Remakes of old N64 Mario Party boards may not sound the most desirable release of the season but in terms of easily accessible party games there are few better options.

A highly competent but disappointingly unambitious real-time strategy that fails to move either the genre or the Age Of Empires franchise forward.

A traditional turn-based role-player which utilises its tabletop disguise with charm and polish, but isn’t long enough to fully capitalise on its ideas.

There’s no question that effort has gone into making it though, and that kids of an appropriate age will enjoy it – but that enjoyment is only likely to last a few sessions at most. At that point you will have spent £35 on something that isn’t really that much more interactive, and certainly has less educational value, than a free mobile or browser game.

A surprisingly ambitious cosmic space adventure that excels the more it diverges from the movies, offering robust action, impressive visuals, and unexpectedly sophisticated storytelling.

Easily the best of the Dark Pictures Anthology series, which finally manages to serve up some interesting characters and effective horror scenes, with an appealingly gothic atmosphere.

The Japanese role-playing game stripped back to its bare essentials and yet rather than an exercise in nostalgic pandering this is one of the most compelling and sharply designed dungeon crawlers of recent years.

A work of devilish cleverness that’s both a mockery and celebration of collectible cards games and an increasingly disturbing horror story about the cost of victory.

The series may no longer be the graphical tour de force it once was, but all three Crysis games remain highly playable, your nanosuit’s suite of powers adding a distinct twist to the shooter action.

A hugely disappointing mess of a game that magnifies all of SWERY’s worst tendencies and fails to compensate in terms of the unengaging characters and script.

While it never forges its own identity, or escapes the shadow of Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood provides a great cover act, that captures all of the original series’ magic.

One of the most enjoyably weird games of recent years and yet surprisingly easy to grasp, with an engaging mix of action and survival gameplay – and a good dose of surrealist imagery.

The original was always highly simplistic and repetitive, and neither the passage of time or being in 4K can do anything to improve this disappointingly trivial actioner.

A mechanically solid and fun Super Smash Bros. clone which doesn’t have the style, personality or affection for its characters to reach the heights of its inspiration.

One of the best Metroid games ever made and a thrilling restatement of everything that makes the series, and the genre it inspired, great.

Colourful and brutal, funny and horrifying, Far Cry 6 is the distilled essence of its franchise, as well as a richer and more coherent experience than recent outings.

On paper it does everything XCOM does and more, but poor balancing and overcomplicated rules means it’s just not as much fun.

Another sub-par remaster of Super Monkey Ball that ruins the precision and elegance of the originals and replaces it with janky, unpredictable controls and shoddy presentation.

A shameful launch of a barely playable, graphically embarrassing game that shames the memory of PES and may have killed the new franchise before it’s even begun.

Although the quality of the puzzles remains the same this unexpected expansion certainly isn’t just more of the same, with an unexpected new survival horror element.

A charming puzzle platformer which makes great use of its puppet show concept but falls short in longevity.

An unexpected gift for fans of the SNES original and while the remake is seriously flawed in terms of both graphics and gameplay its sheer oddness is still highly compelling.

A very narrow selection of games, from a format that does not work well on modern TVs, but Aria Of Sorrow in particular stands out as one of the best Castlevania games ever made.

It’s hard to believe this is Hideo Kojima’s preferred version of the game, considering it side lines so much of the core gameplay and adds little else of any substance.

An exacting remake of Diablo 2 that will not only please those that played it the first time round on PC but works impressively well on consoles too.

An ambitious release that focuses on new animations and gameplay innovations but the execution needs refining, whilst matches feel too heavily skewed in favour of defence. [Provisional Score = 70]

A bigger, more ambitious stealth sequel which revamps the original’s mechanics and personality but most of the changes are to the game’s detriment.

Highly impressive on a technical level but the throwbacks to PS2 era game design feel less like a homage and more an indication of the developers’ lack of experience and imagination.