C-Smash VRS is a brilliantly restorative VR experience. With finely tuned motion controls, sparklingly simple visuals, and a chilled-out electronic score, it’s yet another fine addition to Sony’s roster of VR titles. We can even see it becoming a go-to with friends who just want to game and have a catch up. Yet while the core experience is fun enough, its lack of content and currently empty matchmaking experience leaves it feeling like an unfulfilled promise — especially if you're playing solo. We’d love to see an improvement to matchmaking and servers, but until then, C-Smash VRS will leave more of an impact on our battered walls than it will our memories.

Another double-edged sword is the brevity of the game. While we'd argue that a lot of visual novels pad out the running time and get a little long in the tooth, the eight hours we spent with Harmony weren't enough to effectively flesh out the world or the characters. That said, the story moves at brisk pace, and we never found ourselves bored even if we were sometimes a little confused.

The online multiplayer space is so competitive that it's tough to judge whether Crash Team Rumble will be able to carve out its own niche and warrant support beyond what Toys for Bob has already committed to. However, those who give the game a chance will find a really fun fight for Wumpa Fruit with varied classes and characters. Addictive just enough to look past the lack of local play and potentially long load times, Crash Team Rumble is worth trying — even if you wish Crash would just stick to what he's known best for: platforming.

Although Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine is presented gorgeously and provides an interesting twist on the genre, it lacks the meaty content required to keep players engaged. The steep difficulty results in frustratingly repetitive level restarts, and with all stages locked with no hints, tips, or level skips the majority of players won’t see it past world one. There’s definitely more enjoyable ways to beat your meat elsewhere.

At its best, Final Fantasy 16 is a jaw-dropping epic of rarely seen proportions. It's pretty much the pinnacle of cinematic spectacle in modern games, and its often gripping, emotional story is only matched by its fantastic combat system. While its overall quality does dip outside of the main plot, this is still a must-play action RPG, and the best single-player Final Fantasy in over a decade.

Park Beyond will probably be pretty good one day, but it is not this day. Currently, it's a theme park building sim that doesn't include features that we'd consider to be a basic requirement of the genre, it's poorly balanced with systems that feel wildly misjudged, and it's also riddled with bugs and glitches that range from comical to pad-tossingly infuriating. Avoid it like Alton Towers during the school holidays.

And all of the customisation, the staple of the series, returns in the background – allowing you to build your own team, right down to the minutiae like uniforms and logos. While there’s no shortage of pre-created content, Super Mega Baseball 4 will reward those willing to invest the time to personalise it exactly how they want it. It’s that, paired with its very entertaining arcade gameplay loop, that ensures this fourth instalment doesn’t drop the ball – even if it never quite feels like the seismic upgrade we’d expected when developer Metalhead Software was acquired.

The updated version of Layers of Fear is incredibly impressive. In addition to offering high-quality remakes of the entire series, this version goes a step forward and creates new material with the explicit purpose of bringing all pre-existing content of the series under one umbrella. The exceptional visual overhaul, fascinating transforming environments, and great sound design ensure this horror series has done a phenomenal job of making sure it continues to be an experience worth having.

While the gameplay doesn’t evolve nearly enough given the game’s runtime, you still wind up with a fun experience. And for anyone invested in the history of the medium, there’s a lot to love.

F1 23 is a solidly packed racing experience that improves upon its predecessor in almost every way. With a little something for everyone, on top of an immersive and impressive experience on PS5, it's a worthwhile addition to the libraries of enthusiasts and casuals alike. We loved how tailormade the game could become, whether that was a heavily assisted racing experience, or a brutally immersive one. The campaign doesn’t always hit the mark, and F1 World while expansive isn’t exactly revolutionary, but at the very least, it’s nice to see Formula 1 get the same care and attention that many other popular sports games have been receiving for years.

Amnesia: The Bunker sticks a little too close to what Frictional Games has been doing for over a decade now, but with a more free-form approach to gameplay, the team is back on the right track again. Coupled with an excellent setting, Amnesia: The Bunker represents a vast improvement over its predecessor. You'll still encounter the same stumbling blocks of old, but this horror experience comes recommended.

We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie is the best version of what is generally considered the best Katamari title. That being said, if you own the original and are looking to buy it just for the Royal Reverie content, its extremely short runtime makes it hard to recommend for that alone. However, for anyone who hasn’t played this weird and wonderful game (or series) it’s a definite recommendation – and a game with an extremely fitting name.

Ultimately, the issues that arise aren’t enough to quash the immense level of fun or the mastery of design on display. Red Matter 2 is a PSVR2 must-play.

Budget Cuts has thrilling stealth gameplay that'll have your heart pumping as you dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge your way past robotic pursuers. With a solid length campaign, headset haptics, and an intriguing story, you'll want to see this one through to the end. Although some major hand tracking issues and jagged visuals cut the immersion, we'd still recommend you optimise your time and give this one a shot.

Despite our complaints, though, Killer Frequency is lifted by its daft charm. It's an intriguing, unorthodox murder mystery that fans of narrative-driven games will certainly enjoy — it just needed a little bit more tuning.

If you have a soft spot for unconventional puzzles ala Resident Evil and Silent Hill, then look no further than this charming PS4 effort.

A good time loop mechanic is supposed to give you enough variety so that repetition doesn't set in. Unfortunately, this is where Loop8 falls flat. You’ll be going over the same conversations and they’re just not interesting enough to make it worthwhile. It also doesn’t help that there’s only a small variety of enemies, and that the underworld is mostly just the town with a different colour palette. It's hard not to get annoyed when you realise that you’re still not strong enough to take out the next boss, and have no choice but to repeat the last few weeks.

Even with these setbacks, you still get a brutally exhausting, immensely fulfilling gameplay loop with masterfully charted songs. However, until those issues are fixed, what you have is merely an adequate port.

Diablo 4 is the true successor to the bad old days of action RPGs and oozes quality in its frenetic combat and deep, engaging character development. It tells a complex, gritty narrative set in the darkly beautiful world of Sanctuary. Even better, it provides a solid foundation for years of Diablo content to come.

Street Fighter 6 is an absolute humdinger of a sequel. Capcom has created a fighting system that has all of the tactical depth professional players expect but managed to make it fairly easy for casuals to wrap their heads around. Not only that, it’s introduced smart ways to onboard newcomers, including a simplified control scheme and a great suite of tutorials, which even extend to the impressively enjoyable RPG-inspired single player story mode. A strong roster of starting characters, near-flawless rollback netcode, and a seemingly never-ending selection of content – including interactive online lobbies with playable retro games – round out another unbelievably impressive effort from the seemingly unstoppable Japanese publisher.

For anyone familiar with the series (and the RTS genre itself), Company of Heroes 3 is a solid but flawed entry. For newcomers, getting to grips with the controls and trudging through the patchy Italian campaign might not be worth the price of enlistment. However, if you do learn its intricacies, you're rewarded with fantastic, intense combat. It's a great effort to translate the RTS to console even with one or two issues.

Other game modes feel slightly less frenetic than the campaign and scenario modes, and are definitely the modes to try if you really want to take your time and not feel rushed. There's definitely a lot of opportunity to play the game exactly how you want to, and find the mode that works for you if you feel the competitive options are a bit too stressful.

Nock is a super addictive bow-and-arrow soccer title with accurate physics, on-point hand tracking, and impressively satisfying traversal that’s almost impossible to put down. The few niggles here — similar arenas and lack of visual environments — aren’t enough to detract from the core gameplay. Nock virtually hits the bullseye, and we’d recommend you give it a shot.

In Tanta We Trust is a DLC better than the game it's based on, but that's more because it strips the Forspoken experience of its open world busywork than anything else. An expansion that focuses more on combat, the single open area is a condensed version of what the base title offers, turning it into a more tightly packed undertaking that gets you in amongst the action much faster. It's more Forspoken, but a better version of it.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a broken mess of a game. There are barely any redeeming qualities to be found amidst what can only be described as a massive missed opportunity. There is some serious potential in a single-player linear Lord of the Rings experience like this, but with outrageously dated level design, clunky controls, a severe lack of polish, muddy and unimpressive graphics, and a dull story, Gollum completely misses the mark. As massive fans of the books, films, and games, it's sad to see that there is nothing precious about this experience.

There's a kernel of a fantastic tactical role playing game in Miasma Chronicles, but it lacks polish in a few key areas, and while the lore and the characters are endearing in their own right the overarching fiction that binds it all together disappoints.

With lofty ambitions and some great elements, After Us lets itself down in as many ways as it triumphs. Gorgeous art direction and an admirable anti-pollution message aren't enough to make up for tedious combat, performance issues, and open-ended level design that plays things a little too loose. If you're itching for an experience like this, there are better options out there, at the very least until After Us' performance issues are addressed. There's the core of an incredible experience here, but it's just not ready yet.

If you can look past the repetition and the roadblocks, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a largely solid shooter. It nails the visuals, the guns generally feel great, and the sound design is suitably punchy — just don't expect it to push beyond those foundations.