Replaced’s most memorable stretch sees Warren sneaking back into the heavily guarded facility where the adventure began. You crouch amid tall, swaying grass and boggy marsh while being stalked by futuristic choppers that can end your life with a single, booming bullet. A gigantic wall looms in the background, rendered as an imposing black silhouette. For much of its 10-hour run time, Replaced seems content with replicating cyberpunk leitmotifs in pretty pixel-art fashion without adding much of its own. But this supersized, militarised fortification sees the game extend its purview, powerfully evoking the Mexico-US border wall and the West Bank barrier.

While the music and gameplay have evolved with the times, in terms of narrative, Scott Pilgrim EX plays it way too safe. Though written by series creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, there’s none of the edge that secured Scott Pilgrim its original cult following. Our cast have, for the most part, worked out their differences. There’s no David v Goliath here, no antagonist that forces Scott and his pals to grow amid the messiness of bad relationships. Scott’s other friends appear in fun cameos and cat-meos, but the story is a silly, shallow adventure that feels like a side quest, the kind of game Scott would stay up all night playing before missing his shift at work.

And, yes, the handful of marquee moments spent running from or tussling with gargantuan creatures are spectacular. I will never turn my back on a pelican again as long as I live. Throughout, Reanimal drip-feeds clues to compelling mysteries surrounding the nature of its world and the children’s place within it. A shame, then, that it whiffs its apparent swing at recapturing the gut-punch of Little Nightmares II’s ending.

While No Fate doesn’t move the needle for Terminator games as much as I’d like, it succeeds in resetting the clock for the series’ interactive arm. It’s a pointed reminder that Terminator has gaming greatness within it.

What Air Riders lacks in modes, it makes up for in charm. There are a heap of customisation options, allowing you to pimp your ride with unlockable stickers and alternative colour schemes – you can even hang a plushie from your machine like a Kirby-branded Labubu...This is a tightly focused game that reminds me of Nintendo’s fun-first NES-era game design – for better and for worse. It has a sprinkling of Sakurai magic and oodles of visual panache, but at full price it is – like Kirby – a little puffed-up.

Even if The Outer Worlds 2 rarely blows my mind, and suffers from direct comparisons to Avowed, the smaller scope of which resulted in a tighter experience overall, there is inherent value in a role-playing game that so effectively sucks you in for hours upon hours. It’s not breaking the mould, but improving its structure: offering you something satisfying and solid that rarely surprises, but still manages to regularly delight.

Keeper speaks clearest through its tremendous images, while billing itself as a “story told without words”. But the latter isn’t quite right. At various points, button prompts flash up on screen: for example, press X to “peck”. In spelling out exactly what the player should be doing, the world’s ambiguity is diminished.

Borderlands 4 is a big game – the main storyline takes 20 to 30 hours to complete, and there’s plenty to do afterwards. It is not entirely frictionless: sometimes you need to traverse huge distances in its missions, and the directional indicator that helps you along the way is annoyingly erratic. And it has been buggy at launch: playing on PC, it has occasionally crashed on me, even after a huge patch, and early players have reported problems with stuttering and other performance issues. But Borderlands needed to grow up a bit, and that’s exactly what it has done, without losing its essential charm. Its top-quality shooter action might be comfortably familiar, but it’s also an awful lot less annoying than it used to be.

It’s hard to make the case that its knife fights and shootouts are anything more than functional, and its missions feel slightly too straightforward to befit a franchise once known for its sublime changes of pace. But even with those caveats in mind, it’s still absolutely worth playing for the richness of its setting, and the infectious enthusiasm it has for its grim subject matter.

Not all cosy games need to evoke hard emotions. However, it does feel like a disservice to the emotionally complex source material not to explore the richness of the world at large – especially when dry humour, tragedy and finely drawn social structures are what make Tolkien’s writing so powerful. Without any challenging quandaries to pull at your heartstrings, the promising atmosphere in Tales of the Shire is overwhelmed by endless fetch quests. Diehard Tolkienites and Stardew Valley lifers may be better off looking elsewhere for their cosy thrills.

FromSoftware’s experiment in upending its established gameplay formula is admirable, and taking down gargantuan foes alongside friends really adds to the joy you feel at finally besting what at first felt like an insurmountable task. It’s just a shame that the game’s skewed pacing and overreliance on Elden Ring’s pool of assets so greatly mars the experience.

This attempt to cosy-fi an immersive sim game is full of ‘zany’ gags as you rescue cats from a spaceship, but it gets a bit too saccharine.

I wanted to love this game. On paper it is outrageous. Strange Scaffold, the developer, is known for the weird – notably Clickholding, which is sinister, experimental and truly queries what a game is in its execution (there is a lot of clicking, and being watched in the action of clicking). Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 certainly is creepy, and set in a mansion, and does have dinosaurs and some really satisfying puzzles. It also has some great ideas and isn’t quite a failed experiment. While it doesn’t bend reality in the way that it seems to want to, it aims high, and if the player can manage the places where the aesthetic falls short, they’ll have a great time. They might even meet a nice, blond dinosaur they can take home with them.

What you’re left with is a game whose best ideas are all optics. The fairytale southern style plays out like a modern, YA take on Toni Morrison’s fiction while summoning some of the whimsical, damaged beauty of 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. The soundtrack is a rambunctious collage of howling blues, twanging folk and lilting jazz. Compulsion Games bottled much southern magic during the making of this seemingly risky gambit for Microsoft, yet failed to take risks where it really mattered: this unique setting deserved more.

Inspired by the 1967 Windscale fire, Rebellion’s open-world adventure features an interesting mystery, but suffers from middling combat, poor stealth and an underutilised setting.

The third of the game’s five chapters in particular is truly wonderful, presenting a warren of secret corridors and a series of interconnected puzzles that are particularly satisfying to solve with the help of night vision goggles that can reveal hidden writing. But sadly the game can’t quite keep up this pace to the end, and despite the odd flash of brilliance, the quality of the final puzzles never quite reaches the height of those in the middle of the game. The plot, too, fizzles out unsatisfyingly, with a solution to the house’s mystery that seems obvious and yet doesn’t make much sense when held up to scrutiny. Still, the idea of a house with conundrums built into its very fabric remains tantalising: I couldn’t help but give my own house a sweep after playing, just on the off-chance there might be a previously unnoticed hidden message or two.

So for £25 you get a well-crafted, enjoyable game, a strange curio, and a flawed but fascinating piece of gaming history. Not quite as valuable as a Ming vase, but good value, and a lot more fun.

Avowed started out as Obsidian’s answer to Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, and it did remind me a lot of Oblivion and Skyrim in the exciting moments where I stumbled across something unexpected in the wilds. But it also shares those games’ tendency towards repetition, and the weightless feel of their fighting. My first 15 or so hours in The Lands Between felt rich with potential, but I got fed up with it long before the end.

Rivals is crammed with Stan Lee superheroes, but its message – about the total and utter Funko-Pop-ification of games – is as bleak as a Charles Burns graphic novel.

There’s much to enjoy in this sequel to the trailblazing female-led narrative game, but inconsistent characterisation lets it down.

There is lots to do in this huge and beautiful fantasy world, but inconsistent writing and muted combat dull its blade.

Apartment Story is a film-length mediation on loneliness, repetition and adult life that is unlike anything else I’ve played. With a little more time and scope, a little more access to Arthur’s wider life, this could have been a cult classic rather than a cult curio. Yet when an indie debut manages to so effortlessly capture such a miserable mood – and for less than the price of a London pint – Apartment Story still feels like an easy recommendation.

It’s great to finally get to play as Zelda, but working out how to take an active without being able to fight is rather hard work.

The underlying issue with Dustborn is the balancing act between serious topics and the supernatural, as well as its clear desire to alternate between fun moments, activism and drama – a balance it ultimately can’t hit. For example, a tragedy for an entire community is followed by a birthday party for a raccoon. I had a better time once I stopped taking it seriously, because the standout moments happen when Dustborn leans into the silliness of its supernatural storyline. With Dustborn, you may expect a tense trek across the US, but what you really end up with is the equivalent of an interactive Marvel movie, and that is OK.

I enjoyed the couple of afternoons I spent with Flock – I only wish there were more of it. A couple of really interesting little environmental puzzles made me wish to find others hidden around the uplands. Most of the creatures can be found quite easily, but just a few required some enjoyable deduction from a single sentence in the field guide. Once or twice, a creature in my entourage pointed me towards another, or helped me search something out, but most of them do nothing except follow you around. I couldn’t help but imagine a just slightly more ambitious version of this game, in which key beasties bestowed interesting abilities, with races or challenges to give you something to do with your friends once you’d filled out the field guide. But after less than five hours I’d done everything there was to do.

As ever, Mario’s brother is a scream, but this remaster is haunted by the spectre of its much better sequel – and the price might spook you.

This horror game creates great atmosphere with its acting and visual design, but is regularly brought to its knees by uninspiring gameplay.

Hunters is not quite as much fun as playing Overwatch … or watching Star Wars. It could have done with some truly original features, or more movie content tied in with the gameplay. Instead, it is a decent team shooter that you can play on Switch or mobile, and swap your progress between the two, so you never have to go more than a few moments without levelling up a wookiee. Yes, it tries to bamboozle you with many quests, challenges and blinking icons on the menu screen so that you inevitably fold and buy a £10 season pass, but you can definitely defeat the game’s Jedi mind tricks and have a blast without paying. The force is strong in this one, but not THAT strong.

Reigns Beyond works as a madcap space caper that you can dip into for 10 minutes at a time, and the wit and pace of the dialogue are impressive. But I did wonder why I was part of a band. Sometimes when you land on a planet you’ll play a gig, but these musical interludes are repetitive, unchallenging and inconsequential. It’s funny and surprisingly wide-ranging as a space-team comedy, but as a band buddy comedy it’s comparatively shallow. I also wonder whether the name isn’t holding it back at this point: Reigns made sense when it was a game about being a variably competent monarch, but it doesn’t scream comedy sci-fi, and I think it will end up passing a lot of people by as a result – a minor tragedy, as you won’t find anything else like these few hours of spacefaring silliness for under a fiver.

It will deliver a fun weekend of fart-infused chaos for anyone who misses the days when snowfall meant freedom.

Melody of Moominvalley is simple and unchallenging, and also disappointingly short – you can see almost everything within a day’s play. And yet it’s all put together with such care that it’s difficult to begrudge these shortcomings. The licence is everything: spending a short time in a faithfully evoked version of Tove Jansson’s strange and memorable world is worth the entrance fee.

If its publisher Ubisoft continues to support it, Skull and Bones will attract a committed player base of sea-combat enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with their ships’ builds and facing off against each other, or teaming up to take on the intimidating fleets, cargo heists and sea monsters that lurk tens of hours in. If you are after a game that feels like a pirate adventure, though, you’re still better off with Black Flag.

This is a well-made Avatar game. If you’re fond of the James Cameron films, then you’re in for a real treat, while even Avatar apostates will probably find something to enjoy amid Pandora’s dense undergrowth. But there are better examples of this form, and if you’re not all-in on the Na’vi way of life, you’ll be gritting your teeth through their tedious stories.

With rewards for completing each stage within a set number of moves, there are incentives for perfecting your approach too. But the game’s tutorials linger well into the game’s 40-hour runtime, and combined with a bland storyline, basic environments and a persistently low challenge, it’s a game that will only appeal to the series’ most committed followers.

The same old arguments apply to this release as to all retro compilations: you can find these games online then run them on an open source emulator for free, though you won’t get the modern save features. You could buy an original console and a copy of the games on eBay, but then that will work out much more expensive and unreliable. For Jurassic Park lovers and retro enthusiasts, this is a really nice way to relive a lost world of gaming.

Mortal Kombat 1 is also home to an esoteric, slightly underbaked “Invasions” mode, which injects a dash of RPG-ish grinding – complete with random encounters and variating elemental damage types – to its bread-and-butter brawling mechanics. I found this to be less compelling than either the campaign or the standard multiplayer ladder, but it’s good to see that NetherRealm is, at the very least, considering how they might reinvent the wheel in the future. After all, this is supposed to be a total reimagining of Mortal Kombat oeuvre; a new beginning for all of our twisted, bloodsoaked combatants. I’m happy to have them back in my life, but it’s a shame they didn’t learn a few more tricks during their time away.

It is imperfect but affecting, and hopefully after a few patches and updates, players will be able to enjoy it with fewer caveats. It’s peaceful under the waves. I can see why Stan, desperate to escape a measureless grief, would be drawn to it. But in the end, this turns out to be a game about what it takes to avoid being dragged under.

I hope Stray Gods kicks off a whole new genre, and more from Summerfall Studios in the future.

This is a simple game, artfully told.

It all adds up to a feeling of becoming enmeshed, slowly but surely, in a little community – one that you become familiar with and part of, even if the moment-to-moment interactions can feel a little shallow. Marvelous also seem to have finally nailed the technical performance for their remakes, too, especially on the Switch, with fast load times and little to no slowdown even with loads of animals on screen. It’s not going to be a game for everyone, but if you can meet A Wonderful Life on its terms, you’ll find a lot to love in its slow-paced, small-town gait.

But despite the rewarding interplay between various stats and buffs, and the laudable sensation that, even very early on, you have access to the sort of freedom in character and combat customisation that’s typically locked away for hours in similar games, Diablo 4 feels … toylike. Strip away the hellish screams and scarily convincing Halloween costumes, and what’s left is the video game equivalent of hyper-palatable junk food, albeit with myriad colourful warnings on the packaging.

If you have young children and want to share with them the thrill of driving across a wild, fantastical landscape, crashing into stuff and getting constant positive feedback, this would be a smart investment. It is a game with a lot of heart, made by developers who clearly understand how to make kids smile while they play.

Dead Island 2 will amuse you for days with its stylish vision of a zombified LA, but it’s also limited in scope, and with skill systems that feel shallow and impersonal it won’t hang around long enough to achieve superstardom. The fact is, Dead Island 2 is one of 2014’s best zombie beat-’em-ups – it’s just a pity we’re in 2023.

This brief, raw and unsettling reimagining of a celebrated environmentalist’s campaign against pesticides presents a sickly vision of nature contaminated by humans.

Revealed to little fanfare at last year’s The Game Awards, Bayonetta Origins was the game that no one expected, and even fewer wanted. For some then, its mere existence is akin to Bayo blasphemy, yet in truth, this spin-off is far from the disaster many expected. While it never comes close to the highs of last year’s Bayonetta 3, it’s still a charming curio for fans and more importantly – a fantastic introduction to the genre for younger players.

If you’re looking for a nostalgic J-horror experience, and you’re prepared to put in the effort and work with the control scheme, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is an enjoyable, highly atmospheric adventure, with many brilliant moments of fear and dread. The spirits are wonderfully designed, and spotting a black-eyed ghost child lurking behind you, or in the corner of a room, never fails to send a shiver down the spine. For those of us who believe the Project Zero series should be as revered as Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it has been a pleasure to step, once again, into its chamber of horrors, with just a camera to protect you and the remnants of an ancient ghost story ready to be exhumed.

Before he had a face, Kirby’s unassuming spherical design was intended to be a graphical placeholder – but then its creators fell in love with his squishy simplicity. Return to Dream Land feels like a playable placeholder, ticking the right boxes without ever being truly exciting. In multiplayer it’s much more fun, but after the charmingly inventive Super Mario odyssey-inspired escapades of Forgotten Land, revisiting the safe, side-scrolling Kirby era holds little appeal.

EA and Omega Force’s unlikely venture succeeds by being the perfect entry point to the hunter genre. This is the accessible radio single to Monster Hunter’s prog album odyssey: it’s silly, flawed and probably not destined to be an all-timer, but if you’re in the right mood, my god is it fun. Whether it’ll continue to dig its talons into me remains to be seen, but after years of frustration, I finally feel ready to dive further into this once-impenetrable genre.

Hogwarts Legacy starts to feel like countless open-world games of the past decade once you’ve been playing it for more than 15 hours. However, you get to ride a Hippogriff. It’s those magical moments and the setting that rescue it from mediocrity, but only if the Wizarding World still has you under its spell.

The cult 3DS game has been refreshed for smartphones and the combination of card game and horse racing is as weird and addictive as ever.

Season’s unwillingness to paint the world in anything but the broadest strokes (“The country’s expansion caused a war. Internationalism was breaking down”) and penchant for flowery but meaningless language may have been influenced by a troubled development history. Part of Season’s development cycle was marked by allegations of workplace harassment and disorganised leadership, which became public in 2021. The game is enamoured with ideas of community and culture, but in appropriating real culture and removing it from context, it robs itself of its own message.

Technical wobbliness doesn’t always denote a bad game. The sheer charm of the writing, delightful golfing and the warmth of the world compensate for the rough edges. It’s a generously big game, too – imperfect, but special nonetheless.

Of course, all of that chaos leaves the game vulnerable to some seismic bugs. It is no shock that the first option on the pause menu is an automatic respawn, because it is quite easy to banjax yourself. (Once, I fell through the bottom of the world and into a strange, psychedelic nether-realm.) Perhaps this is part of the deal, in a game this manic. Goat Simulator 3 has no aspirations beyond what it is: a dishevelled yet appealing bender of self-destructive looniness.

By the end, there wasn’t a lot that felt new – but I had phantom hand cramps from swinging that electrified baton, and a powerful need to sit down and have a cup of tea. I felt as if I’d survived – which is just what this game is going for.

Somerville is the only game that has ever had me hiding from aliens in a grimy festival Portaloo. Yet its last-ditch attempt at a galaxy-brain sci-fi ending lands with a disappointing thud. While its head-scratcher finale leaves you wishing its nonverbal narrative was a little more verbal, Somerville remains a masterclass in minimal storytelling; a series of memorable, haunting vignettes.

Here, Game Freak draws up an exciting new open-world blueprint for the Pokémon franchise, but appears to have lacked the time and knowhow to deliver it to spec. Compare this with June’s gorgeous Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which runs on the same console, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re beta testing an open-world Pokémon. With more time in the oven, this could have been genuinely exciting. As it stands, this fun-filled adventure asks you to put up with an awful lot more of the rough than the smooth.

Here, Game Freak draws up an exciting new open-world blueprint for the Pokémon franchise, but appears to have lacked the time and knowhow to deliver it to spec. Compare this with June’s gorgeous Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which runs on the same console, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re beta testing an open-world Pokémon. With more time in the oven, this could have been genuinely exciting. As it stands, this fun-filled adventure asks you to put up with an awful lot more of the rough than the smooth.

When a Sega marketing executive came up with the nonsense phrase “blast processing” to “explain” the technical capabilities of the Mega Drive, it’s now clear they experienced some sort of messianic premonition. Sonic Frontiers is blast processing in video game form: anarchic, careless, silly, exciting, meaningless, wonderful. What a daft and incredible ride.

Stealth, however, is the biggest disappointment in Gotham Knights. Where Batman infested the city’s crevices, his underlings merely invade them: you can work together to set up terrain traps or create distractions, but it’s a world away from the older series’ puzzlebox intricacy and it’s always more fun to barge in swinging.

There is a genuinely brilliant strategy game lurking under all this flimsy Nintendo wrapping. For younger audiences, these complaints probably won’t matter, but for the fully-grown Nintendo faithful, Sparks of Hope’s paper-thin narrative, juvenile jokes and disappointing hub worlds are hard to ignore, despite the fantastic fights.

Running a struggling potion shop, sourcing ingredients, haggling with customers and fending off the bank is all charming and stressful work in equal measure.

While Saints Row is messy, buggy, silly and often derivative, it also recalls a time in the early 2000s when the open world genre was a haphazard, joyful space with none of the codified, dopamine-fracking precision of modern titles. There are, in this frisky reboot, the ghosts of titles such as True Crime: Streets of LA, State of Emergency, The Getaway and Runabout – patchy, imperfect but gripping experiments in player agency that didn’t quite understand the conventions, but had a bash anyway. To me that is a far more interesting set of stablemates than the last couple of Saints Row titles. To me, this is a preposterously fun video game, despite its many faults, or more accurately, because of them.

Rollerdrome is about getting lost in a giddy gameplay trance. As the hypnotic electro pulsed with each turn of the half-pipe and slow-mo bullets tapered out of a well-timed flip, I was grinning like a goon. Yet where OlliOlli World offered a bountiful buffet of levels to grind across, Rollerdrome’s stingy stage selection left me hungry. Much like a lockdown fad, Rollerdrome offers a thrilling way to pass an afternoon or few, but once you’ve got your kicks, only the dedicated will still be donning their skates.

Arcade Paradise comes across as a little confused, sometimes: if the premise of the game is that you’re running an arcade in your father’s laundromat in secret, for instance, then why is your dad the one paying you bonuses for those daily gaming challenges? It has the feel of a game that changed shape a few times over the course of its development. Nonetheless, it is more than a collection of average arcade game tributes. Intentionally or not, it captures something of the ennui of young adulthood and 90s Gen X disillusionment with menial work – and how video games have always been a colourful escape from the boredom of everyday life.

Whether your guests’ stay is pleasant or not rarely makes a difference, so the management elements feel like stepping stones to the story Bear and Breakfast actually wants to tell. Hank is a sweet Bear and his friends are memorable enough, but in its storytelling the game seems to introduce and abandon characters for long periods of time. It is a simulation that requires patience in a genre that usually gives players loads to do – it’s a management game that’s obsessed with managing its players, rather than letting them exercise control.

F1 22 is technically stunning, and that, combined with the chance to drive this year’s cars on this year’s tracks, should make it irresistible to Formula One fans. As long as they manage to ignore the egregious F1 Life.

Like Ash’s “improvised surgery” with a chainsaw, the multiplayer is surprisingly deep. Unlocking new powers and abilities for Survivors and the three varieties of Demon continually opens up fresh horror possibilities, and the player community is already making the most of the nefariousness on offer. It’s fittingly rough around the edges, but Evil Dead: The Game is a surprisingly worthwhile cabin retreat.

Moral murkiness helps preserve the tension across Swansong’s duration. There’s always something at stake – your life, the masquerade, your integrity – and that does a lot to infuse some meaning into all the talking and scouring rooms for notes. I doubt that Swansong is set to become a vampire RPG of legend, like 2004’s Bloodlines, but it nonetheless makes vampires scary again.

Habitat destruction is something we’re surely all aware of – we’ve all seen the heartbreaking footage of animals left stranded in tiny patches of forest, surrounded by roads and industry. Beyond the Trees reinforces its ecological message through its visuals and through play, and though this might not be many players’ introduction to this pressing real-world issue, it is a new way to look at it, and a new way to engender sympathy. Developer Broken Rules has done its research here, both on the creatures themselves and the places they call home. No matter how many people feel moved to donate to conservation charities after playing, this game will have made a difference through its advocacy.

Despite its repetition and frustrations, I warmed to this grainy, gore-soaked journey after the tedious early hours. Thanks to a smattering of player choices, the game offers just enough of a hint at player agency to make you feel involved in the narrative, too, giving Trek to Yomi’s surrealist slaughter a sense of purpose. There’s a strong argument that a Japanese-made attempt at this genre would come closer to doing the samurai fantasy justice, but as with the many Japanese takes on virtual America, there’s a schlocky charm to Yomi’s tropey inauthenticity nonetheless.

I’m glad this game exists, but I wish there were more to it. There wasn’t enough variety in the virtual landscapes or in the characters’ conversations to make the long night drives or train journeys appealing beyond the second or third go-around. It is a game that wants us to think about the contradictions and complexities of being alive on this Earth, but also, it doesn’t seem to come from a place of great life experience. I would be fascinated to see what these developers would make in another 20 (or 50) years.

It’s a landscape worth visiting, nonetheless. Okomotive’s games are the antithesis of open world blockbusters – see that mountain? You can’t go there – and their geography is all the more sublime for being non-traversable. Rather than routine video game empowerment, Changing Tides offers mindful deprivation in a ravaged world where even the concept of a haven must move with the flow.

The Chinese term “kung fu” roughly translates as “a skill acquired through hard work and practice”. Sifu might just be the purest expression of the concept that games have ever seen. The journey is brutal. It is not for the faint of heart, nor the short of patience. But those prepared to rise to the challenge will find that something spectacular comes after the pain. Is it worth the hardship? Ask me when the wounds have healed.

The soundtrack is one of the best of the year, and it’s incredibly stylish. But the sheer gory, numerical compulsion at its core gets more terrifying the more you consider how much sway this manic impulse toward numb, exploitative accumulation holds in our own world. Dystopias like this used to feel creepily prescient. Now, they just feel terrifyingly honest.

Both longtime RTS fans and Age of Empires vets will find things to love here, a comfy if well-worn tactician’s armchair to slip into, spiffed up, and with a few shining surprises stuffed down the sides. But it all comes at such a premium, and with campaigns geared so heavily as tutorials for the multiplayer, it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone not already invested.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is the video game equivalent of an old war film that you’ve seen many times before, but still enjoy watching with a feeling of nostalgic comfort that armed conflict perhaps should not provide. It won’t set the world alight, but gives you the opportunity to blow a lot of it up – which is, after all, what we want from this series.

Simplistic, repetitive interactions drag on an otherwise engaging story based on the Marvel franchise.

Perhaps I am asking too much. We don’t pry for depth from Mario as he rescues his princess, or ask what motivates Tom Nook in his real estate empire. Like pretty much all Nintendo’s games, with their long legacies and perfect jumps, this feel good to play, and that should be enough: but I don’t come to a Nintendo title for enough. I left Dread feeling that perhaps the real legacy of 2D Metroid will be the games it inspires, rather than the games themselves.

Writer Alan Wake searches for his missing wife while tackling a malevolent force disguised as darkness in this clunky but atmospheric reboot.

Interactive possibilities make this dorky tale about a small-town psychic musician strangely absorbing.

Uncover a grim conspiracy and sweet-talk snooty bears in this genre-hopping indie game.

This peaceful circuit is perfect for the kind of person who tries to observe traffic laws when playing Grand Theft Auto.

Like the best punk records, No More Heroes 3 is a grower. Its messy and unpolished gameplay can be completely offputting, but a scrappy, anarchic joy courses through it. For those with a love for gaming’s weirder side and nostalgia for a time where most games were endearingly unpolished, this will suit nicely. For many modern gamers, though, reaching the best sections will require more patience than it’s worth.

The Ascent is an atmospheric power fantasy, a cinematic cyberpunk escape where you can disengage your brain and indulge in copious virtual violence. If you’re a Game Pass subscriber, it’s worth a try – at £25, it’s harder to recommend.

The innovation of players running around after their shots is fun but you may find yourself longing for a leisurely stroll over the course.

Hang in there through the repetition, though, and it turns out that there’s more to this than internet dog jokes and fetch quests. The combination of wandering and postmodernism put me in a contemplative mood anyway, presumably by design, and the wistful conversations with Krista, in which the couple gently nurture a long-distance relationship, have tenderness and pathos that kept me coming back. As a joke game, this has the expected issues, but ultimately it’s a flight I’m glad I didn’t miss.

It seems Ibrisagic has partly conceived the game as a satire on intergenerational angst and society’s treatment of old people. In that respect, Just Die Already is about as convincing as one of its own physics interactions. However, as a juvenile, tasteless and problematic co-op party game, it’ll provide as much guilty pleasure as Goat Simulator. And it’s going to be all over Twitch for the next few months, you can be sure of that.

It is still enjoyable, because the Pokémon themselves are so interesting to look at; it’s just not wildly exciting. It’s a laid-back game and one that offers many hours of gentle photographic research to anyone drawn to Pokémon’s weird world – whether you’re a veteran of 90s Pokémania, or a nine-year-old.

Much as our heroes are caught between two worlds, Fantasian has one foot in design dogma while the other paddles around cautiously in new ideas. The result is a lengthy and sumptuous genre piece, the equivalent of a good Netflix movie that you probably wouldn’t watch at the cinema. These days, that’s more of a compliment than it used to be.

Without the drive of something new and promising on the horizon, the daily grind just doesn’t have that one-more-go appeal that is key to the farming-sim experience. There have been big improvements to the game’s presentation and accessibility, and it remains warm, cheerful and inviting, but between the technical issues and the aimless design it’s difficult to recommend highly – even if it’s better than the newer Harvest Moon games.

On iPhone, there are some frustrating control issues, and often, the text in your journal and the icons on your GPS are too small to make out. On top of this, the game provides scant information on your objectives, which can be trying. Nuts is, however, a warm, stylish and contemplative little game, which makes clever use of photography and nature watching in order to craft a modest, meaningful ecological fable.

The game is also too faithful to Orwell’s plot, for all the alternative endings. At its best, it encourages you to rethink and even challenge some of the novella’s concepts, including its rather dated classist metaphors. What if the rats were more of an opposition than an infestation? What if the sheep were more than mindless propaganda machines? But these divergences are frustratingly limited by the need to pack in familiar scenes and conversations from the book. In the end, Orwell’s Animal Farm can’t work out whether it’s a retelling or a revolution – but with the nation’s schoolkids in lockdown, it’s nonetheless a valuable adaptation.

Does Cyberpunk 2077 live up to the hype? Is it significantly deeper than Watch Dogs: Legion or Yakuza: Like a Dragon? Is it as good as Grand Theft Auto V? The answer to all of these questions is no. The sheer size of the world, its astonishing architecture, its set-piece battles, its stylistic bravado – all are testament to the efforts of a talented workforce. But you have to play by its rules, accepting Night City’s xenophobia and misogyny as unavoidable fictive components. Unlike Los Santos, this is not a multifaceted sandbox where you’re free to create whole new activities unforeseen by the designers. You’re there to do missions and side-missions, and the world only yields thus far. You’re always a tourist, never a citizen...In this way, Cyberpunk 2077 resembles a vast, futuristic Las Vegas. You come here and have a hell of a week, but then you wake up one morning feeling jaded and complicit, and you realise that the glitzy signs lead nowhere, the noise is meaningless, and when you look beyond the strip, there is only desert.

It’s unfortunate that Empire of Sin has arrived in town with holes in its waistcoat, but I don’t believe its problems are beyond fixing, and it’s got moxie that ultimately shines through the flaws.

The result is a game about mythology that somehow lacks a sense of mystery. It’s fun to play and I dare say I will keep chipping away at it for weeks to come, but say what you want about Norwich in the dark ages – at least there was real depth beneath all that mud.

Age of Calamity is a bizarre, enjoyable beast that pays homage to an incredible game, while merrily doing its own thing. Scything through thousands of identical baddies might not be the most sophisticated power fantasy, but the compelling rhythm of intense battles and constantly achievable microgoals ensures it’s certainly a fun one – to the point where only thumb pain was preventing me from playing even more.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War does everything it needs to with polish and zeal, and those who plan to spend the next year levelling up through its multiplayer ranks won’t be disappointed if they get this for Christmas (although they might have liked a few more maps than the currently available eight). But given how disruptive March’s battle-royale Call of Duty game Warzone has been, both as a competitor to Fortnite and Apex Legends and as a new meeting place for CoD fans, Cold War could definitely have used some more innovation. The campaign hints at it, and the 1981 setting offered so much promise, but, sadly, this is not the subversive goth-punk krautrock shooter I was waiting for.

It’s a satisfying experience as you glide gracefully over the ocean, but too often the dogfighting and bombing runs play out as erratic scrambles.