Phantom Fury sometimes falters in its basic elements (and it can be a little buggy too - fair warning) but its devotion to detail is so laudable I don't care. Chekhov said that if you have a prop on stage, then that prop must serve a purpose to the story. Hemmingway said, nah, that's bollocks, inconsequential details are important. Phantom's Fury feels like the latter; a devotee of inconsequential gizmos. Its clocks are fully animated gif timepieces. Its cream-coloured PCs make clicking hard drive noises when you switch them on. And, very importantly, its toilets flush.

You know what I'd buy, actually? I'd buy an anthology collection called Tales From Aveum, that has stories about a carpenter who's building a mansion in the shanty town clinging on the sides of a giant bottomless pit, and the bored noble who's a secret magic assassin, and whoever it is who has to train new recruits in arm strength. Make it more focused, pick a lane with your tone, and baby, we'd have a stew going.

It's a decent, fun game if you liked Road 96 and while I don't think it's essential, it's endearing to see a developer like their characters enough to want to do more with them. Nice, too, that they had the runway to do it rather than move on to the next thing. You get the feeling they wanted to do more, even so; there's a DLC in the form of an interactive e-book bridging the gap between Mile 0 and Road 96, which costs almost as much as Mile 0. It's nice to go back - but my gut tells me it's probably time we all left Petria behind now.

I wish I could say I was surprised by the sloppiness of Black Ops 7's campaign, but the sad reality is it's part of a long-running pattern with Call of Duty's annualised releases that has only exacerbated in recent years, with direct sequels to the series' various offshoots feeling like warmed up leftovers from a twelve-month old meal. That said, it is still disappointing considering the comparative quality of the last two Black Ops campaigns, and at a time when old-fashioned linear shooters are extremely scarce, Black Ops 7's failure to offer up something even modestly enjoyable is keenly felt. [Campaign Review]

Though simple, Lethis comes across as modern and thoughtful, not chained to nostalgia. I’ve enjoyed my time with it for the most part, but I’m ready to part company with it now: I feel I’ve seen everything and any revisit would simply be repetition. I’d love to see its art approach applied to something a little more organic, though.

Predictable and nice, if you like that sort of thing, but quick to go stale.

It's Travis who carries this version of No More Heroes, and occasionally makes you forget that you're actually playing what is a rather mediocre port in 2021. Unless you're a mega-fan, I don't see why you should play this version over the Wii one, because it lacks many basic PC-specific improvements you'd expect from a remaster. But mainly, it loses a lot of charm without those motion controls. I can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe it's time for me to pick up a Wii.

Overall, despite all the frustrations, I enjoyed being a broody detective cat. I just wish the game itself was as strong as the story it was trying to tell.

It would be unfair to single out AO Tennis 2 for replicating the banality of tennis when every sports ’em up has the same conceptual flaw.

All of this could be fixed with future updates, but I think the devs have built themselves into a corner with the fundamentals of Minecraft Legends. Adding more content and complexity won't solve the issue of the awkward control scheme and lack of precision - something that all RTS games need in order to be great.

The balance is all off, and its slog of a campaign and the attempts at streamlining make this a disappointing extraterrestrial outing.

And yet... I recorded all these complaints with a detached sort of "hmm" rather than major frustration. It's one of the most low-stress strategy games I've played this year, and its detail comprehensible once you've picked up the stone it's hiding under. It's a combination of engaging and undemanding that grand strategy seldom manages, and has enough Trek stuff to work for someone who's seen most of the serieseses but only once, and can only sometimes tell if something's a reference to an episode or wholly new. How the boon of such a familiar setting will stand against the weight of that setting's expectations I do not know, but if you go in wanting an enjoyable game that you kind of already know, Infinite will be a pleasant little surprise.

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.

Aragami 2 absolutely channels highlights from the past three decades of stealth-action, but it also files a lot of the bumpy bits off. Immediacy over complexity.

For those first few hours, Battlefront 2 struck me with gorgeous moment after gorgeous moment that’s made me reevaluate what’s possible with 2017’s technology. It’s a shame that the fighting frequently gets bogged down by chokepoints, and any long-term appeal is undermined by a progression system that can’t shake the pay to win shadow which continues to loom over the game. [Multiplayer review]

If you reckon you've got a higher tolerance for battering the 'skip dialogue' button though, by all means go for it. There is, as I say, some excellent, dumb fun to be had here.

This is a smart, gorgeously presented game, novel and peculiar, and as I mentioned at the start, with a lot to not quite say. I’m not convinced by the ending, I think it aims for too much “Ahhhh but ahhhhhhhh” and not enough, “Oh.” But the journey toward it had me intrigued, and the game’s final sequence is utterly stunning – level design you won’t have seen elsewhere.

Albino Lullaby delivers all the atmosphere we were hoping for, but then fails to have a sturdy enough game beneath it.

YIIK might have been able to get away with some of its issues if other areas were able to pick up the slack. I’ve sat through plenty of tiresome combat to find out what happens in a story, and a convoluted plot can be fine if it’s allowed to breathe through interesting characters. But Alex himself is this game’s millennium bug, preventing the player from even rooting for their own actions, because they are all filtered through this deeply unlikable proxy.

If you're allergic to puzzle games, though, it's not a gentle introduction to the genre. Depending on the ending you get, it might feel a little abrupt at the finish, but there are some puzzles in there that feel revelatory to solve. You feel smarter than one of those sheltered Mensa kids whose parents force them to learn to play the tuba. I figured out that bit with the blood serums, godammit, I should be eligible for lifetime membership of your little genius-person club without any tests.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the game that sprang to mind while I was mulling over how to approach this review. It’s also a janky, overambitious RPG full of sweary, violent people doing horrible things to each other. The difference is that, by and large, the characters in Cyberpunk are compelling, well-rounded characters with depth and nuance. They’re frequently likeable, even caring, forcing us to deal with the contradictory aspects of human nature. Elex 2 has none of that, it’s just a game filled with deeply unpleasant people.

Maybe Serial Killer is a great idea with appealing style, saddled with iffy design and insufficient flexibility. Walks the walk, but the talk’s another matter. For some, that’s going to be forgivable because of its conceptual novelty and stylistic verve (which includes unlocking wackier or film-inspired character outfits and maps). Me, though – I want to scrub all evidence of Serial Cleaner from my PC before its lovely look tempts me into having a tedious time all over again.

Ancestors is a mish-mash of ideas, some good, many awkward and poorly executed. Down another evolutionary branch, this might have been a solid ape sim about swinging from branch to branch and raising a family of hominids across the eras. But here, even the sometimes pleasing “floor is lava” tree-swinging can’t be saved from the slavering jaws of those clingy context-sensitive menus, nor the mess of barely explained HUD elements, nor the obnoxious video filters.

It’s a really well made and sometimes great portion of turn-based tactics, but more often than not, it was frustration rather than strategy that drove me to go maximum boyo.

Lego Marvel Avengers is very much what they’ve already been, but with most of the magic missing.

Right now, it’s lacking, and not just in musical numbers.

At the heart of Sea Of Solitude is the idea that all emotions can have a positive or negative form — love can be twisted to be something unhealthy or saddening, for example, just as being alone can be quiet solitude or debilitating loneliness. I’ve no doubt that Sea Of Solitude might seem facile to some people, but that just means it isn’t for you. I think it’ll probably be for a lot of other people.

It makes me too sick, and because the underlying experience collapses from operatic space disaster into rinse and repeat all too soon, I am not minded to endure that awful lurching sensation. Despite that, some of my VR confidence has been restored. Maybe this thing can happen after all.

King’s Bounty 2 leaves me with the sense of a workmanlike adherence to genre trends rather than anything particularly creatively fulfilling or naturally complimentary to the core game. While the narrative context and contiguous casualties, experience, and treasury provided by the quests and exploration is good and necessary, it’s just all too puffed up in mostly uninteresting ways.

There’s a really excellent single-player action game hiding somewhere deep inside Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, calling out for help from beneath a few metric tonnes of loot-addled drudgery. The vast talent of Rocksteady peeps out just often enough to make it worthwhile for the genre’s fans, but the game’s extended development time has Suicide Squad chasing old trends, leaving it feeling cautious, unambitious and old-fashioned.

The most glaring problem is how The Suicide Of Rachel Foster fails to meaningfully engage with its central themes.

The game's story keeps unravelling towards a genuinely tearjerking ending, digging into its themes of community, resilience, and rebuilding in surprising and consistently interesting ways. It keeps a steady, compelling rhythm, switching between the normal fishing and cooking to something more dramatic and then back again. And watching the town slowly come back to life, not despite setbacks but building on what they leave behind, is beautiful.

At The Gates has an impressively complicated set of interlocking systems, but the amount of time and patience it takes to actually get anywhere is ridiculous.

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.

It's not exactly Saints Row, but it's not exactly its own thing either. It just is, and the lack of creative purpose makes me think it exists almost exclusively for balance sheet reasons, which isn't a nice conclusion to come to. I wish we lived in a world where the people who made the pun food trucks and the big, weird city and conceived the interesting duality of the Idols gang (and their cool helmets) were given a large pot of money and several years to make whatever game they wanted, no strings attached, no legacy series hanging over them. But that's not the world we live in.

Look past the slightly dubious plot and there's much to enjoy about The DioField Chronicle's combat, but when it's a full-priced game I cannot in good conscience say it's 'worth a punt' when half of it leaves such a sour aftertaste. You'll stop caring about this band of mercs long before they do anything to try and redeem themselves, and there simply are better RPGs and better strategy games out there to sink your teeth into instead. It's a shame, especially when its free first chapter demo looked so promising just a couple of months ago, but alas, the central cast just absolutely lost me halfway through. It may not be the greatest plot twist you've ever seen, but at least you'll be on the right side of history this time.

I love being exposed to new places and histories, but the distancing of Aurelia’s structure had me looking for a way to get closer; that brush with the familiar pulled me right in for a moment and I wanted more of the same.

The game offers an immediately recognisable concept, that manages to innovate and surprise, and it’s entirely unlike anything else I’ve played before. Just like a secret clubhouse, it’s likely to lose its allure if you spend all your time there – but it’s exciting as hell to to visit in a snatched moment.

It’s a shame, because it’s a wonderfully ambitious mashup of systems wrapped around a lovely, if extremely cliched, caricature of the golden age of gangster fiction. When negotiations break down and you end up in a shoot-out with enemies that look like they’re dressed for a wedding, Empire Of Sin feels like a farce worthy of a Coen brothers movie.

It’s undeniably repetitive. I like the game a lot, and in a large part because of its simplicity. But it’s certainly walking a fine line, possibly limiting how many times someone might want to take another trip down its randomly generated tower knowing they’ve encountered many of its surprises.

Straightforward, simple, but slick and solid. Cossacks is comfort food, but it feels sufficiently of today despite its cheerfully throwback heart. I had a good time, and most of all I realised that I’m more than ready for this once so staid of genres to come back in earnest.

Despite those reservations, I'm won over by the birds themselves. I haven't unlocked all the levels yet but I'll crack on to help Big Friend. My hands may never adapt to the precise gravity of these joyful idiots. But bailing as a sparrow is relatively painless. With time, I will become unflappable.

There are so many smart ideas in here, and the concept is neat, even if obviously derivative. But the execution doesn’t hold it together, with disappointing responses to extremes, and a strangely anticlimactic progression. I feel like if this were given another six months, the game could be as interesting to play as it is in ambition. But as it is, it’s not there.

It’s just so self-sabotaging at every point. Astonishing amounts of work have gone into this, to creating such a vast detailed city, writing an apparently infinite story, building something on such scale. And then this has been dramatically let down by the dreadful AI, a woeful inability to edit, and the mindnumbing monotony of its identical missions. I’m fascinated by it, but I absolutely cannot recommend it.

Each character class I’ve found so far has been really distinct, and I still have a few to encounter. Warsaw has the makings of a genuinely fascinating, unyielding tactical game with a lot of heart and reverence for the events it’s based on. Still, as is, it’s currently a hard sell unless you’re really intent on a challenge that, while thematically resonant, often feels more arbitrary than it is complex.

But this just wasn’t for me. Ultimately, there’s only so excited I can get by the prospect of being (let’s all say it in Chod’s awed whisper) an entrepreneur. Maybe I’m just becoming more prone to escapism as I age, but there’s just not much of a thrill for me in getting really, really efficient at flogging grape juice and tables to people.

A cursory attempt to yank the story off the rails by picking every antisocial, confrontational dialogue option resulted in the plot following the exact same trajectory, with somewhat snippier interactions with the cast and a few new lines of incidental dialogue based on clan choice. Being an elder vampire means that people will put up with a LOT of your bullshit, it seems. Aside from some Fallout-esque epilogue slides based on your few choices, there's not much you can do to steer the story. Not an inherent flaw if you're willing to judge this game on its own terms, but a final nail in the coffin for those hoping Troika's legacy lives on through this game.

Disintegration has a lot of room for improvement, but I enjoyed my time with it, and it succeeds in finding a balance between its shooting and strategic elements. It’s the kind of game I hope gets a sequel, one which is bolder in pursuing its ideas, and not just in its character names.

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.

The basic act of hitting something doesn’t feel quite right, even when you’re whacking someone with your massive motorcycle hands. There’s this feeling of disconnection, some of it coming from the way your enemy can blink away at speed, and some of it, probably, from lag. A recent patch claimed to address that, but it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Hopefully that will be ironed out further down the line. But even if it is, I’d steer clear of Bleeding Edge. The characters may be inventive, but everything else is bleeding out on the floor.

This is a shambolic RPG barely held together by an underutilised photography aspect and an entirely inconsequential shapeshifting ability, wrapped in the familiar trappings of a rural life simulator. The Good Life is tonally stupid, structurally broken, surprisingly deep and occasionally self-aware. It is a confusing and strange and mostly horrible experience, which I feel personally worse off having been through, but am somehow glad that I did.

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.

I’d say “I’m sorry, Unto”, but I’m really not sorry because I hate this sluggish, clumsy little arsehole and I wish he’d stayed dead the first time. Some of you will like him (and it’s worth giving it a go via Game Pass to see if you do). But that’s your problem now.

With just three maps to choose from, all of them set in the same jungle and pretty much indistinguishable from one another, it will only take a dozen matches before you’ve seen every which way that things can shake out. It’s at this point that Predator: Hunting Grounds really does feel like the interesting-but-limited multiplayer component of a much larger game, and no amount of loot crates with customisable cosmetic skins, unlockable sniper rifles and fancy new dresses for the Predator can hope to liven things back up again...It’s a shame too, because I could spend ages running around the jungle as everyone’s favourite Schwarzeneggar-botherer, leaping over temples and howling at the sky in unbridled agony each time this supposedly rock-hard alien has to give himself his little injection of health medicine. There’s a really excellent Predator in here, waiting to be set free.

I hope Blackbird can turn Legion's ailing fortunes around. Not simply because good RTS games are rarer than white rhinos these days, but also because I genuinely think Legion has potential. It's not as derivative as its theme makes it appear, and despite the ruckus it caused, the idea of earning new units through play is not entirely without merit. Nonetheless, with the campaign being as anaemic as it is, right now I'd only recommend Crossfire: Legion if you already know your way around fast-paced, competitive RTS games. [Early Access Review]

I did eventually power through to Follow the Light’s climax (also disappointing, for reasons relating but not specific to the aforementioned not-actually-missing child issue), and the only thing that could tempt me back is some kind of dedicated free-sail side mode. It’s frustrating: a game that’s so good in places at weaving that sensation of impetus, of literally moving forward with the wind at your back, also being so willing to bog you down in busywork. And I’d rather be dashed on the sharpest rocks in Scandinavia than have to poke at one more circuit breaker.

It’s short, it’s brutal to the point of unfair, and I haven’t even mentioned half the things you need to manage, because I don’t wish to either spoil or overload you.

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

Broken Roads isn’t bland. Fun writing and odd ideas prevent it from being so, but it does feel like a bland place to spend time. These roads aren’t broken, but they’re so serpentine that the game cannot help taking wrong turns and getting in its own way. If the setting and themes appeal to you enough to overlook the rest, then sure. Otherwise, save your dollarydoos.

Maybe Aquatico is more satisfying on higher difficulty levels and maybe campaigns will be introduced in future updates (though I haven’t found anything from the developers indicating that is the case). All I can do, though, is review the game in front of me: it’s pretty but lifeless.

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.

There’s definitely some dark stuff in there and the characters have a real spark of life in them, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing - and that’s kind of how I feel about Vertigo as whole, too.

This likely reads as an overwhelmingly negative review, and it’s deserved – No Man’s Sky is massively flawed, and systematically poorly designed. But it’s also a massive playground of potential and opportunity, and its sheer ambition, for all its massive stumbles, is rewarded in play. It’s bloody awful that the whole time I’ve been playing, the dozens of hours on PC this weekend, I’ve been thinking about the PS4 hastily hooked up to the TV at the other side of my office and wishing I were still playing over there.

It’s absolutely true to say that you get out of Sword Coast Legends what you put in, but right now there just aren’t enough reasons to put much in.

It’s sailing on, happy to be what it is – another pirate game with a skeleton crew.

Much like crabs themselves, I am tremendously glad this game exists, but it’s something I’d rather appreciate at a distance.

It goes back to the game seemingly utilising cyberpunk as an aesthetic, and an excuse for computer-magic, without really exploring the human concerns involved. There’s a billboard in the intro cinematic that literally just says ‘Neon’. Another advertises ‘Hack Cola’. I don’t want to make a joke about an AI writing a cyberpunk script for fear of falling into some sort of terrifying Rococo’s Basilisk-esque logic hole, but you get the picture.

The nicest thing I can say about Terminator: Resistance is that if a Terminator were sent back in time to wipe out its code, the timeline of gaming in general would almost certainly proceed unchanged.

Kalypso and Yippee seem determined to banish memories of the ropey release build (As I type this, my install is being modified by a fresh 1GB patch – 1.08) as quickly as they can. If they stay the course and keep delivering fixes at the current rate, by March, Commandos 2 HD Remaster could be entirely error free. I’m reasonably confident the repairs will be completed satisfactorily. Whether Pyro’s masterpiece will ever get back the minuscule black crosses and red circles, it wore, without controversy, for nigh-on twenty years, remains to be seen.

I almost walked away during the opening moments, when Sylvio seems like yet another cobbled together mess of repetitive graphical assets. I figured I’d play until the first jump scare and then quit. Instead, I found a game that uses its limited resources to find clever ways to scare the life out of me. It’s a quiet horror game – an anti-screamer, right down to the calm almost-whispers of the protagonist – and it’s a triumph.

It’s clean and painstakingly handcrafted, with superbly chosen colour palettes, striking linework, and cracking use of lighting effects to bring life to grisly, glowing ghosts.

It's so full of love and pretty reveals, and empty dwarf pubs that feel hand crafted, and overheard orc conversations where they bitch about goblins. If you have a group of friends that you already play games like this with, then I'd say it's well worth bringing campfires and cosy stew to as many corners of Moria as you can.

Reforged, like a lot of remasters today, is good for a run around if all you wanted was to give your nostalgia a long leash – long enough to punch some elves in the face, say. But if Warcraft III was a game you not only once loved, but love still; if it’s a game you’ve been playing for the better part of 20 years… Well. It’s not hard to see how Reforged could end up being a bit of a disappointment.

It's worth sticking around in the forest once you've actually dealt with the witch, too. Like Death Stranding's residents, Witch Strandings' animal folk still need someone to take care of them every day, letting you continually add to your ever-growing point score, but their demeanour and local surroundings also change in tangible, noticeable ways. You start to see the effect your handiwork has had on them more clearly, and the completionist icon-clearer in me does want to see what a completely clean, hex-free forest looks like. So I think I'll be sticking around a little while longer in this strange, haunted woodland. My wrist might not thank me for it, but I'm sure a soft blanket will cure my aching bones.

It’s a clumsy, dull, shallow, lacklustre trudge through cold soup. And fails at the most important aspect of any game in the genre: making me want to have another go.

There’s beauty to be found here, among the stars. But it’s going to take a more dedicated role-player than myself – or at least someone far more interested in systems for their own sake – to buy into this flimsy simulation for very long.

There's no incentive to actually fu.king do anything, and in between the things you can't be arsed to do are just vaste swathes of nothing. I'm convinced everything in Forspoken would be 100% improved if it was about 60% smaller. The world would be compact, but it would be dense, more interesting, and appropriately scoped. It might have characters in it beyond the same few urchins standing on the streets in Cipal dong one of three "I'm scared" poses, and cutscenes that don't have a fade to black every five seconds for no apparent reason. It's so annoying, because I think a lot of the core ideas here are very cool, and it's one of those games where I want a sequel where they do everything better. Given the nature of these things, I expect we never will.

All of these issues are fixable (some quite easily, I’d hope), and just a little extra content could do so much to hide the edges of the game.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a developer try to recapture the magic of Jagged Alliance and I hope it’s not the last, but I found Rage pretty hard work to enjoy. Much like the mercs themselves, for every positive trait it may offer, there tends to be some frustrating problem to deal with too.

It's by no means bad, but it's a disappointing game that fails to capture the appeal of any of its component genres, and fails to generate anything interesting by combining them.

It needs changes to how it actually works, which is a lot to ask. But the biggest fight I’ve had with Anthem so far is against Anthem.

The appeal of being a humble, vulnerable bee going about their business in a more detailed, freeform way seems obvious. Bee Simulator has its upsides, but this just isn’t the one. My bee t-shirt, and I, are still waiting.

I think Skull And Bones might be one of the most boring games I've ever played. There might be value in it for those looking for a leisurely sail, or folks who enjoy the time management side of making deliveries optimally. For everyone else, boat-lovers, live service fiends, and people who like fun, the game will be nothing more than a tedious slog through unrewarding waters.

There’s a common narrative that Call of Duty campaigns were at their peak in the late ‘00s. That may be true in pop cultural terms, multiplayer having long since overshadowed solo modes for the typical COD fan. But this Modern Warfare reboot began with Infinity Ward firing on all cylinders, embracing brave themes and experimental designs in single-player that excused its occasional stumbles. It’s a shame to see the engine it built sputter and fail, betrayed by a stopgap schedule-filler with nothing to say. [Campaign Review]

I like the game at CE’s heart, but interacting with it is simply unpleasant.

Without having been in one myself I can’t say with any authority that Disaster Report 4 isn’t an accurate representation of the kinds of things that happen after a real earthquake, but I’m willing to guess that it falls short of a true simulation. It’s certainly about as ridiculous as the unfolding apocalypse happening outside our own windows – where society has seemingly ejected its collective mind to stockpile eggs and demand that the army open fire on joggers – but it’s about as passive as our lockdown too. Disaster Report 4 depicts a strange and consequence-averse crisis, in which you’re usually little more than a hapless observer.

In 2019, a massive and meticulously-crafted open world just doesn’t cut it. Any life breathed into Ghost Recon Breakpoint will have to be pumped into it by you and your friends, and you’d do better to save your breath for other games.

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.

I'm genuinely a bit gutted about Wanted: Dead. I really wanted the game to be a stylish hack n' slash romp with a quirky, cyberpunk edge. The result, sadly, is anything but. It doesn't know what it wants to be! And in many ways, it's bucket of ideas and force-fed zaniness only serves to make it feel both incomplete and directionless. Save your money folks.

There are moments in this where I’m just cheerfully jetting around, my hands moving me and my head gawping at dinos, and it feels like a natural and pleasant way to pass the time. As opposed to battling controls or being acutely conscious that my boxed head is wired up to a PC...The right software may yet save VR gaming, and while Time Machine VR is not a revelation, is does offer some promising signposts. [Tested with Oculus Rift]

Despite having my skin crawl at almost everything Mr. Voice said, his breaking the fourth wall to rope the player into his scheme creates an awful sense of complicity. Thankfully, this is directly balanced by the joy whenever you can lead Misfortune into any small act of rebellion against him. It’s a giddy combination of adult smugness at getting one over on a rival combined with childish conspiratorial whispering under a blanket fort.

£14 is a lot for two hours, and as I think I’ve perhaps covered above, it’s an abysmal game. The Welshest game I’ve ever played, but still abysmal. Great TV show for the most part, but one that keeps annoying your viewing pleasure by asking you to click on a dot. Graphics are amazing, though!

It’s a fun and original concept, stretched so thinly that it’s snapped back and pinged us in the eye. We deserve to be underwhelmed by it, and its creator should be lauded as a prodigy of the horror genre all the same.

A short-lived yet slowburn sci-fi drama about two engineers exploring a spooky, beautifully designed Martian base that's let down by a general lack of inspiration and especially, a dissatisfying plot.

Praetorians HD Remaster looks better than its predecessor, but honestly, still looks like a mobile game I’d find in a promoted tweet, alongside a vague imperative like “defend your empire!”.

On paper, Crucible was built for me. It’s a MOBA-infused hero shooter with an emphasis on mobility, with a diverse line-up and some interesting new ideas. In reality, I’d rather play any of the many games that grapple with just one of Crucible’s heads, and pulls it off far better. This hydra might be sprawling, but none of it looks healthy.

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.

I am an Elite apologist, and have been since the earliest of accesses. When I praise the exploration and simminess I do so from the mindset of a guy who can put on a playlist of songs and indulge in the kind of spaceman play-pretend reserved for toddlers in cardboard boxes. And I would be an ingrate if I did not acknowledge the delivery of those spacelegs I have so often requested. But even I can only stomach so much bugginess and general wonk. Hopefully in the future Frontier will finish working on Odyssey's borked features. When that happens, I'm sure this will be the place to jump in for new players. But I can't make that recommendation now. Perhaps if you're desperate to step foot on a strange world (lord knows I have been) this fancy-yet-malfunctioning ferry might satisfy you. For everyone else, stick with the spaceship you've got.