This arcade racing series rumbles on quite nicely. The second instalment offers a fun career mode and rich open worlds, even though the Championship mode is disappointing and the game won’t be winning any beauty contests.

This is a jewel. An unbelievably clever, thought-out, detailed, balanced, fun, brilliantly designed masterpiece that really doesn’t have any drawbacks at all. If you like to build and optimize, you simply have to play Factorio.

This is a deeply flawed strategy game whose main selling point, the new warlords system, turns out to be a complete failure. After a few hours you’ll be itching to uninstall this new Stronghold - if only because it’s not particularly nice to look at.

The game looks beautiful, and its source material is brimming with potential, but the gameplay itself is lacklustre in the extreme. Most of the time you simply don’t know what to do or how to achieve the few things you’re sure you want. A very confusing, sometimes frustrating experience rescued only by the strengths of the book.

This experience will be worthwhile only for the most hardcore of Cyanide & Happiness fans. It’s not a very good adventure game and it’s not very funny.

Initially, you must be very patient when jumping straight into a humongous armed conflict, but in exchange you’ll get some of the most intense turns you’ve ever witnessed in any Total War game. But the strange thing is, you’ll get a lot of the best stuff for free. So why pay?

This is a brilliant political strategy game, very well written and full of gut-wrenching decisions. Only you will decide the fate of the Republic - and its embattled president.

This is no Hades but if you like to die a lot, you’ll love it anyway. The innovative curse system is a lot of unpredictable fun, every single run is different and, what’s more, it all looks really pretty.

Monster Hunter Rise brings with it several new features that should become mainstays of the series. At the same time, however, it loses one of its most impressive systems - tracking the monsters. And so the hunt loses much of its magic.

This is a very solid JRPG with a fun story and a decidedly unfun protagonist. But his companions are great! You’ll be further pleased by this game’s tough boss fights, further annoyed by its repetitive music.

El Hijo will satisfy a craving for stealth games and it looks stunning, but it’s not very original and its weird controls are an endless source of frustration.

This is how you end a trilogy. If you love this murderous series, you simply cannot miss its latest instalment. The campaign is a bit barebones, though, and a pause might be the best thing for the whole franchise.

If you haven’t yet played Devil May Cry 5 and you have a new console at home, don’t waste a second and go buy this brilliant action game. If you’re a veteran, just buy the Vergil DLC and be done with it.

Yes, this is one of the first Xbox Series X’s big exclusives, yes, it’s in the Game Pass. But those are about the only reasons why you should even think about playing this mediocre horror.

In Ride 4, you’ll get an uncommonly beautiful racing game with a brilliant driving model and superb utilization of the DualSense controller. But be warned - the difficulty is punishing and the AI is intent on crashing your bike.

This game demands quite a lot from you, but if you’re willing to immerse yourself in micro-management and suffer infrequent frustration from a district gone wrong, you’ll find a brilliant old-school city-builder set in one of the most interesting locales imaginable.

Cyanide Studios once again manage not to raise the bar. This is a deeply average game reminiscent of cheap B-movies, visually awful and mechanically obsolete. But massacring your enemies as a bloodthirsty werewolf is, not surprisingly, quite fun.

If you already played both games, there’s no reason to do it again. But if you’re a new player, this is a fantastic way to immerse yourself in a stricken feudal Japan.

This is certainly not a bad game, but it’s missing a spark, something to make you want to skip work and play a few more turns. Furthermore, the combat system is boring and everything relies on chance too much for my liking. This expedition has lost itself.

They didn’t have to make this game. It tries to go in a more action-packed direction than its terrifying predecessor but ends up being frustrating and unnecessarily punishing.

This game brings a huge amount of consistently brilliant fun and happiness. It’s not a revolution, but it’s damn near perfect at what it does.

Persona Strikers is a very familiar game - and yet manages to keep itself fresh with new stuff. Some will hate it, some will love it, but the main thing works as great as always - the story and the characters within it.

Have you ever wanted to lead your men into an actual medieval battle? Now’s your chance. Field of Glory II: Medieval is a chaotic melee with its own unique, unpredictable dynamism. It’s great, even if medieval warfare is slightly more monotonous than its ancient counterpart.

Alba wants you to find happiness in something larger than yourself. But instead of actually teaching you anything about protecting the environment, it “only” succeeds in being an enjoyable adventure.

Our system prevents us from scoring any game at zero points which is the only reason this mess gets anything at all. Don’t pay for this. It’s not funny, it’s not helpful. This party should have ended years ago.

A brilliant DLC that lets you play as the German Army and, through its punishing difficulty, makes you understand that being a general in the 40s was no easy gig.

Ambitious but broken. Beautiful but full of mistakes. That is Empire of Sin, a disappointing mobster tale from the days of the Prohibition.

Are you ready to figure out the very limits of your adrenaline tolerance? Then play Ghostrunner, a devilishly difficult action game let down only by its slower platforming portions.