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.

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.

Rome: Total War is one of the most brilliant games I've ever played. Total War: Rome II inverts far more than the name. This does not channel the greatest military empire in history so much as the pale shadow of its ending; a bloated, technically corrupt and unfocused mess.

We loved SimCity for the first few hours, but the compulsion soon gave way to frustration...The simulation promises more than it delivers, and you feel perpetually boxed-in by the meagre city sizes. The social features are interesting, but we'd rather have the ability to save our game, play offline, and not have to worry about server downtime. The regional multiplayer really should be an optional aside to a standard single-player mode.

MindsEye is an oddity. For all its failings, I rarely disliked playing it, and yet it’s also difficult to sincerely recommend. Its ideas, its moment-to-moment action and narrative are so thinly conceived that it barely exists. And yet: I’m kind of happy that it does.

With better controls and collision detection this would have a pretty decent Wii game – especially considering how little is expected of this sort of licensed offering. As it is, I'd expect only fans of the film or puzzle-game devotees to consider this a worthwhile purchase – and even then, perhaps only after a couple of months when it can be found in the bargain bin.

What a shame that Luminous Productions didn’t capitalise on its best assets. Frey’s taken some heat for being overly chatty in Forspoken, but without Ella Balinska’s fantastic performance, the game would be totally forgettable.

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

Peaky Blinders: Mastermind is stuck between abstraction and fan fiction, ambition and restraint. At its best, it’s streamlined; at worst, stifling and predetermined. Give me an Alfie Solomons rum-empire management game, and you’d have my attention.

There just isn’t very much to do in The Pathless: you run across empty fields for a while, before solving a small variety of puzzles. Boss battles, with their blend of dashing, fighting and light brainwork, drive home that the Giant Squid formula works best in small doses. The score is reduced to sparse percussion in the open field, and the world itself doesn’t offer much in terms of visual variety or secrets to uncover. The problem isn’t the rudimentary gameplay itself, but how The Pathless tries to stretch its few puzzles across several hours. I was bored after the first hour, and no new ideas or clever twists arrived to rescue me from torpor.

The most frustrating thing is that there is the kernel of something great here. Despite the time-travel conceit, Cronos: The New Dawn isn’t remotely original – you’ll swear you’ve skulked the darkened corridors of these very hospitals, factories and apartment blocks before – but it looks stunning in places, plays well once you’ve upgraded your weapons, and there are spooksome moments and satisfying puzzles peppered throughout. When everything clicks, it is the engrossing, icky body-horror creepshow you want it to be. But then it will throw you into another exhausting death room full of bullet-sponge ghouls, and you’ll soon be filled with irritation instead of dread.

Hotline Miami 2 is a messy, aimless sequel and a step back from the original. Many of its levels feel like crafted set-pieces rather than playgrounds for violent expression, and your scope for creativity is stifled as a result.

Phantom Doctrine may find an enthusiastic audience with strategy-game masochists. It is complex and open-ended; there are multiple ways to finish missions, and they’re are not always about taking out targets. But it’s also punishing and opaque, poorly explained and hampered by a flummoxing plot. For most of us, it’s a confused and very niche experience.

There’s nothing wrong with a game making you work hard before it yields rewards, but Ghost Recon Breakpoint takes that principle so far that, in its early stages at least, playing it is a chore. The latest iteration of Ubisoft’s future-soldier open-world shooter has plenty of good points, but those are marred by basic elements that so broken that the game feels like a backward step from Ghost Recon: Wildlands (2017).

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.

Overall, this game has a nice central premise let down by execution. For die hard fans – either of skateboarding or Orwellian nightmares – only.

At its worst, it’s the gaming equivalent of a drunkard shouting abuse from a park bench. At its best … well, the drunkard has leapt up and now he’s wielding a plastic knife. Rage against political correctness if you like, but don’t support this tired game as part of your ideology – there are so many better uses of your spare time.

After the excellent surrealist horror of Alan Wake 2, which revelled in its own strangeness while also delivering a clear, compelling story, Alone in the Dark is too staid, too clumsy, and too haphazard to invoke anything other than a shrug. The mystery surrounding Jeremy’s madness isn’t worth putting up with the ponderous unravelling, while the combat and puzzling are mere shadows of Resident Evil 2’s superior design. The curse, it seems, lives on.

When I imagined a video game adaptation of Squid Game, I did not imagine running around an arena in a golden pig outfit trying to hit a player called skibidi69 with a baseball bat. Perhaps I set my expectations too high, but the only shock value here is in the lack of imagination.

A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien’s fiction.