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.

A Japanese role-player that everyone can enjoy, and which mixes old school influences and some interesting innovations to charming effect.

A classic arcade racer that was always ahead of its time and seems both refreshing, and thoroughly modern, even now.

A slightly underwhelming end to the legend of Kazuma Kiryu, but the changes in gameplay and graphics do hold a lot of promise for the future.

Kirby’s games never seem fair on the enemies but this tiresome and poorly balanced co-op platformer offers little chance of fun for them or you.

A relatively competent remaster collection but the games are so old now that, without a full remake, newcomers will struggle to understand how they became so beloved.

One of the most ineffective reboots of recent history, with a game that seems purposefully designed to undermine the unique qualities of the Scribblenauts series.

Even without microtransactions, loot boxes manage to spoil another potentially classic game, although the core combat and co-op atmosphere still shine through.

The mash-up between 2D shooter and roguelike works surprisingly well, with a game filled to bursting with imaginative weapons and winning presentation.

A shockingly poor attempt to make a VR military shooter, that barely seems to work in any aspect and unwittingly exposes just how limited VR gaming can be.

We’re not giving this bonus episode a score because it’s only an hour long, and it will mean nothing to anyone that hasn’t played all the other episodes. But we strongly recommend both series to anyone that enjoys slow-burning interactive storytelling. We just warn you that, emotionally speaking, it’s going to be a rough ride – for you and the characters.

If you are an old school Fear Effect fan it’ll be obvious the developers are too, but despite the changes this is no better than either of the PlayStation originals.

Watching paint dry really can be entertaining, in this relentlessly cheerful mix of platformer and interactive colouring book.

One of the worst games of the generation, but at least it’s an interesting failure – with almost comical attempts to mimic everything from Max Payne to Silent Hill.

An excellent remaster of an unappreciated classic from the PC’s golden age, whose unique mix of genres seems more novel than ever.

As a junior UFO recently arrived on Earth, you need to find a job helping people using your giant mechanical claw. So begins this charming grabbing and balancing game, with graphics and soundtrack that will take you straight back to the best of the SNES. Mechanically perfect, but also fastidious in its attention to detail, each level’s three medals, awarded for completing specific details within each puzzle, elevate it to an entirely new plane, forcing you to think and practise enough to get everything right in a game with surprising and joyous hidden depths. The game is also notable for being the work of Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creators HAL Laboratory, who many assume are owned by Nintendo but are in fact an independent company.

Although not a game in any conventional sense, more a work of interactive fiction, Florence is about falling in love, its protagonist drifting through the tedium of adult existence before meeting the love of her life. From the mild awkwardness of their first date, to moving in, daily routine, arguments and beyond, your part in each scene sometimes amounting to no more than scrolling through its practically wordless pages, but making you feel a part of its story in a way that graphic novels and films can’t. At only 30 minutes long and with little replay value, this is not for everyone, but its unique emotional journey is an experience that stays with you.

Wonderfully surreal and revelling in its Germanic roots, Lichtspeer starts with the god of light replacing your puny human fists with a light spear to hurl at the faces of a relentless onslaught of winged horses, penguins, giants, zombies and, in the case of the first boss, an insane biker Viking. You’ll earn plenty of LSD, which apparently stands for Licht Standard Denomination, to spend in the shop in order to expand your ‘uber fantastisch Lichtpowers’. Despite never taking itself seriously, the action quickly gets hectic, your accuracy with the lichtspeer and its various upgrades is strenuously tested, revealing some limitations in the touchscreen controls.