This is the beautiful game in its greatest digital form, oozing gameplay from every sweaty pore. If someone wants to pass on the experience because the names aren’t right, more fool them, I say.

There is no doubt that Hack, Slash & Backstab contains all the ingredients to make a very fine solo experience, but it’s just far too tough to do anything other than frustrate you.

The physics-based play of the game makes for some astounding puzzles that bend your mind and stretch your problem-solving skills to the limit.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II is exactly how a sequel should be: it respects its prequel’s strengths, brings them to new heights, and also strives to remediate its flaws.

It’s a completely fine and competent game that may satisfying someone who is less discerning or has some time to kill with it. However, if you’re a fan of Zelda or action RPGs in general, you can do much better than Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas.

Your enjoyment of Filthy Lucre will entirely depend on how much you enjoy pure stealth – sneaking around half an hour into a mission as the music ramps up due to increased heat can be incredibly tense – but some people may just dislike having to start all over if you die. The shooting is bad, the AI isn’t great – and why, oh why can’t I move dead bodies? – but Filthy Lucre still succeeds in being a tense, and most importantly, fun stealth game.

Pure Chess: Grandmaster Edition is the definitive chess-playing experience. It’s a must for any fan of the classic game; the choice of beautifully rendered locations and board types even makes this a preferable option over a real board. It’s a shame that the online multiplayer isn’t a little busier as playing against a real opponent is always more enjoyable than an AI counterpart, but the option to play locally is a nice touch.

Claire: Extended Cut is a title that fails to live up to the greatness that obviously inspired it.

The idea behind Event[0] is a wonderful one and I would love to see the technology behind Kaizen refined and used in future projects.

A colourful, digital puzzle book if you like, Nightmares from the Deep 2 stuffs in puzzle after puzzle, with plenty of variety and type on offer.

Repetitiveness is undoubtedly God Eater 2: Rage Burst’s biggest issue. The mission structure is repetitive, the basic combat system is repetitive, and even your actions within the hub are repetitive.

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness somehow manages to be an easy and hard recommendation at the same time. The story, characters and theme that worked so well in the first season of the anime return and are in top form. The antagonist might very well be the best in the entire franchise. Any fan of the series will find a lot to love here. Unfortunately, as a video game, or as a visual novel, it fails to really impress. If you’re unfamiliar with the anime, I doubt there’s much here worth investing in.

If you feel that static/simplified tower defence games are a bore… then maybe Infinium Strike is what you’ve been looking for.

Strike Vector EX pulled on a lot of nostalgic heartstrings for me, and it was a refreshing experience.

As slick as Solar Shifter is when it comes to its style it just can’t be recommended when it comes to the gameplay. It’s a shame as the Xbox One could really do with some solid shoot ’em ups to help fill up the online store.

Textures looks incredibly stretched and muddy even on the highest setting and animations are clunky and stiff.

Unlike other famous entries into the genre, with unique and conflicting level designs to offer a break from the monotony, 140 lives on that repetition.

While plenty of levels will look like a Super Mario Maker level from hell, they more often than not are so intuitively designed that you may understand its complexity before you even realise it.

The action is expertly metered against moments of exploration and light puzzling, creating the right balance of highs and lows that promotes extended bouts of gameplay.

King Oddball seems to constantly transmit some sort of secret message to your brain demanding that you give it one last try.

The whole time you feel you are playing through a disjointed connection of apparitions that tie a loose story together, all a bit too far removed to create any meaningful attachment.

Repetitive level formatting is a curse many roguelites have to contend with to some degree, but it rarely strikes as soon as the one hour mark.

I have to give credit where credit is due and that lies mainly in the consistently stunning visuals, the beautiful graphics, and the interesting variety of music.

There are no set patterns, no connection or justification; just arbitrary cause and effect. For the most part you can’t take what you’ve learned with you from one puzzle to another and that, for me at least, is where the frustration comes from.

Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA X is more of the same but better, and for most that’s all it needed to be. It’s got new songs, a new and improved structure, and so many customisation options that it’s hard to imagine you could ever tire of it all. And so with its beautiful graphics, great animations and classic Project DIVA gameplay, Project DIVA X is undoubtedly the definitive Hatsune Miku experience.

It’s a refreshing change from the rest of the first-person shooters and goes to great lengths to ground itself in reality.

It’s the sort of plot with so many layers, so many questions and so few definitive answers that it’s likely to keep you up at night.

Inversus packs a lot to love into a little package and it just works. The gameplay is smooth, the mechanics are solid and deep, and the soundtrack is perfectly tuned to the game. I admit that I didn’t catch the bug for Inversus when I first played, but I have it now and I like it.