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.