Gears Tactics is a triumphant twist on an old favourite, capturing the fury and spectacle of its shooter-based brethren while also offering a more cerebral experience. Gears has always exhibited shades of American football, from the hypermasculine tone to its disconcertingly swole characters. Now it has the conspicuous brains to match its conspicuous braun.

XCOM: Chimera Squad is essentially the Agents of Shield to XCOM 2’s Avengers. It gently plays with the formula, and tells the peripheral stories of a much wider world on a much tighter budget and with much smaller stakes. In other words, it’s XCOM but chilled – and, in these desperate times, that’s just fine.

Remaking a universally acclaimed classic was always a fearful responsibility, but like its own sword-wielding heroes, Square Enix has risen to the challenge spectacularly.

For the most part, the acting is pretty dismal, as if the cast were exhausted by the number of takes they had to make for each branch path of action. Nevertheless, the always welcome Kate Dickie pops up as the tech company’s CEO and gets to sport a particularly amusing pair of tartan pants – the kind of clothes you dig out of the closet when you have been in isolation for too long.

Resident Evil 3 doesn’t quite hit the heights achieved by last year’s reworking of Resident Evil 2 – it fails to gloss over the shortcomings of its forebear. But it is still a well thought-out and nicely executed modern refresh of a survival horror classic – and welcome slab of (almost) escapism to enliven our current house-bound lives.

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

Every design detail serves to propel the player forwards with as little friction as possible, with enough surprises and twists to prevent the formula becoming stale. It’s a real delight to be the Doom Slayer: to put everything else aside and focus on just the problem in front of you. Especially if that problem is a swarm of angry demons.

Peppered with devious puzzles, Ori and the Will of the Wisp is an irresistible challenge. There is extraordinary attention to detail – the entire world feels alive with excitement and danger. I struggled to put down the controller as I progressed deeper into the game, unable and unwilling to let anything stand in the way of Ori realising his true destiny. A bold and ambitious sequel.

Animal Crossing is everything I have been craving: it is gentle, soothing, social and creative, and my group chats are already buzzing with hype about beetles and villager fashions. If there was ever a perfect time for a game such as this, that time is now.

Size Five delivers both classic platforming and point-and-click adventuring in this self-aware and deeply anglocentric caper.

This comfortable but clunky reboot of the part farming simulator, part dungeon crawler, part life sim is very much a product of its time.

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.

There’s a fine line between playfully obtuse instructions and infuriatingly vague game design. Being unable to complete a task because it’s challenging is one thing, but not knowing exactly what the task is (and being blocked from doing it by bugs) is another. Table Manners has a brilliant premise and provides incisively funny commentary on modern romance but, just like when a Tinder date doesn’t match their profile and then proceeds to behave inexplicably, sometimes you just want to make your excuses and leave.

With gruesome visuals and a shameless B-movie narrative, this Nazi-bashing survival game offers little more than mindless mayhem – but that’s what we enlisted for.

Strangely, for all the noise Savage Planet makes, its strongest moments are its quietest. There’s an element of silent theatre to the way your character communicates his goofy personality through his hands, while the world design is spotted with pleasing flourishes, such as trees bearing foliage that transforms into butterflies. In the end, it’s little touches like this, rather than the more in-your-face moments, that lend Savage Planet the dash of flavour it spends so much energy searching for.

If you have a Switch, Tokyo Mirage Sessions is an essential purchase – and if you harbour a fondness for anime and its aesthetic, it is worth buying a Switch for. This is, simply, the first cult-classic game of 2020.

Like Katamari Damacy, Wattam is a feast of visual gags and imagination. But Takahashi’s newest project ultimately doesn’t have the necessary depth of gameplay to transform itself into more than a silly yet loveable romp.

Transport Fever 2 doesn’t need to be a firebrand vehicle for climate activism, but having such themes inform the systems more closely would give it a little more personality and relevance. As it stands, this is a pleasant if not particularly distinctive game that may provide frustrated commuters with hours of transport therapy.

With X-COM, Firaxis took a punishing, impenetrable strategy game and made it slick, cool and thrilling; a dynamic sci-fi beast with muscular jaws. Phoenix Point has double the number of teeth but a less effective bite. The devil may be in the detail, but the drama is in the edit. Phoenix Point feels like it’s a draft short of greatness.

With so much emphasis on art and audio, there was always a risk of style over substance. But the almost hypnotic blend of rhythmic tapping and gliding create a compelling flow state experience – at least that’s when you manage to master it.

If you played the first two games, the way Shenmue III uses modern technology to restablish the classic lore and gameplay may just bring tears to your eyes. It will certainly remind you of Suzuki’s genius. Certainly, it contains eccentricities that feel old-fashioned, but it also offers epic, immersive and calming escapism. For gamers of a certain age, it’s the ultimate nostalgia trip.

In relaunching a much-loved and much-missed Star Wars genre, Fallen Order does exactly what it set out to. It reaches the bar, but then stops, with a set of characters and adventures that are not particularly intriguing or fresh, but certainly feel like they come from that very particularly galaxy, far, far away.

Above all, Death Stranding is a sermon on the importance of belief. The power of putting one foot in front of another when hope looks lost, in the belief that things will get better. By working together, a series of small intentional steps can make a difference, and in this often fractured, angry and confusing world; that’s as hopeful as it gets.

A slickly produced, well constructed military shooter filled with thrilling set-pieces and moments of fraught tension. It’s also a good run-and-gun online shooter, which wants to bring something fresh to the way online team-based competition works in this genre but isn’t quite there yet – new maps will inevitably follow.

Like many of Nintendo’s best-loved franchises, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is imaginative, humorous and highly inventive. It may be nearly two decades old but the series continues to evolve in pleasing ways.

More than just Fallout in space, this action-RPG is a delightful sci-fi romp with razor-sharp writing, lashings of humour and enough content to entertain you for months.

While wildly ornate, Autonauts is in equal parts playful, welcoming and charming. It is comparable to the cute farming sim Stardew Valley, yet it is very much its own game. And in the taste it gives you of thinking like a creative coder, it is in its own quiet way empowering and exciting.

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).