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.

It’s this sense of ownership – coupled with an ardent, fervent familiarity – that’s soaked into my very core. So no, Dishonored 2 isn’t perfect… but it’s pretty fecking close.

Ultimately, Pokemon Sun and Moon feel like a familiar experience refreshed and renewed. I’m back in love with a series I’ve been treading water with for a little while now. It feels damn good.

Ultimately, Pokemon Sun and Moon feel like a familiar experience refreshed and renewed. I’m back in love with a series I’ve been treading water with for a little while now. It feels damn good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yoku’s Island Express has a lot of fantastic ideas. It plays with its pinball formula enough to keep what could’ve been repetitive endlessly new and engaging, and it wraps all that up in its beautiful and unexpectedly deep world. Unfortunately, every good idea is slightly undermined by its glaring lack of real challenge, turning its otherwise fantastic design into more of a chore than it really should have been. It’s a nice change of pace from the likes of Hollow Knight and Steamworld Dig 2, but I don’t think Yoku quite has what it takes to stand up as equals alongside them.

The Last Guardian is a beautiful experience that I have no desire to actually control again. If it released a decade ago I might have felt differently...I hate that such a beautiful game is so unbelievably infuriating to actually play.

It can at times be weak on overall narrative strength, but it excels at interpersonal stories about a believable group of twenty something guys driving their car down long unending stretches or road.

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.

Berseria is in many ways just another Tales Of game. The combat feels familiar, the environments are non-distinct and the cooking system isn’t anything special or new. What carries this entry is its narrative, the characters, and how the game explores the consumptive and destructive nature of revenge as a motivator. It’s an interesting RPG story wrapped in decent, if not exciting, surrounding elements. An alright RPG I’m certainly glad I played.

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.

Sniper Elite 4 is far and away the best game in the series so far. Mind-bogglingly complex levels, improvements to the series’ storytelling, and some of the most fun cooperative play I’ve enjoyed in a long time make it both the essential Sniper Elite experience, and a grand ol’ time for anyone who fancies taking the hurt to a few Nazis.

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.

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.

There’s something special about Shu. Though delightful, it’s not the graphics, the sculptured bones of its story, or even the titular character him/herself. It’s not the mechanics or the gameplay, despite a calm, intuitive system. The score is beautifully hypnotic, too, but no, it’s not that, either. While all of those things are pretty much fine and dandy as disparate entities in their own right, it’s the sum of these parts that gives Shu its uniquely whimsical magic.

It was only during my subsequent playthroughs that I was able to catch the game’s quiet understatement, and I’m so frustrated that I missed these the first time around. This is a game to be savored and treasured, but its blunt delivery and liberal use of codes and symbols only serve to sacrifice clarity.

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.

Ultimately, 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue has one purpose – to pave the way for Kingdom Hearts 3 – and it pulls it off incredibly well. Dream Drop Distance HD has a great story and some really cool mechanical ideas, but is let down somewhat by the limitations of the 3DS hardware it was adapted from. But 0.2 Birth by Sleep A Fragmentary Passage is just stellar. It gives the perfect taster of what to expect in Kingdom Hearts 3, while also being its own awesomely designed short-form experience. If we discount its smaller scale, 0.2 is probably one of the best instalments of the series we’ve ever had.

ClusterTruck is a simple game, and it manages to flawlessly pull off almost everything it does. The sporadically iffy controls make the last level is a total pain in the arse bordering on the unfair, but with a one in 90 fail rate it just feels petty to even bring it up. With hectic play, visual flair and an easy to use level editor, I’ve never had this much fun being hit by a truck.

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.

It’s a cute little non-stop runner that showed me why the genre was worth the time of day thanks to its superbly layered level and gameplay design. I found myself putting countless hours into working through its selection of content. I easily got £7.99 of enjoyment out of it, and would love to see more Nintendo games like it on Mobile. Just don’t force me to be online to play single player content.

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.

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.

I walked away from Ladykiller in a Bind deeply unsure how to feel about the game, even though its positives probably outweigh its negatives.

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.