Sports Interactive has exposed more of the game’s workings to players than ever. It feels both fresh and familiar at the same time, while being the best FM has ever played on day one.

Odyssey is a better, and certainly bigger, Assassin’s Creed game than any before it. It’s an RPG to rival the likes of The Witcher 3 with a massive historical world that is consistently and astonishingly handsome. The sheer number of moving parts can be intimidating but this is a special adventure that must be savoured.

Groundbreaking, but not quite as much as you're hoping it is. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't surpass its brilliant influences, but in Night City, Johnny Silverhand, and its chilling vision of hyper-capitalism, it claims territory of its own.

It’s fast, explosive and completely ridiculous, and it’s horribly frustrating when whole days go by without it working.

Much like the sport itself, the driving is as impressive as ever. But the worries about management’s business practices endure, too. Fundamentally, F1 2021 is worth it for the handling model.

While Portal was just a series of connected puzzle chambers it always felt that a developer was leading you through it. The Talos Principle feels like boxes within boxes, left by the developer for you to play in.

Cities: Skylines is absolutely the best city-builder I’ve played since SimCity 4. From macro to micro, from the sprawling transport networks and city-wide policies to the fine-tuned districts and street-level detail, it impresses.

Despite its shockingly short story, World of Warcraft: The War Within is the most confident and slick Blizzard's MMO has been in years.

Lurid characters, a deep RPG system, and captivating combat set in an unhinged apocalypse - inXile Entertainment’s latest shouldn’t be missed.

Starfield is a true behemoth of an RPG, and in many ways it’s the logical endpoint of Bethesda Game Studios’ well-worn formula. However, its massive scope pushes this formula to the absolute limit and the cracks begin to show, from feature creep to the stop-start nature of its exploration. Dedicated Bethesda fans are sure to get their fill, but this interstellar adventure never leaves the atmosphere.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a heavyweight shooter that, at its core, is lighter on its feet than its predecessor. However, id has at times gone too wide with its half-baked new features and open level design. Rip and tear, until it is done. But please, Slayer, get out of the damn robot.

Frostpunk 2 makes clever reconsiderations of, and expansions on, the first game’s design, offering a better rounded, even harsher follow-up to the original’s concept.

A gripping descent into something between alternate history and fever dream, realised beautifully in audiovisual flair, and lacking just slightly in the combat itself.

Solium Infernum regards strategy as a game of intellect, patience, and observation. Put into those terms, it might sound dry, but its visual flair combined with the ingenious ways it turns abstract ideas into tangible, comprehensible, and thrilling game mechanics make it irresistibly playable.

Where other South Park games have utterly failed to capture the crude, offensive, absurdly entertaining spark that has kept the cartoon running for 16 years, The Stick of Truth succeeds utterly. Not only is it series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker - who co-wrote the game - firing on all cylinders, it’s Obsidian’s most polished RPG. Not just a great South Park game, the Stick of Truth is simply a great game.

Characterized by stunning visuals rooted in Japanese folklore, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess' tower defense and hack-and-slash action is like nothing I've ever played before. While there are a few minor frustrations, Capcom's new adventure is a must-play and a ready-made cult classic.

Silent Hill f skillfully reinterprets the iconic horror series for a modern audience, acting as both a stirring homage and a strong vision for Silent Hill’s future.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is everything you could want from a sequel, building on its predecessor's strengths in storytelling and character design while also bringing new complexity to the dice and clocks that govern its capitalist dystopia.

Faith is a sterling beginning to what looks to be another feather in Telltale’s cap; a confident, slick opener to a mystery that begs to be explored. I wait with bated breath and sweaty palms for the next installment, where I’m sure to discover how my choices have only made things worse, at least if The Walking Dead is anything to go by.

An expansion that makes arguably the best game in the series, even if it was a tad conservative, better and more exciting. But the real coup is how it makes every turn feel important. There’s always a new deal to be made, more citizens to groom, burgeoning worlds to fine-tune and enemies to spy on. Crusade’s tireless pursuit to make the moment-to-moment management as engaging as a galactic war is the real headline feature.

With more tools at your disposal than ever, this is a rich, realistic management simulation that delivers thrills both on and off the pitch.

Skate Story takes the familiar and flips it, elevating itself beyond a skateboarding game. Its ethereal, thumping soundtrack propels when it wants to, with each new chapter surprising with its visual inventiveness and off-the-wall, abstract ideas. It's like peeling off a bit of wallpaper and finding a whole new world behind it.

The Alters spreads itself thinly, approaching heady subject matter with little imagination and shallow dialogue. Coupled with irritating resource management, cumbersome traversal, and an ever-ticking clock that harms its narrative pacing, 11 Bit's ambitious survival game is only for those who love deadlines and suffering.

It still has its quirks, but this year's Football Manager is the best one yet.

Changes on the battlefield don't make for a Total War experience to match historical and Warhammer entrants, but there's still a deeply involving strategic layer in Three Kingdoms that sits well with its licence.

Thronebreaker struggles as a card game but excels as a Witcher game due to its rich narrative and excellent, if simple, worldbuilding.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is simultaneously overblown and undercooked in some areas, but it nails the fundamentals of combat, platforming, and exploration, making for a strong Metroidvania adventure and an exciting new entry in a legendary game series.

Builds on what's good about its unapologetically hardcore predecessor and adds a full-featured Rallycross career mode for those who prefer to trade paint in their racing.

Two Point Museum is more of the same we’ve come to expect from Two Point Studios, but its imaginative approach to heritage ensures plenty of museum magic. Boasting a broad thematic range, endless exploration, and more decorative options than you can shake a dinosaur’s femur at, you’ll end up being the one getting excavated after sinking countless hours of your life into this addictive management sim.

A very workmanlike open-world game. Great to look at, competent overall, and charming when it tries something new, but formulaic when it doesn’t - which is most of the time.

Planet Coaster isn’t Rollercoaster Tycoon, nor is it Theme Park. This may put off those looking for a simpler, more nostalgic take on the genre, but it’s nonetheless the most creative, technically intricate theme park sim to date.

Telltale’s trip back to its comedy roots is a triumph. Rhys and Fiona are a duo I want to spend more time with. Baker and Bailey do a phenomenal job of bringing them to life, with spot-on comic timing and just enough humanity so they don’t simply feel like vehicles for jokes.

With a darker, more nuanced story, loads of activities, and clever tweaks to its core systems, Forsaken vastly improves the quality, quantity, and structure of content in Destiny 2. It's expensive, especially if you don't own the base game, and it could still peter out if the raid is bad or the DLC is as poor as it was last year. But as of now, Destiny is officially fun again.

Hearthstone is good. I adore it. But think very carefully how if you want to get in here.

Rise of the Tomb Kings is a much better format for adding new races than the Wood Elves or the Beastmen DLCs were.

Successfully juggling all of these needs is where Frostpunk is at its most challenging.

It looks as much of an iterative update as any FM game, but the added finesse of the new match engine, and the extra depth to the club staffing dynamics and development, make this the best version of the game yet. Get past the overly familiar visuals and you’ll find more reasons to keep on managing.

Stellar Blade often looks great, and it features solid combat design that remains exciting throughout. It’s let down, though, by a dull plot and a bland cast of characters who fail to make its story consistently compelling over the course of its runtime.

You can’t beat the feeling of playing Magic with cardboard in your hands. Still, Arena presents a slick realisation in digital form, and one that should suit both old hands and newcomers.

Bandai Namco combines excellent writing, stunning anime visuals, and a deep, rewarding combat system to make one of the best JRPGs of the year.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred takes everything that made Diablo 2 and 3 great, and modernizes for it the present day. Blending stunning visuals, musical majesty, and slick, gory combat, it surpasses the base game in every way, even if some may walk away from its story a little perplexed.

The Division 2 is a substantial evolution on the mechanics of the first game, with a more immersive world to boot. This is an impressively complete game, with heaps to offer players across all of its content prongs and a level of polish that belies the size of the game’s open world. Sure, it’s story is utterly forgetful to the point where you may not even realise it has one, but all the other components have been tuned to near-perfection.

It’s loaded with some of the best adventure game one liners; a gripping, winding plot that only slips up three quarters of the way through the game, and then improves drastically afterward; and a vibrant, bizarre world that, for all its weirdness, is extremely easy to get attached to. It’s just not a very impressive remaster.

With new official DLC, a glorious audiovisual overhaul and a touch of modern quality-of-life polish, this is now the best way to play Age 2 - though it'll take a while to match the HD edition's user content.

The lower-than-anticipated graphical quality and sometimes iffy performance is a bit of a blemish on the experience, but Fallout 3 suffered similarly and still achieved greatness... Its combat is the best Bethesda have ever produced: involving, kinetic, and exciting. The collection of weapons at your disposal are destructive and inventive, and strapping on power armour makes you feel like an absolute killing machine.

Dynasty Warriors Origins takes the series' crowd combat and visuals to the next level while plumbing new narrative depths. I'd have liked to put my own stamp on its dull protagonist, but this is still an essential ARPG for fresh-faced players and grizzled veterans alike.

Project Cars 2 is not a racer in which you ever feel compelled to simply go through the motions. It’s a game that centres you firmly as an active participant. It’s a game that makes you want to be a racer, and that might just be the best compliment that can be bestowed upon a representative of this genre. You just need to make sure you’ve got the patience required to work out exactly how best to begin consuming what it has to offer.

It’s not just a great, surprisingly insightful game. It’s also true to the literary genre that inspired it and Bill Willingham’s Fables comics.

The Silence and the Fury has some exciting new units and cohesive mechanics, but overly powerful factions prevent its campaigns from offering a fresh challenge.

Ubisoft were hoping for two things when they decided to give Assassin’s Creed a gap year: they wanted to deliver a more polished experience, and they wanted us all to have time to miss shanking people in the neck in a gorgeous historical setting. They have achieved both. Assassin’s Creed as a series has had a strange evolution, but going back to the start of the story, the place where the entire Creed was formed, has breathed new life back into it. Absence really does make the heart grow, well, stabbier.

Football Manager 2024 brings added finesse to the ultimate sports management simulator. There are frustrations for seasoned players, and a heavy learning curve for rookies, but this is still the best single-player sports game on the market.

After years of waiting for a game to capture the same joy of Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital arrives as an able successor. Although, two decades on we'd hoped it wouldn't share the same flaws.

With a campaign that takes a swing, the return of secret-packed, round-based Zombies, and multiplayer that makes some genuine improvements over years gone by, Black Ops 6 is a solid package that will please longtime fans and entice more than a few newcomers.

Smite is invigorating. It’s not another MOBA. It takes one aspect of a MOBA’s structure and builds on it until it's something else entirely. Smite has developed into an action game. One with lanes, creeps and towers, all the things you’d expect from a MOBA, but even the familiar looks different when viewed from Smite’s refreshing perspective.

This is undoubtedly the best 4X game I’ve played in years, delivering top-notch exploration, combat, and diplomacy alongside a rewarding and dynamic customisation system.

Blasphemous 2 is a well-constructed but ultimately conventional Metroidvania, and while it still delivers on holy grotesquerie and striking visuals, the end result is a sequel that feels markedly smaller in scope.

In Blackout, Treyarch has proved the series can still be agile and forward-thinking, while smart changes to Zombies and multiplayer show there's still plenty of life in these old bones.

A handsome, thoughtful blend of shooting and stealth that delights with its choice-driven play. Though it can feel painfully rushed at times, which is a shame.

It’s hard to recommend a game that makes you feel disgusted or upset, but I’m doing it anyway. This War of Mine is great, it just asks a lot from its players.

Content-rich and competent, if a little uninspired, Potter fans will enjoy Hogwarts Legacy’s faithful recreation of its universe, but it brings little of novelty to the open-world RPG genre.

Konami has taken great care with the remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, bringing this legendary spy thriller to a new audience with a modernized play style and thoughtful QoL tweaks to suit today’s gamers. If you haven’t played Snake Eater or any of the MGS series before, this is the perfect entry point into Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus.

To enjoy that game, you have to forgive incomplete or poorly implemented features, and make your peace with the evil AI. They’re small problems, in the scheme of things, and they don’t spoil a great drive. But they’re just enough to deny Project CARS what could have been a clean pole position.

Creative Assembly's art team has outdone itself on Curse of the Vampire Coast, building a visual treat that drips with detail. The campaign is an inventive but uneven experience, with some Legendary Lords more enjoyable than others.

Two Point Campus certainly makes the passing grade thanks to its unrelenting sense of humour and occasionally brilliant level concepts, but too much repetitive busywork keeps it from getting top marks.

The completionist in me is nearly overwhelmed with the sheer amount of things to do in A Realm Reborn. Square Enix really do deserve praise for not only fixing the issues of the original game, but far exceeding their goal.

It remains a fascinating project: endlessly discussable in its ambition and its frustrating mix of brilliance and ineptitude, and as imitators like The Division and EA’s coming Anthem prove, it is going to define an era, like it or not.

Age of Mythology: Retold is up there with the best RTS remakes thanks to its faithfulness to the original, myriad UI and aesthetic updates, and smart decision to leave AoM's enjoyable idiosyncrasies intact.

Card Hunter is anything but inconsequential. It’s a top tier turn-based tactics game, a secret TCG, and the first RPG I’ve ever played to make a virtue of a generic fantasy setting. It’s the inspired XCOM variant that Space Hulk seems to have turned out not to be.

A triumph in both mechanics and delivery, Hitman turns its controversial episodic release model into a true strength that's suited to IO's vast and nuanced sandboxes.

A marvellously accomplished realisation of RedLynx’s deranged vision for the series, which somehow manages to be both the most accessible and most unforgiving Trials game to date.

WoW's latest chapter offers a gorgeous leveling experience, interesting endgame systems, and a pile of well-designed dungeons. Though some rough edges remain, ongoing hotfixes are chipping away at them.

A scorching, over-the-top sendup of capital’s morbid contempt for labour, Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs adds a wild new unit roster and a fun new campaign, and is an essential addition to Total War: Warhammer 3.

If you enjoyed Sekiro's parry-heavy combat and Nioh’s mission-based structure, The First Berserker Khazan will likely work for you. Even with few new ideas of its own and often unexciting levels, its build variety and brutal boss fights more than make this soulslike worth the effort.

While at first glance Lies of P is ‘Bloodborne at home,’ Round8 Studio’s clockwork adventure writes its own unique story, filled to bursting with expansive Steampunk-style environments and defined by impressive, well-balanced combat. In some cases, though, it gets a little too clever for its own good, tying itself up in the strings that it fights so hard to break free from.

A superhero game that teases the brain as much as it can tug at the heart, with rich strategy mechanics, great writing, and wonderful characters. A few bugs and visual problems aside, this is a great tactical RPG.

After the fifth and sixth games, the Resident Evil series was in dire need of a re-think. That’s exactly what Capcom have done, and they’ve done so in a way that’s braver, bolder, and more assured than I could ever have dreamed. They’ve refreshed the series for modern times, incorporating new techniques to ensure the horror is both sickening and chilling, while re-focusing the core structure around the things that made these games so great to begin with. The result is something that will almost certainly go down as a Resident Evil classic; a title that will be spoken about with reverence in the future, and an excellent turning point for the series as a whole. In those respects, Resident Evil 7 is the new Resident Evil 4.

Resident Evil Village pulls the best bits from the series' past and recombines them into something fresh and surprising. It can’t maintain that momentum for its entire run, but Village’s heights are among the best in Resident Evil's illustrious history.

Forza Motorsport is an adequate racing game, one that delivers on the track but doesn’t come with enough bells and whistles to be considered a true great in the genre. There are better options in almost all racing sub-genres on PC, but when you’re in the cockpit, the driving itself is ferocious and raw, with plenty to enjoy.

Nexus 5X is a fun, breezy, and surprisingly nuanced spin on Stellaris that's perfect for an evening's gaming session with friends.

Sparking Zero takes the Budokai Tenkaichi series to new heights, successfully recreating the grand spectacle of an epic Dragon Ball fight. With plenty of single-player content to get through, a custom battle mode bursting with potential, and online multiplayer to challenge players around the world, Dragon Ball fans have never had it better than this.

These games often feel their age, but their genius shines through, especially in this polished package. This is one of the best remasters around, and an easy recommendation for the nostalgic or the curious.

A beautiful-looking simulation with very specific appeal that will likely turn off as many people as it interests. If you’re in the latter group, however, this is an indispensable physics toybox.

A first-person slasher for Monty Python fans rather than reenactors, Chivalry 2's unswerving dedication to fun and goofiness makes it a rare treat in modern multiplayer gaming.

Hitman 2 introduces a wealth of meaningful new toys and systems, generously reshapes the first season with them, and then throws in a couple of sturdy multiplayer modes to boot.

The Banner Saga 2 captures much of what made the first game such a compelling fight for survival. It has a tendency to focus on the bigger picture and with the large number of characters that don’t have much to say, some of the emotional engagement from the original is lost, but both the management side of things and the tactical battles have been lavished with improvements. The journey is bleak and savage, but the game is great.

In general, what all of this adds up to is a more sensitive game. All of the depth is there as before, but the humanity of football is represented in a greater way - whether that is through players striking up bromances that lead to goals on the pitch or you personally getting involved in pricing wars with clubs from Europe and, increasingly, China.

Sega’s original sequel has received the remake it’s due. The story fumbles in places, but its high points allow it to sit next to Yakuza 0 as the best the series has to offer.

Stray merges feline mayhem with a classic cyberpunk setting, inviting you to explore its neon dystopia while never taking itself too seriously.

A Plague Tale Requiem is much the same as Innocence in terms of gameplay, but its character development and blood-soaked universe make it an absolute pleasure to play.

It doesn't do anything fundamentally new and too much of the series' jank remains, but when Valhalla works, it's a marvel, and it works far more often than not.

Pulling its inspirations from across videogames, this radioactive romp is the strongest in the series, and one of the best post-apocalyptic games ever made.

Obsidian’s RPG fulfills its potential, but only in fits and starts. Sure, its worst moments are only ever as bad as workmanlike RPG-making, but they make the stretches between some instances of genuine greatness a little more disappointing.

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2’s properly vicious combat and impressive presentation are let down by a bland story and uninteresting mission design.

Endless Legend combines fantastic fiction with compelling strategy. Underpinning it all is a strong design philosophy that connects the tenets of the 4X genre together seamlessly, while providing a plethora of options without being overwhelming. Even during a time when we’re seeing a lot of 4X offerings, it sets itself apart, promising something different from its contemporaries.

I’m completely invested now. I worry about Bigby. I’m pointlessly going through the decisions he made, I made, attempting to figure out how they will change the way the rest of the fables’ view their protector. But most of all I want to finish this case and catch whoever is responsible for this titanic mess, and then rip his limbs off. Bigby’s indignation and quest for vengeance is infectious.

A host of minor and major improvements add up to make Battlefield 6 the smoothest, most bombastically entertaining entry in the series to date. A lacklustre campaign aside, this is a triumphant return and a must-play for both BF veterans and newcomers alike.

Mortal Kombat 1 offers smart changes to the series’ gameplay, an entertaining story that still threatens to baffle newcomers and veterans alike, an online mode that works well on PC, and tons of gore. While the seasonal Invasions mode is a fascinating idea, it’s unclear whether it’ll be enough to retain long-term interest. However, this is still a fantastic, horribly gruesome Mortal Kombat game that’s well worth your time.

Ninja Gaiden 4 revives a legacy that’s languished for far too long. Its technical achievements in camera and combat movement eclipse its limited enemy and level diversity. Sure, the story is a glorified stepping stone for the future, but I’m too busy reducing enemies to a shower of limbs and bloody pulp to care.