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.