A game that marries the best bits of the franchise’s long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts.

There can be no doubt that this is a landmark game. It is a new high water-mark for lifelike video game worlds, certainly, but that world is also home to a narrative portrait of the wild west that is unexpectedly sombre and not afraid to take its time.

New sidekick Cappy could have been just another annoying sidekick, but its inclusion only adds to the playfulness of Nintendo Switch’s first Mario adventure.

It’s been a long time coming, but Grand Theft Auto V’s PC debut is a triumph...The Rockstar Editor is endlessly entertaining. The online heists are, with friends, some of the most fun you can have in a multiplayer game. The single-player story is an exhilarating series of increasingly absurd missions. And it all takes place in one of the richest, densest, most atmospheric game worlds ever built.

Baldur’s Gate 3, like its titular city, is a towering landmark of an RPG. Bustling with life, brimming with scope, and bursting with imagination.

An unrivalled feat of design and inventiveness.

Skyrim is one of the most gargantuan undertakings gamers will experience all year. The sheer size of the adventure, both in terms of its environment and in the amount of activities available to the player, is mind-blowing.

I feel as if I will never finish this game. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on it, it reveals a new expanse. I haven’t even mentioned the depths, the particularly dangerous pitch-black underground world that exists below Hyrule. (Man, I do not like it down there.) I am walking around looking at all the clutter in my house and imagining ways that I could fuse it together. I invite my kids on to the sofa with me to watch Link’s adventures, and we all scream as I’m pursued by a terrifyingly fast gloop-monster made of grasping hands. In an airport recently, surrounded by bored people staring at their phones, I was so absorbed in a labyrinth I’d found at the edge of the map that I nearly missed my boarding call.

The Last of Us is visually arresting, mechanically solid, maturely written and by turns heart-rending, tense, unnerving and brutal. Check your ammo. Grab your shiv. Just try your best to stay alive.

Valve has created a masterpiece in Portal 2. The depth of content, the mind-bending mechanics and fantastic experience are almost certain to satisfy ardent fans of the first game; and to all newcomers to the series, it's as simple as this: prepare to have your mind blown. Over and over again.

Metal Gear Solid V is a game-changing triumph. It is comfortably the best stealth game yet made. But that accolade sells the game short. This is the final evolution of a video game director’s singular vision, one first painted in the crude pixels of the 1980s and now fully realised, fully resplendent.

Astro Bot is still the wonderful tribute to PlayStation history and hardware design that Astro’s Playroom was, but it has been given room to grow beyond a characterful tech demo and into the best platform game I have played in many years. Actually, it’s one of the best platformers I’ve ever played, – and, as a child of the 90s, I truly have played a tonne of them. PlayStation has been lacking a great homegrown family-friendly game since LittleBigPlanet, and Astro Bot is a worthy inheritor of that series’ playfully humorous legacy.

It is rare to play a game so accomplished in everything it sets out to do. God of War is a standard-setter both technologically and narratively. It is a game that, until recently, would have been impossible.

One of the joys of Hades II is getting caught up in the internecine discord among the dysfunctional extended family. But it’s ultimately about resolving conflict. Sure, not everyone has read the memo: Scylla, front woman of a pop-punk trio of Sirens, cheerfully sings about clawing out your eyes and drowning you in the dank depths of Oceanus. But even the likes of power-suited Chaos and grumpy Nemesis (so affronted by you effectively doing her job that she’ll sporadically show up to challenge you to a contest, before barricading a potential exit) can be won over with a gift of nectar – or ambrosia. The game’s ending, too, makes it abundantly clear that any fight against forces of oppression requires us all to play a part, no matter how small; that whether you go low or high, resistance requires strength that can only come from solidarity.

Stands head and shoulders over its previous efforts. Despite facing stiffer competition than its predecessor, Batman: Arkham City is easily the best Batman video game of all time.

I wonder how anything will ever better Ocarina of Time in its small but vital corner of this bloated industry.

That's what makes Mass Effect 2 great. Not the outstanding action, the compelling story, the huge depth of interaction, or any of the other ways in which the game demonstrates its outrageous surfeit of quality. It's because this is a game so coherent, you start to believe that you could actually live in it.

BioShock Infinite is a hell of a lot of fun to play. That really should be the only quality it needs to exhibit. The fact that it holds much more feels like an advancement of an art form. Just remember that nothing in BioShock Infinite is an attempt to be cute. Just let it tell you its story.

There haven’t been many interpretations of ancient mythology as gripping, detailed and imaginative as this, in video games or any other medium. It brings the stories and characters of an ancient era to life in a way that only modern technology could realise.

This is an unlikely comparison, but now that I’ve had some time to absorb The Last of Us Part II, it reminds me thematically of Shadow of the Colossus, another game about how consuming grief and anger can be. I was similarly poleaxed by that game’s clever manipulation of the player’s power, the way it also used the language of video games to make you think twice about your actions. The Last of Us Part II is another story that could only work as a game, the kind of challenging, groundbreaking work that comes along two or three times a decade.

You could summarise Dwarf Fortress as a game about the meticulous cultivation of downfall. There’s no victory condition beyond the satisfaction of bolting together another grand chronicle of inevitable disaster. It’s this joyful fatalism as much as the simulation’s richness that makes it timeless.

The results of this suffusion are nothing short of spectacular, delivering an expertly crafted Half-Life tale inside a knockout VR experience.

To some, Super Mario may appear tired: a mascot whom Nintendo trots out every few years to sell another console with repackaged but fundamentally stale ideas. Super Mario 3D World is a fierce rebuttal to the accusation. Mario and his makers once again assert their dominance of spatial navigation games, displaying a rude abundance of ideas to delight, surprise and celebrate innocence and playfulness.

At its core this is a spectacular work of contemporary young adult fiction, one with a strong moral core, angled yet never didactic, expansive yet always focused.

More than ever, the Mass effect universe pulls off the masterful trick of feeling huge and yet believable – the game's production values are through the roof, and its third-person shooter controls incredibly precise, responsive and accurate given Mass Effect's immense scope. It really does feel like a TV sci-fi series in which you play the central character.

Whether or not it's the best ever Zelda game is open to debate, but it's certainly up there. However, nobody could argue that it's anything less than a masterclass in the art of crafting video games.

This is the kind of video game fighting that puts your heart in your mouth, an exhilarating whirl of slashes and strikes and dodges. Each jewel in Zagreus’ armoury – brass-knuckles, greatshield and sword, railgun, spear – has its own rhythm: some favour quick flurries at close range, others charge up to unleash hell on rooms full of gorgons and cursed chariots. Conquered chambers sometimes bring a new blessing from one of Zagreus’ relatives up on Mount Olympus, boons that add a watery damage-dealing flourish to your dash or imbue your weapon with lightning, calls that summon gods to unleash magical arrows or make you invincible.

With our video game reviews we reserve a five-star rating for games that we think everyone should experience, that are so interesting or impressive in certain areas that they transcend any flaws, limitations or genre concerns. Uncharted 4 is certainly in that category. [Official Verdict - 5stars]