Limbic has turned down its opportunity for revolución in favour of reinforcing the rule of El Presidente - a safe pair of hands for colourful city-building and wry commentary on the abuse of democracy.

Boasting the best swordfighting in the business, Sekiro is a game of rare but deserved self-assurance. You’ll despair as it breaks you down, but then you’ll exult as it builds you up. It’s a journey like little else in gaming, and if you’re up for the challenge, you absolutely have to play it.

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.

Few games are as endearing in their madness as Devil May Cry 5. It’s deeply old-school and made for fans first, but its new character will entertain newcomers and keep them coming back for more.

The culmination of over two decades of refinement, resulting in fluid, accessible, and balanced combat mechanics. While the game’s lurid focus on flesh will divide opinion, it remains one of the most polished and fully-featured fighting games in recent years.

This hack-and-slash wears its simplicity like a lovely Scandinavian jumper, but is scarcely substantial enough for its handful of hours and drenched by awful aesthetic choices.

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.

Beautiful and mechanically robust throughout, but weighed down by repetitive missions, a flabby structure, and a lot of the people you meet in Fort Tarsis. Even the strongest beats become tiresome if repeated or drowned in white noise, and that’s Anthem in a nutshell.

A year of updates has helped fill out its light content, but the real magic was there from the start. Rare’s take on cartoon piracy encourages you to behave as a cartoon pirate should: a little bloodthirsty, a little silly, and almost always drunk.

Despite having 50 years of legacy to work from, this manga mash-up feels like a rush job. The combat offers basic fun, but as a complete package Jump Force proves to be a flop.

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.

Respawn’s game elevates its entire genre, doing away with its failings while innovating upon its strengths. From out of nowhere, it’s become the prodigious new face of a worldwide phenomenon.

Competent, with enough fun weapons and silly spectacle to make it inoffensive entertainment. While a half-decade of development hell could’ve ended with worse results, it’s tough to muster much excitement for what’s here.

Ubisoft’s open-world shooter digs into what makes the series great. Some of those experiments bear fruit, others bring frustration.

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.

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.

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.

Failbetter continues to revolutionise the RPG - not by burning it all down, but by slipping pages of prose into every crevice it can.

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.

An intricate and highly replayable game that shines across both of its genres, MegaCrit’s debut combines a simple premise with near-flawless mechanical execution.

Rules maintains the series' dual coming-of-age narrative, but often undermines its central pillar of choice.

Capcom’s remake is a spectacularly gory game that brings a classic in line with horror titles of today, and only at the loss of some of the original’s beloved goofiness.

Easy to master and a campaign full of action movie-worthy missions but the game is let down by frustrating checkpointing and simplistic combat.

My Time at Portia is a gorgeous game with solid crafting mechanics and a mysterious post-apocalyptic tale, but its intriguing story is buried beneath slow pacing and flimsy characters.

Insurgency: Sandstorm is a solid shooter that offers the series’ best intense, tactical thrills, but can’t help but feel behind the times in both theme and looks.

Just Cause 4 refines everything that made its predecessor great. It’s still one of the most generous and bombastic open world games, but its new systems don’t progress the sandbox as much as they should.

Robust tactics and elegant design ensure Artifact’s often sublime strategy isn’t complex. But a lack of long-term goals and a risky monetisation strategy leaves the game’s future feeling uncertain.

Fallout 76 isn’t to be compared with other Fallouts - it’s a spin-off that wants to be something new. Unfortunately, the multiplayer sandbox it tries to be is stagnant and intensely frustrating to play.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

With a beautiful Blighty and an innovative season-based online endgame, Horizon 4 is a wonderfully polished, thoroughly modern racer. Sadly, it doesn’t feel quite as progressive or impactful as its Aussie predecessor, and there’s a sense the sandbox series is ever so slightly coasting on its laurels.

Battle for Azeroth is a solid follow-up to Legion that'll keep fans happy - if only for the new continents, War mode, and dungeons. Time will tell if the rest of the features will give the expansion the shelf life it needs.

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.

Eidos Montreal applies its signature gameplay touches to Tomb Raider, making for the series's most satisfying balance of combat, exploration, and puzzle solving. Unfortunately these mechanical successes are let down by a journey that fails to deliver a compelling study of Lara's personal shadows.

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.

Total War: Rome 2 is five years old but Rise of the Republic acts as an anti-ageing cream, bolstering it with a new campaign and features that means it can keep up with Total War: Warhammer 2.

You might well find the evocative, smoke-damaged backdrop of ‘80s espionage fresh enough to carry you through a satisfying playthrough. But even with the plates changed and the serial number filed off, there’s no mistaking XCOM 2.

Beneath We Happy Few’s flaws is an excellent story, some clever first-person exploration, and a bunch of stunning design work. But the rest of the experience feels profoundly self-conscious and unsure of what it actually wants to be, imposing on you in some areas while remaining hands-off elsewhere.

Simply put, Monster Hunter: World is one the finest action RPGs ever made and a unique, rich co-op title to boot. Spectacular and deep in equal measure, with the technical improvements of the PC version, it's happy hunting all round.

If anything I took on the role of a benevolent eccentric, building a park and bringing long-dead creatures back to life for my own pleasure and fascination, not to gouge the wallets of the people drawn to the creatures I was so captured by. Basically, what I’m getting at is that Jurassic World Evolution made me into John Hammond.

What’s struck me most about my time with Vampyr is that it manages to turn you into a predator through its mechanics as much as it does with its storytelling. It does collapse under its own weight by the end, but the fact that it so effectively seduces you, almost trance-like, into roleplaying a villain makes it worth biting into.

State of Decay 2 is a strong sequel that, bugs and odd design decisions aside, expands on the innovative original in all the right places. The larger map might not add much, but the game is deeper and more refined. I found that the best stories in State of Decay 2 were the ones I wrote myself but, while the game can stand on its own in single-player, I look forward to doing that even more with friends.

It’s an extraordinary game. One that you’ll feel faintly lost in at first, while its many systems permeate your grey matter. But all the while its story unfolds and reveals new wrinkles, the sense of place growing deeper. The mechanics underpinning everything in Pillars II have shifted marginally towards accessibility, but that still leaves a huge amount of room for brutal challenge levels to its combat - and, crucially, it’s scalable enough that you can whack down the challenge, ignore your party composition, leave the pause key unpressed, and enjoy the adventure.

The fact that I can’t wait to go back and play through the game again with each of them gives you an indication of just how moreish Thrones of Britannia is.

In BattleTech, the persistence between battles lets you weave a whole new plot through the game, one filled with characters and stakes that are wholly your own.

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

Its failures prevent Far Cry 5 from being a classic, but its successes mean it has plenty to keep you embroiled in its reactive world.

Q.U.B.E. 2 takes the first-person puzzler in a direction I can only hope Portal 3 might someday go.

Although the series naturally lends itself to scale, it has often been observed that Total War is at its worst when bloat sets in. So perhaps it should have been no surprise that Arena finds victory in focus, accentuating just a handful of tactical elements so that they become the totality of the game. Then again, that is exactly what makes Arena so much fun: surprise.

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is still lumbered with some of the quirks of its ‘90s origins. This is understandable - it is a remaster, not a remake - but those quirks do cause some friction. Beneath them, though, the underlying gameplay remains as solid as a fully upgraded phalanx. Indeed, some of its ideas are almost as fresh today as they were 20 years ago, which says something rather damning about the genre as a whole. The game also looks and sounds terrific, and fans of the original will be delighted.

Kingdom Come is as stubborn as it is embracing, making for a potentially tumultuous relationship between player and game. But it is a relationship I absolutely feel compelled to nurture.

Civ VI is undoubtedly a better game with the addition of Rise and Fall - especially when you are struggling to hold everything together through a Dark Age. However, I do not think this expansion brings it to a place where all of its core ideas have really gelled yet.

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

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is without a doubt one of the best and most inventive multiplayer shooters of all time, and its persistent flaws have done nothing to detract from that, or its popularity. Perhaps it is not the first of its kind, but it is the purest distillation of what battle royale games are about: self-preservation by any means. And that, as 26 million people have now discovered, is endlessly appealing.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm is a masterful prequel, then.

Star Wars Battlefront II houses a decent single-player campaign and good multiplayer, but, like the otherwise slick design of its multiplayer maps, that accomplishment is often obscured by distractions. Normally, my brain blocks out in-game monetisation, letting me enjoy the game for what it is. Battlefront II changes that because spenders get a real advantage here. You cannot help but notice it encroaching on everything, plastered all over the game’s convoluted, drawn-out progression system.

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.

As a whole package, Call of Duty: WWII has a little something for everyone to enjoy, but that has been the story of this series for a long time. No, this homecoming is far, far better than the sum of its parts, a true return to form in practically every respect. It feels alien to be looking back on a new Call of Duty release as anything other than enjoyable yet unremarkable triple-A fare, but here we are. Call of Duty: WWII delivers on all fronts: compelling and heartfelt in its storytelling; imposing in its sense of scale and spectacle; and unremittingly addictive in its gunplay.

As a messy muck around, MudRunner has enough to offer to warrant a few hours of experimentation. Beyond that, for me, the limitations of its controls, camera, and missing mirrors put a cap on the off-road giggles.

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.

If you want a good shooter, play Wolfenstein 2. If you want an incredible single-player story, play Wolfenstein 2.

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.

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 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.

I wish Shadow of War was as confident in itself as I am in it. Had Monolith proudly led with the Nemesis Fortress system and introduced players to it quickly, they would unquestionably be on the shortlist for making the Game of the Year. Thankfully, the system acts as the Mithril-strong foundations for the game, so while the additional elements may be generic and unwelcome, there is very little digging required to find the shining silver. That surface of ash and smoke may have prevented Shadow of War from attaining its rightful score, but it certainly does not prevent it from being one of the most joyous games you can play this year.

At its core is a rewarding driving model, hundreds of gorgeous and unusual cars, and some imaginatively designed solo championships to tackle in them. In time, it will probably be unreservedly brilliant. But, right now, I can’t overlook the technical problems that I’m having. And, to continue this candour, I can’t overlook the VIP pass nerfing or the exclusion of a season pass from Forza’s Ultimate Edition either.

This is a rich and thoughtful strategy game that is a joy to engage with at practically every level, and a new high-water mark of ambition and quality for Creative Assembly.

Unfortunately, Heat Signature’s structure lets it down somewhat. It becomes a repetitive grind, broken up by the occasional amazing moment. The procedural generation makes it feel special, randomly creating an environment for these unique anecdotes, but it is a double-edged sword as there are a multitude of uneventful missions in-between. Still, it all feels worth it for those moments when there are a few seconds left on the clock and you are forced to take desperate action.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 stands as a remarkable example of three genres: the classic roleplaying game, the online arena battler, and the tabletop-style adventure enabler. If its campaign fails to shake off some of Larian’s unfriendlier habits, those flaws are mitigated by the ways in which the studio have shaped a genre moulded by nostalgia into genuinely new forms - changing more than just the keyboard shortcuts for the better.

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.

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.

I sincerely hope this isn’t the last we will see of Tyranny, because - in its current state - it has ended with a whimper, absent of a single fight or NPC who could be characterised as memorable, or quests that would inspire anyone to start the game all over again. Obsidian’s dark RPG deserves a better expansion than Bastard’s Wound.

The endgame is all about becoming an Absolver, donning a cloak to signify your status as a person who’s finished the campaign. After you’ve beaten enough players, you can create your own fighting school and recruit newbies, sparring with them and letting them absorb your moves. It’s a clever idea, and it’s thematically consistent because it’s quite the grind to unlock your own school. By the time you do, every parry will be a reflex. You won’t be kicking people off a cliff for some bandages, you’ll be doing it simply because you can.

Ark’s ambition pulls it in the right direction with more force than its clunkiness tugs it the other way. It’s always more enjoyable to spend time with a game that tries something new and exciting, stumbling along the way, than a game that tries to tick focus group-inspired boxes. If that game also happens to simulate an entire prehistoric ecosystem, and produces bewildering emergent scenarios like clockwork, all the better.

In its new expansion, XCOM 2 makes people of its soldiers and turns its aliens into personalities. It cares about the individual. But that’s only so you feel the loss of your bonds more keenly, and hate the enemy more personally. In War of the Chosen, Firaxis are being kind to be cruel.

It’s one of those ‘good game buried in here somewhere’ experiences. Tonally it’s all over the place, and its design may as well be from the dark ages at this point. But there’s an alternate universe in which the likeable, upgradeable Agents and gratifying gear-gating are instead married to interesting, varied missions and an atmospheric open-world. That is what it would have taken for Agents of Mayhem to shine, and the most bizarre thing about its actual execution is how deliberately Volition seem to have shot for mediocrity. This doesn’t feel like a game hampered by ineptitude, but instead by a misunderstanding - or plain indecision - as to who it’s actually intended for.

There’s a firm foundation for a great competitive shooter here, but the rest of the house needs to be built on it sooner rather than later. LawBreakers needs ultra-skilled players to come in and show the rest of us what’s possible, but they need a competitive format to entice them in. Until that happens it’s a dizzying and consistently exciting shooter, but one whose long-term appeal isn’t yet locked in.

I enjoyed almost every minute I spent with Tokyo 42. Few games feel so immediately and consistently inviting - there are no penalties for pissing about in this urban utopia. You don’t even have to feel bad about killing civilians, as they’ll simply flicker back to life once you’ve ended your shooting spree. It’s a remarkable shooter, a solid stealth-‘em-up, and a terrible racing game.

The Long Journey Home does a superb job of making you feel like a stranger in a strange place. The aliens you encounter are all established and regard you with mild curiosity rather than alarm. You’re properly up against it and that can be very gripping. After six hours, however, it’s just draining, and because every objective is a mini-game, there’s almost no respite from the moment-to-moment struggle.

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.

The Surge is a superb game on its own terms, compelling in every nook and cranny, lopped-off limb, and newfound shortcut. Underpinning it all is a surprisingly engaging, multifaceted narrative, and a set of combat mechanics that offer a little something for every type of player, but that punish all comers with equal aplomb.

The sad reality is Strafe exasperates as much as it exhilarates. For every fleet footed show of sharp shooting it conspires to blast itself in the food with devious tactics and a steady slew of quite ‘fuuuuu!’ moments to players brave enough to endure the onslaught. There’s a really solid, often graceful FPS in here, one beefed up with generous side content – the 10 room horde mode-esque Murderzone and online speedruns break up the crushing campaign. Yet ultimately, you can’t quite outflank Strafe’s unfair, overwhelming slaughter.

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.

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]

Red Barrels should be commended for trying a different approach to their sequel, but unfortunately it’s just not the instant horror classic the first game was.

This is the most conventional RTS in an historically unconventional series. While this fact alone may divide players, its quality of presentation and polished mechanics mean that, as it inevitably expands with more content, Dawn of War III may yet become the champion of a genre that remains stubbornly resistant to evolution.

The luster wears off as the game wears on; and boy does it wear in those latter stages as the level design peters out and the global Pagie population diminishes. For several hours, Yooka-Laylee gave me the kind of thrills that I’d long been looking to rediscover, but that initial warm blast of nostalgia quickly fades, revealing this to be a mirage of the 3D platforming golden years, rather than their long-desired comeback.

If you look at it as a reboot, a starting point for the series, there’s lots of promise in that future. The first Mass Effect had countless problems, far more than here, but that will always be remembered as a classic, despite leaving similar threads hanging. Ultimately, this is a story about laying the foundations of a civilization, and it feels like BioWare were doing the same for the future of the franchise. In that way, these RPG developers have become Pathfinders themselves.

Proof that bad writing can ruin anything, Ghost Recon Wildlands feels like the death knell for a particular style of open-world game. Occasionally great moments, like the co-op play and the Sync Shot, are sadly drowned out.

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.

A bombastic but simplified RTS with great set-pieces and interesting new ideas in Blitz mode, but a lack of depth that'll shorten its longevity with PC players.

Ubisoft have done a solid job with For Honor, then, forging it from worthy materials and engraving it with a few details that place it above other games from similar scale publishers. There may be the odd occasion when it feels like it’ll buckle, but in the end its blade always seems to strike true. [Tech review: Pass]