Despite some serious technical compromises this is still XCOM 2 and playing it on Switch in handheld mode is just as engrossing as any other version.

A milestone in action video game storytelling and while the gameplay is not nearly as inspired, the experience as a whole is one of the best of the generation.

It’s a nerdy organisational rabbit hole of depth and intricacy that, for the right personality, will create the sense of benign addiction gamers crave.

There’s a new, less punishing, three-round battle system, but this is mostly business as usual with lots of deep pits, damp caverns, mysterious alcoves, and a short-lived partnership with Throm the barbarian. It’s a pleasantly relaxing game to play, your frequent deaths only ever sending you back to the previous narrative branch, with Eddie Marsan amiably suppling details of your demise.

As you upgrade you’ll face tougher monsters, your backpedalling crowd control getting steadily more bloody as foes arrive thicker and faster, and you unlock more of the game’s vast arsenal of weapons and armour. You’ll need to grind its paltry selection of side missions to keep up with the rigours of story mode, but it’s a rewarding progression even if the action soon starts to feel repetitive.

It’s a friendly and beautifully constructed ecosystem, and if you enjoy tinkering with, as well as simply playing, levels this is an endlessly engaging toy.

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.

Because this is free to download everything comes with a countdown timer, which in time-honoured tradition starts off instantaneous and soon has you waiting multiple hours for processes to complete. It’s also very buggy, frequently crashing to the home screen, although rarely losing too much progress.

Two of the best remasters ever made, as after years of neglect the Command & Conquer franchise finally gets the tender loving care it deserves.

A great Switch port that packs in an incredible amount of content and comes with relatively few technical issues.

A fun action platformer with plenty of charm and some great visuals, that’s only let down by an uneven difficulty level that seems unsure exactly how hard it wants to be.

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

An engrossing look at pre-digital gaming entertainment that offers an attractive way to play familiar classics and introduce yourself to new ones.

The best Paper Mario game since The Thousand-Year Door, but also a charming adventure in its own right, with some surprisingly good storytelling and fun combat.

£35 for half a Kombat Pack and a three-hour epilogue is terrible value for money, especially as only two of the new characters are any good.

One of the best Japanese role-players of last generation is still one of the best on current formats, with an excellent remaster that includes a generous amount of new content.

A shark RPG sounds like an unlikely idea for a video game and unfortunately the end result is even less entertaining, and far more repetitive, than you might imagine.

A modern day alternative to Gauntlet, whose innate shallowness and overreliance on random generation is balanced out by some fun combat and great co-op action.

Still one of PlatinumGames’ most imaginative and exuberant action games but the refusal to improve the controls or accessibility doom the remaster to further obscurity.

A welcome tonic to overly large open worlds, Mafia 2’s story and missions remain worth experiencing if you haven’t already, but its age and intrinsic flaws are still obvious.

The most enjoyably one-note VR game for a long time, that turns its simplicity into a virtue and whose cathartic ultra-violence is strangely therapeutic in these difficult times.

The world’s least realistic golf game is a tour de force in manic invention that values variety, invention, and surrealist humour above all.

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

An impressively ambitious survival horror that moves beyond the realm of mere VR tech demo and, despite some technical limitations, is a hugely engrossing game in its own right.

There’s a plot involving the town’s ineffectual mayor, gaff-prone police department, and various other resident caricatures, but underneath that shell, it’s incremental business as usual. How this got past Apple’s legendarily puritanical vetting process is anyone’s guess.

Its non-rotate-able isometric world makes it tricky to see around furniture and walls, and the absence of an undo button makes that problem worse, a single misplaced tap enough to end an otherwise perfect raid, which encourages continual shameful save scumming.

There are cars to unlock using a spin-the-wheel lottery style, and you win the usual variety of currencies for completing events, but at heart this is a stylishly presented car-themed rhythm action game rather than anything to do with driving. You can sign in with Xbox Live and it has Forza in its name, but that’s absolutely all this psychologically addictive but patronisingly over-simplified abomination has in common with the illustrious Xbox franchise.

Clever, taxing, and graphically elegant, the short-form ads you have to watch before and after each level are thoroughly inoffensive and can be removed for a one-off payment of £3.99, which also unlocks hats for your worm.