Another amusing look behind the veil of role-playing conventions, although it’s a shame the experience feels so slight and insubstantial.

It always put nostalgia first and gameplay second, but 10 years on and Ghostbusters: The Video Game just feels like mediocre fan fiction.

Not the return to form that the SteamWorld franchise needed but still a fun and unusual strategy game, even if a lot of the newer features work against it.

Whether you know it best as Puzz Loop or Zuma this is an imaginative variation of the puzzle formula, even if it's a self-consciously weird one.

The games are historical touchstones more than they are all-time classics, but nostalgic fans will still enjoy these entertaining riffs on the work of Rare and Rockstar.

A disappointingly trivial expansion in terms of gameplay, story, and new features; although more Metal Gear Rising and Jetstream Sam was never going to be an entirely bad thing.

The best WWE game of the generation… but only because it successfully pulls upon your nostalgia strings, helping you forgot how mediocre the gameplay is.

The change of publisher has not yet ensured a change in quality for WWE games, although the 30 Years of WrestleMania mode is definitely of interest for long term fans.

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.

No doubt a dream come true for fans, but with so little innovation in the core gameplay the boast of being an interactive cartoon seems more like a liability than a positive.

A stunning technical achievement and a mesmerisingly addictive one, even after you realise how simplistic and repetitive it really is.

An effective tech demo but it struggles to be anything else, not least because for the majority of the time it’s just a fairly vanilla climbing simulator.

A slight improvement on the disappointing Bangkok level, but the lack of traditional Hitman thrills don’t make this a mission to remember.

In pure gameplay terms this is one of Suda51's most accessible and entertaining games for years, but it's badly devalued by its extreme brevity.

An aggravatingly poor sequel that insists on changing things that didn't need changing and refusing to fix those that did.

A competent Metroidvania but although Shantae and her friends are as charming as ever the franchise is beginning to seem aimless and overly repetitive.

A technical masterpiece with some of the best swordfighting combat in years, but the storytelling and puzzle elements come across as muddled and awkwardly mismatched.

A classic example that sometimes less is more, as a deadweight of mini-games and side characters dilutes an otherwise fun, if unambitious, platformer.

It gets most of the mechanics right, and it certainly looks like Sonic, but this new episode doesn't have the heart or the imagination of the originals.

With infinite continues and no ads, it’s a friendly user experience, and even though some of the level design is a bit iffy, the art style is unusually good for a freebie.

The camera technology can't keep up with the game's ambition, but at least this Pokemon clone has some.

Competent but personality-free third person shooter that's another good demonstration of the Vita's ability, but an instantly forgettable playing experience.

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.

A great technical showcase for the 3DS but also one of the least substantial launch games ever seen for a new console.

The combat is a lot of fun and the visuals are dynamic and exciting, but repetitive missions and dire storytelling ruin what is otherwise a mechanically superior giant robot game.

There are some compelling ideas at work here and probably the closest you’ll ever get to Chromehounds 2 – but only for those already intimately familiar with Armored Core V.

Charming, silly, and occasionally profound but Keita Takahashi’s latest lacks the gameplay hook of Katamari Damacy, even if it is surprisingly well written.

The sparkly graphics and familiar faces do their job, although it soon starts to get trickier, tempting you to spend in-game gold and actual currency to complete levels. For its target audience of small girls it’s fiendishly compelling, just don’t forget to turn off in-app purchases before handing your phone over.

A reskinned Borderlands 3 that would’ve been much better off as an expansion, given it’s too short to justify the outrageously high price tag and too long to hide the lack of variety and new ideas.

One of the best looking games ever, but its awe for retro Zelda ruins hopes for similarly inspired gameplay.

Amiibo Party is a welcome step back towards the franchise’s more enjoyable past, but the main modes aren’t proper board games – they’re just plain boring.

The once inspired mix of rhythm action and real-time strategy becomes further diluted by obscure rules and needlessly high difficulty.

A game of two halves: the new Marvel adventure is awful but the improved Toy Box is good enough to inspire kids to make something much better themselves.

What should be the most epic crossover of all time is reduced to Daley Thompson's Decathlon in the snow.

The best tech demo so far for PlayStation VR, but with some better storytelling it could also have been a good game in its own right.

It doesn’t push its ideas as far as it should, but this is a cleverly unique puzzle game that turns normal first person shooters on their head.

Even on the easiest difficulty level it’s intensely challenging from the start, with movement, managing your dwindling oxygen supply, and timing the long cooldowns on your weapons requiring patience and skill to get right. It’s also hampered by touchscreen controls that never feel as responsive as you’d like.

For better and worse a very useful introduction to VR gaming, with a wide range of games that demonstrate the potential, and pitfalls, of PlayStation VR.

The co-op mode saves it from complete failure but this is a disappointingly timid update of the original, that squanders its potential in both gameplay and storytelling.

It’s very much showing its age, but this remaster does just enough to prove that Racer would’ve been a good game with or without the Star Wars licence.

At times it feels like a reanimated corpse itself, but as mindless and predictable as it may be Dead Rising 4 can still offer hours of inoffensively dumb entertainment.

A disappointingly low-tech space exploration game that relies too much on the legacy of Skyrim and Fallout and lacks the innovation and imagination to do its concept justice.

There are still problems with artificial intelligence and level design, but despite its age this is still one of the best sniper games around.

A slightly disappointing sequel, but still an addictively bizarre musical mini-game collection.

A very peculiar platformer, whose wonky mechanics never fully deliver on the fever dream promise of its ambience, but at least it plays better on more modern formats.

SNK fail to provide any real justification for continuing the 2D shooter series or for moving to the DS.

An ambitious and morally complex role-player, but one still limited by a poor script and half-broken game mechanics.

The princess may have bitten off more than she can chew with her clever but confused multiplayer melees.

The multiplayer options are impressively comprehensive and as Diablo clones go this ticks all the necessary boxes, except the ones for imagination and innovation.

An uninspiring beginning to Clementine’s final story but there’s enough potential in the plot, and the more cinematic visuals, to leave hope that it’ll end better than it started.

A predictably flawed Switch port which works fine in terms of gameplay but loses a lot of the spectacle and stress-free enjoyment to frustrating frame rate issues.

One of the most beautiful video games ever made, but the gameplay is a far less attractive proposition – especially in this barely-altered remake.

An excellent port of the Xbox game but the original is now so old it’s becoming difficult to enjoy even for veteran fans.

Not a sequel that seemed desperately necessary, and it's arguable if the end result is any real improvement, but still an enjoyable - if quickly disposable - download.

The best Dynasty Warriors game so far is still barely competent compared to other action games but for those seeking more Persona 5 this is a fun, if trashy diversion.

A charming and well-made role-playing adventure, but despite how much it might resemble Pokémon it has nothing like the depth of Nintendo’s games.

It would probably make a better movie than a game, but there’s still a unique charm about Harold Halibut and his slow-paced journey to discover his place in life.

A flawed attempt to adapt the show, that struggles when it comes to storytelling but has the makings of a great heist game.

It's a perfectly competent strategy role-player, but one lacking any real personality or imagination.

Each level has a strictly limited number of squares in which to undertake your merging antics, deploying a small supply of tactical powers – swap two squares, delete a tile – to correct mistakes or reverse bad luck. You get a small number of moves per day for free, but you can watch an ad to earn more or pay to unlock the full game and all its maps, in this neat little puzzler.

A less than impressive remaster, that still isn’t up to par with the PC version, but there’s a lot of content here and the bank-robbing co-op remains a fun novelty.

Superior, but still badly flawed, portable real-time strategy that lacks both depth and variety.

An always welcome celebration of one of the 16-bit era’s most innovative and cinematic arcade adventures, even if its gameplay irritations are even more obvious in today’s world.

Not as daring as you'd hope in terms of gameplay or humour, but this Diablo parody has its moments.

A competent Overwatch clone but one so apparently allergic to new ideas it’s depressing to see it so thoroughly waste its technical triumphs and well-designed characters.

Fast, fun and a little bit silly, Squid Game’s battle royale works surprisingly well on mobile, but it lacks the depth to provide any long term interest.

The action can feel repetitive and the usual gacha caveats apply, but the flanking manoeuvres and judicious use of special abilities make for a game where tactics do at least play a part.

An improvement over the Wii version, but this still seems like the bare minimum that could be done with a Michael Jackson music game.

Although the central conceit of continual binary choices sits well on mobile, it eventually proves a shade too simplistic, making your ongoing adventures feel repetitive and as though you’re too much at the mercy of RNG-esus.

An overall improvement on the original but the lack of focus encourages too many unwanted features, that dilute an otherwise interesting portrayal of law enforcement.

Konami play Frankenstein with another old series, but even though the seams are showing the game's still fun.

A near perfect update to what remains a game with far more style than substance, nice new graphics or not.

A poor man's Panzer Dragoon is still a relatively rich meal for anyone, even if this has little real connection to the original.

At its best it’s like being in control of a pixellated Final Destination, the deaths coming thick and fast with amusingly inventive variety. At its worst it’s a fiddly load of trial and error, where you can still be tripped up by pesky police angels even once you’ve figured out what to do.

It's a shameless copy of Diablo, but this action role player still has some personality of its own.

A strange set of priorities and a peculiarly high price make Nintendo’s big DLC experiment a hard sell for all but the most committed platform fans.

It’s good looking, and you’re not forced to watch as many ads as you are in Archero, but on the minus side it’s also not nearly as much fun.

For a Japanese role-player this is a fun, accessible romp, but it stops short of reinventing its ways out of any of the genre's more long-standing issues.

Better than My Life As A King but the bad guys still aren't having that much fun with their tower defence.

The fact that it’s free-to-play is almost the only point of interest in this derivative shooter – and even that is far less appealing once you get into the details.

What could have been a competent third person take on Metroid Prime is brought low by needless technical and design mistakes.

Ratchet & Clank's less talented cousins show just how unimportant technical competence is when a game has no heart or ambition.

A Monster Hunter clone that does some things differently but doesn’t manage to improve on element of it is far more entertaining inspiration.

The faults are a shame because the basic gameplay works perfectly well and if the technical issues can be ironed out, and the musical horizons broadened, a follow-up could be the real evolution needed.

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

A competent clone of Zelda and a pretty poor adaptation of Adventure Time, this amiable but frustrating tie-in doesn’t really satisfy on either level.

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.

There’s a nice weight and momentum to the rolling characters, you can play in four-player co-op if you have three Apple Arcade subscribing friends, and it has high production values, but its ideas never seem to go anywhere, as though the game had bigger plans that it ended up not getting around to.

A co-op action roguelite with simplistic, special move-based combat and some heroes that don’t quite pull their weight, which while fine in multiplayer is not satisfying enough to take on solo.

One of the more reprehensible examples of withheld content in recent months, although you aren't really missing much from the mission or character.

It’s entertaining enough while it lasts, but with puzzles that predominantly rely on trial and error or simple pattern recognition, there’s little to really get your teeth into.

Gauntlet with Pokemon is at least something different, but it's too repetitive and shallow to really work.

There’s no indication when you pass a checkpoint, so it’s easy to lose chunks of progress if you’re interrupted by a call or life, and the touch controls occasionally get in the way of solving puzzles, but it’s still a unique experience, albeit one marred by its own butterfly attention span.

More an interactive hint at what could've been than a proper game, but more engrossing than the flat out disaster it first appears to be.

Some effort has gone into this ill-advised port, but it's still a pale shadow of the HD original.

A crisply drawn futuristic racquet sport with consistent and nuanced physics that’s let down by a user base too small to support online matchmaking.

It has extremely high production values, but the lack of skill needed and the emphasis on waiting for absolutely everything limit its appeal.

Not the bold new reinvention that Assassin’s Creed needed but instead a rushed, patently unfinished mess whose improvements are minor and failings more obvious than ever.