It’s a strangely meditative process though, thanks to the plinky-plonky music and ambient sound effects; along with the slow pace of the game supplying an almost ASMR feeling as you fiddle about with the number of spots on each hexagonal tile to get them to add up, whilst feeling absolutely no time pressure whatsoever. It’s a great little game, even if it occasionally dances over the fine line between tranquillity and dullness.

The deadpan humour is complemented by deliberately B-movie style acting, but the formula-making mechanic is undermined by ever-stricter time limits which make it feel like a chore well before its relatively brief eight acts are finished. On the plus side, half its profits go to charities actually searching for a cure for cancer.

With its splendid mock 16-bit graphics (that come complete with a simulated CRT mode), chiptunes, a save system that lets you continue but resets your score, and an easy difficulty that gives you three layers of recharging shield, it’s tough but fair in the way that modern versions of old school shooters tend to be. This is a quality offering and easily amongst the best available for touchscreen devices.

It’s an interesting mix, and despite moments that require ultra-specific placement of Magibot’s power circles, and a fair bit of dodgy translation into English, this is a mostly successful blend of mental and dexterity-based challenges.

Its rapid-fire sequence of perfectly designed puzzles is a constant source of joy, as is its simple and elegantly-designed interface.

Despite its good looks and offbeat content, the process of winning rapidly becomes too fiddly to be much fun.

One of the least-demanded Nintendo sequels of recent years has relatively high production values but it’s still a dull, repetitive mix of tower defence and overly-simplistic action.

Mysterious, whimsical and intriguing, this is one to take your time over.

A mediocre remaster of an all-time classic, but by the mere act of fixing (most of) the frame rate problems this becomes the definitive version of one of the decade’s most influential video games.

A considerable improvement on Quantic Dreams’ previous work, and while the storytelling is still flawed its tale of abused androids feels very human.

A deeply disappointing sequel that devolves from a perfectly judged mix of rhythm action and platforming to an unfairly difficult slog that’s not nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

Some of the most difficult decision-making in gaming, both tactically and morally, but occasional rough edges betray the game’s small budget and short development time.

The spirit of old school arcade racing is reborn in a homage to everything from OutRun to Lotus Turbo Challenge, and despite a few bumps in the road it’s all just as much fun as you remember.

One of the best Shin Megami Tensei games returns, mixing standard Japanese role-playing with the series’ typically provocative story elements and Persona style gameplay.

The State Of Decay concept still holds plenty of promise but this sequel is so broken that laughing at its bugs and glitches becomes its primary source of entertainment.

Zelda may have inspired one of the best Dynasty Warriors games to date but the end result is still well below average by any other standard.

Half-broken and needlessly obscure, but if you have the patience this challenging survival game can be extremely satisfying – and it’ll be even better when it’s finished.

Another unapologetically old school role-player that gives its audience exactly what it wants and adds some fun pirate-themed exploration for everyone.

A bizarre mix of weighty subject matter and cartoon presentation that somehow works perfectly in portraying a morally complex world and its characters.

A predictably inessential expansion that adds nothing anybody ever asked for and completely fails to address the points fans have been complaining about for months.

No fun at all on your own, but together on the same couch this is one of the most entertaining co-op puzzlers of recent years.

A charming homage to Streets Of Rage and other scrolling beat ‘em-ups, but it doesn’t overcome the genre’s limitations and manages to add a few of its own.

An amiable but underwhelming homage to the forgotten majesty of Uridium, that adds some welcome new ideas but removes too many of the old ones.

Not so much a video game as a shameful attempt to convince children to spend their parents’ money on expensive microtransactions.

A novel setting and concept can’t hide the game’s technical limitations, but this is still an entertaining first person roguelike that does try to do things differently.

A fun, if slightly limited, retro reboot, that works very well as an arcade shooter even without the novelty of VR.

Another failed attempt to get a traditional first person shooter working in VR, although the online co-op option keeps the novelty going for longer than it should.

An understandable attempt to create a more accessible Total War experience, but it’s been streamlined so much it offers only a small taste of the series’ full potential.

A highly competent 2D platformer, but one so utterly devoid of any new ideas it’s really only for the nostalgic and those desperate to play something new(-ish) on the Switch.

A mixture of roguelike and Zelda: A Link To The Past that looks and plays extremely well, but has its potential cut short by an unwelcome time limit.

Original Journey is a twin-stick shooter-meets-platform game, with Tower Defense-style fixed guns and an upgrade system more reminiscent of a role-playing game. adly though its gameplay loop of shoot, loot, and retreat is just a tad too tight, rapidly feeling repetitive and restrictive.

It’s not perfect and although you could argue that the typos reflect a slightly lower standard of proof reading in mid-21st Century news publishing it’s still a satisfying read, even if some sort of player agency would have made it even better.

Like the ineffably dull Battleships, OIL has difficulty providing interest when so much of your success depends on luck.

Featuring a high degree of polish and a scattering of secrets and collectibles in each level, it may not be particularly original, and its cut scenes outstay their welcome, but this relatively short and highly entertaining game certainly does not.

At the end of each 10-level world your view pans back to reveal the monochromatic artwork you were exploring in a beautiful final flourish, leaving you to admire the developer’s handiwork and your own dexterity. It’s a masterpiece of minimalist puzzle design.

It’s a slow burn and has zero sense of humour, but believable characters, decent voice-acting, and accurate historical detail make for a sturdy if linear game. This is only the first half of book one, so don’t expect any neat resolutions.

It may have the framework of an ordinary city builder but there’s an insightful, and frequently disturbing, philosophical message at the heart of this cross-genre classic.

An excellent turn-based strategy that mixes tense battlefield tactics with an engrossing meta game of money-grabbing mercs and expensive-to-maintain mechs.

It’s unclear how much Nintendo is going to market Labo as an educational toy but it certainly has great value as such. It not only stimulates artistic urges but making full use of each of the Toy-Con garages feels like the most entertaining science lesson ever. The potential seems limitless and while Labo may not be a video game – and in that sense will provide little relief to Switch owners looking for something new to play – it could well be the next big thing. For big kids as well as little ones.

It’s unclear how much Nintendo is going to market Labo as an educational toy but it certainly has great value as such. It not only stimulates artistic urges but making full use of each of the Toy-Con garages feels like the most entertaining science lesson ever. The potential seems limitless and while Labo may not be a video game – and in that sense will provide little relief to Switch owners looking for something new to play – it could well be the next big thing. For big kids as well as little ones.

One of the most enjoyable roguelikes of recent years, with the heavy emphasis on RNG saved by some fun co-op options.

A fine idea in theory but while designing your own robots does have some unwanted limitations it’s the dull multiplayer that really shorts its circuits.

A fun and funny 2D platformer whose infectious sense of humour comes through clearly in the visuals, the script, and the gameplay.

Half a decade’s worth of expansions deliver a dizzying array of features but this stylish survival game still frustrates as much as it entertains.

A top-to-bottom revamp of the whole God Of War franchise that matches thrilling, if slightly shallow, combat and exploration with some impressively trenchant storytelling.

Fighting giant monsters should never be as dull and formulaic as this cheap and nasty attempt to remind you other better games… and anime.

A superbly crafted 2D adventure that is a near perfect blend of new and old influences, in terms of both gameplay and the stunning visuals and music.

The low-key narration and sparsely surreal graphics play well in this uncluttered game of brinkmanship, dexterity, and puzzle solving. Its challenge certainly isn’t for the faint hearted though.

The apes look pleasantly simian, and it’s nice observing conversations from behind the small visible portion of your hairy forearms, but these are small beacons of light in an otherwise unremittingly bleak landscape.

Even though it offers cross-platform play finding those teammates can be a tricky, but once you’re up and running both sides are at least equally hamstrung by the control set-up.

There isn’t even a win condition, you just keep battering back identikit waves of badly drawn enemies in small, bland maps until one overwhelms you. It’s the video game equivalent of clinical depression.

Getting killed because of unwieldy controls is nobody’s idea of a good time, and Apex Construct rubs salt into those wounds by removing un-banked experience points every time you die. Although not all bad, its sense of adventure and investigation is marred by eternally clumsy motion and combat.

The balloon popping sub-game isn’t up to much, but the rest of Ultrawings is a dream come true for fans of Nintendo’s charming slice of amateur aviation.

Despite its non-essential relationship with the medium, it’s a pleasant enough experience and a lot more polished than many VR-only titles, somewhere between arcade and puzzle action, although you’d be hard pressed to get too excited about it.

It’s great fun, the refined and challenging shooting mechanics and enormous assortment of gun configurations proving highly entertaining.

Minit offers a wonderfully minimalist adventure with not an inch of bloat. Instead, it’s a game where it seems like every tiny detail has been handcrafted and placed in the world only after careful thought from the creators. So while the lifespan of your hero, and the retro visuals, may seem very limiting they help to enable one of the most inventive and imaginative indie games of the year.

Probably the best single-player experience ever in a fighting game, on top of being an extremely accessible and highly technical multiplayer brawler.

Siege Of Dragonspear takes you and your plucky band of adventurers crawling dungeons, having detailed conversations with non-player characters s and generally attempting to overthrow evil using weapons, magic, and light tactics. If you missed the original this will be incomprehensible, featuring no training whatsoever, but if you played Baldur’s Gate you can import your party and just carry on. It’s not as good, but then there’s really nothing else quite like it.

Taking its cues from laid back infinite sand-boarding game Alto’s Odyssey and its predecessor, Ava Airborne has you attempting to keep hang-glider pilot, Ava aloft as long as possible. Graphically it’s pretty sparse and the flight dynamics are simple-going-on-remorselessly shallow, but there’s a world of upgrades to unlock at the usual snail’s pace of freemium titles.

As in its PC and console-based big brother, you’ll be attempting to kill 99 other hopefuls on an island with an ever-shrinking play area. And, like Fortnite, the most surprising thing about PUBG’s trip to the small screen is that it works so well, with the controls and environment holding together magnificently even on older phones. There’s been a little bit of server instability in its opening few days, but given how solid the rest of the experience is that’s likely to be nixed in short order, making this pretty much the best month ever for battle royale fans.

Although touchscreen outings for first person shooters are normally riddled with wearying compromises, this looks and plays like the full game, even if you can never quite recreate the precision of mouse or even joypad control using touch alone. Of course there are still glitches and places where characters merge alarmingly with scenery, but compared with the Xbox One version of PUBG it’s a technical tour de force.

As well as building your town, your overarching quest is to awaken a titan and kill a dragon. Getting there takes plenty of resource management and job assigning, but the late game drags horribly in the gap between completing all your buildings and killing the dragon, and while it’s mechanically interesting, it’s also a short game with absolutely no replay value.

Its biggest problem is touchscreen controls, the joystick and buttons regularly proving elusive and making precision platform stages just as nightmarish as you’d expect. But get past those moments of finger-slipping, iPad-hurling frustration and you’ll discover an unusually well-made and inventive tour of gameplay from the last three decades.

Pocket Build’s approach to world making is unusual in that there are no goals or enemies, your time and effort freed up for aesthetic concerns and the mellow process of terraforming and building towns, villages, and parks populated by humans and goblins. Your tiny denizens will fight each other, but fallen combatants can easily be revived. It’s the essence of relaxed geniality for those with a high boredom threshold.

It has very high production values and its colourful, cartoony visuals have a matching zany sense of humour. Unfortunately, despite splashing some cash on the user interface, the combat is primitive and rapidly becomes boring; the chance encounters on each planet repeat ad nauseam and its whacky comedy is nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is.

How anyone came up with the idea, let alone made it work, is baffling but this charming little mystery game is the most entertaining Pokémon spin-off in a long time.

It’s highly inconsistent, but this is still one of the most daring co-op games of recent years and shows how well playing together can work for story-based games.

A uniquely open-ended online adventure with some of the best co-op of any game, but at the moment there’s not nearly enough content or variety to keep it interesting for long.

The best Far Cry yet and one of the best open world shooters of any kind, with an impressive variety of missions and non-linear structure.

As fearlessly unconventional as the rest of Suda51’s work, but even existing fans will have trouble deciphering the hidden depths beneath the surface level of surrealism.

An enjoyable twist on the usual city building formula, that simulates the dangers of planetary colonisation impressively well – although it could have done with a slightly lighter touch.

A Japanese role-player that everyone can enjoy, and which mixes old school influences and some interesting innovations to charming effect.

A classic arcade racer that was always ahead of its time and seems both refreshing, and thoroughly modern, even now.

A slightly underwhelming end to the legend of Kazuma Kiryu, but the changes in gameplay and graphics do hold a lot of promise for the future.

Kirby’s games never seem fair on the enemies but this tiresome and poorly balanced co-op platformer offers little chance of fun for them or you.

A relatively competent remaster collection but the games are so old now that, without a full remake, newcomers will struggle to understand how they became so beloved.

One of the most ineffective reboots of recent history, with a game that seems purposefully designed to undermine the unique qualities of the Scribblenauts series.

Even without microtransactions, loot boxes manage to spoil another potentially classic game, although the core combat and co-op atmosphere still shine through.

The mash-up between 2D shooter and roguelike works surprisingly well, with a game filled to bursting with imaginative weapons and winning presentation.

A shockingly poor attempt to make a VR military shooter, that barely seems to work in any aspect and unwittingly exposes just how limited VR gaming can be.

We’re not giving this bonus episode a score because it’s only an hour long, and it will mean nothing to anyone that hasn’t played all the other episodes. But we strongly recommend both series to anyone that enjoys slow-burning interactive storytelling. We just warn you that, emotionally speaking, it’s going to be a rough ride – for you and the characters.

If you are an old school Fear Effect fan it’ll be obvious the developers are too, but despite the changes this is no better than either of the PlayStation originals.

Watching paint dry really can be entertaining, in this relentlessly cheerful mix of platformer and interactive colouring book.

One of the worst games of the generation, but at least it’s an interesting failure – with almost comical attempts to mimic everything from Max Payne to Silent Hill.

An excellent remaster of an unappreciated classic from the PC’s golden age, whose unique mix of genres seems more novel than ever.

As a junior UFO recently arrived on Earth, you need to find a job helping people using your giant mechanical claw. So begins this charming grabbing and balancing game, with graphics and soundtrack that will take you straight back to the best of the SNES. Mechanically perfect, but also fastidious in its attention to detail, each level’s three medals, awarded for completing specific details within each puzzle, elevate it to an entirely new plane, forcing you to think and practise enough to get everything right in a game with surprising and joyous hidden depths. The game is also notable for being the work of Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creators HAL Laboratory, who many assume are owned by Nintendo but are in fact an independent company.

Although not a game in any conventional sense, more a work of interactive fiction, Florence is about falling in love, its protagonist drifting through the tedium of adult existence before meeting the love of her life. From the mild awkwardness of their first date, to moving in, daily routine, arguments and beyond, your part in each scene sometimes amounting to no more than scrolling through its practically wordless pages, but making you feel a part of its story in a way that graphic novels and films can’t. At only 30 minutes long and with little replay value, this is not for everyone, but its unique emotional journey is an experience that stays with you.

Wonderfully surreal and revelling in its Germanic roots, Lichtspeer starts with the god of light replacing your puny human fists with a light spear to hurl at the faces of a relentless onslaught of winged horses, penguins, giants, zombies and, in the case of the first boss, an insane biker Viking. You’ll earn plenty of LSD, which apparently stands for Licht Standard Denomination, to spend in the shop in order to expand your ‘uber fantastisch Lichtpowers’. Despite never taking itself seriously, the action quickly gets hectic, your accuracy with the lichtspeer and its various upgrades is strenuously tested, revealing some limitations in the touchscreen controls.

With a warm but whacky sense of humour, this is a Tycoon-style game that has you managing a blacksmithing business staffed by spuds. Set them to work forging weapons with stats that appeal to the selection of heroes that inhabit each of the game’s towns; the better the correlation, the more they’ll pay and the better their XP, adding to your shop’s fame and letting you expand your operation. It’s a polished product, even if it does eventually feel a bit repetitive, and the fact that it’s a PC port makes some of the text so tiny that those playing on phones will be reaching for a magnifying glass.

Rogue Hearts is a dungeon crawler in which your hero stalks the hallways of its randomised levels smashing absolutely everything to reveal tiny, incremental quantities of gold and occasionally fighting monsters using melee weapons, magic, and a selection of special moves. Unfortunately, the dungeons are unerringly dreary, the relentless smashing of furniture, appalling translation of its turgid dialogue, and poorly explained mechanics add to an overwhelming sense of futility. To make matters even worse it monetises like a free-to-play game despite costing actual money. It’s peculiarly awful and you should on no account download this catastrophic mess.

In Dissembler you swap tiles in a grid to match three or more of the same colour, which then disappear. Your job is to clear each board, a process that involves making considerable use of the game’s unlimited undo button as you tinker with tactics to make sure you leave no square behind. The puzzles are elegantly designed, the interface simple and the ratchet and click noise as you swap tiles is so satisfying it’s almost a game in itself. There’s also a pleasing sense of progression, and before too long you’ll be spotting promising patterns of squares before you’ve even made your first move.

Transplanting its action from the snow of Alto’s Adventure to a desert makes less difference than you might imagine to this beautiful-looking, almost meditative sandboarding game. Sharing a great deal with the first outing, you’ll once again be sliding down undulating, procedurally-generated terrain, popping tricks, hopping over rocks, chasms and bonfires and occasionally racing stray lemurs. Its perpetual magic hour lighting and immaculately drawn visuals complement the serene action, in which you can now wall-ride to extend your chain of tricks, even if players of the original may feel they’ve seen much of this before.

An almost perfectly formed strategy game, that hides near infinite variety and depth beneath its deceptively simple presentation.

One of the most impressive PlayStation VR games so far, in terms of both its technical achievements and the sheer joy of playing it.

The flawed original is already showing its age, but this poor quality Switch port is Payday 2 at its very worst.

Not the Metal Gear fans will be used to in terms of either quality or action. But despite a few interesting highlights, it’s just too boring to get very angry about.

A milestone in fast action VR games, which solves most of the problems with motion sickness while also being an excellent first person racer.

An unexpectedly brave attempt to once again rewrite the rules on Pac-Man, resulting in another near-classic arcade experience.