There’s a special appeal, too, for Dota players. It’s remarkable how effectively Artifact captures the structure of a Dota game, where semi-isolated struggles build to climactic battles that see every hero converge on the same lane. Though not always: Artifact’s well of possible situations runs deep, offering variety where other CCGs dry up.

I’m just at a loss as to how this has happened. Just Causes have been buggy, sure. But they’ve never felt at least six months from finished. I cannot fathom how this wasn’t lengthily delayed, because it’s in such a dismal state. Although that said, even if the bugs and AI were fixed, it would still leave behind a version of Just Cause that barely changes anything you actually do since the third edition, yet has made every aspect of doing it so astronomically more annoying. What went wrong? How did such an established and entertaining series end up in such a quagmire?

I’m greedy. I want a bigger, beefier, more flexible Mutant Year Zero. But that’s because the small, linear but smart, powerful and atmospheric Mutant Year Zero I got grabbed hold of me so completely. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Flashpoint is fine expansion in terms of re-engineering BattleTech for extended play, then – far better than kicking us into another pit of mega-story or necessitating a new beginning. Long-term, I’d love to see more vibrancy from BattleTech – wilder planets, more colourful mechs and special attacks, grimier, punchier characters – but I suspect only the latter is compatible with this decades-old setting. Already though, a Flashpoint-augmented BattleTech is a significantly leaner and more adaptable machine than the lumbering brute of launch.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes Ian Loredump shows up uninvited and ruins everything.

Even when things got super easy, I still really enjoyed ordering my beautifully animated, lovingly customised Pope bots around these maps, dripping with architectural oddity and detail as they were, and watching them dismantle their foes with fuck-off power axes.But there’s just no bite to it, and it sadly ends up undermining itself as a result.

Each battle is small and short and self-contained, so Bad North has all the ingredients to be a moreish barnstormer. The problem is that they combine with mixed results, much like the members of my extended family and homemade sloe gin.

Share this game with other people, if you can. Play together on a couch, passing a controller around and commenting on the story together. Wear your fluffiest pyjamas and make chamomile tea. Bring tissues as well. I hope you’re comfortable with crying in front of others, because you will shed a tear or two. I bawled at least four times. Five, if you count the trailer. But by the end, I wasn’t sad. I was just glad this game existed. [RPS Bestest Best]

If you never did on mobile, then this is an exquisite puzzle game to play on PC, and only a fiver for the honour.

It’s by no means a terrible game, but it whiffs on too many elements for the admittedly cool aesthetics to carry the day. There were moments of pure fun, like escaping from the docks as a robot-controlled ship ripped up everything behind me with a massive anchor chain. But there were just as many infuriating, controller-tossing moments that managed to destroy any goodwill the fun times had built up.

The strength of its new dinos will pull me back now and again, if only to float around aimlessly on my favourite Gasbag. But as the last of the planned expansions for Ark, Extinction is far from the swan song that I was hoping for.

Taken on its own terms, Battlefield V is an incredible achievement that’s absolutely worth your time and its AAA price tag. Taken in the context of every battle that’s gone before, what’s on sale is the all-too familiar fantasy of being one insignificant drop in a sea of raging war-soup. It’s a fantasy I’ve lived enough times already.

Hitman 2 is about possibilities; the maps, weapons, and disguises all make it sing. Patience is it’s own reward: if you study your foes, if you watch the movement of guards, the placement of certain elements, you’ll get back what you put in.

It’s easier than ever to be drawn into the world of Football Manager 2019, and set about becoming the next Pep Guardiola — or perhaps for the more modest and realistic amongst us, the next Steve Cotterill.

Listen, if you like crawling around in the dark in an asylum, play Outlast. If you like detective games with weird facial animation, play L.A. Noire. If you like the Call of Cthulhu TRPG, keep playing that.

I’m staggered by how clever it is. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Lethal League Blaze doesn’t flip over the table, but it’s an extremely confident sequel that improves on just about every part of its predecessor. [RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s awful. Colossally awful.

In all, I’m pleased by my scrappy fights, and my tutelage of Hooves the horse man continues. One sad thing to note is that £50 is a high price, a fandom price, and that’s a pity.

I do find Black Ops 4’s tone genuinely disagreeable. Even so, I can see myself spending a few more evenings toying with this angry man’s guns.

It’s also really fascinating to play with a nearly four-year-old, who just can’t get his head around playing as the baddies, and incessantly asking, “So is HE a goodie?”, “But is SHE a goodie?!” with every introduced character, not quite able to grasp the complexity, but then suddenly shouting encouragement to help break everyone out of prison. I think I might have broken him.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales has a few problems with pacing and a dry story in places, but otherwise it’s a decent singleplayer spin-off of Gwent and the cards are worth a shuffle.

It can a bit confounding at first, not to mention the ugliness of those grey boxes. But it doesn’t take long to realise that this is something special. A management game that feels like you’re in charge of people – beautiful, flawed people – instead of a handful of impersonal bots. And it’s those little people who will keep you going. [RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s frustrating that for all the improvements, Space Hulk: Tactics still trips over the same things as Full Control’s Space Hulk and Space: Hulk Ascension. It’s too slow, and the interface is far too fiddly for a game that punishes even tiny mistakes.

It’s very funny, so busy with good ideas, and really damned strange.

For players who grew up loving games like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, Pathfinder: Kingmaker might feel like sitting around a table with old friends. But I can’t stand DMs who prioritize the rules over the joy of telling a story.

It’s a tricky balance to master, relaxing but complex, yet Megaquarium manages to do it while making it look effortless. It’s a breezy, upbeat management game that nonetheless gives you lots to play with and plenty of room for experimentation. Plus, the fish are all cuties.

If you’ve built a sufficiently nice world for me to run around in, I like just running around in it. There’s a lot of busy work, an eagle, and stabbing people brutally through the throat. Sometimes when you jump off a high thing you land in a load of hay. So, so far, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a very good Assassin’s Creed game. Which is what we were all expecting, wasn’t it? Except this one lets me ignore all that and roleplay as a big buff Greek neighbourhood hero. I’m alright with that.

I’m really enjoying this. It’s worth noting that I’ve not played as much of the final version as I’d like to, and it could still go wrong later on – I’ll certainly be updating regarding that. But as it is, this is all rather fun.

Like the original before it, this is an enthralling game that occupies a very specific niche – one certainly worth delving into, as long as you have the stomach for its niggling imperfections.

Forza Horizon 4 is quickly turning into one of my favorite racing games. For me, it’s up there with iRacing, but for totally different reasons.

Classical education standards aside, this is certainly a mixed bag, but a very interesting one, and I’m certainly very pleased to have played it. If they could have ditched the dullest puzzles for more of the smartest, and had that jump feel a little less awkward, I think it would have shone. But it still glimmers rather nicely, and for a price that makes it worth it.

The Gardens Between is all about reminiscing. It plays like two friends talking about all the adventures they’ve had, with the conversation flowing as they remember details and go back over stories that’ve grown with the telling.

Heaving with all that content, and impressing on the pitch where it counts, this is the best FIFA has been in years. I won’t deny I’m more than a little in love with it. The highest praise I can give is that I wasn’t expecting to say that this year. Well played.

It’s still very much an involved strategy game, and not one that transcends its genre enough to convert players with perpetually itchy feet and twitchy thumbs. If painstakingly planning out breaches down to the literal tenth of a second doesn’t appeal to you, you’ll want to look elsewhere. For all you really cool strategy fans, though, fill your cyberpunk boots.

There are ideas to celebrate, then, but this isn’t an entry that particularly excites or builds upon what we’ve already seen. If you love the NFL then you’re going to play this because of the lack of competition, but EA Sports needs to seriously think about how it’s going to evolve its Madden formula over the coming years. We can’t keep giving it the benefit of the doubt forever.

This works out as a great balance between the icon-ticking compulsion of a top tier Ubisoft game, with the puzzling chops from a team that have suddenly remembered they were the best in the business. It’s huge and detailed and stupid and probably most of all, fun. Problematic fun, without question.

Yep. It’s a good’un. Theme Hospital occupies a pretty special place in my gaming memories. The sense of relief and joy I got after my first hour with Two Point Hospital was palpable enough to turn into a pill, bottle, and then overcharge for. [RPS Bestest Bests]

A very middling execution of an extremely lovely idea.

Yoku’s Island Express feels to me like a palate cleanser. I played it in short bursts at the end of long days and was refreshed by it each time. It’s not rich enough in terms of its ideas and set-pieces to get under your skin and I likely won’t remember much of the details of my time with it a year from now, but I will remember that it provided me with easy, simple pleasure. I could use a few more games like that in my life.

The gorgeous Mexiverse and hotheaded combat and puzzles are entertaining, but overall Guacamelee! 2 lacks the tightness that made its predecessor such a hoot from start to finish.

The beginning is still as fun as a kick in the shin, but after that it just becomes a wondrous playground, and perhaps most crucially in light of the misery that is modern open world racers, one that just lets you get on with it. And now it’s slightly prettier, and runs in a window! Hurrah!

Despite some wonky physics, Flipping Death melds its platforming and puzzle elements seamlessly enough leave fans of both genres at least satisfied (though it’s more puzzle than platform). But the unique art style and comedic punches are what ultimately enticed me to stay in Flatwood Peaks a while longer.

It’s a real shame. If State of Mind was more minimalist in its plot, and focused on exploring and completing character arcs rather than absurd thought experiments, if it dealt with one or two of the themes of posthumanism, instead of six or seven all at once… we might have had something really special on our hands.

I’ve not gotten an enormous way through We Happy Few, because I’ve severely disliked the hours I’ve sunk into it. I think it’s probably, really, just a mediocre game, but it’s one that’s made me feel drained and discombobulated with its incoherence and that deeply peculiar atmosphere of feeling like it should be a great game, while never actually being one.

For a game about spies, Phantom Doctrine is atrocious at providing you with information. It doesn’t set up its pieces in an interesting way, it just pretends to – and while it has some neat ideas I haven’t gone into detail on, that’s because I so rarely needed to engage with them.

It’s an exceptional space sim that’s happy to let you just while away the years, smuggling spice and getting into bar fights, all while this elaborate and galaxy-shaking space opera plays out behind you. It’s shining a spotlight on the Bossks of the universe, sort of just getting on with their job and sometimes being tangentially related to important stuff. [Bestest Bests]

This is an epic. A huge, ridiculously detailed adventure, that successfully borrows one of the most complex and complicating features of BioWare RPGs without screwing it up! [Bestest Bests]

Like any good recipe, Overcooked 2 is more than the sum of its parts. It’s fast-paced, hilarious, and just the right amount of stressful, and that all comes together into one of the most fun and moreish co-op games I’ve played in years. [RPS "Bestest Bests"]

Monster Hunter World is gorgeous and exciting. Its elegant systems are packed with depth. It’s hugely generous with a frankly bewildering amount of content, but still provides a firm, focused gameplay loop. The online experience is balanced, seamless, and challenging.

Blisteringly fast when it needs to be, challenging without being frustrating, and packed with sharp, fatal toys, Dead Cells doesn’t keep you on your toes, it keeps you on your toenails.

If you’re a fan of old school Castlevania-esque games then this is the ticket for you. A perfect recreation of the mould, but filled with its own strange story and theme. For those of you who aren’t this is a tough recommendation. You’ll need a lot of patience to get to the oddities I found so compelling, but if you want to know what Indiana Jones would be like if he fought mecha-dinosaurs instead of Nazis… well, you absolutely do want to know don’t you?

Yakuza’s debut on PC is long overdue, but you couldn’t have asked for a stronger start.

Whether you have a satisfying ending or not is very much down to your choices, and yours alone – which, for a game like this, couldn’t be more fitting. Yes, it runs the risk of being a massive anti-climax if you make a few duff decisions, but even that has a kind of poetic justice to it – it’s just another tragic tale to be woven into your ever-eventful banner...Overall, I think you will have a good ending – and one worth the pain you’ve had to endure over the. course of these collective 40-odd hours

The glitchiness is my only hesitation in wholeheartedly recommending Semblance. But it’s vital that you know I’ve had a thoroughly good time with it. Not just because the puzzles are so smartly designed, but also the cartoon graphics are a complete joy, and the music is some of the best unobtrusive ambient pleasantness I’ve heard in a long while. This is a properly good debut from South African developer Nyamakop, and a genuinely interesting take on puzzle platforming.

The Spectrum Retreat may be the perfect holiday resort, but I can’t really say I’ve enjoyed my stay.

The game is in desperate need of a beefier crafting and construction list, certainly, but more than that it needs to find its purpose, or a hook of any kind. There’s nothing to latch onto, and no moment where everything clicks and it becomes clear where the game is heading. [Premature Evaluation]

This is such garbage. For goodness sakes don’t buy this as DLC, but don’t even bother if you were lured into getting a season pass at the start. What a pile of piss.

The between-fight map-wandering feels a bit time-wasting, despite a few feints towards ‘quests’ – really, all it involves is taking turns to move a few hexes over in search of an opponent, a pick-up or a shop where you can recharge health or buy upgrades. But it’s fine, it does the job. In fact, Insane Robots holds up remarkably well as a singleplayer game.

It’s just simply a wonderful creation that you absolutely should buy and play. It’s brief – the nine levels will perhaps take you a couple of hours – but a splendid couple of hours they are. Daft, fun, exuberant and very pretty, it captures a sense of joy like little else. [RPS Recommended]

Lovecraft’s Untold Stories lulls you into a false sense of security with its mostly banal horror, and then boom! Penguins screaming like people. I can still hear them. [Premature Evaluation]

I think, streamlined significantly, with the repetition removed, this could have been a really neat two-to-three hour game. Instead, with so much that feels like padding, it gives all the mistakes so much space to become a problem. It’s often a lot of fun to grapple and leap about in, but it’s always too quickly spoiled by something else.

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a nearly flawless remaster of a mixed bag that I’m still incredibly fond of, even after so many deaths. These games might not be nearly as genre-defining as they seemed in the ‘90s, and we probably got carried away because 3D platforming was new and exciting, but they’re still so full of character and silliness that it’s hard not to be charmed.

Starman isn’t big or brash, but sometimes you just need to sit quietly for a couple of hours and focus on something nice.

Next week, once the servers are busy, I’ll return and find out whether this is a game that desperately needs the internet it insists upon to shine. I’ll be delighted if that’s the case. Right now, this is an awful lot of not very much. [Single-player review]

A game that offers us both a memorable journey and a place to call home. Of course, how much meaning can one have without the other? Far: Lone Sails gave me a wistful sense of both that I won’t soon forget. [RPS Recommended]

A beautifully engineered tactics title free of gimmicks and artificial grind, Football, Tactics & Glory abbreviates without over-simplifying, and absorbs without overwhelming. If, like me, you crave the drama and flavour of club football, but don’t have the patience to grapple with full-blown management simulations like Football Manager, or the manual dexterity or even-temper necessary to play games like FIFA, anticipate obsession. [RPS Recommended]

As much as I enjoyed learning the rules and rhythms of bus driving – thanks in part to the warm words of Mira Tannhauser – once that was done, I just couldn’t find waters deep enough to swim in for long.

Mooncrash is an enormous paddling pool compared to Prey’s Olympic swimming pool. There’s none of the depth, but it’s a heck of a good time to splash around in.

It’s a greater disappointment because it falls so short of Planet Coaster. Frontier has already made the game that shows Evolution where it went wrong. It’s not that Evolution couldn’t have forged its own path, but it throws away lots of proven systems, often without substituting them for anything else. I don’t want to bad-mouth cool dinosaurs, but cool dinosaurs can only carry a game so far.

It’s a mess, but it’s a fun mess, like 52 pickup. It’s got the prettiest rectangles I’ve ever done seen, the back and forth of evolving makes every match exciting, and despite its faults Shadowverse can still produce the highs that keep me coming back to card games. My latest match was textbook CCG fun: I managed to barely scrape by in an unfavorable matchup, only to win at one health on the back of a few lucky top-decks on my end and two weak evolutions from my opponent. In that brief moment, I was over the moon about Shadowverse, and sometimes that’s enough.

I’m frustrated that Vampyr falls just short of truly combining a smart choose-your-own-adventure game with a meaty action one. It’ll never happen, but a director’s cut that thins the sombre exposition eases the medical busywork, injects more pep, and makes decisions decisions, rather than often either a roulette wheel or a railroaded path, would create a dream combination of darkness and light. Nonetheless, as a sprawling midnight world of tight fights and atmospheric exploration, this is a fat vein I keep returning to.

It completely has me in its grips now. I want to know what it means that the later dungeons are for adventurers only, not merchants, and I want to know just how big a store I can run, and will I ever get security guards to deal with these bloomin thieves? It’s very charming, very beautiful, and both its comprising halves are enjoyable in their own ways.

I’m looking forward to the first opportunity I get to play with some humans in the physical world – and sad that their online counterparts aren’t sticking around.

I’m not really convinced by Worlds Adrift the MMO. The freewheeling aviation adventure? That I absolutely dig. I can lose days to it. It’s become my happy place, where I can look at pretty islands and not worry about the weird rattling noise that’s coming from my bathroom. I don’t even mind losing my life to the occasional workplace accident. I’m not bemoaning that it’s multiplayer, either. It’s perfectly suited for it, particularly co-op. [Premature Evaluation]

Minor issues aside, I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve enjoyed a long-form point-and-click adventure this much. It reminds me why I love the genre so much.[Recommended]

There’s much I wish it did better, but I can’t fail to be drawn in by the sheer substance of it.

Super-fans of the show may get some enjoyment out of the story, but only if they can stomach a lot of grind, tedium and wandering through identical corridors, and for anyone else, just stick to watching the anime.

The Forest remains a huge achievement, and a survival horror game that somehow manages to keep those two elements surprisingly separate and yet let each impose upon the other in very interesting ways. I do wish it had been tidied and bug-fixed by now, but I can’t stop wanting to play despite it.

Once I was hooked however, I wanted to see Ezra’s story through, even if it was just to see if I could afford him a little rest after everything he’s been through.

And after all this, there are the bugs. Bugs bugs bugs. Characters vanishing, cameras swiveling, cars becoming lodged in barriers, shotguns becoming lodged in spines, doors that look wide open but are really closed, ambulances flickering in and out of existence like a dying filament. The majority of the bugs are visual hiccups, but a couple are complete blinders, such as the time my onscreen health, stamina, ammo and minimap all vanished in the middle of a fight with a tank-like juggernaut zombie. Or the time I threw a pipe bomb and it simply froze in the air centimetres in front of me, then exploded.

There are a ton of great ideas here, and I particularly dig this whole concept of a management game that’s about a production line for silent slaughter rather than cash-generation as such, but the best stuff can struggle to breathe through the excessive micro-management. The stereotype-heavy gags and iffy translation make things more of a drag than they deserve to be too. It’s well worth persevering with MachiaVillain despite this.

Wizard of Legend is a good, if lopsided game. The moment-to-moment combat is highly flexible and seldom anything less than satisfying, especially in co-op. It’s just a pity that while your arsenal of spells and artifacts is massive enough to be remixed a thousand ways, the maps, bosses and enemy types only fit together in a handful of configurations.

It may take a few tries to discover how to land a date, but playing Monster Prom is some of the most fun you’ll have trying to figure out a game’s mechanics. By making the goal competitive in multiplayer, it challenges the dating sim genre in a wholly unique way, and its combinations of events and endings make every playthrough feel like it’s your first time (this is the part where I wink suggestively).

I wish PoE2 had had more to say, more it wanted to express. I think that would have covered over a multitude of its other sins. Half-ideas about colonialism mixed with exploitation of natural resources by trading companies don’t really deliver the goods here. (That is the best joke.) As it is, despite having spent dozens of hours playing this, I’ve always felt at arm’s length. [Review in Progress]

I’ve still happily lost hours mining away, blasting gun-toting demons with bouncing icicles and hanging with my skulls. It’s constantly doling out new weapons and monsters to test them on, and every dive into the subterranean world results in so much more loot than I can carry that I’ve just got to go back down one more time. Brevik, as you might expect, is still pretty good at making the grind compelling. [Premature Evaluation - Early Access]

It’s all focused firmly towards evoking the period though, and here, Creative Assembly’s love for history absolutely bleeds through.

As it is, it’s a lovely, fun game that too frequently reminds me of its mistakes. And despite that, I want to keep playing. Which is probably rather important.

There is something great glinting just below BattleTech’s dour and crusty surface. So much now depends on whether future updates will dig for it or not – I pray they do. I’ve put an inordinate amount of time into playing Battletech, even starting the campaign over at one point, so convinced was I that I must be missing something or playing it wrong, but now I have reached an inescapable conclusion. If you want a picture of BattleTech, imagine a giant robo-tank silently firing an ineffective laser at another giant robot-tank – forever.

Frostpunk may be one of the most tense, exciting city building survival games on PC, but for a game with such an emphasis on innate justice, and heat, it leaves you surprisingly cold.

There’s so much room for shenanigans thanks to the gameshow theme, but Radical Heights too frequently relies on the bare bones battle royale formula, which is a shame because being a battle royale is by far its least interesting feature. And it’s so early that it’s extremely difficult to predict what type of game it will grow into over the course of what Boss Key predict will be a year-long stint in early access. It doesn’t even have an identity yet. It does play You’re The Best during the victory celebration, though. [Premature Evaluation]

A pretty, weekend wonder that may never beat you but should never bore or baffle you either, March to Glory is a hard sell at £16. If you’re in the market for some quality turnbased wargaming free of hexes and headaches, and don’t already own them, I’d invest in Shenandoah’s WW2 duo instead.

At its best, Dead in Vinland is compulsive, and a great example of systemic roguelike storytelling. Just be prepared to scratch your beard constantly at some baffling writing decisions. Or, be prepared to buy a fake beard, I guess. All Viking games should now come with beards. New rule. You heard it here first. Also, mead. And an axe. You’d think we’d be able to download axes by now.

Usually, in the course of gameplay, a game’s character becomes an avatar for you. But A Way Out accomplishes something far more subversive and bold. Eventually, for better or for worse, you become an avatar for your character.

Minit is that most rare of joyful things: A really good idea, done really well. [RPS Recommended]

Far Cry 5 is frustratingly uneven as a whole. From minute to minute its combat systems are the best in the series, and its vehicles handle better than those in previous games as well. Its landscapes are a delight, their details rich and worth exploring, and you get to develop your playstyle and objectives on your own terms. Until something gets in the way. It wants you to enjoy all of the freedom it offers until, through its systems, characters or story, an interruption arrives. It’s the land of the free, but that freedom only goes so far.

Almost anybody can mine out 40 or 50 hours-worth of honest enjoyment from the quest to build Evermore, and I certainly encourage genre fans to take the plunge. Just don’t be surprised if it fails to make much of a lasting impression, like a sandcastle going out with the tide.

On the one hand, Sea of Thieves is a game so empty that recommending it feels like a dereliction of duty. On the other hand, I just chased down a man who killed me and threw a bucket of my own grog-induced vomit over him by way of revenge...It’s the small things like that that can make Sea of Thieves triumphant, which is just as well, seeing as there’s just an empty mass of very pretty water where the big things should be.