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.

Exactly the sort of fun, colourful, and purposefully silly multiplayer game the world needs right now, even if it’s not exactly the most polished video game of the year.

Skater XL has a mid-budget price point and comes from a small indie outfit from which you wouldn’t expect triple-A polish and heft. It also has a substantial community busy designing mods and items for it, too. But unless you’re a truly fanatical skateboarder in real-life, your most likely reaction to buying it and booting it up is likely to be: ‘Is that it?’. It’s an exemplary control system in search of a game.

Another ineffectual attempt to transpose the Dark Souls gameplay and atmosphere into a sci-fi setting, although the split-screen mode is an interesting novelty.

Grounded shows great promise, and apparently a large community is already at work helping Obsidian to hone it (which is the main point behind its appearance in Early Access). It has all the ingredients required to make it a cult hit and you can only hope that Obsidian will finish it off sooner rather than later.

One of the best 2D shooters of the modern era is also one of the most visually distinctive games of the whole generation, and a stunning work of imagination on every level.

An impressively original take on XCOM style turn-based strategy that gains in depth and versatility what it loses in accessibility, with some of the best boss encounters of the year.

One of the most impressive technical achievements on the Switch, which even manages to make improvement to the PC original – although it’s rather expensive and the original is beginning to show its age in design terms.

Playing as an alien monstrosity is a great idea, and at times works well, but the fiddly controls and awkward mix of gameplay ideas doesn’t gel together well.

As far as being an early access game goes, you’d barely guess in terms of normal gameplay, as while there are a few bugs and glitches it’s nothing compared to how most AAA games launch nowadays. However, the further you start to explore away from the town the more missing content and blocked-off areas there are, waiting for a future update and the final release. We’re never fans of early access precisely because of things like that but if you take the current state of the game as an extended demo then we can definitely say that Ooblets is already growing us.

A stylishly presented, adult-themed adventure that explores the night life of Paris in thought-provoking but agreeably quirky detail.

One of the most relentlessly charming video games ever made and the best Paper Mario since The Thousand-Year Door.

A competent but shallow and overfamiliar attempt to replicate Assassin’s Creed style open world adventure in the world of 13th century samurai.

The coronavirus has made its themes more relevant than ever and while there are many odd decisions, in terms of plot and game design, the overall experience remains strangely engrossing.