Surprisingly dark, despite its protagonists’ youth and manga cuteness, the narrative branching in all sorts of semi-lethal directions as you test the game’s capacity for characters to lie, manipulate, and double cross their junior school chums.

The in-your-face visuals distort and strobe when you collide with walls or objects, giving the whole enterprise a migraine-inducing quality that actually goes quite well with its savage difficulty level. If you suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, this is a game you might want to avoid.

It’s a surprisingly expansive mobile interpretation of its older sibling, your clone pilot gradually earning and learning new skills, and with that the ability to fly better spacecraft. Ship-to-ship combat takes place at huge range in the empty blackness of space, but it’s nevertheless satisfying blowing away space pirates with your slowly improving arsenal.

Gorgeous pixel art graphics and one of the best turn-based combat systems of recent years can’t quite make up for an obnoxious script and frustrating role-playing elements.

A jumbled mess that’s trying to be at least three different types of game at once, drowning out the enjoyable combat with a tsunami of repetition and meaningless loot.

A stripped-down, glorious-looking remake that updates the original two games in just the right way to make them feel fresh and exciting again.

A terrifying vision of future America, that already seems worryingly accurate, and also one of the most open-ended role-playing games of recent years, with a smart line in dark comedy.

An inferior experience to PC and Oculus, not in terms of graphics but the frustrating PlayStation Move controllers that make wielding a lightsaber more a pain than a pleasure.

A stale series stuck in its own Groundhog Day almost redeems itself with The Yard and will entertain casual football fans, but mediocrity seeps into almost every mode in another backwards step for the franchise.

Technically impeccable and fantastic to behold, 2K’s first PGA Tour game is already the best golf sim currently available.

Dontnod continues to lead the world in terms of character diversity and representation, and while Tell Me Why’s story can sometimes lack drama it’s still engagingly interactive.

A solidly made and entertaining racing game with loads to unlock, whose minor graphical shortcomings and sim-lite handling do nothing to interfere with long term appeal.

The original was hardly viewed as a classic even at the time and while a lot of work has gone into this remaster it can’t hide the game’s intrinsic shallowness and repetition.

A wonderfully cheerful rhythm action game that channels the best of Jet Set Radio and Parappa the Rapper but still maintains its own distinctive style.

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

In the end we’ve come to believe that maybe the trolling theory is accurate and that this is all one big joke carried out by Microsoft, Rare, and Dlala Studios. Either way, we spent the entire time being frustrated, bewildered, and only very occasionally entertained. We don’t think our experience would’ve been improved if we did happen to be big Battletoads groupies though, as this doesn’t seem like something fans, or indeed anyone else, would enjoy.

An utterly charming and perfectly paced mini-adventure that packs in more character, emotion, and sense of wonder than most 30 hour epics.

The best Dark Souls clone so far features a number of interesting new ideas and also offers an experience that is easier to acclimatise to for new players.

If you play it for free this is an excellent introduction to the concept of Total War, but as a paid-for product it’s a sometimes awkward mix of fact and fiction, old problems and new.

It looks and sounds great but this post-apocalyptic rhythm action game lacks that little extra kick to make it a genuine classic.

Sony’s first experiment on the PC is just that, with a disappointingly glitchy port of one of the PlayStation 4’s most technically advanced exclusives.

Clocking in at under an hour, with no challenge and a story that is at best highly confusing, Arrog is beautiful but strangely empty.

Amanita’s distinctive art style and wonderfully expressive characters, whose movements and expressions convey chapters’ worth of emotion, are as effective as ever, even if the ladder mazes and robot baiting eventually get to feel a bit samey.

Felix moves beautifully, and the game’s narrated by the eternally sonorous Patrick Stewart, but it suffers from a patchy difficulty level, supplying five-ish hours of mildly frustrating and often repetitive puzzling.

Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem as the rest of its genre, namely relying on random-seeming and counter-intuitive combinations of equipment to overcome many of its problems. YouTube will get you unstuck but cheating your way through feels as hollow as it always does.

Telling the story of Meve, queen of Lyria, and replete with familiar characters from the games and books, Thronebreaker’s games of Gwent mix standard one-on-one matches with a plethora of puzzle levels, each with its own set of rules and constraints. The result is a rich and varied tactical tour de force, comprising dozens of hours of entertainment backed up by a story that’s as twisted and interesting as Witcher fans have come to expect.

There is a satisfaction to completing stages with all three bonus goals intact, but the game’s glacial pace and realistic but intrinsically clunky onscreen controls, that offer no option to connect a controller, will not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Another deeply disappointing Fast & Furious game that’s all the more upsetting because of the obvious talent it wastes in terms of both developer and cast.