MGO’s fundamentals are great, and the experience it can create in the best modes is nothing short of exceptional. But these are high points in what is otherwise a polished but meagre offering, a multiplayer mode that feels lacking in depth and longevity. MGSV’s singleplayer saw Kojima Productions over-deliver and leave with a bang. In such company, the LA studio’s MGO is little more than a whimper.

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.

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

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

Just like the numpties on Grand Designs, Happy Home Designer doesn’t really know what it wants, and it suffers for it. It can’t possibly be the newest Animal Crossing – it’s far too small. It’s a pretty good, if simple, home decorating game, but not as a full, standalone release.

Ultimately, high production values and variety raises Kinect Star Wars above mediocrity, but it only delivers tantalising glimpses of the kind of game both the controller and the franchise badly needed.

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.

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.

There are still moments when you unfairly plummet from first to sixth in three seconds, but that frustration is as much a part of this genre as cartoonish platforming heroes looking for a lucrative side gig. Just go with the flow.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's a game in which an early sense of delight and intrigue soon turns to weariness, the standout scenes and ideas failing to compensate for an increasing sense of deja vu with each new wall run and puzzle, wrapped in a tired storyline that does little to propel you forward. In the end, it's the zombies that make you flee to the conclusion, rather than the design that draws you towards it – a subtle distinction perhaps, but a crucial one.

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

While the different games offer some variety, there's simply not enough to differentiate between 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.

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.

A cunning combination of word search, Tetris and those kids' puzzles with the slidey tiles, Word Soup is simple enough to grasp on a short commute, but suitably addictive to last a long-haul flight.

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.

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.

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.

There's a great live version of Paranoid featuring both Ozzy and Metallica, but the basic track has been used before – suggesting that without innovation in other departments, the series is simply running out of guitar styles to ape.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.