Mental deficiencies aside, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is an enjoyable game with a wonderfully-written storyline. So few games succeed at making us exercise our brains; you’d be blockheads not to give this one a go.

While a bit disappointing on the mini-game front, Yakuza 0 remains as strange and charming as ever, with the best story and combat the series has seen in years.

It's this severe push for gamers to be determined and persistent enough to explore every nook and cranny in Dead Rising that makes it either a splendid, geeky Pandora's Box full of unrelenting challenge and rewards or controller-smashingly difficult because of its hardcore mentality.

Masterfully balances the needs of old and new players alike – but online teething problems are a curveball Sony has to overcome for the game to truly prosper.

Hunters is strictly for the hardcore, bloodthirsty gamers who live for fragfests. Moving Metroid from a slow-paced adventure to a nail-biting wrecking ball of explosions was a risky trick, but damn did it ever work.

Evolved beyond what anyone imagined, Destiny 2 realises the FPS-RPG dream with a richness, warmth, and player-minded benevolence that needs to be played to be truly understood.

Mario Kart 7 is THE game the 3DS has been in dire need of. Sadly, it raises the bar so high for almost everything else, most 3DS games don't even look like they belong on the same system.

Even with our small list of complaints – add sluggish menus and lack of meaningful updates to Road To Glory and TeamBuilder to them – NCAA Football 11 is a triumph. It's the best college football game we've ever played, offering a tremendous experience to gridiron fans.

An excellent way to experience Death's adventure. There haven't been any significant changes from the Xbox and PS3 versions. The combat is still thrilling, the dungeons are lengthy and challenging, and the loot hoarding is addictive.

The Metallica integration goes deeper than the music itself – the band members all appear in the game, although career mode finds you playing not as anyone IN Metallica, but as the band opening for them while on tour.

Even if it's not brand new, Pikmin 3 Deluxe deserves a place in your Nintendo Switch library.

The Alters is both immense in scope and deeply introspective. 11 Bit Studios has once again found the humanist side in a genre rooted in systems and management. It's a fantastic base builder and survival sim, but what makes The Alters truly brilliant is how these systems are underlined with vulnerable, emotional moments – like holes being punctured in your space suit.

A whopper of an NFL game to play this season, with more good stuff to experience than most of us will ever get to.

BattleBlock Theater is filled with absurdity, fart jokes, and curious characters that will easily suck you into a colorful world. Its stages are creative and get more complex as you get used to its mechanics and controls and offer enough challenge and funny dialogue to keep you amused. Play it alone and you’ll laugh; play it with a friend (and push him off a ledge) and you’ll laugh even more.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow reinvigorates the franchise by borrowing from other games, adding its own wonderful magic system, and ratcheting up the epic factor to ludicrous degrees. It's huge in scope, length, and depth, and it's polished with obvious love and passion.

Despite a few niggling issues, Out There's melancholy atmosphere and challenging resource management will have you coming back for seconds. And thirds.

Pokemon Diamond and Pearl are not only the best Pokemon games yet, but some of most enjoyable on the DS.

The Rise of the Golden Idol wonderfully evolves on the original with some truly devious cases that empower you to feel like a genius as you piece everything together and read between the lines. Loads of details make this best played with a notebook to hand, each case stretching you to think in genuinely fresh directions.

With the extra time, the developers were able to truly polish the game, bring forth a game that, while flawed, doesn't have any glaring issues. It's more accessible without losing any of the complexity, it's deeper without being isolating, and it's bursting with content, even if we wish the content was implemented better.

The Wolf Among Us is a game that exceeds expectations, providing an intriguing, painful, and thought-provoking journey that everyone should experience at least once.

With breakneck racing thrills and impeccable presentation, this ranks up there with The Last Of Us Remastered as the best redux on PS4.

Brave New World might not feel incredibly new or brave, but it's an impressive expansion that any Civilization V fan should enjoy.

Aesthetically scintillating, but equally enthralling in its immense depth, Geometry Wars 3 is a sequel whose design insight is matched only by its endlessly creative sense of fun. Close to perfect.

Despite some wonky tie-ins with the film, this is a gorgeous, thoroughly great platformer and a worthy reboot for Ratchet & Clank.

PS4’s biggest sports exclusive delivers a moonshot home run, thanks to perfectly balanced fundamentals, astonishingly lifelike presentation, and little details that few rivals – past or present – have come close to getting right.

Football Manager 2021 may not revolutionise the series, but instead it adds countless quality-of-life improvements – including ones to the match engine – that make it the best Football Manager game to date.

The way Kirby and the Forgotten builds on the traditions of the series really makes it feel like we've entered into a new era for the pink puffball. The bigger, more open 3D setting full of challenges and inventive features makes this an unmissable adventure for long-time fans. And for newcomers, I can't think of a better introduction. There's just no holding back my excitement about what the future may hold for the series going forward. Kirby and the Forgotten Land truly is a delight from start to finish.

Your enjoyment of Mortal Kombat on Vita will depend on whether or not you've already played the identical console version, and how much you like tapping the touch screen to make people's heads explode. Mortal Kombat remains faithful to its console counterpart, and is an equally entertaining, albeit sometimes uglier, addition to the family.