It is not the blow-away game of 2016, nor does it seem to have the staying power of Ruby and Sapphire, but it’s enjoyable. Pokémon games are their own beasts, and hopefully Sun and Moon is a show of further changes and things to come for the franchise.

This game shows tremendous love for all things Spider-Man, and the ending packs a punch he would be proud of. But Insomniac relies too much on its hero to elevate the world built around him, with the result that the game wears thin some time before its powerful conclusion.

All-in-all, fans of battling, wonder-trading, and scratching their Pokémon behind the ear will still find things to love in the game, and for many, the changes in Sun and Moon are a refreshing reinvention of a classic formula. It may be initially jarring to veterans, but it is an attractive option for those who have been away from the series for a time to return.

Fallout 4, then, is a paradox, delivering in many of the areas that matter most but undermined throughout by poor combat, technical problems, and what feels like a lack of focus. So here we go again. It’s not war, but Bethesda that never changes.

Teenage boys will absolutely hate it. But when viewed as a platform game for kids, it's pretty impressive. Kirby first emerged in 1992; only now has his existence been justified.

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.

This mixtape, then, plays it safe, curating a crowd-pleasing compilation of teenage tropes and homages to coming-of-age cinema. It’s a beautiful and inventively silly series of musical vignettes – but without any real conflict at its core, the adventure fails to match the memorable heights of Life Is Strange. Much like an evening spent scrolling through classic music videos on YouTube, there’s a simple, nostalgic joy to be found. But once this four-hour spectacle is over, you might be left wishing that you’d spent your time more wisely.

A crowd-pleasing game, which offers only glimpses of what could be if this team were only allowed to take some braver risks with Croft’s next expedition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's frenetic and anarchic, but hardly the stuff that will convince you to buy a Wii U. Come on, Mr Miyamoto: let's have a proper Mario game for the Wii U. And a Zelda, and a Metroid, and a Pikmin, and a Donkey Kong and so on.

Unlike Assassin’s Creed, which always uses its historical settings as stages for its own eccentric stories, Ghost of Tsushima sticks so closely to the tropes and storylines of classic samurai fiction that it sometimes forgets to have a personality of its own. After I caught myself repeatedly checking my phone out of boredom during the story missions, I decided to abandon them entirely for a while and had a great time chasing foxes, bathing in hot springs, composing deeply average haiku and climbing mountains in search of a legendary bow instead. This is the most beautiful version of Japan ever conjured in code, and when running errands and slashing Mongol spearmen to bits gets tedious, you can always just drink in the view.

Perhaps it was inevitable that after such a long time, the conclusion to this story would ring slightly hollow, even rather facile, after all the prior build-up. I’ve been through 13 years of life, but it turns out that Sora got to skip all of that. Kingdom Hearts III plays it extremely safe, ultimately banking on nostalgia and delivering more of the same. Its charm is only skin-deep.

Eidos Montreal’s near-future thriller presents a visually impressive dystopian playground, but a wonky narrative and some shoddy touches tarnish its potential.

Black Ops II isn't a lazy annual update – it deserves credit for trying to play around with gaming's most winning formula. Yet this engine is showing its age, creaking at times as the jets fly overhead. Its new strategy levels don't need strategy. And the best parts are tweaked copies of what has been before. In the end, Black Ops II doesn't give us meaningful innovation, and it suggests COD's future success will depend on much more than fiddling around with the past.

Final chapter in intriguing narrative adventure series brings back favourite characters, but fails to go out with a bang.

Though its narrative could use more teeth, as a sensory experience GRIS is hard to beat and the most striking looking game of 2018.

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.

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.

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.

Those with a less all-consuming enthusiasm for all things on four wheels will find it provides more frustration than enjoyment.

It's clear that, like Sam, Ubisoft has a plan. They want a Splinter Cell that builds on Conviction but is truer to the series' heritage – and with Blacklist they've achieved that, albeit imperfectly. If the next game can refine the formula and give it a proper plot, then just maybe Ubisoft can deliver a classic the next time Sam is the man with the plan.

It's rarely an enjoyable experience, but within that, Catherine perhaps poses its greatest puzzle of all: does a video game always need to be enjoyable to be worthwhile?

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.

This comfortable but clunky reboot of the part farming simulator, part dungeon crawler, part life sim is very much a product of its time.

Despite these creative flourishes, Sunset Overdrive never quite surpasses the chaotic physics of Just Cause, the coherent style of Blood Dragon or the assured sense of place of GTAV – nor does it manage to draw its story and systems toward a coherent, impactful point. In the end its hero escapes the purgatory of a boring job and successfully wreaks revenge on the judgmental consumers he once served. But the game itself does little to undermine the increasingly over-familiar, open-world establishment, instead quietly celebrating the status quo.

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

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.

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.

Cindy’s design is laughable, but she draws attention to a broader problem with the game: its overwhelming maleness.

There are great individual moments in Far Cry 5. The gunplay is excellent, its unpredictable world generates daring stories of accidental heroism, and when it leans into the whole red-blooded American patriotism schtick, it’s genuinely funny. It doesn’t always fit together as well as it should, sometimes forcing the player to work around the game rather than with it – but the wildly vacillating tone is the bigger issue. It’s at once disorienting and noncommittal. Paradoxically, this is an extreme satire of modern America that says pretty much nothing about it.

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.

Black Ops III is the classic fan game: if you still love the series, you’ll love this one. But if the relationship is fading into routine, if the spark has gone, those old habits and nervous tics are really going to nag at you. You will go through the motions, but quietly – guiltily – you will already be looking elsewhere.

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.

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

For those who love the series and have dedicated hundreds of hours to it, purchasing the game is an unavoidable ritual. It’s more of what you want, with a lick of paint and up-to-date player stats...But for everyone else, it may be better to sit this one out, or wait for some sort of mid-season overhaul.

In Blood Dragon the risk-taking, while welcome, is arguably in the wrong place. After 60 minutes' play, the joke wears away to near invisibility, and all that's left are the familiar systems that underpin the game. These remain enjoyable and, after the slow start, most players will be compelled to push through to the end. But there's an undeniable thinness here, the sense of a mild joke that's been eked out for too long, that can't fully wrap around the heft of the underlying game onto which it's been grafted.

The more ambitious surrounding artifice may alienate much younger players, while the lack of quest lists with which to track your progress will frustrate older, more seasoned virtual adventurers. This is a less focused game than the most recent Lego Harry Potter game, then, thoughtfully assembled but ultimately failing to rule them all.

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

The further you delve into New Super Mario Bros U, the more rewarding it becomes. Its final worlds hold some of its best levels, and there are plenty of fun secrets to enliven the second or third attempt at a level. But it’s hard to summon the motivation to devote that much time to it. It’s typically well-made and enjoyable, but next to the best of the Mario series, it’s unmemorable.

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.

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.

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.

Second Son comes off as gorgeous, carefree fun, but a disappointing next-gen entry. The combat is as fast-paced and open to experimentation as it's ever been, but there is never the same sense of real power that the previous games delivered. Sucker Punch clearly wanted to create a big-hearted hero in Delsin, but there's a surprising lack of soul in everything else.

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

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.

The best thing one can say about Absolution is that it's impossible to feel ambivalent about it; players will love and loathe aspects of this game in equal measure. In Absolution, terrible ideas rub up against great ones almost on a moment-to-moment basis, and the end result is a title which is impossible to consider with the same clinical detachment that it's protagonist is known for.

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.

Nearly everything good about Prey is pulled from a game released in the decade before it. Well, four other games to be exact...The new Prey takes the highlights of these games, but merely allows them to coexist in a single habitat, never doing anything new with the foundational building blocks it has borrowed.

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.

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.

The most important aspects - how it looks and the feel of play - are top-drawer, but this only makes the surrounding drabness even more disappointing, and ensures that PES will remain the preferred choice of contrarians only.

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.

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.

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.

More generally there is much better access to tactics and strategy, with players able to manipulate their team's position and lineups to an almost Football Manager-style degree.

Wasteland 3 is treading creatively irradiated ground. The nuclear post-apocalypse has been explored to exhaustion, in video games and elsewhere, and no amount of weird factions or sex jokes can prevent it from feeling like an aged rock band on a comeback tour: the tunes are still decent, but there’s no youthful vigour.

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.

Such rough edges, and there are many more, suggest that while CoD: WWII may look the part, this is actually a game rushed to hit release – there are at least two areas in HQ with placeholder vendors saying ‘coming soon’.

This Definitive Edition might have been wiser to double down on the original, slightly hokey script and performances, rather than strive for something more sophisticated in the rewrite.

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.

It really is testament to the gruesome enjoyability of those hyper gory killcams that, even after four games, the sniping continues to be satisfying enough to warrant a look in. Sniper Elite 4 doesn’t miss its target, then, but it plays things safe enough to guarantee the kill without any undue risks.

The frantic and occasional flawed action on the pitch harks back to older PES games. Fifa 12 is the more complete football experience but PES 2012 can still deliver in short hectic doses.

Sonic Colours never feels like a world you want to hang out in. There are smart ideas and neat challenges here, but in the end there's probably too much stuff and the untidy interface makes it hard to get at the goodies.

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

A more forgiving proposition than its forebears, this is an enjoyable zombie romp that's lost some of its character in the lurch onto the next generation hardware.

Infinite Warfare could have been much more than a passable single-player movie attached to a super fast, super confident multiplayer infrastructure. As such, and with those moments of tantalising potential in mind, it feels like a wasted opportunity.

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.

Reigns offers a pretty, innovative and charming diversion, then, but don’t let yourself care too deeply about what actually happens, or the charm will give way to frustration fast.

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.

It's not the best racing game around – it's not particularly unique or innovative, the "plot", as it is, in story mode isn't engaging or well told, the soundtrack is undistinguished, but its flaws are forgiven thanks to its great looks and fantastic playability.

In introducing cooperative multiplayer, it has opened up an entirely new way to experience the adorable conceit of yarn characters making their way through a gigantic human world – but in freeing up movement and removing some of the friction, it has lost a little of the original’s focus and heart.

Quantum Conundrum feels like the PC's answer to a smartphone app – a simple idea, well executed but never quite reaching the level of a "real" game. You'll play it for a few hours, enjoying the experience and then suddenly think: "Well, that's enough of that," and never go back. It is what it is; a small slice of casual gaming at a slightly inflated price.

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.

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.

A solid enough title – but it's certainly not a game for the casual console golfer.

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.

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.

While there's some genuine heart and originality in Spec Ops: The Line, the experience of playing the game is just too hit and miss for me to recommend it unreservedly.

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.

It is the striking cel-shaded design, though, that elevates Röki just above games such as Year Walk, which is similarly inspired by Scandinavian folklore. The design enhances minor artistic details – whether it’s snow glistening on a treetop or a hostile character’s imposing shadow – to create a more involving experience. Röki’s pleasing aesthetics are well-matched by an absorbing story that always keeps you on your guard.

Not since Mirror’s Edge has first-person movement felt this good.

Transport Fever 2 doesn’t need to be a firebrand vehicle for climate activism, but having such themes inform the systems more closely would give it a little more personality and relevance. As it stands, this is a pleasant if not particularly distinctive game that may provide frustrated commuters with hours of transport therapy.

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

The cute monster battling fun is extremely familiar, but Yo-Kai watch has plenty of its own charm.

It wants us to take its medieval world seriously, but also wants it to be a playground, and it constantly struggles to balance these two sides of its personality. If you can embrace its quirks, it’s easy enough to lose yourself in its luscious and dynamic medieval landscape, but you’re unlikely to emerge with much insight into the historical period that it so faithfully depicts.

This is a simple game, artfully told.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a strange and vaguely disappointing game, but not a bad one.

Captain Spirit is only clumsy occasionally; as a whole it is affecting, sweet and memorable. It is a free taster of a forthcoming game from the same developer, Life Is Strange 2, but more than just an advert or a demo, it is its own short story about an everyday tragedy.

No other game this year will make you an accomplice in a dastardly raccoon plot to take over a town.

Rebirth will feel familiar to anyone who played The Dark Descent 10 years ago, but Frictional still know how to set up a damn good scare. A level set inside crumbling Roman catacombs had me feeling wrung-out with anxiety by its heartstopping end. Just because it’s curled up in the darkness, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the monster is dead.

All Stars will put a smile on the face of any lapsed wrestling fan pining for the simple, undemanding action of the WWF games of yore. Still, it's hard to justify paying the full RRP for a game that seems to go out of its way to have as little depth as possible.

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.

The first big project from a team of Spanish developers working out of an attic in Seville, Crossing Souls is a passionately made ode to an era, even if it occasionally feels underwhelming. From the plucky 2D characters to the synthesised background music to the dated-looking cartoon cutscenes, it captures the 80s perfectly. There is nothing original about this game, but that is why I enjoyed it.

Swapping freedom and tactical depth for twitch-based thrills and teamwork has certainly made it a viable multi-platform release...However, those with longer memories may argue that rebooting Syndicate as yet another FPS, complete with identikit hero, is a bit like remaking Citizen Kane as a rom-com starring Adam Sandler. For all its multiplayer merits, I'm afraid I'm with the Luddites on this one.

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.