Funny in bursts, regularly creative, yet held back by distinctly average combat and poor exploration elements. High on Life 2 is a surreal trip well worth taking, although you'll need to adjust your expectations accordingly. Do that, and it'll regularly put a (sometimes guilty) smile on your face.

Reanimal is an enjoyably disturbing horror fairy tale full of beautifully designed scenarios, landscapes and creatures that just doesn't quite bring itself together as a whole.

Neither great nor terrible, Crisol: Theater of Idols lands with a wet, inoffensive plop precisely between the two. It largely fails as a horror and struggles as a shooter, but stands solidly as a curiosity that follows its own rules.

Nintendo serves up an immediately accessible and hilariously chaotic multiplayer experience, but a duff single-player campaign and hodgepodge assortment of other modes leaves you feeling that Mario Tennis Fever hasn't quite aced the complete package.

An oddly emotional game, Romeo is a Dead Man is Suda51's best in years, marrying entertaining combat with pop culture references and constant creativity. Get through the game's somewhat flat start and you'll find auteur game design at its best, idiosyncratic, strange, and thoroughly enjoyable.

When Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties has me gunning for max daddy rank or using over-the-top brawling moves to smash gangster skulls on behalf of my orphan children it's a sunny adventure like little else. Many great remake choices shine, but a few hold them back, like an edgy and dull bonus campaign that adds very little to the narrative or the series in general.

A dense, detailed, and hugely varied strategy roguelike, Mewgenics borrows much from its iconic predecessor with an imaginative and rewarding gameplay loop. Occasionally harsh RNG can be a buzzkill, but doesn't prevent this from being a worthy successor to The Binding of Isaac.

A triumphant evolution of the series for existing fans, and the best possible jumping-on point (though far from an easy one) for new ones. Nioh 3 demands care, planning, and patience – and gives immense satisfaction in the form of a brutal but engrossing adventure in return.

Cairn is a zen, meditative survival game defined by the intentionality of its movement and the way you interact with its world - when its protagonist can be prevailed upon to act like the elite athlete she's supposed to be. When it works, it's excellent, but its core system is often too clumsy to bring to bear with the precision required to ape top-level climbing.

Code Vein 2 feels like the first post-Elden Ring Soulslike to try something of a similar scale, but it's made too many compromises to get there. Inspired moments are trapped in a bland, repetitive experience with far too much padding to recommend seeking them out. Time travel back six years and play the first Code Vein instead.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon iterates on the excellent hybrid action and turn-based combat that's defined the last few entries, continuing to evolve beyond Metaphor ReFantazio's own take. Yet, frustrating pacing in this JRPG epic's pivotal entry makes it one that only the most ardent and patient fans are likely to see through for now.

Skate Story is a beautiful and unique skateboarding game with great, stylized visuals and interesting characters. The movement might make you queasy and the skateboarding element could have been developed further, but it does a lot with its premise and refuses to pander to convention, which is refreshing. A wonderful creation, but not always a great game.

Although retreading a familiar nostalgic path, Octopath Traveler 0 improves its JRPG formula, while also being an enhanced and unabridged adaptation of the series' mobile spin-off without the grubby monetization. The cast may not have the same limelight as the original (flawed) premise intended but they still shine in turn-based battles that are among the genre's finest.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is finally here after an 18 year wait. At its best moments, it feels like no time has passed at all, as I'm awed by the melancholy and mysterious vibes of this exploration-focused FPS. But, at many other moments, it's bogged down by odd new features that detract from what's almost one of Samus' best. Being so close to greatness can sometimes be the bitterest feeling of all.

With some very good puzzles, a solid story, and a consistently strong atmosphere, Routine is doing anything but going through the motions. You may not feel over the moon about the stealth elements, but there's not a trace of the protracted development period.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion finally gives the comic icons the beat 'em up they've so-long deserved. The Marvel Vs Capcom-inspired tag-team combat makes comboing hordes of villains ultra satisfying, but a lack of meaningful character progression and an abundance of MCU-style quipping hold it back from being a true brawler legend.

The prototypical extraction shooter, Escape from Tarkov is a shooter I've been playing for the past decade and will be playing for years more. Sublime firefights and just-complicated-enough mechanics make this a great game to lose yourself in, but the immersion only lasts until you need to check the Wiki, which is constantly when you're just starting out.

Constance is a beautiful and enjoyable Metroidvania that doesn't outstay its welcome. Filler free, the game instead throws plenty of well-designed and enjoyable boss fights at you, interspersed with tight, challenging platforming action. It follows the formula too closely to make it remarkable, but what it does it does with charm and flair. And the ending is a 'chef's kiss' moment.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is a highly ambitious FPS that delivers on its promise to be the biggest Black Ops ever, wearing its psy-op weirdness proudly, but is an uneven package overall. Multiplayer is fast, frenetic, and polished while Zombies feels like a trip to Black Ops 2's good old days, but the co-op campaign and new Endgame mode stretch the definition of a Call of Duty campaign a little too far with repetitive and underdeveloped design that, both in terms of narrative and gameplay, ends up falling flat.

Kirby Air Riders is perhaps an ideal video game in that it's easy to overlook its flaws because it's just fun enough to play over and over again. Despite the fact that, taken on their own, each section of the game largely leaves me cold or indifferent, the entire package together is shockingly solid with plenty of charm.

Morsels' gnarly, gross visuals pair well with a dreamy VHS visual style – you'll immediately be hooked or feel a little sick. Collecting different playable creatures you can swap between is a nice idea, and mastering the chaos of this roguelike shooter can be satisfying. Yet, hewing too close to The Binding of Isaac, annoyances stack up to the point where I end up just wanting to play that instead – an ever present danger in a genre where replayability is the appeal.

Demonschool makes punching a parade of gloriously grotesque creatures an absolute riot. An approachable tactical RPG with a radioactive amount of style and flair. However, for a game about punching demons in the face, there's not a lot of crunch.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault's early access launch offers entertaining dungeon-crawling and smart inventory and management minigames, even if the devs are still figuring out exactly how those systems all combine. [Early Access Review]

Some of Where Winds Meet's many minigames and stealth systems could use a polish, but it doesn't Suck-iro – this martial arts action-RPG is well worth your time. If future updates focus on its strengths and reign in the gimmicks, this joyous open world will be a pleasure to fight your way through.

Dispatch might be the best superhero TV show of the year, even though it's a game. Incredible acting talent pulled from Hollywood, Critical Role, and beyond bring this hopeful yet deep world of heroics to life, filled with enough interaction to really help you feel like a part of the narrative yourself. Each episode is smartly pitched to be TV-length, making it impossible not to binge with how wonderfully focused each story beat feels.

Possessor(s) takes a good story idea and builds its world well, then stretches it far too thinly over a mundane, buggy, and depressing Metroidvania template that just isn't fun for far too many hours. The story's decent, but so many similar games are demonstrably better.

Lumines Arise is just as effective as Tetris Effect, block matching to a beat becomes a transcendent experience with a radically different ruleset. This is an excellent evolution of the PSP original that uses a wide game board and a musical wipe to create a constant sense of teetering on the edge, daring you to build big combos even when they take you close to wiping out. Lumines Arise's brilliant visuals and synesthetic grooves wonderfully fit this already musically minded puzzle ruleset.

While not particularly revolutionary, there's a lot to like about Anno 117. If you get your teeth into the game's complexity, you'll find yourself investing a lot of time into spreading Roman ways across your islands and growing your settlements from tiny villages to grand cities.