Half a decade’s worth of expansions deliver a dizzying array of features but this stylish survival game still frustrates as much as it entertains.

A top-to-bottom revamp of the whole God Of War franchise that matches thrilling, if slightly shallow, combat and exploration with some impressively trenchant storytelling.

Fighting giant monsters should never be as dull and formulaic as this cheap and nasty attempt to remind you other better games… and anime.

A superbly crafted 2D adventure that is a near perfect blend of new and old influences, in terms of both gameplay and the stunning visuals and music.

The low-key narration and sparsely surreal graphics play well in this uncluttered game of brinkmanship, dexterity, and puzzle solving. Its challenge certainly isn’t for the faint hearted though.

The apes look pleasantly simian, and it’s nice observing conversations from behind the small visible portion of your hairy forearms, but these are small beacons of light in an otherwise unremittingly bleak landscape.

Even though it offers cross-platform play finding those teammates can be a tricky, but once you’re up and running both sides are at least equally hamstrung by the control set-up.

There isn’t even a win condition, you just keep battering back identikit waves of badly drawn enemies in small, bland maps until one overwhelms you. It’s the video game equivalent of clinical depression.

Getting killed because of unwieldy controls is nobody’s idea of a good time, and Apex Construct rubs salt into those wounds by removing un-banked experience points every time you die. Although not all bad, its sense of adventure and investigation is marred by eternally clumsy motion and combat.

The balloon popping sub-game isn’t up to much, but the rest of Ultrawings is a dream come true for fans of Nintendo’s charming slice of amateur aviation.

Despite its non-essential relationship with the medium, it’s a pleasant enough experience and a lot more polished than many VR-only titles, somewhere between arcade and puzzle action, although you’d be hard pressed to get too excited about it.

It’s great fun, the refined and challenging shooting mechanics and enormous assortment of gun configurations proving highly entertaining.

Minit offers a wonderfully minimalist adventure with not an inch of bloat. Instead, it’s a game where it seems like every tiny detail has been handcrafted and placed in the world only after careful thought from the creators. So while the lifespan of your hero, and the retro visuals, may seem very limiting they help to enable one of the most inventive and imaginative indie games of the year.

Probably the best single-player experience ever in a fighting game, on top of being an extremely accessible and highly technical multiplayer brawler.

Siege Of Dragonspear takes you and your plucky band of adventurers crawling dungeons, having detailed conversations with non-player characters s and generally attempting to overthrow evil using weapons, magic, and light tactics. If you missed the original this will be incomprehensible, featuring no training whatsoever, but if you played Baldur’s Gate you can import your party and just carry on. It’s not as good, but then there’s really nothing else quite like it.

Taking its cues from laid back infinite sand-boarding game Alto’s Odyssey and its predecessor, Ava Airborne has you attempting to keep hang-glider pilot, Ava aloft as long as possible. Graphically it’s pretty sparse and the flight dynamics are simple-going-on-remorselessly shallow, but there’s a world of upgrades to unlock at the usual snail’s pace of freemium titles.

As in its PC and console-based big brother, you’ll be attempting to kill 99 other hopefuls on an island with an ever-shrinking play area. And, like Fortnite, the most surprising thing about PUBG’s trip to the small screen is that it works so well, with the controls and environment holding together magnificently even on older phones. There’s been a little bit of server instability in its opening few days, but given how solid the rest of the experience is that’s likely to be nixed in short order, making this pretty much the best month ever for battle royale fans.

Although touchscreen outings for first person shooters are normally riddled with wearying compromises, this looks and plays like the full game, even if you can never quite recreate the precision of mouse or even joypad control using touch alone. Of course there are still glitches and places where characters merge alarmingly with scenery, but compared with the Xbox One version of PUBG it’s a technical tour de force.

As well as building your town, your overarching quest is to awaken a titan and kill a dragon. Getting there takes plenty of resource management and job assigning, but the late game drags horribly in the gap between completing all your buildings and killing the dragon, and while it’s mechanically interesting, it’s also a short game with absolutely no replay value.

Its biggest problem is touchscreen controls, the joystick and buttons regularly proving elusive and making precision platform stages just as nightmarish as you’d expect. But get past those moments of finger-slipping, iPad-hurling frustration and you’ll discover an unusually well-made and inventive tour of gameplay from the last three decades.

Pocket Build’s approach to world making is unusual in that there are no goals or enemies, your time and effort freed up for aesthetic concerns and the mellow process of terraforming and building towns, villages, and parks populated by humans and goblins. Your tiny denizens will fight each other, but fallen combatants can easily be revived. It’s the essence of relaxed geniality for those with a high boredom threshold.

It has very high production values and its colourful, cartoony visuals have a matching zany sense of humour. Unfortunately, despite splashing some cash on the user interface, the combat is primitive and rapidly becomes boring; the chance encounters on each planet repeat ad nauseam and its whacky comedy is nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is.

How anyone came up with the idea, let alone made it work, is baffling but this charming little mystery game is the most entertaining Pokémon spin-off in a long time.

It’s highly inconsistent, but this is still one of the most daring co-op games of recent years and shows how well playing together can work for story-based games.

A uniquely open-ended online adventure with some of the best co-op of any game, but at the moment there’s not nearly enough content or variety to keep it interesting for long.

The best Far Cry yet and one of the best open world shooters of any kind, with an impressive variety of missions and non-linear structure.

As fearlessly unconventional as the rest of Suda51’s work, but even existing fans will have trouble deciphering the hidden depths beneath the surface level of surrealism.

An enjoyable twist on the usual city building formula, that simulates the dangers of planetary colonisation impressively well – although it could have done with a slightly lighter touch.