Thief feels unwieldy at times, although it's not the travesty some reviewers are making it out to be. It's a beautiful stealth game that's fun to play in bursts, but it's hard to recommend it without reservations.

Technical issues – while improved – still hurt the game. Voice communication, for example, is very hit and miss. The interface is fiddly and slow. Changing from quests to, say, inventory on the menu bar takes two or three seconds a time...Despite the issues,there is lot to admire here.

Those tiring of Overwatch 2, Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, who want a fresh take on the format and have a penchant for Ubi franchises, have many happy hours of shooting, hiding and grinding for XP ahead.

I’m a huge fan of the Oddworld-ian creature design and the factory-farming satire of its plot. But Oddworld made that stuff work because it had a big, weird heart. High on Life just has dilated pupils and a shit-eating grin.

I know it's a Sims game, so recycled moves and gobbledygook lyrics are perhaps to be expected, but surely they could have splashed out on better backing tracks?

Tron Identity has merits in its atmosphere and flexible story, but strip away the licence and what remains is a fleeting and unremarkable visual novel that lives in the shadow of better detective games.

Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games may not do either universe justice when it comes to their distinctive gameplay or graphic styles. However, the use of London landmarks and actual event venues makes for a colourful diversion with more than enough variety to keep the kids happy.

The richly detailed, other-worldly environments are interesting, engaging and strange, but lack the deep unheimlich queasiness of the house you inhabit at the beginning.

The very loose framing that allows Lego Worlds and its players to be free from stifling game design conventions has equally made the experience sometimes ungainly and directionless, leaving its protagonists stranded in a world that is as full of confusion as it is ideas and potential.

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.

The pain and the pleasure of platformers such as this is their precision: the controls must be so tight, the jumping and running so perfectly predictable, that your failures are always your own. In Super Meat Boy Forever, though, enemies can turn up in especially unfair places, and the architecture of the levels sometimes feels thrown together as opposed to carefully placed by human hand. Its difficulty feels vindictive rather than playful, and oddly soulless, like trying to beat a computer at chess. For all its challenges, it felt as if I could feel the creators cheering me through the original Super Meat Boy’s death chambers, willing me onwards. Here, the algorithm is coldly indifferent to your efforts, and, despite the offbeat art and quirky vibe, the game is a punishing gauntlet that’s not worth running.

It successfully pays homage to a fondly remembered old game while adding something meaningful, making you think like a con, plan your crimes and improvise escapes when those plans go awry.

The pity of all this is that there's so much about Nail'd that is innovative and refreshingly bonkers. If only all that potential had been harnessed into a more consistent and rewarding racing experience.

State of Decay 2 is brainless, ramshackle fun. Most of its action resembles Benny Hill more closely than The Walking Dead. It doesn’t really deliver what it promises, and in many obvious ways, it’s a mess. Yet lots of messy games are fun, and this is too – especially on those forays when you slaughter zombies by the dozen and rock up home loaded with loot. In scattered moments, there are glimpses of the game State of Decay 2 could have been. Sadly, they are the only times it pulls at your heartstrings.

For a relatively tiny price, you get to pretend that you're a part of the greatest pop group ever, and it's a pretty convincing show.

Moral murkiness helps preserve the tension across Swansong’s duration. There’s always something at stake – your life, the masquerade, your integrity – and that does a lot to infuse some meaning into all the talking and scouring rooms for notes. I doubt that Swansong is set to become a vampire RPG of legend, like 2004’s Bloodlines, but it nonetheless makes vampires scary again.

This comeback is exactly what was needed: pared down, cheap and distilled to its irresistible essence.

It seems Ibrisagic has partly conceived the game as a satire on intergenerational angst and society’s treatment of old people. In that respect, Just Die Already is about as convincing as one of its own physics interactions. However, as a juvenile, tasteless and problematic co-op party game, it’ll provide as much guilty pleasure as Goat Simulator. And it’s going to be all over Twitch for the next few months, you can be sure of that.

Stealth, however, is the biggest disappointment in Gotham Knights. Where Batman infested the city’s crevices, his underlings merely invade them: you can work together to set up terrain traps or create distractions, but it’s a world away from the older series’ puzzlebox intricacy and it’s always more fun to barge in swinging.

Angry Birds 2 looks great, from the level backdrops through to the little touches: pigs quivering as you prepare to launch a new bird, and then zooming out of the screen towards you as nearby objects explode.

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.

What this game brings is something that remains startlingly elusive in the modern canon: a co-op experience that genuinely requires you to work together. For a wildly violent first-person shooter, Payday 2 sure does promote a heartwarming spirit of unity.

The gameplay is occasionally wonky, some of the more elaborate storytelling devices don’t land, and Sam is (deliberately) unlikable. However, Twin Mirror has a powerful story and it puts you in direct control of where it leads. If you play your narrative adventures for the narrative, Twin Mirror has the plotline for you.

Whatever you think about the series and its problematic role in how the mainstream games industry works, how it is perceived and the types of communities it engenders, this is slick, thrilling entertainment. Nowhere else will you be blasting a giant robot in a corporate science lab one minute, and then playing a modern take on Atari’s Super Sprint the next. Value matters right now, and in this as in almost everything else, Call of Duty does not hold back. It is a maximalist paean to the ultimate, troubling truth of video game design – shooting stuff on a TV screen is a hell of a lot of fun.

The game is also too faithful to Orwell’s plot, for all the alternative endings. At its best, it encourages you to rethink and even challenge some of the novella’s concepts, including its rather dated classist metaphors. What if the rats were more of an opposition than an infestation? What if the sheep were more than mindless propaganda machines? But these divergences are frustratingly limited by the need to pack in familiar scenes and conversations from the book. In the end, Orwell’s Animal Farm can’t work out whether it’s a retelling or a revolution – but with the nation’s schoolkids in lockdown, it’s nonetheless a valuable adaptation.

Sadly a lack of anything approaching a decent story means the action can feel like a grind, especially when played offline.

It’s a satisfying experience as you glide gracefully over the ocean, but too often the dogfighting and bombing runs play out as erratic scrambles.

As a piece of merchandise, this does the job it needs to. As a video game, it's anything but Brave.