For players of the original, this should get a steady nostalgia drip going. But coming to this series fresh makes for an overlong, dated and tedious experience.

An accomplished but rather tedious and macabre game.

Part town-planning exercise, part board game, this thoughtful debut gives plenty of scope for strategy and idealism. [Early Access Score = 80]

Of more importance is how this world will evolve once enough players have completed all the current missions and find themselves in an end-game that is effectively a treasure hunt in an anarchic moral wasteland. Even at this early stage though, The Division is an experience that’s worth having if you’re at all interested in mainstream action games, or role-playing adventures, or co-operative online play. You will not be bored as you blast your way through.

Hamstrung by clumsy mechanics, this game was unfortunately destined to disappoint; which is a pity when the conceptual framework was so promising.

The ability to explore space with a party of up to three friends makes it feel much less lonely than before. And where it once was difficult to return to a previously visited planet, establishing bases allows you to make some small corner of the universe feel like home.

Like throwing a punch in the dark, buying Street Fighter V today is a speculative gamble.

With this time-spanning opus, Remedy Entertainment hoped to unite narrative gaming and linear television for its Xbox One title. But neither comes out of the experiment well.

There has never been a better way to confront, or indulge, your inner assassin.

This unquestionably beautiful game about saving a planet from an encroaching black hole boldly goes where few have remained awake.

There just isn’t very much to do in The Pathless: you run across empty fields for a while, before solving a small variety of puzzles. Boss battles, with their blend of dashing, fighting and light brainwork, drive home that the Giant Squid formula works best in small doses. The score is reduced to sparse percussion in the open field, and the world itself doesn’t offer much in terms of visual variety or secrets to uncover. The problem isn’t the rudimentary gameplay itself, but how The Pathless tries to stretch its few puzzles across several hours. I was bored after the first hour, and no new ideas or clever twists arrived to rescue me from torpor.

Rome: Total War is one of the most brilliant games I've ever played. Total War: Rome II inverts far more than the name. This does not channel the greatest military empire in history so much as the pale shadow of its ending; a bloated, technically corrupt and unfocused mess.

That dearth of fun is the crux here. As the series finally begins to carve out an identity for itself, shed the dead-weight of its futuristic fluff of a sub-plot, and really let fly with its caricatural depiction of human history, it’s simultaneously failing to keep up with even middling mechanical, technical and design standards. With searing irony, the series feels more historic with each profit-driven iteration.

If you’ve played a zombie game in the past decade, this mishmash of tattered post-apocalyptic stereotypes will feel all too familiar.

The most frustrating thing is that there is the kernel of something great here. Despite the time-travel conceit, Cronos: The New Dawn isn’t remotely original – you’ll swear you’ve skulked the darkened corridors of these very hospitals, factories and apartment blocks before – but it looks stunning in places, plays well once you’ve upgraded your weapons, and there are spooksome moments and satisfying puzzles peppered throughout. When everything clicks, it is the engrossing, icky body-horror creepshow you want it to be. But then it will throw you into another exhausting death room full of bullet-sponge ghouls, and you’ll soon be filled with irritation instead of dread.

There is both too much and too little going on in Harmony: The Fall of Reverie at any given time. It is a game of many parts that don’t come together – an interesting design study packaged in a mildly boring game.

Hotline Miami 2 is a messy, aimless sequel and a step back from the original. Many of its levels feel like crafted set-pieces rather than playgrounds for violent expression, and your scope for creativity is stifled as a result.

PowerWash Simulator is currently in early access (you pay a reduced premium to play a game not yet finished), but even now this is an irresistible example of so-called “playbour”, and further evidence that a shit job often makes for a sublime game. [Early Access review]

There's more mileage in a Tamagotchi, and one of them would never ask you to shame yourself by acting out "play dead" on the living room floor.

Phantom Doctrine may find an enthusiastic audience with strategy-game masochists. It is complex and open-ended; there are multiple ways to finish missions, and they’re are not always about taking out targets. But it’s also punishing and opaque, poorly explained and hampered by a flummoxing plot. For most of us, it’s a confused and very niche experience.

Despite the enjoyable premise and high production values, Peach’s long-awaited star turn feels disappointingly patronising, one-dimensional and forgettable – the polar opposite of the Super Mario Bros film’s capable heroine. As the Nintendo Switch enters its twilight years, this was the perfect moment to give the Mushroom Kingdom monarch the celebration she so thoroughly deserved. Yet where Kirby received a Mario-worthy, Iliad-esque epic in Forgotten Land, this is more akin to a flimsy pop-up book.

With the sweetness and delight associated with Disney absent, this new platform game is a strangely cynical waste of potential.

Romeo Is a Dead Man is certainly not predictable. It’s capable of getting a baffled smile out of you, and its anti-gaming-establishment attitude will have diehard fans searching for an irony-drenched reason to celebrate it. But where No More Heroes’ simplistic yarn kept the fights flowing and the jokes rolling, Romeo Is a Dead Man’s sprawl feels disappointingly directionless. Instead of coming together as a kitschy universe-spanning epic, this sci-fi story is sadly told with all the mastery of a rambling drunk in Wetherspoons.

If you’re old enough, if you love Nintendo enough and if you have enough friends who fall into both categories, Miitomo is an inventive and fun, first mobile app for the company. Everyone else? The wait will continue for Nintendo to make some more ambitious mobile games based on its most-loved brands.

When set against the non-VR first-person shooters, a genre in which only those games that have benefitted persistent, focused iteration and a king’s ransom of investment can now compete, Farpoint seems embryonic and amateurish. Its thrills are short-lived, but the lessons that can be drawn from its struggles in trying to transpose the genre into VR will surely echo for a long time to come.

The Medium is hugely ambitious and could have been a site for incredible, innovative storytelling. Instead, it fumbles sensitive topics, plot points evaporate into thin air, and characters who are studied closely are left behind and never mentioned again. Even while taking notes, the story became difficult to follow. It took me 12 hours over three nights to play, and towards the finale I was astounded by how a game so short could feel so long. This certainly is a game of two worlds: one very beautiful and one very empty, unfortunately leaving us with a game that is all skin and no spirit.

It’s plausibly a commentary on the nature of an ecosystem, but the emotional reward doesn’t compensate a player for the amount of busywork.

The idea of a literal battle of the bands is a good one, and I was always keen to see what the next encounter would look like. But the lack of substance to the actual fights was invariably disappointing. Despite some impressive sights and sounds, in the end No Straight Roads has too many potholes to make its musical journey worth recommending.