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.

Its light challenge and straightforward level design are complemented by minimalist good looks, but there’s just too little going on to maintain interest beyond saving up and collecting a few perfectly drawn miniature vehicles.

It often takes the best part of two minutes to load, but after months spent locked inside, it’s just quite nice getting a bit of unfettered fresh air, even if it is only simulated.

Its mellow pace requires diligent concentration, and its 30 levels will be enough to sustain a few days’ solid puzzling.

The way seemingly innocent snippets of data are collated, corroborated, and then grossly misinterpreted in the name of law and order makes for a sobering refresher course in why digital privacy is so vital. It’s also an enticing few hours of drama.

One of the best video games to ever be based around cycling, with the stylised visuals and pitch perfect controls creating an impressively immersive experience.

It has its flaws but this inspired mix of first person shooter and traditional roguelike offers a level of freedom and tactical decision making that many bigger budget games can only dream of.

A fantastic movie adaptation that may not look the part but manages to perfectly translate the action of John Wick into video game form.

One of the best attempts at an interactive anime ever, although the nonsensical story, weak combat, and dubious portrayal of female characters will ensure it a limited audience in the West.

A better remake than Secret Of Mana, even if it does remove one of the original’s best features, but the one-note gameplay and weak storytelling limit its appeal considerably.

An excellent return to form for gaming’s favourite beat ‘em-up franchise and while it doesn’t represent much evolution from the original games it’s still just as much fun as ever.

What started off as a fan remake of Resident Evil 2 has been transformed into a would-be homage that even in its better moments is a tedious and frustrating slog.

Easily the most authentic Predator game ever made but also a paper-thin multiplayer game that offers far too little content and variety for its asking price.

By the end of the 30+ hour campaign you begin to realise that the worst thing about Gears Tactics is that it’s a Gears Of War game. The gameplay and controls work very well but the repetition and lack of strategic control becomes more of a problem the longer the game goes on. As an introduction to the genre it works very well, and we hope it’ll get more people interested in turn-based action, but we doubt it’ll do the same for Gears Of War itself.