The early hours feel like the playable equivalent of being sent to military school, and demand saintly patience – but it’s an investment that pays off. Much like in Red Dead Redemption 2 before it, I happily lose hours wandering around this vast simulation, curious to see what wonder and depravity I might stumble on. It’s telling that despite spending more than 115 hours in Bohemia, I have yet to roll credits on the main quest line. If you’re uninspired by the prospect of roaming yet another frictionless open world where everything comes easy, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a breath of fresh air – scented with just a hint of dung.

Youngblood is adolescent in all the right ways, anarchic and ferocious on the surface with thoughtful design running underneath. Characters Jess and Soph are loud, goofy and annoying, but that’s exactly as they should be. Some of the writing is a little iffy, and you won’t find much in the way of nuanced storytelling, but to be honest it isn’t required. This a game about two young women blasting racists into goo – for me, that equals a bloody good time.

Drop Duchy is an extremely clever experiment in game design by combination, and with each new feature you wonder how on earth the team managed to balance all the spinning plates. There’s a reason why the rogue-like and deck-builder genres are so wildly popular: they’re compulsive, challenging and systemically fascinating, and each one adds its own little foibles to the collective rulebook. In the case of Drop Duchy, the foibles are worth the price of entry alone.

Somewhere out there is a bigger, more vivid version of Metal: Hellsinger that could truly rock it with the FPS greats. Yet while Hellsinger’s art isn’t good enough to grace the black cotton T-shirts of an avid metal fan, its music certainly wouldn’t feel out of place in their record collection – and the way Hellsinger weaves this soundtrack into an infernal action experience makes it a thoroughly enjoyable twist on shooter convention.

Snake Eater is a melodramatic delight, offering a brilliant introduction to – or excuse to revisit – one of gaming’s most gloriously idiosyncratic masterpieces.

Video games, at their best, allow us to inhabit the lives of people who are different from us, or to assume the roles of protagonists in stories we have the power to shape, or fiddle with recreations of the systems that underpin civilisations. But they can also be a very silly little joke, shared among friends, which for 15 minutes or so make everyone love each other a tiny bit more.

On the bike, though, Trials Rising is close to flawless, a demanding, absorbing and occasionally rage-inducing game that will serve you up an exciting challenge for as long as you can take it.

Dragon's Dogma has everything that RPG-heads crave – you can lose yourself in tinkering around, collecting items, finding arcane quests and seeking random enemies for days. It's reassuringly complex, and astonishingly well-executed given that this is Capcom's first attempt at such a game.

It’s what you’d expect from the people who made Gone Home, but that’s no bad thing.

Even on the hardest of the three difficulty settings, Terra Nil is more forgiving than expected. Everything from its simple interface to an easily understood tutorial and a fantastically beautiful in-game guidebook makes environmental restoration go smoothly. The music and sound effects are very relaxing, and after every successfully restored map, there is a moment where you can just appreciate your handiwork. While a bit more friction wouldn’t have hurt, and the variation from map to map is modest, by keeping it simple, developer Free Lives spreads a clear message: saving the planet could be so easy if we wanted it to be. All that’s missing is a toxin scrubber.

Is this the Pro Evo to convince Fifa fans to switch? No. Is it an improvement on the last couple of years' PES incarnations? Yes. Will I be loving it and hating it and still playing it until PES 2014 comes out? Absolutely.

Battlefield 3 was supposed to bring down CoD, and without a campaign – which seems to be DICE's approximation of a CoD experience – this wouldn't have been possible. This is unfortunate, because the instances in which DICE seem to have tried to beat their rivals at their own game have resulted in Battlefield 3's weakest content.

On the one hand Horizon: Zero Dawn is an ambitious technological showpiece for Sony’s new PlayStation Pro platform and a visual benchmark for this console generation. And yet its underlying hunter/gathering gameplay mechanics and zonal map architecture have barely evolved from their obvious origins in the long-established franchises Far Cry and Tomb Raider.

The very purity of purpose which makes the game such a fine arcade killbox also renders it unengaging on any level that isn't soggy and littered with stray organs. So while as a destruction simulator Prototype 2 scores very highly, there's a chance that, just like those toddlers in the dirt, you'll get bored after a short while and wander away.

Just as the fictional maker of the archive fell under the spell of these records and materials, I too was seduced.

Visually, Sonic Generations is impeccable: bright, colourful and universally appealing. At last, after well over a decade, Sonic has been given a starring vehicle that doesn't make a mockery of his glorious heritage, but instead celebrates it.

You could spend months in Forza Horizon 5 on a coast-to-coast trip, or dip in for a few days to see the sights and admire the sunsets. The vast array of fun on offer means that whatever you do, wherever you end up, you’ll have a very good time.

If this review feels chaotic, then that’s a fair reflection of the game. It is mad, fun, fantastical chaos and I honestly love it. Before I started writing this, I had left my Arisen and her endearingly incompetent pawn in an ancient battleground patrolled by a dragon. We blasted it with a couple of ballista bolts, and then it flew over and crushed the ballista with a claw, at which point I realised we were somewhat outgunned here and ran for some castle ruins to hide from the creature. This seemed like a good idea until skeletal warriors rose from the ground, and I realised the castle is extremely haunted. I don’t know how we’ll get out of this situation. But I do know it will be an adventure.

Though The Lost Legacy boasts beautiful new environments to explore and for Chloe to take collectible photos of on her smartphone, the journey through them feels very familiar. The only thing that’s truly fresh about this game is the protagonists, but they’re a promising pair, and those who don’t mind a formulaic sequel should take the chance to get to know them. They’ve certainly proved that we don’t need Drake.

This can be a fiddly game, and certainly isn’t one for people who dislike mining or organising elaborate storage systems, but after a couple of years in Early Access this is now a refined and elegant experience, gently paced, where there is always something interesting to pursue through beautiful spaces. Voluntary isolation in the deep cold might not sound like solace after a winter of lockdowns, but Subnautica: Below Zero is cosy and moreish. Dive in, and you may be surprised how deep you end up going.

Advanced Warfare is the best that Call of Duty has been for years, a successful negotiation of that troublesome creative and commercial tension.

If you've never played LittleBigPlanet before, then this PS Vita version is the ideal introduction. In fact, it's the ideal introduction to games in general, as it will teach you the basics of how to make them, as well as providing you with a huge dollop of entertainment.

Lego City Undercover is a joyous thing, filled with life and fun. It took me right back to my first go on the original Lego Star Wars – that pleasure of finding a favourite creative toy rendered so beautifully, faithfully and humorously into video game existence.

For those who think they don’t know enough about the war, 11-11: Memories Retold paints a picture of the time. Aardman Animations, development partner DigixArt and publisher Bandai Namco have harnessed the power of video games to create a fitting accompaniment to the centenary of Armistice Day.

Death of the Outsider successfully sees out one of its most intriguing lead characters and one of its most powerful villains in a worthwhile adventure. Across six or so hours, this standalone indulgence doesn’t add much truly new, instead relying on tweaks of its existing formula . But it delivers strong missions and an excuse to continue skulking around this fabulous and hugely atmospheric world.

As a complete package, Fifa 15 still rules the roost. But where it matters – on the pitch – PES 2015 is far superior.

Like the real sport, it’s about perseverance and repetition: when the combos started to flow again for me after a few hours, it felt so freeing. I still don’t think there’s a better skating game out there than old-school Tony Hawk’s, even after all this time – and there’s certainly no better time capsule of this pivotal moment in the history of the sport.

The game presents a formidable challenge, and most players should begin at the easiest difficulty level, where the laser bullets fall like a shower rather than hail, and you have a modest stock of lives that replenish between each of the game’s seven lingering stages. It is, at times, repetitious, and Cygni’s novel systems will no doubt prove divisive among the genre’s dedicated and often conservative followers. But for those who approach with an open mind and dextrous fingers, it remains a thrilling vision.