Valve has improved the Counter-Strike formula with the release of CS2, even if there’s still a lot of work to be done before it’s feature complete. While we’re in the dark on specific timelines, the developer’s work rate has been promising since launch, and if it continues at this pace, we’re in for an exciting 2024 as Valve ushers in a new era of Counter-Strike.

While the repetitiveness of its turn-based battle system can become frustrating, Monster Hunter Stories 2 is more than a novel twist on the main series' core components.

Familiarly solid cover shooting with the occasional surprise. It’s fitting The Coalition has opted to simply call the latest game ‘Gears’, because mostly, it’s just going through the motions.

Chucklefish's strategy tribute does nothing worse than Advance Wars, and little better - instead, it’s exactly what it needs to be to spiritually succeed. It’s small, in both character models and design ambition, but it’s probably going to be massive. Despicable.

Indeed, Prey is the best performing triple-A game I’ve played for many months. It’s incredibly rare to be able to boot up a game at maximum settings and get consistent reports of 90+ fps when using mid-tier hardware, but here we are. No matter how many benchmarks I ran, the reports came back clear and consistent: on a GTX 1060, an average of over 100 fps is easy to attain. [Tech Review]

Loop Hero successfully borrows from a surprising range of genres to create a refreshing new twist on some very old RPG ideas.

In some ways it’s surprising that - despite being traditional - it doesn’t feel like a Lucasarts game. That’s likely what backers wanted, and whilst those elements are there, this is a Double Fine game to the final letter. It’s gentle, loving, and fun; not a Grim Fandango rehash, but the gaming equivalent of a petting a kitten. If your eyes are not welling up with sheer joy at such a thought, then perhaps Broken Age is not for you.

It's an improvement on the scrappier feeling original, introducing that one tiny combo-blending manual trick that transforms the game into a profoundly new-feeling and lovely thing.

An ambitious, beautiful, and obsessively detailed society simulation that still needs to iron out a few rough edges.

A well-implemented redux of a moment in time, which may surprise you with its engaging focus on leveling and the friendliness of its players.

The '90s have nothing on this. Torment: Tides of Numenera might have been fuelled by nostalgia but outstrips its contemporary peers in reactivity, writing and invention.

AreaNet's best expansion yet is brimming with all the detail and character that makes Guild Wars 2 so special, and its approachability to solo players means nobody has to miss out this time around.

It is a game crafted by those with an irrepressible love, and possibly hunger, for words and tales.

Wolfenstein is a masterpiece of its genre. It does good shooting men. But it's more than that, it's an effortlessly melancholy adventure that doesn't drown in its own bombast. It's like finding out that a superstar footballer is a poet, or finding your dog pressing flowers. It's a game with hidden depths that you're invited to explore, but ones that never overshadow the thing it's best at...Which is shooting all the men so that all their blood comes out.

Its story doesn't quite stick the landing, but this is a beautiful game - not just in its look, sound, and feel, or even in its real and relatable characters, but in its message and its delivery.

Gameplay is solid from the start and gains depth, transforming you into a Jedi badass. Respawn has also nailed the Star Wars universe, for better (sights, sounds, and cinematic flair) and worse (cringey dialogue and vacuous plot).

Unlike every other Alien game to date, the alien in Alien: Isolation is an unpredictable enemy. It's off-rails, unscripted and behaves pretty much however it pleases. Like a mad Tamagotchi, the alien is powered by some clever AI routines that allow it to hunt and kill using a bunch of different senses.

Taking lessons learned from previous games, trimming out anything less effective, and scoring home runs with its fresh additions, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is the new gold standard for the series and an absolute treat for RPG and action game fans.

Unrivalled parkour mechanics and tough-as-nails combat more than make up for a bland cyberpunk setting.

Built on the foundations of several fantastic games, and those qualities remain – but you already own them. F1 22 simply doesn’t offer enough for a full-price purchase.

An online horror shooter packing some suitably devilish details, but slow pacing and cruel penalties don’t give you much reason to return.

An exceedingly complex, infinitely rewarding space strategy game. It’s made me more excited about the genre than any other game of its kind since Galactic Civilizations II.

Ghostrunner 2 improves upon everything that made its predecessor great. Framed by a stunning, neon-bathed city with a soundtrack that’s to die for, One More Level’s latest is a high-octane parkour adventure that you really don’t want to miss.

By opening it up and providing countless meaningful choices and random events, Relic has put the war in the players’ hands. It’s not a directed journey through a bunch of scenarios where winning is all that matters; it’s a persistent struggle where failure is always nipping at the Americans’ heels, where an entire company can be lost in battle, making the war seem even more desperate. It’s exhausting, and the best game in the Company of Heroes series.

Any doubts I had during the first episode have been washed away. This is Telltale’s storytelling ability at its very best. Filled with emotionally resonant dialogue, painful scenes and a cast that’s quickly matured, A House Divided makes it seem possible for The Walking Dead Season Two to eclipse its celebrated predecessor.

A powerfully distilled story told in a time and place that haunts you with its beauty, its mystery, and restraint. Firewatch takes the time to turn its setting into a character, and it's one of the most three-dimensional videogame characters you'll encounter in 2016.

Marathon is a feast for the senses - vibrant sci-fi visuals and world building, amazing sound design, and a brilliant combat experience are the main things elevating it above its extraction shooter competitors. Its endgame map, Cryo Archive, also creates the same intimidating yet jaw-dropping atmosphere of some of Bungie’s finest Destiny raids. However, issues such as clunky inventory management and dull faction quests hold it back from true greatness right now.

Mouse P.I. For Hire takes every noir trope and turns it into something new. A monochrome shooter with a delicious mystery at its core, the varied locales and wonderful voice cast make this one of the best games I've played all year.

That’s the thing about Beyond Earth: I feel like for every considered, clever addition to Civ’s formula, there’s always a near miss. War is fun, but the AI is not. Aliens are novel, but humans are dreary. I enjoyed playing it, I’m still playing, but it just hasn’t gripped me like previous games. I want it to be better, more interesting, than it is.

But Vietnam ‘65 is really closer to great board game design than traditional PC wargame design. It’s a single scenario that operates according to very special rules. But it holds up under repeated play.

Forget the campaign - multiplayer is where it’s at. Impeccably balanced, ludicrously varied, and damn near perfect.

Turns out it’s possible to be a turn-based Warhammer 40k game and still retain user-friendliness and pace. Who knew.

Wasteland 2 is huge. It’s not just the massive map, but the number of stories and the myriad ways they can play out. Though some moments left me disappointed, I always left the game eager to return. Inventive solutions to tricky standoffs, my failure to save a life, a silly line of text spotted in the corner of my eye - those are the things that stuck with me every time I pressed “quit”.

A vibrant snapshot of the Victorian era that’s bustling with character, but doesn’t explore the intriguing, seismic politics of the period.

While not every multiplayer addition is as good as it could be, Modern Warfare’s campaign sets a new gold standard for the series that will be hard for sequels to match.

By building on the original’s foundations with more impactful decision-making and gameplay refinements, The Outer Worlds 2 feels like the Obsidian game that Fallout: New Vegas fans have craved for over a decade.

I’m hooked in the same way I was with the last game, and not because it’s stayed the same, but because it’s managed to strike that balance between the comfortingly familiar and the refreshingly new.

Frontier delivers a richly detailed and visually glorious zoo creation sim for genre fans, newbies, and animal lovers alike, bloated only a little by a few clumsy interfacing points.

F1 25 offers a stronger driving experience and greater attention to detail than its predecessors, with major changes to My Team breathing new life into the mode. It's not a revolution, but it's undoubtedly Codemasters' best F1 game in years.

Polishing a classic formula without revolutionising it, this is a robust package that includes something for just about every kind of RTS player, from beginners to grizzled veterans.

Battlefield V delivers the series' finest single-player campaign yet, painting the horror of war from rarely seen perspectives. That tension carries through to the multiplayer, which has been tuned to hammer home your vulnerability in a firefight.

TV show stalwarts should breathe easily and those on the fence about the game’s penchant for outrageous humour to definitely give it a go for the sake of its fantastic gameplay. However, if South Park has never been to your taste, The Fractured But Whole makes no attempt to change that.

The classic RTS battles carry the third entry in this once-essential series, returning more or less untouched, but alongside a bloated and unfinished campaign mode that feels at odds with the core ideas of Company of Heroes.

One of the most engaging and original story-based games this year. It’s dragged down by some trite videogame elements but its characters elevate it above its contemporaries.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider captures everything that’s great about Arkane’s assassination series, while also showing that it can still surprise. Smart tweaks improve the core gameplay and, if you’re worried about having fewer powers to play with, you can always go back through it with Corvo’s moveset when you’re done. As far as mission quality goes, it peaks in the middle - the fourth mission has us revisit a location from Dishonored 2, albeit slightly reworked, and the final mission feels much more linear than what’s come before. Still, it all leads to a satisfying conclusion that neatly ties up every plot strand that’s been hanging since that political assassination, whoever you decide is responsible.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is an impeccable story of coming to terms with trauma and making difficult decisions, punctuated by moments of outstanding beauty and strength.

Initially unwieldy but eventually engrossing, Age of Wonders' latest entry translates its Civ-meets-XCOM formula brilliantly to a new sci-fi setting. Even if the elements of that sci-fi are a bit rote.

A superb dungeon crawler that's held back from perfection by some crude monetisation practises and half-baked dialogue.

Black Myth Wukong is the Journey to the West adaptation I've always wanted – an ambitious action RPG with stunning visuals, spectacular boss designs, and snappy combat. However, sluggish camera tracking, restrictive exploration, and early-game difficulty spikes might be a dealbreaker for some.

Though the natives still feel underdeveloped and the colonies don’t really become interesting until they attempt to gain independence, Conquest of Paradise is still a welcome addition to Europa Universalis IV. It adds more than it takes away.

Its core combat is probably better than XCOM's. If only it did a little more with it, Gears Tactics would be one of the greats.

Old World adds dimension and complexity to the 4X style, but its slow pace and intricate resource management hinder it from reaching its full potential.

An outstanding homage to Fire Emblem which, in its rich cast of characters and thoughtful tweaks to combat, occasionally surpasses its classic inspiration.

This is Company of Heroes 2 at its best, a standalone that focuses on the series’ core: man and machine duking it out across Europe. Those seeking a narrative will find plenty of stories in the tense battles amid crumbling towns and dark forests, so the campaign isn’t missed at all

Struggles to do justice to what should be its show-stopper moments, but breathes much-needed life into the Khajiit and their homeland.

A phenomenal single-player experience that competes with the best this iconic series has to offer. Multiplayer needs a fair few structural tweaks, but still ultimately sparks joy.

Just as Endless Legend and Civilization V are now far superior to how they started, so can Endless Space 2 be. It’s odd to talk of foundations in something so markedly floaty and space-based, so perhaps it’s better to think of this as an outpost, plonked down on a planet waiting to be colonised. It’s a fertile planet, sure, but one that’s yet to be fully exploited.

Though on the surface it’s a simple tribute to Command and Conquer, Tempest Rising breaks free of its influences with a visual style and mechanical flourishes all of its own. Its core ideas may work better in a smaller-scale tactics game rather than an RTS, but there are several missions where everything fits together.

The Evil Within 2 is entirely its own horror experience - part open-world survival game, part psychological horror. It is a bold, bloody evolution of the survival horror genre. Moreover, like its centipedal monstrosities, this is a game that excels at defying expectations. Scenery, gameplay, and pacing shift gears constantly, keeping me guessing nearly every minute of the 20 hours it took to reach the end of its story.

It’s challenging and thoughtful, but it does lamentably become repetitive.

Reanimal exploits our love of theories and in doing so creates a game that’s bloated and narratively confusing. While it’s undeniably pretty and the boss designs are cool, two-player co-op is fiddly and unforgiving, detracting from any real tension the game tries to build.

Headline features that don’t have a lot going for them mean Football Manager 2023 is the smallest step forward in the series yet, but a step forward nonetheless, to make this the best FM game to date.

Never before has a game felt more at home on VR when compared to its PC counterpart. PowerWash Sim VR sets a new standard for the care and attention to detail that devs must now meet when porting their games into virtual reality. [Meta Quest 3]

Elite: Dangerous is a beautiful arcade experience, plugged into an empty galaxy, one so big and bold that it might trick you into thinking there’s more to see and do than there really is. You’ll probably love it anyway.

The new World Congress and climate change mirror real-life in that they're partly beyond your control, making them hard to factor into your schemes. The new civs are among the best and most novel in the game, though.

Honkai Star Rail is a highly polished turn-based RPG that builds off the Hoyoverse gacha machine, and while it certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, its colourful cast of characters and mercurial tone sets it on the right track.

Life is Strange 2's first episode goes in a bold new direction that points the series towards current political issues as much as it does human drama. It's promising but a little slow to get going after a thrilling opening scene.

Remnant 2 marries Matryoshka level design and sublime set pieces with memorable bosses, all while polishing the combat system and build customization of its genre-bending predecessor to a spit shine.

A creative expansion that adds enjoyable new mechanics and units, plus a unique two-stage campaign, without feeling disjointed from the core game.

Valorant is not original. Rather, it's a successful interpretation of and expansion on its inspirations, with impeccable gameplay, well-designed maps, and a dev team eager to refine it further.

Fall Guys’ ingenious game show royale formula is a recipe for success, and its gameplay is full-fat unadulterated fun.

Both its greatest strength and biggest weakness, the precision that Broken Arrow demands often chokes its more abstract qualities. It's a stark spectacle with nasty, legitimately cynical overtones, but its unwillingness to compromise aesthetically and tonally almost makes it mechanically inflexible, to the point that the player often doesn't feel included in the strategy making whatsoever.

Infinity Nikki takes all the best bits of Genshin Impact to deliver the definitive dress-up game for girls. With a vast wardrobe of exquisite outfits to collect, its whimsical open world is a treasure trove of activities that distract from the gacha grind.

Updated systems, fleshed out characters, and, yes, higher fidelity graphics, all mean that this original gangster epic can sit proudly alongside the rest of the family.

Dungeons of Hinterberg is a wonderfully captivating trek through the gorgeous lands of its magical alpine setting, where a world of adventure, challenges, and intrigue stands at odds with the political machinations of a greedy government.

Successfully brings an icon into the modern era, and the underlying gameplay still shines. But while Resurrected does a better job than Warcraft III: Reforged, it leaves similar questions unanswered over its feature set and long-term community support.

Simple in almost all respects, Luftrauser is one of Vlambeer’s biggest triumphs because it strips back everything in the name of exposing the fun at the centre of the game. It’s almost as if the designers were engineers of the rauser itself; reducing weight and tweaking fuel lines to ensure the most effective deliverer of death possible.

It’s the best that Age of Wonders has ever been.

Some creaky design concepts that don't hold up well and a slipshod PC port hold Nier Replicant back from greatness on PC.

Last Epoch is an ARPG that puts mechanics first, and does so with a resounding sense of class identity. Its player-friendly design ensures you have all the tools you need for the job, and rivals such as Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 would do well to pay attention to some of its smartest innovations.

It integrates the fighty and the talky enough to make Rapture feel a more dangerous and believable place, discards the impenetrable conceits with which the first DLC began, and brings an almost seven year old series full circle and to a satisfying end. What a wonderful trick, and a fitting note for one of PC gaming’s best loved studios (as we know them, at least) to bow out on.

It is, across the board, an improvement on Rome II, despite some issues that have been carried over.

The best Three Kingdoms DLC so far - a stirring rendition of the final days of the Han, the people who rose against them, and the humble heroes whose ambitions would change China forever.

There’s endless hours of enjoyment in ArcheAge for just about anyone. If you can stomach a slightly stale questing experience, and get your head around the quite innocent labour system, it’s an MMO with near endless potential for player driven, organic content. And to be quite honest, it’s the closest thing to a true fantasy sandbox experience on the market, and will be for a good time yet.

Oblivion Remastered proves that The Elder Scrolls 4 has withstood the test of time. It’s the perfect opportunity for new audiences to discover why it’s so beloved, and a nostalgic throwback to Bethesda’s golden years for older fans. However, its extensive quality-of-life features aren’t enough to excuse the endemic performance woes of Unreal Engine 5.

While the starring wayward sons of A World Betrayed offer flavourful and dynamic new campaigns, neither quite manages to leave the shadow of the dramatically different playstyles in the Mandate of Heaven DLC.

After such a long wait for a successor to X-Wing and TIE Fighter, Star Wars: Squadrons feels like a lucky shot with a proton torpedo.

Immortals Fenyx Rising's open-world is a constant delight to explore, even if it struggles to balance history and humour.

Quality of life and balancing changes set the stage for the next ten years of Rainbow Six Siege X, forging strong foundations that bring the FPS game roaring into 2025, but retreading old ground with map and operator remasters feels like it’s running out of mileage. Fortunately, the 6v6 Dual Front mode breaks the mold with something new, and a reworked sound system will have you relearning the game as if it were Year One all over again.

Earth Defense Force 6’s quality of life improvements make for the strongest gameplay in the series to date, but an annoying intro and the same glitches as usual leave it as a diamond in the rough.

Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail introduces some of the game’s best dungeons and trials yet alongside a compelling story that, while slow to ramp up, delivers resoundingly in its second act, setting a promising precedent for the future of the MMORPG on all counts.

While Amerzone - The Explorer's Legacy is a loving tribute to its source material, its gameplay remains trapped in the past. The world is more realized than ever before and, at points, almost feels real, but the addition of a few new puzzles doesn't quite inject the excitement that I'd hoped. Amerzone is a must-play for fans of Benoît Sokal, but is unlikely to wow the new generation of point-and-click adventurers.

The shooting is sharp and impactful, and the slow and snipey set pieces feel as slick as they did all the way back in All Ghillied Up, but it feels like the ratio behind this tried-and-true formula is a little off this time. It’s more stop-start than any COD in recent memory, and the highlights are diluted by a few too many drab stealth missions. It’s not one of the best Call of Duty campaigns, but it’s far from a bad one. [Campaign review]

While its open world is stunning, its combat is robust, and its dual-protagonist design is somewhat novel, Assassin’s Creed Shadows proves too repetitive and dramatically flat to wholeheartedly recommend taking its trip back in time.

While it won't appeal to every shooter fan out there, Hell Let Loose's complex interplay of FPS action and real-time tactical planning rewards communication, coordination, and genuine leadership in a way few other games even attempt.

While there is a lot of potential in House Flipper 2, it hits too many stumbling blocks that prevent it from achieving greatness. If you don’t bother with sandbox mode, at least in its current state, and opt to rush through the restrictive story mode quests, house flipping itself is good fun. So perhaps House Flipper 2 should just stick to its name and what it does best.

Dying Light: The Beast is a serious gore-fest that, when you dig a little deeper, turns out to be a rather silly playground teeming with ingenius ways of dispatching the undead. The fun, for me, was finding them all, and while it may not stick with me for long, this is still the best that Dying Light has ever been.

The elements are there to create something truly special, but right now Metal: Hellsinger feels more like a Doom Eternal mod than it does a standalone title.