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.