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.

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.

In its juxtaposition of abstract puzzles with domestic-scale storytelling, Maquette is more familiar, following the tradition of indie games that link high-concept puzzle-solving with romantic introspection. Like the relationship it maps, the game is at its most elegant and pleasing in the early stages, when its challenges are clearly stated and simply solved. Even so, the creative possibilities of this Russian doll world seem to extend beyond this brief, delightful exploration.

It’s a jokey concept, but this dating game/dungeon crawler deals with everything from stalking to polyamory with admirable frankness.

The single player campaign remains immensely enjoyable but it’s a shame it can’t sustain early success. Refined controls and a focus on more crafted stealth missions, rather than turning everything up to 11, would have meant fewer rage-quits and a higher score.

Freemium quibbles aside, as a game Angry Birds Transformers does a great job of appealing to Transformers fans old and new, while also providing yet more proof that Red, Chuck and crew are characters flexible enough to fit neatly into new stories and game genres.

If you know someone whose mantra is: "They don't make games like that anymore," just force them to play it and they'll have been well and truly silenced.

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.

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.

What Lego Jurassic doesn’t do is innovate on the previous Lego games a great deal – nor does it really need to. This is aimed squarely at children – or more specifically at parents who want to share some nostalgia with their kids while making use of the perfect drop-in/drop-out co-operative option.

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.

Unfortunately the game has a few logic issues of its own. A handful of bugs, including one that breaks the game and forces you to retreat to earlier saves, threatens the delicate relationship of trust that exists between player and designer, as each time you get stuck, you question whether the fault lies with your reasoning or simply a glitch. Patches will, no doubt, quickly fix the issues, at which point Beyond a Steel Sky will join its stablemates as a modern classic.

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’s not just the sense that everything is aeons old, it’s that aeons seem to pass before your eyes, chapter to chapter. Brief combat encounters are tense but sparse, and neither a highlight nor detriment, although creature design is enjoyably gruesome. Not an acquired taste, then, but an unequivocally bitter one, engineered with such bold artistry you’ll wince as you go back in for seconds.

This feels 80% of the way to a great game, but that missing 20% soon comes to dominate the rest. With a little more fine-tuning who knows how The Swindle may have turned out but, as things stand, it feels a little like being short-changed.

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

After the touching emotional drama of Dontnod’s previous game – the coming-of-age adventure Life Is Strange – Vampyr’s ambitious but awkward chin-stroking is disappointingly inert, while its failure to reconcile its ethical hand-wringing with its gratuitous combat leaves it as conflicted as its undead protagonist.

Despite being written by John Milius, the characters lack any hint of personality, though, and ultimately the single-player campaign is short and disappointing.

Traditional it may be but Divinity 2 Dragon Knight Saga is an excellent RPG that is up there with the very best on the Xbox 360.

I wanted more: more depth, more interaction, more complexity; a hero's journey with more at stake than flowers.

Sadly, the game has one glaring flaw: the camera has an annoying tendency to zoom in too close, particularly when you're fighting.

Let's hope the 30th Anniversary package is a bit more ambitious.

Final Fantasy Explorers most certainly isn’t the game that will turn those who have always wondered what Final Fantasy is all about onto the franchise. It does at least provide something new to play on the legions of 3DSes out there, at a time when owners have been particularly ill-served. For confirmed fans it offers a nice, gentle, if non-archetypal, means of re-entering the Final Fantasy universe, whetting their appetites for Final Fantasy XV and VII.

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.

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.

With the second part added, Broken Sword 5 could certainly reach beyond three stars – but, until then, it's wise to remain agnostic about Charles Cecil's latest offering.

Much like the physics glitches that will clog up YouTube channels for months to come, such quirks are inevitable hazards of open world gaming. A more pressing concern is whether the lack of human spontaneity can sustain the marathon commitment and repetition needed to complete the game’s herculean campaign. With friends in tow, Wildlands could well prove to be The Wall of its genre; but much like a Roger Waters solo album, it loses some of the sparkle on its own.

When you’re flat-out sprinting, Catalyst feels wonderful. When standing still, in the Grid Nodes, it’s great too. It’s only in that mid-region, either gaining or losing momentum, that you end up clumsy and infuriated.