A brilliant return to the series at its best that modernises the point-and-click form.

What it lacks in charm, Temtem makes up for with mechanical depth and involved multiplayer.

Sunday Gold didn't set my mind on fire like those artsy fartsy RPG/adventure game hybrids, but it makes up for it with honest, lunch pail, hardcore resource management.

Tinykin's minion management might be shallow, but its platforming shines.

Tense and involving, if just slightly lacking smarts and spectacle. A firm foundation to build a series on.

Immortality is Sam Barlow’s best, most thought-provoking game yet, and a barnstorming debut for Half Mermaid.

The knockabout glee of classic Saints Row ultraviolence is here, but held back a little by new-found restraint.

An uncomfortable blend of vulnerability and brand consumption.

A fun Smash Bros. on PC that needs a little more fine-tuning to reach its full potential.

One of the best to ever do it. Rollerdrome is an action showstopper.

A superb tactics game that looks like an XCOM clone but really, really isn’t.

Insomniac's Spider-Man is as loveable as ever, even if the surrounding game can't quite live up to him.

Unlike anything else, and able to meld its two disparate halves into something cohesive and satisfying. You won’t feel fleeced if you buy this.

A gripping experience, despite an ending that kicks itself up the arse.

So Two Point Campus doesn't really rock the boat, fitting firmly into the mould of its predecessor—but replicating one of the best management games of recent years is a smart strategy. Genuine surprises are few, and I hope the UI flaws are fixed promptly, but this is still a guaranteed good time, bursting with energy, charisma and slapstick shenanigans. You should definitely consider enrolling.

Simple, polished systems allow Stray's rich fiction and charismatic star to shine.

Novel tactical mechanics make this indie a contender for the best strategy RPG this year.

A peaceful and utterly charming adventure that left me wishing for more.

A choppy start leads to a compelling survival experience in Raft.

Deep and unique enough for genre veterans, yet also simple and welcoming enough for newcomers.

An elegantly simple adventure that proves this new genre has legs.

The Cycle: Frontier is well-polished but undone by tedium and a lack of imagination.

A sweet treat that recreates the old recipe with higher quality ingredients.

Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak is more of the same for Rise fans, which is great, but the lack of truly 'new' stuff is disappointing.

You might love or loathe Neon White's willfully cringe anime storytelling, but these blistering platforming time trials are a heavenly delight.

Another superlative career mode, but the avatar customisation and tacked-on supercars feel like bullet points.

Evil Dead brings a brand new tactical thrill to the multiplayer horror genre.

This heartfelt, engaging reprise of a classic falls just shy of greatness due to a lack of fresh ideas and endurance.

A gripping horror story, but one where the interactive elements struggle to sustain the tension.

A fresh, high stakes take on card-based videogames, sure to appeal to more than just deck-builders.

A quality step-up for a series that's still short of greatness.

A satisfying disassembly sim wrapped in cutting workplace commentary, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a gig well worth taking up.

Unexplored 2 has potential, but right now the adventure's unreliable and storytelling's seriously flawed.

A promising mystery concept that doesn't quite give players a truly mind-melting temporal puzzle.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong offers an impressively flexible story, but that can't save it from its mediocre writing and scattershot game design.

A gorgeous game with frustrating combat and glitchy exploration, Trek to Yomi is the definition of style over substance.

An evocative life-sim RPG you won't want to wake up from.

A sublime addition to the Rogue Legacy family and one of the best roguelites yet.

A layered and engaging space opera that triumphs both on and off the battlefield.

Galactic Civilizations 4 is a vast and dependable grand space strategy. But there's little here that radical, and expect to meet it halfway.

A delightful update that fills the original game with even more humorous and thoughtful rabbit holes to get lost in.

An endlessly delightful destruction sandbox.

A documentary format worth expanding and repeating, more assists, and the same rough but rewarding racing.

The Skywalker Saga's competent design is elevated by its infectious, charming sense of humor.

Even Abermore's cult of beetle worshippers would draw the line at this many bugs.

Chinatown Detective Agency is a solid hardboiled detective adventure with a unique DIY approach to clue-solving—but it’s most impressive as a cultural artefact.

A worthy send-off to Guild Wars 2's Elder Dragon saga, and a reason to be optimistic about the future of the game.

Look past the murky aesthetic and clunky combat: this is an exciting fusion of immersive sim and CRPG.

On a good day, Norco is a bastion of beautifully evocative storytelling that invites any player to take refuge in its world. On a bad day, it cuts deep as a sobering, but loving portrait of a modern dystopia—a community on the edge of great change. But on a personal level, it's a game that understands who we are and what the internet has made us—how this digital constellation of fragmented subcultures has shaped the way we see the world and our place in it. There are few games in the world like Norco, and it belongs unequivocally in the highest tier of narrative experiences in the medium today.

Delightfully difficult combat and meaningful exploration make Tunic a retro-inspired modern marvel.

Better than Borderlands 3, but not quite reaching the heights of Borderlands 2 at its best.

Team Ninja serves up some solid Soulslike combat with a generous helping of cheese.

Fun combat and a sophisticated city burdened with the unfulfilled potential of a far scarier experience.

An overpriced game with a solid combat system that's buried under a mountain of banality and monetisation.

There's still work to be done on the game at large, but The Witch Queen is a massive step in the right direction. The campaign alone is worth the price of admission.

Great music, delivered in frustratingly bitty form. A clever rhythm game that doesn't mesh with its prominent story.

Satisfying sailing in a beautifully soggy apocalypse. I've never felt so connected to a vehicle in a game.

Mortal Sin is a skeletal roguelite, but the surprisingly meaty combat goes a long way to making up for that.

Shadow Warrior 3 buries a fun shooter so deep in muck that it’s not worth dirtying your hands.

Scarf is a nice if not particularly original idea, disappointingly executed on almost all fronts.

An open world action RPG from FromSoftware that reaches new heights, but spends too much time in the familiar.

Deeply silly and all the better for it, the missed political targets really don’t matter.

Ota Imon has something interesting to say with Wolfstride. I just hope it finds the right voice to say it with next time.

Not Tonight 2 does a decent job of adapting Papers, Please to a terminally hateful America, but the premise wears thin with every pit stop.

A brilliant final act with the series' most inventive and unusual factions yet.

One of the most exciting online CCGs released yet. It could use more singleplayer content, but for PvP, it's tough to beat.

Excellent combat and a stunning sense of scale help steer Lost Ark through its more tired MMO conventions.

Sifu will test your patience, but learning how to coolly dismantle a room full of goons with virtual kung fu is worth the pain.

A fresh new style and smoothed out lines make OlliOlli World an unmissable skate 'em up.

Wordle is a fantastic, mesmerizing daily puzzle that's bundled to a community offering some of the best vibes on the internet.

An underwhelming story but a massive, exciting sandbox of parkour and kinetic combat.

Windjammers 2 is a blast when you get into its zone. But despite that joyful core, it feels like a failure to bring this classic game to a new generation. Just as its style is trapped in the aesthetics of years gone by, so too is its approach to design. There a lot to like about it, and for some the stripped down challenge will be a welcome callback, but I imagine most will be left wondering what the fuss is about.

An uneven epic whose historical richness guides it through some awkward pacing.

A beautiful and engrossing detective game packed with mysteries, puzzles, and intrigue.

Rainbow Six Extraction is a fun and unremarkable co-op shooter with some very good ooze.

If it's a bit flabby and messy, though, Nobody Saves the World is far more often a delight. Guacamelee was a showcase for ingenious level design, but here DrinkBox demonstrates a different knack for layering up complex systems, which combine and play off each other in deviously logical ways. Under the brash exterior lies a wonderfully technical game that offers the freedom to let you discover the quality of its craft in your own time. Grinding through quests is a genuine pleasure and, well, who doesn't want to be a horse with the powers of a slug?

The best game on PS4 is now one of the best games on PC.

Monster Hunter: Rise is arguably the greatest entry in Capcom's flagship series, and a game that simply never stops giving.

A terrific return to form for singleplayer Final Fantasy that makes the series' future exciting, in a barebones (though functional) PC package.

It's impressive that the team is still able to take FF14's trappings and crystalise them into new forms even so many years on, from the way jobs and dungeons feel like the best they've ever been, to their confidence when it comes to experimenting with the relationship between gameplay and storytelling. But while there are some stunning vistas and lighting effects, and the detailing on new armour designs are enchanting, the age of the core game can't help but show, smooth as it is to play. This is a great final chapter to a story that'll stick with me, and I'm excited to see the team tell a new one—but I'm eager for some bigger changes to shake up Eorzea when they do.

There still isn't any game on the market quite like Farming Simulator, but the series is overdue for a gameplay makeover.

A fiddly take on management, survival and city building that you can still lose a weekend to.

Despite its strengths, Solar Ash fails to skate free from the gravity of its influences.

Halo Infinite can't quite deliver on being an open-world throwback, but it's the best shooting the series has seen to date.

An excellent turn-based strategy that shines in spite of some minor annoyances.

Ruined King’s innovative battle system is the highlight of an attractive but unexciting RPG.

The constant threat of chaos adds tension and fun to an otherwise basic management sim.

Battlefield 2042 makes gutsy changes to a series that needed them, and sets a new standard for built-in custom mode support.

An island full of riveting mysteries, stuck with some truly awful and jarring combat.

CoD's multiplayer is as dependable as ever, but Vanguard's campaign and Zombies mode fail to capitalise on what could be interesting ideas.

It's still one of the best dungeon crawlers ever made, but now it's on PC.

Strip away the framing and this is a throwaway JRPG that never finds its bite.

The veteran playmaker is still banging them in and deserves that new contract.

Playground's singular series gets a lush new setting, but otherwise remains committed to tuning an already winning formula. But even a marginal improvement on the best racing series around is worth celebrating.

Extreme sports made accessible to the point of basic. It's got a tin ear but a big heart.

A surprisingly good time when you're not forced to reload your checkpoint after a game-breaking bug.

A worthy new entry in the legendary series that’s equal parts progressive and dated.

New World's engaging crafting and faction rivalries are held back by abysmal PvE and a boring world.