You could argue that Master Chief is the necessary foil to Halo’s inherent silliness, the gravelly undertone that ties all the pratfalls together. All the same, he and his inability to get over Cortana have long since lost their charm. The series has tried to move away from him before – in that regard, Halo 3: ODST remains its finest hour. It needs to carry on trying.

Fallout 4, then, is a paradox, delivering in many of the areas that matter most but undermined throughout by poor combat, technical problems, and what feels like a lack of focus. So here we go again. It’s not war, but Bethesda that never changes.

After a couple of frustrating hours trying to play with other people, it was a relief to return to the solitude of solo mode: just you and the mountain. Here, the only competition is yourself, and the only company is nature. A sense of calm descends. Everything is how it should be. Until you fall foul of a rock, again.

Teenage boys will absolutely hate it. But when viewed as a platform game for kids, it's pretty impressive. Kirby first emerged in 1992; only now has his existence been justified.

All of it comes together in a finale that ties everything neatly together and, even compared to its predecessors, simply astounds in the sheer audacity of who and what exactly you are facing. If asked, therefore, whether The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (as a complete package) is the best game in the franchise, I can really offer no objections. I rest my case.

Football Manager 13 is the most in-depth, detailed and complex football management simulator ever made. But I must admit, I've bitten my tongue as I've written about most of these new features. The last thing I personally wanted was a new set of variables to worry about as I play the game, and for even more hours to have to be invested just to get through a season.

Overboard! allows us to imagine what would have happened had Agatha Christie seen Groundhog Day and written a whole new type of mystery novel as a result. Its mobile format also works in its favour – as a Switch or smartphone game, it feels like carrying a little detective paperback around with you, except here you are the lead character, author and reader. As an experiment in fast, story-based game development it is – unlike most of my own mariticidal plots and alibis – a quite scintillating success.

Come for the gorgeous bygone ragtime jazz, Porkrind’s shop and an evil carrot; stay for the thrill of defeating a boss you’ve spent hours attempting. It’s painful, but you won’t find many games with such a moreish, satisfying sting.

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.

Fantasy tabletop warfare meets historical strategy simulation in a game that should be inaccessible but ends up exciting.

Angry Birds Star Wars is the best Angry Birds game yet, and the best Star Wars spin-off in a long time. It's going to be big, and deservedly so.

Titanfall is a sort of masterpiece, so confident in itself and its identity, yet so reverent in its art direction to the science fiction visions of artists such as Shōji Kawamori, Kunio Okawara, Syd Mead and Chris Foss. You will play for hours, get tired, think you're done, and switch it off, but then it nags at you – you're only a few hundred XP from levelling up – a new weapon awaits, a new type of scope for that assault rifle, a new Burn Card perhaps, and you go back.

Lara's exquisite animation allows her to move through the world with unmatched grace, and the heavy emphasis on combat is more palatable thanks to its ease of interaction, Lara naturally crouching behind cover and switching between her bow, pistol, rifle and shotgun with rare quickness and ease.

For players of the original, this should get a steady nostalgia drip going. But coming to this series fresh makes for an overlong, dated and tedious experience.

You could look over videogame history and pick out antecedents for some of what Her Story does but, even so, I’ve never played anything quite like it.

It really is an impressively welcoming game, this, generous and detailed and unfailingly fun, different but with the same spirit. It feels like the culmination of something, a synthesis of different philosophies of fun that still nonetheless comes together. The Switch 2 itself does feel like a swish upgrade rather than an all-new console, so it’s a relief that its headline game shows that Nintendo still has a talent for reinvention.

For RTS fans starved of major releases, PC fans increasingly abandoned for exclusive IPs and, of course, Starcraft fans in their millions, HotS is a massive slice of expertly crafted, beautifully balanced and totally tactical gameplay...Just don't make us wait so long for the final chapter, please!

Where many western games yearn to be seen as the height of sophistication, craving the critical kudos of an HBO drama, Bayonetta 3 stands defiant in its absurdity. Like its predecessors, this is destined to go down as a cult classic – a dizzying dance of demon-dicing delight. Its crude, whiplash-inducing narrative means it certainly won’t be for everyone, but the best things in life rarely are.

The ponderous, obscure pacing will not be to everyone’s taste, and you’ll need a powerful machine to reproduce the world as its creators intended, but – surprisingly, perhaps – Riven’s mystical power has only intensified with age. There is nothing else quite like it. And as many of us count the days until the summer holidays, here is a destination free of tourists, with plentiful vistas and a clockwork conundrum that, when solved, provides a revitalising blast of satisfaction.

This might be a straightforward tale at heart, but it has absorbed me more than any other historical action game. Even hours and hours in, I still feel a flicker of excitement whenever Atsu purposefully draws her sword at the beginning of a battle. I will be sad to see the end of it.

Frustratingly, though, you cannot see what feature you are paying for until after you have bought it – meaning that all your hard work will often wind up buying you a rubbish extra music track instead of something rather more exciting, like a new fatality.

This mixtape, then, plays it safe, curating a crowd-pleasing compilation of teenage tropes and homages to coming-of-age cinema. It’s a beautiful and inventively silly series of musical vignettes – but without any real conflict at its core, the adventure fails to match the memorable heights of Life Is Strange. Much like an evening spent scrolling through classic music videos on YouTube, there’s a simple, nostalgic joy to be found. But once this four-hour spectacle is over, you might be left wishing that you’d spent your time more wisely.

Arc Raiders isn’t just fun to play. It’s a straight-up shot of serotonin.

This is the first game that Ninja Theory has produced where it can be said the mechanics are as compelling as the visuals they come packaged with. Like Dante, DmC isn't perfect and it's occasionally frustrating, but it's always appealing and it demands your attention. And damned, if it doesn't always look cool.

It's perfectly designed for DS and something the whole family can get sucked into.

Most of all, this is that rarest of things: a horror game that actually has something to say. Rather than simply throwing jumpscares and black-haired ghost maidens at you until you submit, it uses rural mythology and superstition as a lens through which to examine the harms of patriarchy and the rigidly gendered expectations it thrusts on to teenagers. It also proves that the survival horror genre still has so much to give, 30 years after its inception. You must come to Ebisugaoka as soon as you can, and stay at least a week, maybe longer.

The continual design evolution of one project split over three full games and dozens of expansions makes me hesitant to call Warhammer III a landmark strategy game in its own right. But looking back now at that very first trailer, it does feel like a promise kept.

Sonic Mania is what Sonic fans, both lapsed and unwavering since the Mega Drive days, have crying out for all these years. It is a celebration of Sonic history. It is the greatest possible gift to the video game ilegend after spending so many years in the abyss; so great, in fact, that it took someone other than Sonic Team to give it to him.