You will enjoy For Honor more if you can form a clan with friends and support each other properly, but even for casual swordsmen and swordswomen it has much to offer. Yes, the real-money system is galling, but it’s a reality of the modern industry that we’re probably going to have to live with, and everything that you can buy with cash can eventually be earned through doing what the game wants you to do; learning to control and administer the resource of violence against ever more testing enemies.

In returning to its roots, Ubisoft has made a more focused Assassin’s Creed, one that those with limited time have a hope of completing. And in setting all the action in a single city and its surrounding countryside, the team has packed its sidestreets with fascinating snapshots of life – such as heated hagglers bickering in the bazaar, musicians drawing a crowd beside a mosque and pigeon fanciers feeding their birds on a rooftop aviary. Ubisoft lets down the liveliness of its world with a well-trodden story, but after a string of formless open-world games, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a stab in the right direction.

This is perhaps the most fun I’ve had from a pure co-op shooter since Left 4 Dead or the original horde mode in Gears of War – it is so precise, its gunplay so invigorating, its feedback and effects so generous. Everything about this game is ridiculous, including how good it is at what it sets out to do.

I haven’t played a game as odd as Legion in a very long time. Unlike the glossy, beautiful, but samey open-worlds that have dominated the genre in the past few years, it is ambitious, imperfect and unashamedly weird. To me it’s a fascinating, flawed, well-intentioned experiment in what a game can have to say, and how it can say it, while still conforming to the established fun-first template of an open-world action game. London’s landmarks are all here, from the Tower to the Eye, but rather than reducing the city to a pretty backdrop for generic madcap violence, it lets you find your own fun – or even your own meaning – in what you do there.

There’s no question that EA’s behemoth delivers bang for its megabucks.

3D World is one of the brightest and cutest Mario games, a real riot of fun and colour to brighten up a particularly depressing February. Bowser’s Fury, meanwhile, is itself a super little Mario experiment, a novel adventure that might have felt thin as an individual release but which works perfectly as a side dish. It’s impossible not to recommend.

Given the lack of subtlety Gears titles have shown so far, the way Gears 5 seeds these ideas into a knockabout action-adventure is impressive. Admittedly, few of the ideas are new, but how the Coalition brings them together under the skull-and-cog banner is surprising and refreshing, making this the most well-oiled Gears in a decade.

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.

None of these sports would be enough to sustain a game alone, but together, and paired with Nintendo’s charming and slick aesthetic and brain-infesting music, they are the makings of a good time.

This is a distinctive, appealing example of the JRPG genre that also nails the essence of the One Piece universe. Fans from both worlds will adore it, and I found it to be a perfect appetiser as I await The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom later this year.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla takes a while to get going, but don’t be disheartened by its mirthless opening, because the smart, inventive and witty open-world game you’re hoping for is lurking somewhere over those gloomy hills and dales.

It remains a brilliant social game in the classic sense of the phrase.

For now, it's the single player campaign – filled with stunning cut-scenes, music and voice acting – that prove the most compelling reasons to play this excellent sequel.

The Battlefield games are very much designed for the cognoscenti, and those in the know will rush to download Vietnam.

Raccoon City isn't the sort of game that will win awards – it's too rough around the edges in certain respects – and it's important to bear in mind that it's best experienced multiplayer rather than solo. But it's great fun and adds a fresh spin to a key time and place in the Resident Evil universe. It will bring a smile, in particular, to those who remember Resident Evils 2 and 3 with fondness.

Like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which was also billed as a shorter, complementary adventure, Spider-Man: Miles Morales gains something from its more limited focus. The story isn’t massively innovative, but it is full of heart and genuinely engaging, and the action feels as enthralling and intuitive as it did in 2018’s Spider-Man. The message at its core is that self-belief is infectious and that individual actions can reignite whole communities: perhaps not something we might expect from a combat-focused superhero adventure, but here we are. And in 2020, many people will gratefully and wholeheartedly embrace this kind of positivity, wherever they find it.

Here's the thing; if we take it as read that this review is simply a lengthy opinion proffered by a thundering nerd, all the score rating rests on is whether or not the person writing consistently enjoyed the game they were covering – and on that scale, Aliens Colonial Marines is a success. It actually feels like a product out of time; one of those scrappy FPS games mid-tier publishers could boot out between Triple-A titles back in the day, when Metacritic didn't exist and a studio wasn't shut down if the game they made failed to sell a bajillion copies.

It’s a joyous, preposterous romp which sucks you in and takes you on a thoroughly enjoyable, surprisingly well-paced journey. Along the way, it even manages to hammer home the big advantage games have over films: that they can take “What if?” scenarios and explore them over a considerably longer period of time than two piffling hours.

Offering a unique brand of tongue-in-cheek escapism that should induce a laugh roughly every five minutes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a perfect lockdown game. The one unintentionally amusing element is the voice acting, which you can thankfully eliminate by opting to keep the original Japanese dialogue with subtitles. Sega’s Yakuza games have always seemed like a well-kept secret, but they’ve recently been enjoying much more appreciation abroad. If you like the idea of a very Japanese, gangster-themed, interactive comedy soap opera, you’ll absolutely adore it.

It’s a bit fiddly on your phone, but guiding Soviet cosmonaut Ivan through lush jungles and forgotten cities is still a lot of fun.

Gears of War 4 may adhere to a seemingly old-fashioned template but, in practice, it feels anything but archaic. Its single-player campaign is much more varied and engaging than those of its predecessors and the online mode is exhilarating, catering for all shades of gamers, from the less adept to those with pro-gamer aspirations. The horde thoroughly deserves its 3.0 designation upgrade and as a whole, the fourth iteration gives the Gears of War template the rejuvenating shot in the arm it sorely needed.

By presenting unsolvable yet feasible questions in rapid succession, under a time limit, it reveals the flaws and inconsistencies in every person’s moral scaffolding. Unless you cleave to an inflexible rule to, say, never intervene in a way that will threaten life, or to always minimise fatalities, you are likely to find yourself assuming contradictory positions. In this way, Trolley Problem, Inc succeeds in being both absurd and provocative.

Codemasters has been making rally games since the original PlayStation era, but it is now closer than ever to perfecting its craft.

With Casualty levels of gore, Itchy and Scratchy levels of violent humour and many, many hours of multi-player testosterone-fuelled fun, if Bulletstorm's not a classic in the making, it's not far off.

Despite the beautiful detailed environment and the promise of entertaining soap opera-style clips, Rapture is a real test of patience – because it’s just so damn slow.

It looks fabulous, the control system is exemplary in terms of both the control it gives and its flexibility, and the addition of both the Masters and the caddie system should make it more or less irresistible to golf nuts. While the player whose name it bears may still be making his comeback from a disastrous period, his video game at least still towers above all its peers.

In a year that has given us not one but three Mario-themed RPGs, I was ready to be underwhelmed by Brothership. Yet thanks to captivating combat, varied platforming and well-judged difficulty, Brothership not only lives up to my childhood nostalgia for this series, but improves upon it. It is an inviting serving of sun-soaked delight at the beginning of a gloomy November.

Dreams nonetheless still offers a set of powerful, enjoyable tools at a low price and hours of fantastic tutorials. Adults may find the presentation a little too charmed by its own whimsy, especially in light of the tension between an art for art’s sake message and a commercial walled garden. Yet it’s likely to encourage many younger players to bring their own dreams to life.