommended]

For all the weirdness and fun it promises, Biomutant ends up a deeply conventional open-world action game.

Dorfromantik is sunshine on the screen, with a puzzling heart that will keep you busy for days. [Eurogamer Essential]

Sumo Newcastle's debut is an engrossing but substanceless heist game - and an interestingly grim take on Robin Hood.

Wrath of the Druids is a meaty expansion which succeeds in taking Valhalla to new shores, even if the path sometimes feels familiar.

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Sackable offences? Of course not. And for all these flaws, Resident Evil Village was a thrilling adventure that kept me hooked from beginning to end, despite its jarring twists and turns. But the delightful level design isn't enough to mitigate a strange, unsatisfying, plothole-ridden story, and that bizarre final act ultimately sullies what is an otherwise terrifyingly good horror romp.

Enjoyably traditional, if a little tatty in places, this is a shooting game that still stands apart from all others.

Returnal gets halfway to doing it. It is full of real, bona fide video game magic, but with each death it becomes less special, more mundane, and this is why it feels so difficult to pick up the controller again, why Returnal feels like it doesn't want to be played. But the magic it does have is transcendent. And so I do still want to play it - whether Returnal likes it or not. [Eurogamer Recommended]

New Pokémon Snap captures the strange joy of the original game without being derivative. [Eurogamer Recommended]

This isn't just my assertion, Nier: Automata was a clear effort to implement feedback from the first game and enhance Nier's strengths and eradicate its weaknesses, according to its developers. I consider Nier: Automata to be essential, as such I think if you're a mildly curious Automata fan, you'll come away from Nier disappointed. You have played the better Nier game already. This reiusse is meant for lore nerds, for hardcore fans, for completionists, oldschool Nier evangelists, basically everyone who's already decided to buy the game before reading this.

You could label Tasomachi a "wholesome" game - a label I'm wary of myself. If it's wholesome, I would argue this has less to do with its baby-faced character models or delicate furnishings, and more, again, with its sense of its own unimportance. It understands that there are bigger things in life than games, however consoling games can be. It doesn't want to be more than an interlude. It's a sumptuous realm, evoking memories of various continent-straddling adventures, but one devoid of grandiosity and happy for you to spend as much time within it as you need. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Trials of Fire is a complex but seductive deck-building strategy game about sculpting the perfect RPG team.

While it's unlikely to make fans of those of you who've sampled the shooters that came before it and left unsatisfied, as a die-hard Guardian and card-carrying fangirl of the genre, Outriders tickles me in all the right places. Offering gunplay that feels solid and satisfying and an array of additional powers and abilities to keep combat fresh and exciting, I can only admit that Outriders has surprised me in all the right ways. Maybe it'll surprise you, too.

More than any of that, saving the Mudokons from their cruel punishment provides the reason for these games to exist in the first place, and the reason for anyone to spend all this time and effort resurrecting a 1990s game and bringing it blinking into 2021. Slaves travelling in cattle cars, people left to die by the side of the road, toxic big business rolling the environment up and smoking it, the various opiates of the masses and their uses and abuses - the enduring point of Oddworld is that its most horrific elements are not remotely fictional, and that it uses fantasy to refocus our attention on the bizarre horrors of our own world. Back in the day, Oddworld seemed to want more from games, and from its players and it still does. That's worth giving it a little leeway on the rough edges and mis-steps, I reckon.

And yet for all that, I kind of adore Balan Wonderworld, to a degree that's surprised me. Maybe it's just come along at the right time, when I needed a colourful comfort blanket of a thing, a nostalgia strip as strange and insubstantial as watching a YouTube compilation of 90s TV adverts. Maybe it's because my expectations were low - Sonic Adventure has always been the game where the scales fell away from my eyes when it comes to Sega's mascot, and to Sonic Team, and I can't say I've ever enjoyed too much of the series since...Or maybe it's just because this is how games used to be, and sometimes it's comforting to slip into a 90s netherworld, and back into the old ways. When games were often clunky, unexplained, awkward and often downright frustrating. Balan Wonderworld is all those things, an almost too exacting facsimile of a type of second tier 90s platformer that never quite achieved greatness, even if it's fascinating all the same.

This cosmic point-and-click looks and feels like no other game out there. [Eurogamer Recommended]

If you can ignore the story, It Takes Two has some of the best co-op gameplay in years. [Eurogamer Recommended]

With smart additions that move the series forward, this is the most accessible, deepest and simply very best Monster Hunter to date. [Eurogamer Essential]

A neat aesthetic can't disguise poor combat and a lack of anything to do.

Fast, slick but with a few too many flaws, Pacer is nevertheless a fine futuristic racer.

What comes as a result is a sense of distraction, above all. Almost a sense that Maquette suffered from too much budget, from misplaced attention to themes or scale. The first half - three hours or so - is a brilliant success, a gorgeous, ingenious, delicately poised construction of spaghetti-brain recursion and latent atmosphere. The time you spend there, submerged deep in focus, is wonderful. The rest is interference.

Square Enix's line of retro JRPGs continues with an all-new world and tale for Bravely Default, though some of the old problems persist.