The Crew offers these moments of emergent gameplay for those willing to go find them but, tragically, doesn’t have them naturally stitched into its design upholstery. As such, the potential is too often unpicked by the game’s frustrating shortcomings.

Certainly Disney's best video game in a long time – especially for the youngsters, who will enjoy the simple, trial-and-error gameplay and diverse styles, looks and challenges.

Riptide isn't especially good, but I can't help but feel that it might well be the most accurate depiction of what trying to survive a zombie apocalypse would be like in reality.

This version of Vertigo portrays women in a way that is seriously difficult to stomach in a post-#MeToo era. Here, women prey on an unsuspecting man using, for instance, sex and hypnosis to lure him in and do him harm. Male trauma is of course absolutely real, but this game doesn’t have the tools to examine it with the required care, and ends up essentially saying #MenToo – and doing a significant disservice to the body of cinematic work that inspires it.

In a motion control game it is simple; control is paramount. When Kinect 2.0 behaves, Rare’s creation can be plenty of fun, especially in a social setting. But its lack of consistency breeds a sense of distrust in players, and with that the fun fades. It seems that flawless hands-free motion control applicable to a variety of living room environments continues to remain just out of our reach.

Despite some efforts in meta-progression, it’s difficult to look past Drag x Drive’s most significant hurdle – that it’s uncomfortable to play for extended periods. The mouse controls are ingenious in theory, and when applied in small bouts, it feels like a novel prototype. But, in the context of such overtly active gameplay, the concept starts to fall apart. What remains is a surprisingly inaccessible sports game that lacks modal variety and a long-term hook. If you were hoping for a spiritual successor to the Nintendo Switch’s Rock ’Em Sock ’Em brawler Arms, you will be disappointed.

Its mechanics are thin, its micro-transactions are annoying and the plot in the campaign makes the story in Call Of Duty: Ghosts look like high art. But if you fancy thumping barbarians and you don't mind the lack of depth, Ryse is arguably the most beautiful hack 'n slash you can play on the Xbox One.

Angry Birds Go! is great fun now, with plenty of potential for evolution in 2014 and beyond. A few tweaks to the in-app purchases aside, it'll be raising eyebrows for positive, not negative reasons.

There’s the spark of something genuinely special here, beyond a FarmVillian Nightmare, and well beyond the flood of base-building Clash of Clans clones and uninspired Candy Crush-apeing puzzlers cluttering up the app stores.

Really, it’s the kind of game that’s best enjoyed when you don’t think about it very hard. It’ll make 12-15 hours disappear in an ever-escalating sequence of rooftop-spanning leaps of faith, easily conquered shootouts and cartoonish face-offs against supervillains and giant robots. It’s as moreish as popcorn, and exactly as substantial.

In some ways, the game’s simple ambitions would not have been a problem if the recipe had been respectfully crafted. But to a modern audience spolied for choice when it comes to excellent family games, it is something of a travesty.

Ultimately, Warner Brothers live-service ambitions rob players of a remarkable comic-book caper. The result is a game that’s as confused as its titular characters. Just as these reluctant heroes find themselves battling against their villainous natures, Rocksteady’s storytelling ambition struggles to break free of its live-service trappings. Since its reveal as a looter shooter, the internet has declared Suicide Squad an abomination – the antithesis of the classics that Rocksteady once made. The reality is somewhere in between, a game that straddles both the brilliant and the banal. As Rocksteady is surely learning from Suicide Squad’s hostile fan reception, you either die a licensed game hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

If its publisher Ubisoft continues to support it, Skull and Bones will attract a committed player base of sea-combat enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with their ships’ builds and facing off against each other, or teaming up to take on the intimidating fleets, cargo heists and sea monsters that lurk tens of hours in. If you are after a game that feels like a pirate adventure, though, you’re still better off with Black Flag.

There are moments when The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria hints at what it could have been, such as when you’re mining a rich vein of ore in some dark tunnel, and your dwarf becomes inspired to sing. They’ll clear their throat and give voice to a story of trolls and orcs and the beating that will rain down on them if they cross your path. The game briefly feels alive, the story making the cold mines warm. But then the song stops, and you’re still mining, and all you have to look forward to is a long walk back to the forge.

Throw in some surprisingly nuanced storytelling, some boss battles that can only reasonably be described as mega, and what Namco have produced here is something of a masterpiece of the beat-'em-up genre. Splatterhouse is a vulgar, noisy, shallow, juvenile, gruesome gem of a game that never forgets to be fun, even when going out of its way to be as appalling as possible.

It will deliver a fun weekend of fart-infused chaos for anyone who misses the days when snowfall meant freedom.

Even where it is strongest, Anthem rarely stretches beyond the derivative. The combat, while well-designed, is little more than Gears of War with jetpacks, and narratively it veers between inconsequential and downright irritating. This anthem is, sadly, a tedious and conservative dirge that we’ve all heard before

Those previously unaware of Time Crisis will find the whole affair bafflingly cheesy, but devotees of the franchise will love Razing Storm as a package, although most will surely agree that it should have been billed as Deadstorm Pirates, with a free copy of Time Crisis: Razing Storm thrown in.

It is, at least, pretty original, and getting to grips with your submarines' controls is both fun and satisfying. We would, though, have preferred to see it priced more realistically to reflect its brevity. It's true that it simply wouldn't work on any console other than the 3DS, but it's by no means an essential purchase.

The problem is, very little of what you’re asked to do turns out to be any fun. Fetch-quests that offer next to no payoff are compounded by annoying travel: you have to make an unappealing choice between the vein-popping frustration of trying to drive across the craggy, impassable, boulder-strewn landscape, or giving up and shlepping there on foot. And this landscape isn’t Skyrim, or The Capital Wasteland, with discoveries to be made around every corner. It’s a Starfield planet map like any other, with only the odd cave or cookie-cutter facility to explore, and it rarely rewards inquisitiveness with anything other than wasted time and the urge to swear.

It manages a pretty impressive balancing act: non-gamers obsessed with Tron will love its ambience and authenticity, and may even discover they like games more than they thought. Yet it contains enough clever ideas, and is well-enough structured, to keep hardcore gamers interested, particularly given that it takes place in that seductive Tron universe.

Ultimately, it feels almost disrespectful that Tolkien's rich and evocative mythology should be reduced to collecting "Gandalf Tokens" and bowdlerising one of the 20th century's greatest mythologies. The pity is that that Aragorn's Quest works well enough to prove that LOTR does indeed have the makings of an epic RPG. Unfortunately, this isn't it.

There are certainly rough edges aplenty to be picked at, but also a deep love of the source material; everything from the voice-acting to the detail on gun barrels is steeped in that grim 40K atmosphere. The look and feel of this Space Hulk delights the boy in me, who long ago abandoned Games Workshop but never quite lost faith in the Imperium of Man.

As it stands, 1-2 Switch is a really fun couple of hours that may well end up being the star attraction at one or two friends or family get-togethers. However, it will then find itself at the dusty end of your games collection. Nintendo says it wants to offer value to Switch purchasers, yet we can’t help but feel it’s not just the cow getting milked in this scenario.

Not all cosy games need to evoke hard emotions. However, it does feel like a disservice to the emotionally complex source material not to explore the richness of the world at large – especially when dry humour, tragedy and finely drawn social structures are what make Tolkien’s writing so powerful. Without any challenging quandaries to pull at your heartstrings, the promising atmosphere in Tales of the Shire is overwhelmed by endless fetch quests. Diehard Tolkienites and Stardew Valley lifers may be better off looking elsewhere for their cosy thrills.

Everything Frobisher does well, Deviants does too – just a bit worse.

If only the game gave you more encouragement to improve.

Reviewing a Call of Duty game today is a bit like reviewing a military theme park: it’s impossible to give a holistic appraisal. You might find the rollercoasters thrilling, the ferris wheel tiresome, and the hotdogs tasty, but consider its murky ties to the US military-industrial complex deeply problematic. Certainly, however, the game has expanded in such diverse and deliberate directions that most players will find at least one diversion to suit their tastes and play styles, and for this the developers are to be commended. Wrangling an annual series into a persistent online framework is obviously an unwieldy challenge for artists, designers and programmers alike, as they seek to marry the past and future of video game delivery. Within those difficult, arguably misguided constraints, MWIII is, campaign aside, a minor triumph of engineering and design.