The touch controls start off feeling a little detached, but it will grow on you. [Issue#158, p.109]

There's no great depth or immersion to it as an experience. [Issue#158, p.109]

It’s stringent, stripped back and sometimes a chore, but when things click for The Escapists it can be a delightful challenge to overcome.

Evolve stands as a champion of forward-thinking game design that embraces risk and originality. For that alone, whether you end up enjoying it or not (but play with friends of a similar skill level and you surely will), Turtle Rock deserves respect.

For some, Citizens Of Earth will be worth playing through on the strength of its humour alone, but the myriad of technical and design flaws that make the experience more frustrating than it needs to be are certainly no joke.

Even if you could play Funk Of Titans on your phone, for free, it is so ludicrously sketchy and tedious that it would still be impossible to recommend. So on Xbox One, for the positively gaudy introductory asking price? No way, José.

It’s a decent change of pace and allows you to wreak vengeance on maps whose obstacles left you seething with rage. Blackguards 2 has a lot to keep turn-based strategy enthusiasts occupied, though it fails to outshine the more complex games in the genre.

Voice control just isn’t an improved method of input over just pointing at something and making it happen, but the effort is a worthy one.

New players will struggle at first but for those willing to invest the time, Total War: Attila’s deep pockets repay that investment with a varied and deep campaign and a plethora of additional content.

Enigmatic in parts, frustrating in others, Dontnod demonstrates it can fuse the domestic with the supernatural with a deft hand, and succeeds in creating a pastel world brimming with intrigue in about three hours.

While #IDARB has an undeniable spark of ingenuity and humour to it, it doesn’t quite have the depth and variety of games of its kind like Super Smash Bros. It’s #IDARB’s simplicity that holds it back, but it is also this quality that makes it so refreshing to pick up and play.

Ultimately, though, its age has only given it a new layer of context that seems to enhance its fun and intrigue. Grim Fandango remains one of the best of its class and a wonderfully witty noir adventure.

The game is actually better suited to handhelds than consoles nowadays, and the team at Nintendo has kept this at the forefront of its design philosophy throughout – this is a more accessible, more fluid experience than before, and that was all we could have asked for from this remaster.

It feels as though Techland has always had this game inside of it, like it’s been waiting to bust out this technically proficient outpouring of destructive fun. Dying Light is a class apart from its typical output, and a class apart from most zombie games too. A shining beacon in a sea of grisly rotting death.

The narrated "found footage" was a novel idea, but the developers should have held onto it until they had something interesting to say. [Issue#157, p.126]

If it's meant to be played for laughs, the joke falls flat with repetition. [Issue#157, p.125]

A gripping first episode. [Issue#157, p.123]

A fantastic proof of concept... it's just not as engaging or game-changing as the other cinematic episodes Telltale has been putting out over the last three years. [Issue#157, p.122]

It's still hard to shake the feeling that this is DLC; it is padded-out content and it is, ultimately, a bit of a grind. [Issue#157, p.112]

Resident Evil is still a survival horror classic - this just isn't a classic re-REmake. [Issue#157, p.110]

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker may not be Nintendo Japan’s best work, then. But it’s testament to the consistently high bar that their platform developer’s internal teams have set over the past few years.

With completion of each level winning you a new totem for your pole, undecorated logs for a low score and gold totems for maximum, there’s a quantifiable excuse to go back and learn the perfect pathways through each. In this case, however, the journey itself is its own reward.

The game has set a bar for visual excellence as far as anime-inspired games go, and is liable to have the same kind of impact Tekken Tag Tournament did on PS2 thanks to its careful place as a launch title.

While its an advancement on Hearthstone mechanically, if Hearthstone is the standard for the genre these days, then invariably Scrolls becomes one for CCG veterans only.

The narrative endgame of The Talos Principle is a total cop-out – it eschews complex philosophical querying in favour of trite observations on the nature of gaming. Still, it’s more sophisticated than most titles on Steam, and the puzzles have been refined by a team of true craftsmen.

To experience it at its best requires an investment of time that some will be unwilling to commit but for those that are, there are months if not years of entertainment scattered throughout its star systems and the opportunity to make good on those childhood dreams of being a space cowboy.

Meta-gamers might be frustrated as the tiresome task of getting from one section to the next becomes increasingly irritating, but the puzzles will have you thinking and the art style will have you hooked. Sometimes, that’s all it needs.

For a free title, there's plenty of fun to be had here. [Issue#156, p.126]