I feel like Rime will be a game celebrated by those who already love the third-person genre, those au fait with Tomb Raider-style climbing and jumping, and environmental puzzles. It’s certainly celebrated by me. But I wonder if it might have a harder time winning the affections of those who aren’t already sold on the concept, simply because of the swathes of assumptions it makes about a player’s fluency. Or maybe I’m being patronising? I’m not entirely sure. What I do know is I’ve had such a splendid time with Rime, so deeply enjoyed its expansive and sumptuous world, and found myself not missing the attack button at all. Not when there’s a sing/shout button that does so many more interesting things. [RPS Recommended]

Caveblazers is superb and I’m looking forward to discovering all of its secrets, and to the local multiplayer add-on that’s apparently coming soon. I can see myself playing for years to come.

Tokyo 42 is an inventive and strikingly attractive game, with a very natural blend of stealth, combat and figuring out a path, unfortunately hamstrung somewhat by absolute fealty to its isometric perspective. I alternated between the beautiful tension of sneaking through busy places (personally, I incline towards the silent kills of a katana rather than the Syndicate-esque mass destruction of miniguns and rocket launchers) and the jaw-clenched annoyance of death-by-camera. An impressive accomplishment, but sometimes a grating one too.

There’s not quite enough here to win me over completely, but there’s more than enough to make the numerous trips I’ve made worthwhile, and part of the charm is in never knowing if there’s anything left to discover. The stars are strange and home to many mysteries and it’s tempting to stick around until I’ve seen them all. But keep in mind that there’s lots of work to do along the way.

What I really need is a group to play with and I’ll be recruiting across the upcoming long weekend.

Is Vanquish the legendary success that you may have heard others describe it as? Nah, but it is a distinctive and solid good time with excellent movement and controls, and some delightfully tricksy setpiece battles. It feels damn good if you can break apart your shooter muscle memory and give yourself to its new ways, and I only wish that element of it could somehow be transplanted into a game with a less turgid personality. In the absence of that impossible possibility though – yep, play Vanquish.

Too much of the game is spent being annoyed by having to slowly trudge between levers – a crime as old as gaming itself – only to allow it its little follies. The acting is splendid, the writing decent, and as I’ve said, the graphics a fabulous showing off within the Unreal Engine. But in its short time, it frustrates too often, and tries to do too much.

Not creepy or scary enough to quite work as a horror game, and without the sense of investigation that would make it work as a mystery, Perception falls between two posts. It’s premise is strong and the echolocation works well, but there simply isn’t enough to do in that old house, other than knock on the walls and listen to tales of times gone by. It’s a game that I wanted to like so much more than I do, partly because it’s so visually appealing and partly because Cassie is such a likeable character. She deserves a better story for herself rather than to be an observer of other peoples’ lives.

For the sake of fairness, I have to admit that I only made it as far as the fourth boss, 18 hours deep. At which point I was murdered enough times to gently accept my fate as a Surge drop-out.

Sharp as a spike bayonet in the AI department, surprisingly realistic in areas like morale modelling, LoS and armour penetration, SD’s crowning achievement is arguably its interface. It’s hard to think of a wargame that makes control feel so effortless or one that communicates unit details so effectively. [RPS Recommended]

Old Man’s Journey is a game with all of these prickles of delight but where the interstitial matter often feels humdrum. It’s short enough that you can still pick those delights out even if you’re not satisfied with the rest of the interactions, but you can’t help but wonder, what if it had found a way to make the whole thing shine?

It’s grisly and cruel in ways that are both obvious and difficult to identify. There’s a bleakness that worms its way through every aspect, insidious and very effective. And then something else will go wrong and it’s so ghastly to start a chapter over because everything is so damned slow.

From the interface to economics, it sports some of the best systems I’ve seen in a 4X game, and like Endless Legend, it’s simultaneously confident and experimental, finding new ways to spice up a genre that can too often be bland. [RPS Recommended]

Brute is N with a ship in place of a ninja. That change aside, there’s the same challenge of grappling with the particulars of the game’s physics, the same love of alternating bright colours, and a similar menagerie of deadly pursuing enemies ready to destroy you with a single touch. Luckily, there’s also the same sense of satisfaction to be found in trying, failing and eventually overcoming each of its tricky levels.

This is stunning. It’s just so utterly beautiful, its bucolic scenes hiding extraordinarily lavish and enticing buildings. It’s smart but so modest about that, bulging with brilliant ideas. Movement is amazing and refreshing. And despite the guff, the place itself is fascinating to wander. What a treat. Just a slightly expensive treat. [RPS Recommended]

I adore this. I am so frustrated that it’s very hard to convince people to pick up an RPGMaker game, so I’m also very relieved it has the To The Moon alumni tag that will hopefully convince people to grab it. Grab it you absolutely should. Yes, it’s maudlin in places, and yes, it’s undeniably a bit twee, but it earns the right to be by being just so good.

Scanner Sombre is at its best when you’re left to your own devices, lonely yet in awe of the sights you see and make, but suffers when the game itself is pulling the strings, whether that be to evoke empathy or terror. I absolutely recommend it, for its four or so hours of dot-matrix world-generation have pleased me greatly, but you should go in knowing that it stumbles over its storytelling hurdles and should instead be treated as, like the titular scanner, a remarkable technological toy.

Prey is a game that’s smart about almost every aspect of itself, and yet with that, so crucially modest. It doesn’t yank the camera from you, doesn’t force you to sit through cutscenes, doesn’t demand you sit still and listen to its backstory. It’s content to be itself and let you find it, which is a damned rare treat in this hobby. Even more amazingly, for all its array of abilities and powers, you can finish the game without touching them, perhaps even find a narrative rationale for doing so. It lets you improvise, explore, make big decisions without needing to tell you they’re big. And yes, it absolutely does let you turn into a cup. [RPS Recommended]

It comes so close to being something I love and then it has a hollow core. The best way I can think to explain it is how at some point as you grow up your toys stop being these magical things with their own lives and start being toys. From watching the trailers and following the development I was hoping for a window into a little lively toy universe but I’ve opened up the packaging and I can’t seem to find the spark.

Flinthook’s world is weird, with its space ghost pirates, animal ruffians and giant robots, but as colourful and crowded as some of these screenshots look, I’ve always found the rooms easy to read. That’s important because underneath all of the silliness and the roguelite elements, there’s a tight and challenging game that would be a delight even without its superb structure and flow. With that carefully crafted layer around it, Tribute have made one of the year’s best action games.

Horrible to control, horrible to listen to, really surprisingly ugly to look at, and and all-round mess, I’ve no desire to put myself through this.

Under Leaves either needed a lot more to do in a level, or a lot more levels, to feel substantial.

For me, at times, Everything feels like the game Spore should have been. When I watched the early presentations of that game’s silly creature creator and its invocation of Powers of Ten, I wasn’t imagining a fiddly, shallow strategy game, but an experience that hoped to approximate the awe I sometimes feel when stargazing or can tap into by listening to Carl Sagan talk. By throwing out most of Spore’s traditional mechanics in favour of a cross between Katamari Damacy and Nested, Everything gets closer to sublimity. And though I don’t think it gets all the way there – not for me, not right now – the silliness is constant and delightful.

It’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as remade by Eli Roth, starting with the worst possible thing that can happen and then daring itself to go further. Shock tactics so persistently silly that they become the equivalent of a flaming bag of poo on a doorstep. I will always defend the right of horror fiction to be horrible, but never excuse it for being so dull in its depravity. One of the game’s six chapters is named after the Biblical Job and by the end of the game that’s who I felt like. I’d suffered through great and terrible hardships but was no closer to understanding why.

What elevates it from a fascinating and gorgeous experiment in presentation to an immediate contender for my game of the year is the way that the broader narrative informs the stories it contains, just as the house is home to its many rooms. Without casting judgement or becoming didactic, Edith Finch explores both the good and the harm that stories can do, and how folktale, imagination and superstition can lift us up and dash us down.

If it’s your first time back since 1999, however, rest assured that it treats your memories well.

I love it. There were times when I didn’t, mostly when I had to replay a section where I kept failing to line up what looked like a simple jump over and over, but by the end I was smitten. It’s a grotesque, horrid and eventually hopeful in its own morbid fashion, and despite many moments that feel like reimaginings or echoes from elsewhere, it has enough extraordinary images and sequences to stand alone. It’s precisely the kind of horror game I love – grotesque but not gross, and interested in thoughtful pacing and escalation rather than jumpscares and shocks. Also, linear though it is, there are some collectibles I’d like to hunt for and the whole game is short enough that I’ll happily play it again, or watch someone else playing.

There are moments, many of them, during multiplayer and AI skirmishes, where I’m absolutely certain that Dawn of War 3 is the best game in the series, even with its missteps when it comes to cover and fortifications.

Competent enough as these things go, but far less suited to manic action-comedy than it is to languid angst and survival.

This is Full Throttle made playable once again, and that’s something to be celebrated. It’s a really fantastic game, with a lovely story, and brilliant performances. And out of its original timeline it’s free to just be itself, not compared to the last or the next LucasArts adventure to hit the shelves. If you loved the original, this is worth buying for the improved sound alone. If you never played it, then oh my goodness, hurry up!

I dearly hope this receives a huge patch. Perhaps fistfuls of bandages and a full body cast. This could be a three-hour wonder, a really truly beautiful work to be lauded. Gosh I wish I could have written the review its unmangled form deserves. As it is, it’s very hard to recommend spending £12 on – already a tough call for such a short game.

It has quite a few moving parts, but each part is very simple. It really is oddly similar to one of those keep-clicking-the-numbers games, but pinned with a more meaningful structure and shallow but engagingly frantic combat.

These enhancements are great, sometimes even game-changing, but Paradox are offering so much for free that it makes the actual premium DLC less vital.

Bulletstorm is lots of silly fun, and deserved to do better in 2011. It’s still lots of silly fun, but it’s hard to quite get as behind the desire for it to do well when it’s being released at full price with very little new put in.

Yooka-Laylee is bright, it’s positive, it’s daft and it wants to play with you. And that’s lovely.

Most of all, I marvel at how well it’s done snakes (snakes, like snakes). This could, as I say, have been all comic pratfalls and Goat Simulator destruction, but instead it’s an extremely careful study in how snakes navigate their bizarre bodies around, then transplanted into broadly well-done puzzle-places. I feel in awe of how well-realised this is, almost more than I actually enjoy it. I really do enjoy it though, so much so that I ended up picking it up for my Switch too (making it only the second game I own for Nintendo’s latest toy). Snake Pass gets an easy pass from me.

Academy is entirely focused on tricking you into learning some basic electronics. And that’s enough. I heartily encourage you to grab this if you’ve got a kid trying to learn it at school. Heck, if you’re a physics teacher you really should buy a bunch of copies, as this’ll be a surefire way to gain the attention of some of your students. Or if you just fancy reminding yourself about logic gates, pulse generators and capacitors, this is a neat little thing. I’d love to pretend I viewed it all as a smug expert pondering its usefulness for younger players, but that’s just flat-out not true – it taught me a whole bunch, as hard as I tried not to learn anything.

It’s a smart game though and a thoughtful one, even if it sometimes hides those qualities behind its clown makeup and a beaglepuss.

At first glance Beat Cop looks like something akin to the Sierra Police Quest games of the late 80s/early 90s, a combination of point-and-click adventure and fiddly paperwork procedural. Ooh, intriguing. But just a few minutes in it becomes apparent this is far closer to a Diner Dash-like frantic management games, with swearing. Just, not a particular good version of the format.

At 20 hours, having discovered just 8 of the regions, I threw the gamepad aside with a mixture of exasperation and disappointment. There are those who will relish the challenge but I never found the slugcat’s family, and not just because there were no clues or direction as to their whereabouts. There was a big part of me that didn’t want to stop playing and maybe I’ll pick it up again some day, because there is so much to love about discovering the laws of nature behind this huge, ruined ecosystem. But with each random death, each accidental roll off a cliffside, each checkpoint drought, that love turned to ash. There is so much beauty and intrigue and diversity of life in Rain World. It’s a pity the game doesn’t want you to see any of it.

I think the best I can offer is that if you like the kinds of games I like (and you can get a sense of that through my author tag) I think you will like and value this.

It’s tremendous at creating its distinct atmosphere and then drawing you deeper in. It’s witty, spooky, and achieves an ideal sense of urgency. Weird, clamant and intriguing, this is well worth a look.

Whatever happens to Afghanistan 11 in the future, it’s sure to be one of my most played w******* (history-steeped military strategy games with influential terrain and plausible, reality-derived unit relationships) this year. I love how it forces me to spin plates. I like the way it uses IEDs and RPGs to transform every vehicle move into an adventure. In a genre dominated by demolition and death, the emphasis it places on construction, and improving the lives of the local populace, is cheeringly discordant. The theme isn’t one I’m naturally drawn to, but the design is so strong, the history so ingeniously utilized, an ‘RPS Recommended’ rosette is inevitable.

Compact, delightful, slightly wonky in terms of difficulty curves for me and I think overall I preferred A Good Snowman simply because I find the track placement sometimes has a bit too much wiggle room for it to feel entirely neat, whereas rolling the snowballs for A Good Snowman stayed as a very tight experience. But! Cosmic Express is just as delightful to look at, and has a really solid core of puzzling to get your brain around!

It’s rare to see such ambitious storytelling and open world roleplaying tied to such a stylish combat system, not to mention the (optional) Souls-like multiplayer elements, shooter tangents, mini-games that punctuate rather than interrupting, and that big ol’ world to explore. You don’t need to have played any of Yoko Taro’s previous games to appreciate Automata, even though it has links to both Drakengard and (of course) the original Nier, but it’ll probably make you keen to seek them out. Me? I’m hoping Platinum get a chance to work with these worlds and words again. A thousand ideas, delivered in rapid succession, backed by action that is the thread that stitches everything together rather than an interruption between one story beat and the next.

As a follow-up to the previous trilogy, it’s a timid and tepid tale too heavily reliant on what came before, too unambitious for what could have been, trapped in a gargantuan playground of bits and pieces to do.

Pixel Privateers knows exactly what it’s doing, and though it’s about as deep as a microwave lasagne, it’s almost impossible not to lose yourself to it for a few evenings.

Despite those reservations, and the sometimes plodding nature of the matches, there’s a lot of brains to Faeria. It’s certainly more interesting to me than vanilla Hearthstone, even if many of its cards lift directly from the big book of CCG mechanics. It’s a game of risk, reward and really bad decisions. It’s many times more thoughtful than Duelyst, which is always my yardstick for card games. But at the same time it is much less climactic, less explosive, and less creative with its minions and their abilities.

Robo Recall makes me a frantic cyclone of destruction, the force of my mechanical slaughter matched only by my sheer ineptitude whenever I try to teleport. It’s a party, basically, mixing the accuracy of lightgun shooting with the physicality of Wii gaming.

Too often, I plunged to my death purely because Styx did not leap to the handhold he either either appeared to be reaching for or was the only logical place to go. It’s not quite so unreliable as to make the game consistently frustrating, but something there is seriously in need of a fix. I learned to speculatively quicksave my way around it, which isn’t ideal but was enough to let me keep thinking that this is a solid pure-breed stealth game.

The occasional strange conflict and the missing alchemy feature aside, Monks & Mystics is undoubtedly one of Crusader Kings 2’s strongest pieces of DLC. It leans heavily towards the game’s roleplaying aspect, its best feature, and produces some of the game’s most bizarre stories. Essentially, you’re playing two characters. You have your public face and your secret one, so there are very few moments where you’re waiting around for something to happen. Indeed, you can almost ignore the traditional intrigue and realm management, if you want, in favour of playing a member of one of these secret sects or hunting them down to save your kingdom.

After years of seeing the same thing, it has become clear that Ubi games cannot function on the strength of their formula alone. And they certainly can’t rely on the strength of your mate Greg. They need some hook and less bait. At the very least they need decent story-telling or likeable characters. However, the principal problem that will forever plague this developer is that the transparency and rigidity of their formula will always hinder them. You can always see it skulking over the surface of the game, like a man in stars and stripes facepaint trying to sneak into a cocaine warehouse. It has been detected: insta-fail.

Loot Rascals is a smart piece of game design executed with delightful style. Even so, it feels as though the mechanics overwhelm all else – I do think it would benefit from offering more structure and goals in order to then earn the daily-play status it clearly desires.

It’s a couple of evening’s worth of exploring a concept and buying a few upgrades for under a tenner. I don’t not recommend it on that basis – the single greatest thing about PC gaming is that it’s a medium which will explore every niche, and I was glad for a brief nose at this one. It is a bit crashy in its current form through, and that paired with the feeling that it needs a little more meat on its bones makes me more inclined to suggest waiting a month or two.

It all works really rather well, and is accompanied by a very pleasing ambient soundtrack, along with nature noises chirping and squawking over the Eno-esque keyboardy tones. And it gets rewardingly difficult, without feeling unfair, or relying on ninja reflexes. (Clearly I have them, but they’re left in their box here.) This is well worth a look, and a good scratch of the head.

Stories Untold is bleak and disturbing, novel and experimental, and most importantly when doing all that, very clever. It’s smarter than you’ll realise, in fact. And why it’s smart is all in the experience of playing, not to be given away in the process of reviewing. A pain in the arse for me, but worth it for you.

There is, throughout, a slight air of artificiality to Torment: Tides of Numenera. It has been made to please a specific crowd, and sometimes that shows; sometimes that comes at the expense of what matters most. This is outweighed entirely by the scale of this accomplishment. Torment is the weird, wordy, wise and wicked roleplaying game we’ve so desired during these long years of heightened spectacle. Not a total triumph, no, but close enough.

I started off really not liking it, I grew to completely love it, and I walk away from it with so much love but a wobble of doubt. It’s by far the most elaborately graphical piece of interactive fiction, but in being so it suggests it’s going to be other things too, and it’s hard (certainly at first) to let go of all that, just let it be what it is. Get there, forget about what else it might be, and for me at least, it got me good.

Unexplored is almost certainly going to be one of my favourite games of the year.

I’m glad that Barksdale is making these twisted little stories. The Static Speaks My Name impressed me because I never quite knew which way it was going to twist, whereas Bucket Detective is soaking in its own horrible juices right from the start. It starts ugly and ends ugly, without enough humour or horror in between to shock or surprise. I’m not convinced its mingling of arcane silliness and actual suffering quite works either; it’s a bit like Martyrs with gross sex jokes.

Halo Wars 2 is simultaneously conservative and inventive. It’s definitely trying to evoke traditional RTS games – which is not entirely a bad thing given the recent dearth of them – especially when it comes to the campaign, but elements like base construction and Blitz mode make it stand out enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re just going through the motions for the hundredth time. A clumsy UI and weird, sometimes fixed, keybindings and controls reveal its console heritage, but there are a surprising number of benefits to that side of the design.

Again, so much of this criticism really wouldn’t feel relevant if the game’s own storefront (if it has its own website, I cannot find it) didn’t describe something totally other than what’s being sold. This is not an open world game, there’s absolutely no exploring, and you don’t gather twigs to build a nest.

Overall, I don’t know exactly how I feel about For Honor. It sometimes feels like a Ubisoft hired a bunch of scientists in white coats to observe Dark Souls PvP from behind reinforced perspex and experiment on it with Dota DNA in a mad attempt to recreate a tame monster in a safe environment for their own nefarious ends (profit). What they’ve made is an interesting chimera, something that is both more accessible but sometimes just as unforgiving.

This is charming and silly and gentle and fun, ridiculously intricate and lovingly crafted. It’s not hardcore, it’s not going to outfox you, but it doesn’t want to be doing that. This is one of those instances where you wish “casual” hadn’t become a meaningless nonsense term in gaming, because it would nicely capture the feeling of a puzzle book that’s magically come alive, a Where’s Wally where you get to poke and prod the characters. It’s a calm, calming and pleasingly silly game.

What we’ve got here is a solid stealth-action core with some lovely level design – both visually and in terms of the vast array of possible ways to accomplish your objectives – wrapped up in something equal parts drab and cynical. The gore, the Farmvilleish reward system: these are there as contrived hooks for the less discerning man-shooter enthusiast. It’s highly telling that the rest of the game would be barely effected if these were removed...I do like that core, though.

A really splendid example of the form, with enough original ideas of its own within the standard to make it interesting. It’s a good, solid game, that’s occasionally extremely tough, but always fair. The pixel art is lovely, and although the backgrounds are a little bland, animations go a good way to make up for that. Lovers of chiptunes will delight in its soundtrack, authentic to the 8-bit era, and well composed. It’s the sort of game that deserves to stand out, not get lost in the mix.

Despite its flaws, Tales of Berseria has numerous interesting stories to tell. If the developers had cut the flab and focused almost exclusively on the cast of characters – with some combat thrown in – then I think this would have been a must-play. As it is, I think it’s still worth playing if you’re a fan of story-focused JRPGs, as long as you know you’re strapped in for the long haul. I felt more connected with the game’s characters than I have to any group in a long time, and it’s worth putting up with a few hours of pain for that pay off.

That’s where I’m at with the game personally – invested and interested but also frustrated and bored at times. More broadly, the thing I’m struggling with is why I would recommend this to someone when Sunless Sea exists, has a similar sensibility and is more polished. It feels more like something you’d suggest after a player of Sunless Sea has exhausted their interest in that particular game but is still excited about the style of story.

This isn’t going to entertain the brainboxes who demand Stephen’s Sausage Witness before they’ll get out of their four-dimensional beds, but for a chilled puzzling time, they don’t get much better than this. It’s really splendid.

I love this whole genre, this found phone genre that if I call a genre enough will magically become a real genre.

It’s got as many flaws as an outdated Windows operating system.

It’s fine, it passes the time, it could be a lot better with a clearer interface, the removal of its gibberish plot, and much fairer windows for the timing challenges, but none of that would raise it much past “above average”. It’s just an average idea, done reasonably well. And sometimes that’s enough.

It’s the Baker family’s story and they’re magnificent. Grotesque, yes, but delightfully so. Like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and the rest of their kind, it’s a game centred on its villains rather than their victims. And, like those series, this is a game that can scare you, startle you, shock you, draw a nervous laugh out of you and make you shake your head in disbelief, but mostly it’s just here to entertain. And the Bakers are right at the horrible heart of it all.

If you’re after a smart implementation of Threes-like input and tile-based battling, Tiles & Tales does that, and is free!

Despite a heavy dollop of Silent Hill, it’s a horror game unlike anything else I’ve played thanks to the smart use it makes of its historical setting. If you’re interested in thoughtful, fearsome games, don’t let this one slip by.

Sanctus Reach’s unit and faction design and flexible mechanics deserve a much better campaign and fewer constantly recycled objectives.

The pleasures of a focused strategy title like Civilization lie in juggling the numbers in just the right way to succeed. Those found in a freeform city-builder like Sim City come from unleashing your unbridled creativity on a blank canvas. By sticking on a rigidly deterministic (and, thus, politically questionable, however well-intentioned) reading of two centuries of European history, Urban Empire fails to tap either of those joys, revealing its incessant march towards the present is not an ongoing process actively shaped by individual players, but a foregone conclusion simply waiting to be ushered in.

There’s greatness here, and damn, it’s so funny and cutesy-sarcastic. The puzzles are top notch, and the dungeons, when properly equipped, often a pleasure to plough through. But there’s just so much annoyance layered on top for absolutely no discernible reason, beyond presumably a fear that their sequel didn’t feel sufficiently different. The silly thing is, it was.

Ladykiller does a lot of good, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook what it gets wrong.

It’s definitely got a place in my games library, and it’s a really good way to play a version of the board game my friends and I enjoy even though we’re rarely in the same city at the moment. It’s not hellishly expensive so I don’t feel bad suggesting someone pick it up for a couple of afternoons of play. I will say, though, that I didn’t form any attachment to the single player stuff, nor was playing with the AI appealing. I’m going to be sticking to my human (or post-human in the case of the ghosts) buddies from now on.

This is all the work of one man, Thomas Lerdy, and he’s absolutely nailed it. If like me you’ve been craving a good implementation of the puzzle for PC, then you’ve found it in Pictopix. If you’re looking for a fun, brain-using puzzle presented splendidly, then now is the time to discover why Picross/Nonograms are quite so great.

I’m very glad it exists. If it is simply interactive fiction, it’s a wonderfully inventive take on it.

Glittermitten Grove is nothing but misery. Build, wait for meters to refill, endure, repeat, self-loathe.

I’ve had a mostly splendid (and occasionally aggravating) time with it, and for its minimal price really strongly recommend you give it a look.

It’s a frustrating expansion, though there’s every chance patches will address some of these complaints. McMillen has already said that portal percentages and other issues mentioned are on the list for patching. Pick through the shit and you’ll find the nuggets of gold, but if I hadn’t sucked every last drop out of Afterbirth, I’d rather be playing that than Afterbirth †. As it is, I’m just about won over by the promise of new things, many of which are solid additions, but there’s a lot of dreariness to tolerate.

It’s pure agony at this point that they’re re-running the exact same bloody plots yet again for a third five-part series, as if they weren’t miserably worn out before even Telltale scooped them up off the floor and blew off the crust and fluff. That they’re not even trying to take the slightest new angle belies a barren and bereft production not worth dragging your own mutilated corpse through.

It’s pure agony at this point that they’re re-running the exact same bloody plots yet again for a third five-part series, as if they weren’t miserably worn out before even Telltale scooped them up off the floor and blew off the crust and fluff. That they’re not even trying to take the slightest new angle belies a barren and bereft production not worth dragging your own mutilated corpse through.

I’m not convinced that playing a nation like South Africa or Canada will ever be quite as engaging as playing Britain or Germany, at least not when it comes to the war itself. They still have to play catch up, and they’re always going to depend on the superpowers. Together for Victory doesn’t simply buff the Commonwealth nations to make them more viable however – it gives them more options and more nation-defining decisions, especially in regards to creating an alternate history. It’s an entirely different focus, and a welcome one.

Part of me feels as though this is a brilliant, beautiful Space Hulk tech demo blown up and looped, and I’m not sure how long that can hold my interest. It’s a good time for a while, but for a long life its many rough edges need smoothing and more flesh needs adding to its bones.

Don’t play for the graphics. Don’t play for the story. Play for what this game is about: putting your brain through a thresher and loving it.

As a faction, however, the Wood Elves are a worthy addition to Total War: Warhammer’s burgeoning list of fantastical armies. Distinct and terribly tricky, they make the game feel new again, while forcing half-arsed commanders like myself to up our game.

This is an incredible game. I started it with no expectations at all (as I mentioned before, I can’t even remember why I’d flagged the game to look at), and have come away from it as one of my favourite games of 2016.

You’ll have a good time with Dead Rising 4. But you won’t feel as though you earned it.

These aren’t the worst of the Pinball FX2 tables by any means, and prolonged time with DOOM might even show it to be one of the best, but as a bundle of three, they’re…frustrating is the word I’m looking for. Frustrating because the idea of taking a big RPG and making a pinball table that carries over some of its qualities in mechanics as well as art and sound is brilliant. I suspect they’d need to escape the confines of a single table and such a basic ruleset to succeed though – an entire pinball game based around Fallout, with separate tables for factions and areas? Now, that might work.

Slick, beautiful, gently challenging and supremely well designed, it’s a stunning piece of work.

There is no deep understanding here, you won’t have your mind changed, and it certainly doesn’t have any of the emotional impact of Papers Please. But within its own barmy universe, it works! It’s a good chunk of fun, and easily survives at least a second play to see how much you can mess with people’s lives.

For all of its creative solutions and ideals, Watch Dogs 2 can’t help but see California as an open carry state, and while I’ve enjoyed portions of it enormously, it doesn’t go far enough in stamping its own identity on what is, eventually, another city of crime, cars and firearms.

Atmospheric and impossible to rush, Shadow Tactics is a fabulous game – a game I think I prefer to both Commandos 2 and Desperados. I can see myself replaying it regularly.