Inquisition gets under your skull like red lyrium.

As a complete package, Fifa 15 still rules the roost. But where it matters – on the pitch – PES 2015 is far superior.

Far Cry 4 truly shines in the almost bacchanalian sense of freedom it bestows on the player as they traverse through its environment.

If you like games that are so big you can immerse yourselves in them for months, The Master Chief Collection offers excellent value. It’s an absolute monolith of a package, beautifully presented for the 21st century. And with the remastered next-gen GTA V due to arrive shortly, it seems that, at least as far as video games are concerned, nostalgia is the future.

Advanced Warfare is the best that Call of Duty has been for years, a successful negotiation of that troublesome creative and commercial tension.

Despite these creative flourishes, Sunset Overdrive never quite surpasses the chaotic physics of Just Cause, the coherent style of Blood Dragon or the assured sense of place of GTAV – nor does it manage to draw its story and systems toward a coherent, impactful point. In the end its hero escapes the purgatory of a boring job and successfully wreaks revenge on the judgmental consumers he once served. But the game itself does little to undermine the increasingly over-familiar, open-world establishment, instead quietly celebrating the status quo.

Freemium quibbles aside, as a game Angry Birds Transformers does a great job of appealing to Transformers fans old and new, while also providing yet more proof that Red, Chuck and crew are characters flexible enough to fit neatly into new stories and game genres.

The Evil Within will give survival horror purists a rare contemporary pleasure fix. But be warned: if you prize smooth, silky action above all else, it will drive you insane.

Skylanders Trap Team won’t be the cheapest video game for families this year, but with the Starter Pack and some old figures, this compelling action adventure offers good value.

The sheer polish applied to every part of Bayonetta 2 is something every major studio should aspire to: the exceptional and wide-ranging soundtrack, the huge number of unlocks, the Nintendo easter eggs, the “making of” materials, and the unlockable characters that bring their own style. Not a single thing has been held back. In this second adventure, Bayonetta over-delivers in every regard, and it will be a long time before another fighting game threatens her crown.

In some ways, the game’s simple ambitions would not have been a problem if the recipe had been respectfully crafted. But to a modern audience spolied for choice when it comes to excellent family games, it is something of a travesty.

Right now, those prepared to embrace Driveclub for what it is will find a very accessible, carefully crafted, refreshing speed-over-sim driving experience that often provides fabulous fun.

If you want to be free to make your own way through an intriguing narrative in gorgeous surroundings, this subtle, melancholy game is for you.

Right now, it’s my main contender for game of the year, simply because, in its lack of pretension, its attention to detail and its understanding that video games first and foremost should be fun, it puts everything else I’ve played recently in its long shadow.

For button-mashers and hardcore smashers alike.

The Horizon offshoot has unshackled the Forza franchise, letting it run free into the wild, and this new adventure ensures that we don’t take that freedom for granted. Everything is bigger and better, everything is designed to make damn well sure that we’re having fun.

If this is your first Fifa game on the new gen consoles then you will be blown away by all the little details that together contribute to an overall experience not too dissimilar to watching football on live television. If you owned Fifa 14 on Xbox One or PS3, Fifa 15 is still a significant upgrade, though maybe not the revolutionary product that it was built up to be.

Hyrule Warriors ought not to work – it smacks of Nintendo’s desperation to get any sort of game out for its overlooked machine – but it will certainly delight the faithful fans, and manages to remain utterly true to the world of Zelda while offering really fresh-feeling gameplay.

A complicated beast, and easy to write off as a money grab for this lucrative new market created by Skylanders. However, see the game in the hands on young players and the different pieces fit together coherently.

It is a very clever, very charming thing.

Destiny, isn’t just set in space, it an allegory of space. It is beautiful and fascinating, but oh so cold and immense, and the past engulfs everything.

There’s the spark of something genuinely special here, beyond a FarmVillian Nightmare, and well beyond the flood of base-building Clash of Clans clones and uninspired Candy Crush-apeing puzzlers cluttering up the app stores.

The richly detailed, other-worldly environments are interesting, engaging and strange, but lack the deep unheimlich queasiness of the house you inhabit at the beginning.

It could’ve achieved true greatness if it had followed through on its most ambitious promises.

This kind of bubble-popping was brilliant fun in the Bust-a-Move and Puzzle Bobble games, and King has done a much better job second time round in translating it to modern touchscreens. No squinting required.

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.

What Nintendo's designers do with this new spatial freedom ranges from amazing to even more amazing.

Video gamers may wonder why they would play a card game when their medium has moved beyond such limitations; tabletop gamers may bemoan the fact that people are getting excited about the wrong card game. But if you fall awkwardly between those two groups, Hearthstone will keep you hooked for some time.