Millennia is a fresh take on the 4X genre that offers a reactive approach to building your nation throughout history, but a few key issues keep it from greatness.

A range of technical issues are holding it back at launch, but a combination of satisfying combat and likable characters has delivered the foundation of an excellent superhero game.

It isn’t complex enough to satiate veteran RTS players and doesn’t offer mountains of content, but Minecraft Legends delivers the basic loop of attacking and defending territory and finds the odd inventive way to use its iconic IP.

A fumbled finale puts a notable stain on the experience. They say one of the key rules in comedy is to leave the audience wanting more, but as Jazzpunk’s credits rolled I was left feeling a little indifferent. But the game is something to be admired. Few titles dedicate themselves to comedy as wholly as Jazzpunk does.

I can cheerfully recommend it to people who may never have encountered the game before. But if you’re a Heroes of Might and Magic fan, who never needed high-definition anything to enjoy these games, then the chances are that GOG already had you covered, and there’s not much for you here.

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.

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader’s adventure across the dangerous Koronus Expanse is full of fun sci-fi lore and companions, but it’s buried beneath wonky balancing, tedious spaceship battles, and quest-breaking bugs. Perhaps after numerous patches, Rogue Trader will one day become a strong addition to the CRPG genre.

The Operator borrows a bunch of strong puzzle concepts and uses them to good and imaginative effect, but it throws in a few dud sections and its well-paced thriller story is sadly lacking in depth.

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.

Elden Ring Nightreign shoots for the stars with a clean retrofit of familiar assets into a roguelike format, but it’s dragged back down to earth with repetitive encounters, overtuned bosses, and lacklustre meta-progression. Random chance and an urgent pace rewards blind haste over careful buildcraft, but I'm confident its biggest issues can still be fixed.

Ubisoft's PvE shooter fails to extract the best out of Rainbow Six Siege's gameplay mechanics, and the result is a repetitive, mostly bland co-op assignment.

While Overwatch 2 adds a host of heroes and features to Blizzard’s iconic FPS game, its PvP feels more like a simple content update than a full blown sequel.

Gears of War's simple shooting and world design are as strong now as they were in 2007, but Reloaded's more technologically advanced visuals sap away the earlier versions’ grimy cartoon charm.

It’s just not as enjoyable. The first game felt like a focused blast of adrenaline. Hotline Miami 2’s always stopping and starting, its new characters feel rough and buggy, and the new reliance on guns restricts how you can approach combat.

At its best, with its dystopian future and haphazard revolution, Bionic Dues feels like a Games Workshop game that never was. At its worst it’s like being submerged in a swimming pool of dice and calculator printouts.

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.

At the moment it’s functional, sometimes fun, but only something that should really be considered if you’ve got three chums who are guaranteed to play with you. Even then, you might be better off with the original Magicka and its slew of DLC or Wizard Wars, which is free-to-play.

Bloober Team does well to keep things taut all the way to the end, but there's a frustrating amount of untapped potential beneath its gameplay gimmicks and art direction.

More time capsule than game, stirring sentimental wonderment and bad memories in equal measure.

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

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is an exceptional-looking game with initially exciting combat, but it’s let down by uneven storytelling that makes it duller than it should be.

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.

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.

With its weapon-building systems and deliberate, targeted combat, Blades of Fire has a lot of fresh-feeling ideas. Its control scheme is strange and will force you to press each button with care. Its granular forging system makes you consider every weapon in your arsenal. But however differently it approaches them, the game only offers the same thrills as other action games of its ilk. Blades of Fire feels unique, but just can’t get weird enough.

Absolutely bursting with breathtaking vistas, No Man's Sky works best as a stellar walking sim. Sadly the half-baked survival elements only detract from the experience.

At times, it still feels like it’s in Early Access, not because it’s buggy, but because it’s missing that spark and polish that’s kept Worms alive for so long. Yet I do hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of these escaping sheep. There’s a good foundation, and a need for inventive A to B puzzle games.

Gorgeous to look at but quite shallow and full of bugs, F1 Manager 2022 needs to improve on the realism and accuracies before it can achieve pole position.

Burial at Sea has a real pacing problem, stemming from the very literal segregation of its narrative and combat sections. It makes you finish your meat before your can start on your vegetables, where the metaphorical meat is the talking and the vegetables are the shooting.

Grim-faced dedication to history has produced a rules-heavy RTS that’s rarely fun or strategically rewarding – a highly accurate depiction of the First World War, in other words, and a success in that respect at least.

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.

Steamworld Build delivers an entertaining blend of city building and dungeon crawling, but the two pillars don’t completely gel and myriad annoyances taint the experience.

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.

1C Entertainment's attempt to reinvigorate the long-dormant series proves two things: its turn-based tactical combat is timeless, and making a compelling open-world experience is harder than it looks.

Crimson Desert is huge, and it's beautiful, but it can't pull itself out of the bog standard narrative trenches. Combat feels clunky, especially when facing off against one of the many frustrating bosses, and there feels like there is little reward for exploration. I wanted to like this, but it left me feeling empty.

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.

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.

For all the ways in which aims to take SimCity into the future, it remains tethered firmly to its past. Due to the peculiarities of its simulation, Origin's temperamental connection, and ultimately its own mechanical shallowness, Cities of Tomorrow is unlikely to make converts of those already driven out of town.

For an original take on battle royale and a truly special martial arts combat system, Naraka is worth checking out. But between stability issues, off-putting monetisation practices, and an unpalatable learning curve, there's plenty that gets in the way of the fun.

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.

A stellar crafting experience and surprisingly slick combat aren’t enough to compensate for the flaws in New World’s humdrum and frustrating quest design.

Updates and new content releases would do wonders for Spintires, as at the moment it's little more than a pleasingly ground-churning tech demo. A muddy, messy and fun tech demo that gingerly touches on a deeply held love of playing in the dirt that you might have forgotten about.

Strike Vector deserves more. It deserves a selection of inspired game modes. It deserves a collection of well-balanced, strategic weapon unlocks. It deserves a flight school that’s more than picture boxes and poor spelling.

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.

South Park Snow Day makes for chaotic, mindless fun when played with friends thanks to its roguelike-inspired upgrades and sense of humor, but it's a frustrating dud when going it alone.

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

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.

With clever iterations on soulslike conventions and a sharp implementation of videogame fundamentals, AI Limit has frequent thrills. But its derivative art direction, tired level design, and uninspiring narrative make it hard to recommend over its obvious inspirations. FromSoftware’s oeuvre draws on literature and visual art to feel unique and daring; AI Limits’ influences are limited to other videogames, and it’s all the lesser for it.

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.

Broken Sword 5 will slowly worm itself into your affections if you expose yourself to its ever so gentle humour for long enough.

Whether or not you’re a fan of Suikoden II, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is just about worth your time. Unfortunately, almost every high point in Nowa's adventure is met with a painful low, making for a disjointed experience bursting with forgettable minigames and characters.

An intriguing story of exploring new frontiers and an easy gateway into retro sci-fi literature, The Invincible is a powerful, engrossing cosmic drama that’s held back by a lack of variety and innovation, rough edges around its core mechanics, and a supporting cast that can’t quite match the energy of its stars.

It is, perhaps, not a very good adventure game, but – and this is despite the first act – it’s a compelling bit of interactive fiction.

A fairly fun bullet-hell shooter frustrated by under-realised features and missed narrative opportunities. Ultimately, Hired Gun falls into a pitfall all too common to Warhammer adaptations: that of only ever feeling skin deep.

Here’s the thing. I can sort of appreciate Goat Sim, but it leaves me a little cold. However, I showed it to some pre-teens, and they thought it was the greatest game they’d ever seen. Their sides still hurt from laughing.

Sins of a Solar Empire 2's frantic, always real-time pace is both a thrill and a significant hurdle. Its banal space-opera vibes and even worse AI art are a huge detriment. But under the hood, Sins 2 still has generic 4X joys to spare.

In The Fall, NFusion have taken a scalpel to to Human Revolution’s template, collected together a pile of game meat - the essential giblets of a Deus Ex game - stitched it together and presented you with a serving. It’s recognisably Deus Ex but it’s not very appetising.

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.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora gives you the strength and stamina of the Na’vi, but not the consistency and depth of their homeworld. Unless you’re an avid fan who wants every morsel of storytelling, Ubisoft's latest open world doesn’t always justify the trip.

F1 24's new additions and changes, including its barebones Career Mode and overly forgiving Dynamic Handling system, often do more harm than good, making this a solid but skippable entry for anyone other than the most diehard fans.

If the filler were stripped out Foul Play would only be a two hour game but it would be two hours flush with ideas instead of five hours sprinkled with them. It would make for a more appealing co-op game, too. You won’t find yourselves saying “Just one more act,” you’ll be loading up Castle Crashers.

There’s a great game in here, somewhere. Rapidly getting into jaw-droppingly huge wars spanning multiple worlds is brilliant - it really is. And there’s no other RTS that gives players so much destructive power. But the lack of tactical depth and focus on constantly rushing makes Planetary Annihilation tiring.

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.

For all that The Bureau get’s wrong, it is at least a passable tactical shooter with a novel, well-realised setting. If you love the golden age of science-fiction, there’s something here for you. Just don’t expect it to ever get truly interesting, because XCOM Declassified never captures what XCOM is all about.

In fact, of all the games I’ve been in, this one is definitely the worst.

StarDrive 2 would be an impressive 4X game. But its annoying tone, eccentric AI and the shallowness of the empire management casts a shadow over it. If we weren’t in the middle of an unexpected flood of 4X games, then its take on space conflict alone would make it worth playing, but at the moment there are just too many alternatives.

Bugs, repetitive side content, bad storytelling, and the unfulfilled promise of its choice and consequence system leave Dying Light 2 unable to capitalise on the strength of its excellent parkour and combat mechanics.

South of Midnight is a monotonous action-adventure game plagued by boring, repetitive fights and boss battles, with a story that loses momentum when it needs it most. Thankfully, its strong characterization, setting, and soundtrack do a lot of the heavy lifting. If you’re able to survive the grind, you might walk away feeling satisfied, but you’d be forgiven for calling it quits before the credits roll.

Song of Nunu offers a rich narrative with plenty of heart and does an excellent job of synthesizing its characters in an authentic way. However, bland gameplay and performance issues work as a foil to Tango’s excellent storytelling, marring the overall experience.

Bandai Namco's latest falls disappointingly short outside of the thrills and spills of its excellent battle system, but your mileage may vary depending on your fondness for anime.

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.

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.

Capes mostly overcomes its cliches, lack of customization, and limited scope thanks to its strategic gameplay that will test the mettle of even the most hardened of turn-based tactics veterans.

As a sendoff to these beloved characters, Persona 5 Tactica tells a decent story and has novel tactical RPG ideas; even if said mechanics destroy all semblance of challenge.

For the moments where the procedural stuff just works perfectly, creating a bastard-hard but ultimately memorable level, and for the world itself, which is lovely, The Swindle is worth dedicating a couple evenings to. It won’t steal your heart though.

It’s missing that spark of personality and something that ties all the scenarios together. And it’s in desperate need of a great deal of polish.

Beneath Avowed’s mycelium-covered surface lurks a good RPG stifled by a lack of real stakes. The Living Lands feel anything but alive, and while the combat strikes the right balance between fun and challenge, it doesn't offer anything new. If you’re looking for a comfort-food fantasy RPG, then Avowed’s got you covered, but you need to set your expectations accordingly.

Its colourful cast of characters handles Batman’s absence well, but mismatched features and puzzling progression means it trips as much as it triumphs.

A cheeky take on Dungeons & Dragons lore isn't enough to carry the lacklustre combat, sluggish controls, and dodgy enemy hitboxes.

You may get a laugh or two, but it’s an otherwise poor shooter that thinks large numbers of enemies are difficulty spikes and distractions will make people forget about the soft locks, crashes, and lack of accessibility options.

Star Wars: Outlaws captures the visual feel of the source material but misses the mark with nearly everything else. An uninteresting open world and tedious stealth sections bog down what could have been the start of something special.

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.

An initially intriguing game that quickly reveals itself to be a slight and unimaginative shooter. An opportunity missed, and a let-down on a technical level to boot.

Solo Leveling Arise is authentic to its anime and webtoon inspirations, but it's too grindy, frustrating, and repetitive to come close to rivaling the best gacha games.

A unique premise, great sense of style, and a number of novel design concepts aren’t quite enough to compensate for Slitterhead’s repetitive mission structure and lifeless combat.

For the most part the execution is too simplistic, and the frustrations are too frequent.

The premise of Siren's Rest is strong enough to plumb the depths of Still Wakes the Deep’s enduring mysteries, but as a compact story DLC, it’s just too shallow. The principal goal of tracking down collectibles siphons the tension from its claustrophobic environments, and The Chinese Room's overreliance on scripted sequences creates missed opportunities for emergent horror.

A muddled game that trips over itself by implementing mechanics from various genres, but never fully expands on their potential.

An earnest but empty love letter to Quake and Duke Nukem 3D that never gets around to doing anything to call its own.

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.

Considering you’ve likely played the previous three games and have now spent around eight hours keeping homicidal animatronics at bay, there’s nothing about this fourth game that begs for you to return. Instead spend the cash on a bag of snacks and some drinks, and watch someone else shriek loudly into a microphone for you.

Hell is Us starts strong, but quickly falls into a tedious loop of collection and delivery, with an uninspiring combat system and a story that loses its initial promise. The superb place-setting and unnerving tone can’t save this action RPG from stumbling across the finish line.

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.

A game with unapologetically singular focus, its distillation of deeper MMOs' elements nevertheless results in an experience that all too often feels barren.

AEW’s first foray into videogames has much room for improvement across its odd-looking character models, slim game mode offerings, and poor AI balancing. That said, in the right crowd, you might enjoy it for its schlock and solid controls.

Alone in the Dark is a weak survival horror pastiche largely devoid of original moments. The occasional dash of character in its 1920s Deep South setting can't make up for repetitive puzzles and the feeling we've seen all of this before.

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.

Deliver At All Costs has tons of potential, but it doesn’t know what to do with it. A solid storyline is neglected in favor of chaotic quests, but the missions aren’t varied enough to stave off repetition for long. It's a game of competing ideas and intentions that would have been better explored across two entirely separate and fully realized projects.

Where life finds a way, Exoprimal has lost its purpose. Defined by boring combat and a lack of innovation, I’m left feeling like that Brachiosaurus in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – hopeless and yearning for more.