Earthlock isn’t going to do much for JRPG veterans, as it lacks a level of polish and epic storytelling of series like Final Fantasy and Persona. But, for people like me who bounce off of anything even remotely hinting at a random encounter or linear dungeon, Earthlock manages to maintain the feel of a JRPG while adding and tinkering with a formula that’s been codified over literal decades. I couldn’t tell you what on God’s green earth is actually happening in it, but I can definitely tell you it’s worth your time regardless.

Frostpunk is a bitterly cold game. Every wife crying over the corpse of their frozen husband, every father dying in the cold looking for their runaway child, every amputation, and every sacrifice made for the greater good makes it one of the most miserable experiences you can find at the moment. And yet, 11bit manages to make such unrelenting suffering an utterly stellar colony simulator and narrative experience that you’d be a fool to skip.

It identified what was good about the first game, ramped that up to eleven, and let players have fun experiencing the Isayama’s world. It’s bursting with character and flying around on ODM gear is still a treat, even if the time-to-kill frequently borders on the excessive. If you can put up with seeing the first season of the show, and locations from the first game, yet again, there are definitely worse ways of experiencing one of the biggest manga franchises this decade than A.O.T. 2.

Pure Farming 2018 might not be the best simulator around, but it does come close. Farming Simulator 17 offers a consistent quality to its environmental design that PF2018 stumbles on, and it’s slightly more respectful of the player’s time (seriously, an hour for a field is ludicrous). What Pure Farming does instead is offer more of just about everything any would-be sim aficionado needs to get into the genre.

Kingdom Come should’ve been good. It was perfectly positioned to be a unique and refreshing break from the magical, mystical medieval worlds we so often inhabit. Thanks to the bolted-together systems that just don’t fit together, technical issues galore, and a niggling sense the game isn’t presenting its historical foundations in good faith, though, it manages to fall flat in every way.

Origins by no means perfect, particularly in its iffy movement systems and overreliance on the new Eagle companion. But by taking a year off a brutal annual release schedule, Ubisoft has given us a huge, polished, well-written game that successfully reworks and pushes Assassin’s Creed forward in ways I didn’t even realise were necessary. Assassin’s Creed Origins is the best the series has ever been by a long shot, and I sincerely hope it’s only onwards and upwards from here.

Call of Duty: WW2’s campaign is surprising in how, by going back to the structure of mid-2000s WW2 shooters, it manages to wriggle free of the series’ more recent missteps. It’s still Call of Duty, complete with a few mechanical quibbles and sometimes embarrassingly tropey dialogue. But shining out from those are some very clever design decisions and poignant moments that can easily go down as some of the most memorable in CoD history. I’m so happy World War 2 shooters are making a comeback, and that Call of Duty is leading the charge.

What S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is to Fallout, Spintires: MudRunner is to Euro Truck Simulator. They share the same DNA, but a gorgeously grim environment and ruthless challenge push the former into its own level of greatness, despite a few technical hiccoughs here and there. MudRunner’s sandbox mode, simplified controls and engaging tutorial mode make it an accessible game for newcomers, but for driving aficionados, there is so, so much more on offer here. As far as sims go, this one’s essential.

I will admit, Death of the Outsider took a while to really click with me. Its recycling of levels grated, and being limited to three relatively plain supernatural powers felt like a step back compared to the other games. But in its place we got the best, most concise story of the series, essential answers we’ve been asking for five years, and a stellar stealth game to boot. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the Isles again, but if this is the end, it’s definitely ended on a high.

Sadly, nice visuals and a bit of banter isn’t enough to make Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite anything more than a blazing disappointment. It was always going to have a rough time: MvC is a beloved series, and there’s no avoiding the critical eye of series die-hards. You know that, I know that, but apparently Capcom didn’t, and it shows. This should’ve been so much more than what it is: a promotional vehicle for Disney’s Marvel films with questionable balance, muted fighting, and frustrating DLC practices.

Echo is a fantastic experience, but a poor stealth game. Its worldbuilding, presentation, dialogue and characters all very, very nearly do enough to excuse the awful AI, poorly implemented mimicry mechanic and lacklustre sneaking. Stealth aficionados might not get what they’d expect out of an ex-Hitman team like Ultra Ultra, but anyone looking for an engaging, character-driven adventure will be in for an absolute treat.

Splatoon 2 is polished. Everything about it feels deliberate, but I don’t understand half of the choices made with it. It’s an odd game I love and hate and enjoy and get maddened by.

Aven Colony is a fantastic city simulator. It isn’t as economically complex as Anno, and it isn’t as obsessed with micromanaging as Cities Skylines, but it does offer a gripping story mode – a rarity for the genre – and a compelling twist on the usual expansionist mechanics that combines Star Trek-style optimism of exploration with the ruthless, survivalist reality of The Martian. It’s a city sim, Jim, but not as we know it.

Little Nightmares stands head and shoulders above its peers it terms of its true innovation, beautiful, atmospheric design, and a truly terrible tale. For any horror fan, Little Nightmares is the stuff of dreams.

Farming Simulator 18 is an ideal place for beginners to hop onto the series, but for veterans it may feel overly simplified. The controls work astonishingly well, it looks great, and the timescale has been radically adjusted for the shorter playtimes of a handheld device. But I do question developer Giants’ decision to number portable titles alongside the ‘main’ entries like this. While 18 is good as a portable game, it is still drastically inferior to last year’s release.

It’s not bad, it’s creative and a change of pace, but it pumps up difficulty in a really unsatisfying manner. It doesn’t feel rewarding to play, t’s convoluted, and it’s confusing. Despite that, it’s still probably the most interesting attempt yet at learning from Dark Souls and creating something new.

The long and short of it is that Outlast 2 is generic, stereotypical, and poorly designed. There was so much initial promise, with a great premise and some truly stunning visuals, but the onslaught of everything we’ve seen a hundred times before in horror games with much smaller budgets than this left me feeling bored, frustrated, and even vaguely insulted. Truly a sequel in name alone.

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s rerelease is appreciated, but feels somewhat lazy. There’s no balance fixes, no netcode improvements, and no attempt to add in legacy controller functionality to be seen, making the game, essentially, the exact same as it was the day it was snatched away in 2013.

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s rerelease is appreciated, but feels somewhat lazy. There’s no balance fixes, no netcode improvements, and no attempt to add in legacy controller functionality to be seen, making the game, essentially, the exact same as it was the day it was snatched away in 2013. But that doesn’t make it a bad game. UMvC3 is easily one of my favourite fighting games with its huge and varied cast of characters, frenetic pacing to the battles and a decent spread of single-player modes. If you’re able to play locally with a buddy, or heck, if there’s a local competitive scene where you live, this is a game you’ll definitely want to pick up.

Sure it looks visually nicer, and the ability to play it with a dual analogue controller fixes some of the control issues Banjo had on N64, but that’s far from enough to redeem this game...I don’t know what else to say. Yooka Laylee, you’re just a poor facsimile of something I used to love. You really didn’t impress me.

Episode Gladiolus is DLC you can safely skip. While the new combat mechanics are neat, and there are some cool bosses to face off against, how it fits into FFXV – from its lack of plot significance to literal “buy the DLC now!” pop-ups over the course of the game – reek of the worst kind of DLC this side of pay-to-win. Sorry Gladio. You’re nice to look at, but not much else.

While Andromeda is lacking some of the overall urgency of previous Mass Effect games, it makes up for that somewhat with the increase in scope and detail to the world. It’s certainly lacking polish, and several areas of the game feel like steps backwards for the series, but there is stuff to love.

It’s a shame the writing is unmitigated garbage, because the game it’s been dribbled onto is fantastic. The level design is an improvement over the already sublime Master of Shadows, and there are some genuinely memorable missions that make great use of the world Cyanide has built...But that writing. The intelligence of its predecessors, which explored everything from racism and activism to free will and existentialism has been replaced by Family Guy-level cultural references and fourth wall-breaking guff that swings from insulting the player’s intelligence to downright offensive. Shards of Darkness could have easily been Cyanide’s best game ever if the writer was locked in a cupboard.

It’s been some time since I’ve played a horror game that terrified me so, and even longer since a Resident Evil game was able to elicit such fear. For those of us who have, for years, yearned to return to old-school survival horror, Resident Evil 7 is essentially a pitch-perfect example of a title that’s unafraid to learn from the past, whilst also open to freely experiment with contemporary horror techniques. This makes RE7 not just one of the best horror games of recent times; it might be one of the best you’ll ever play. Period.

I’ve honestly fallen head over heels in love with Breath of the Wild in a way I’ve not fallen in love with an open world game before. While many of the singular elements I’ve spoken about here may not sound terribly groundbreaking for the genre, the way they come together once you’re a couple of hours deep is some of the best paced, polished and fun open world design I have ever experienced. The separate parts combine into something far exceeding their sum total.

The Division: Last Stand is an expansion creaking under the weight of its base game. The problem with the entire package is that it amplifies the problems veterans and newcomers alike have had with The Division over the course of the past year: server issues, hackers, a lack of content and loot storage problems plague what could’ve been an excellent closing point to the game’s first year...What is there is good. The incursion is well-designed, and the Last Stand mode itself is a solid, quick blast of tactical PvP goodness that I’m already itching to get back to. It’s everything players have been asking for, but with not enough of the polish or tweaking needed to make it truly great...I’m not angry, Division, I’m just disappointed.

It’s an open world game that kept me engaged and enthralled from start to finish, featured a simplified and polished variant on a combat loop I love, and felt made with a passion and sincerity rare in AAA video games. Horizon: Zero Dawn is right now my favourite game on the PlayStation 4 by quite a long way. It truly is worth of praise.

Really, Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is just a bit disappointing. It’s functional enough, and if you’re a die-hard fan of Warriors and Berserk going in you might get some fun out of this, but realistically it’s not worth picking up for most players.