As befits the official Formula One game, F1 2019 is certainly up there with the very best serious motorsport games. You won’t find one that looks better or provides more convincing car-handling, and yet its optional driver aids mean you don’t need to be as skilled as a real F1 driver to feel like the next Lewis Hamilton.

The game's difference-maker is entirely on the pitch – that new movement system. In multiplayer especially, where the absence of an all-knowing AI sees imperfect humans make repeated mistakes, it leads to slightly clumsier, boggier, slower matches. All the same, the change is only incremental, and doesn't ruin the game by any means.

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.

Telling Lies requires a deliberateness from its players that turns us from viewers to active plot participants. It’s a game that doesn’t hold your hand, and ultimately it’s down to you to decide the truth – another secret of a good mystery done well.

It's a blissful, beautiful thing to play.

The mystery of Crow Country was far richer than I had anticipated: the story is very completely drawn, and isn’t without a little levity and playfulness in the face of the darkness. I found the final sequences really bold – committed to the strange and unsettling all the way through, it certainly sticks the landing. Crow Country is far more than a pastiche of the giants of the PS1 era – it is a real triumph in and of itself.

Hitman is unquestionably the finest game in the series. It might be one of the best stealth games ever made.

While on-pitch matters between these two old foes are too close to call, Fifa’s breathtaking scope secures yet another silver pot for an already heaving trophy cabinet.

The result feels like being trapped in a Alejandro Jodorowsky movie – sinister, strange but beautiful and compelling. Everywhere you look there is some unsettling image, from skeletons lying on riverbanks, to bizarre children sitting alone in bus shelters and ferry canteens. The puzzles are shrewd and challenging, and the blocky discordant visuals make the whole environment feel like some sort of uncanny valley of the mind. If you’re looking for a very different sort of challenge, in a decidedly unnaturalistic open world, Grunn delivers much, much more than the sedate rural idyll it initially promises.

There’s no question that EA’s behemoth delivers bang for its megabucks.

Vanquish isn't going to change the face of gaming, but it's impressive to behold, satisfying to play (as long as you're reasonably hardcore) and shot through with humour (look out, for example, for the robots dancing to a ghetto-blaster which transforms into a mobile gun).

It might look slight, but there are hours of schemes, conversations and grisly deaths tucked away in this game. Broadening your choice of rulers takes some time, and even the same situations play out differently when Tyrion is in charge rather than Sansa, especially when you’re playing in character. It’s great fun to step into the unenviable position of Ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, and a far more enjoyable way to pass the time until the HBO series’ conclusion than combing through the books again for clues.

F1 2010 is an extremely accomplished game, which blends enthusiast-level nerdiness seamlessly with an admirable playability, and even if it is a little on the brutal side, it deserves its place on the podium of great driving simulators.

It may not tear anyone completely away from Overwatch or Fortnite, but it offers a tactically rich alternative for players who want something with more grit, naturalism and sweaty peril. It is perhaps strange, perhaps even guilt-inducing, to take such pleasure from a game that wears its gung-ho military fetishism as a badge of honour, but as it stands this is the most enjoyable Call of Duty game for several years.

The time I have spent in its company has been engrossing, eerie, and unexpectedly thought-provoking. Horror provides a skewed and shadowy lens through which to view our lives and learn new things about ourselves and the world, and it has been expertly utilised here. With love as its focus, Fear the Spotlight will do more than scare you.

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.

Graphically, Kid Icarus: Uprising is astonishing to behold, given that it was designed for the 3DS – which is just as well since at times, it gets incredibly busy in visual terms, and if it wasn't crisp and sharp to look at, it would get confusing. Overall, it feels fresh, original and exhilarating to play, and thanks to its off-the-chain level of bonkersness, it should appeal to young and old alike.

Like all great detective stories, Gunpoint isn't quick to give up its secrets. And like all great games, its elements build up into a system as alluring as it is surprising. You're left wanting more; which is a small criticism, but much higher praise.

Inspecting all that gaming gubbins up-close as a tiny robot gave me a new appreciation for the art of Sony’s hardware design. I’m not a technically minded gamer, and for me the appeal of individual consoles has always been decidedly secondary to the games I can play on them. But there is proper magic in how engineers and programmers create the machines that enable our gaming experiences, and Astro’s Playroom helped me to see it.

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.

There is real craft on show in Angry Birds Space. The merchandise and spin-offs may be ubiquitous, but the gameplay still feels fresh, with enough new elements to reawaken the addiction for players of the previous versions.

I’ve been playing versions of this game on and off for seven years now, but the fun doesn’t wear off. Splatoon 3 doesn’t offer something different, it offers more: more fashions, more modes, more ways to spend time in its messy, chaotic universe, alone or together. It is delightful to be back.

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.

For the most part, Battlefield 6 is a brilliant return to form, a thrilling, almost operatic shooter experience, which manages to combine deafening combat with tactical subtlety. How it will fit into the modern landscape of hero shooters and battle royale blast-em-ups is anyone’s guess – it deserves a shot, that’s for sure.

Overall, Bad Piggies merits a four-star rating, especially as a relatively small tweak in the number of mechanics dished out for free would reduce the frustration factor.

Two Point Campus isn’t entirely toothless: it pokes gentle fun at university life through a range of lightly cynical announcements about paying tuition fees and assignment extensions. Mainly, though, it is content to focus on the journey of learning and discovery that university is intended to provide, which it achieves in inventive, knockabout style. For all the game’s wry declarations, the one truest to its spirit is also the simplest: “Students are reminded to have the time of their lives.”

Splatoon 2 gets so much right that it’s easy to ignore the occasional baffling ways in which Nintendo has failed to score into an open goal.