The fate of the world depends on your grace. So pick up your tiny pink blobs, listen out for that tempting beat, and put your best foot forward. With the music flowing, and the world on your back, Tempopo is a charming little experience.

For Bleach fans, Rebirth of Souls is a fun little treat – and while it’s not the most polished experience, there’s still a lot to love about how it shoots for the moon.

As a smorgasbord of new content, headlined by new, handy small business features that open up the possibilities for making money and monetising your Sims’ favourite activities, The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies still feels rich with potential. It won’t completely overhaul your gameplay experience, but it adds in a bunch of neat touches to make the experience of running a business fresh and exciting all over again.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is a game that unabashedly demands you meet it on its level, which I do find somewhat admirable. I just constantly found it to be a miserable slog to engage with, where everything was ten times more overblown than it had any business being. There’s a fascinating sandbox deep down within it, but digging through the mountain of muck to appreciate it was simply more than I could stand most of the time.

Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind is a sincere, often enjoyable game that will give long-time Power Rangers fans a pleasant burst of nostalgia. It cares about the franchise, and it nails the looks, the sounds, and the vibes of the series. As a beat-em-up, it’s serviceable – intermittently fun, if undercooked – but any fans starved for a halfway decent game that “gets” why Power Rangers has endured, could certainly do a lot worse.

In its approach to campaign integration, Sparking! Zero is much weaker. While it presents strong ideas in having branching story pathways, the narrative’s varying quality and beige storytelling is a letdown. The flash and style of individual battles may be enough to dazzle you, but those looking for anything deeper will need to dive further back into Dragon Ball‘s video game past to find it.

Let go of your inhibitions, and Funko Fusion can be a real blast. Like a magic trick, you shouldn’t look too closely, though. Sometimes a game can be fun without being good, and Funko Fusion fits that description quite nicely.

It simultaneously tries to be as ‘mature’ as possible through constant depictions of excessive brutality while also being stubbornly unwilling to engage with its source material beyond the aspects most problematically aimed at 12 year olds. It is in the most basic of senses very fun, and I will be coming back to it again when new Operations missions drop for free over the next year. Its combat loop is exhilarating and its visual splendor immaculate. Its entire package just sits in such tonal disharmony within itself and worse so still when compared to other recent 40k video games...Perhaps ironically that makes Space Marine 2 the truest and most immersive satire of fascism in gaming yet though. Just a whole lot of hollow sound and fury.

Visions of Mana isn’t necessarily breaking the mold, but it’s a good time if you’re keen to rollick around an assortment of biomes, smashing monsters with big ol’ swords and delving deep into the class system. While I don’t necessarily see myself undertaking another playthrough of the game, I do think that fans of the series will enjoy what’s in store. Just brace yourself for the inevitable “grizzly” cry to get stuck in your head.

Pepper Grinder is a great game, I just deeply hated the experience of playing it on Xbox. On PC, it felt great. I’ve heard very good things about it on Switch. Your experience might vary, you might like the extra grinding frustration of the Xbox experience. Whether you play it or not, though, you should seek out the soundtrack and listen to it, and then look at all of the art, because it is an experience to be savoured.

It’s in these interactions that Lovestruck makes the most difference. As mentioned, it’s not a particularly robust expansion pack, and it doesn’t introduce mechanics that should be considered outright “new.” Rather, it expands on existing features and provides new possibilities, allowing you to live out dramatic new tales, complete with racy, steamy, complex romances.

This game is absolutely “for” certain people – speedrunners who enjoy a good challenge, competitive online gamers, or those looking to indulge their nostalgia – but fitting none of these categories, I found myself wanting more from Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Despite a moreish opening loop of mini-games, it’s not long before the game’s lower depths are plumbed.

On the pure charm of Sushi Bot, and his tiny little reactions, Rolling Hills is bright and breezy to play. For those familiar with Diner Dash, there is also elements of nostalgia in the sushi delivery process. A sense of repetition and a slower pace does mean Rolling Hills isn’t particularly gripping or challenging after hours of gameplay – but regardless, there’s plenty of fun and comfort to be found in this light-hearted sim.

It’s hard to deny that the minute-to-minute gameplay is just a whole lot of fun. The varied mechanics of each class, and the deep bench of weapon customisation, will offer something to keep the wheel spinning. If nothing else, that the game is free helps clear the hurdle of getting your mates to drop in – especially in the face of Call of Duty’s premium price tag – even if only for a month or two.

It’s a game made for people who already love cats, and it’s probably not going to convert your one uncle who’s a bit weird about how much he hates them (you know the one). But if you love your weird little guys, here’s a game made by people who clearly love them, too.

While the game feels like a filler episode, particularly as you trample through the same patches of deserts and other terrains, completing similar quests with similar goals, it remains a pleasant experience, thanks to its stylistic touches. It might not be a perfect adaptation of Sand Land, but for those who wish to inhabit its world and expand the tale of the iconic manga, it’s a fine road trip that brims with enough style and personality to paper over its biggest flaws.

I truly loved the first two-thirds of Tales of Kenzera: ZAU and it saddens me that I felt the opposite for the remainder of it.

I don’t see myself sticking out hours upon hours of further gameplay, but the handful of salty, vinegary chips that make up the foundations of Skull and Bones have kept me well sated for the past two weeks – and I can’t deny I’ve found myself thinking about the game even when I’m not logged in.

It’s not overtly ambitious and there are very safe choices in its approach, but Mario vs. Donkey Kong is still a lovely time – and provides relief in a storm of more complex and frustrating puzzlers. It’s certainly a product of its era, but it works wonderfully well as a callback to simpler times.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League feels like it was designed as a single-player narrative adventure, with plenty of love and care devoted to its killer story (which should rightfully be considered among the best DC adaptations), before it was transformed into something else entirely. In individual parts, it shines incredibly brightly and there are strong, clever choices in the game’s narrative – but like Frankenstein’s Monster, the way it’s put together means it doesn’t quite realise its true potential.

While its best ideas are held back by its lack of refinement, the adventure remains surprisingly compelling, even as you’re wasting hours away on levelling up your favourite monsters, and experimenting with battle tactics. It doesn’t quite live up to its competitors in the monster-catching genre, but it’s certainly a memorable game, and one defined by its devotion to being fun, silly, and wonderfully weird.

Despite some initial misgivings and a few frustrations, there’s a lot to latch onto and love here. Though the battle system is in need of some heavy tuning, frustrations can mostly be mitigated with accessibility options, and the game that ultimately comes together is more than the sum of its parts. It might buckle under its own weight at times, but Knuckle Sandwich is an endearing and wild ride worth going on.

For the grown-up Bluey fans in our household – one who has spent their entire career covering video games, and one who has barely touched a game from the last thirty years – there are as many obvious shortcomings in Bluey: The Videogame as there are charming callbacks. But to the six- and four-year-old, even though there were frustrations, none of that really seemed to matter in the end. Sometimes the bugs and glitches even served as a spark to imagine some logical in-world reason for the mishaps. Is it magic? Is it actually a hidden secret?

These small issues add up to sour the experience – especially given the lengths the game goes to presenting itself as the definitive rally package. They feel like a further indictment on the numerous crude contexts that surround the centre of EA Sports WRC’s fantastic rally experience. It’s a shame, because when you’re behind the wheel, absolutely sending it at 150km/h on the narrowest road you’ve ever seen in your life, it feels like nothing else matters.

My experience with Saltsea Chronicles was a very conflicted one. It’s unlike anything I’ve played before and I appreciated its genuine uniqueness. It boasts an intricately crafted world with an intriguing investigative system, colourful characters and seemingly endless choices. But as much as I liked the narrative conceit, the way it unfolded felt long-winded in a way that struggled to keep a firm hold of my attention.

Reviewing a game from a solo developer, especially one with so much obvious love and care poured into it can be difficult. As a calling card for Koźmiński, World of Horror is astonishing – a stunning achievement, an incredible piece of work. As a game? It’s not bad. World of Horror will impress you more than it scares you, but it really is very impressive, at least. For all its faults, fans of Junji Ito would be hard pressed to find a more loving homage.

Getting into the groove and feeling the rhythm with your whole body is brain-tickling. It’s an absolute joy. With my arms burning, Break Free complete, I felt like I’d accomplished something. While the other game modes in Samba de Amigo: Party Central are slightly less compelling, in that many are routine and eventually devolve to repetition, on the strength of StreamiGo!, this spin-off is a strong entry in the rhythm game genre.

It’s a great escape to the ‘wild west’ countryside, but one without significant bells and whistles.