Like Cities: Skylines, Planet Coaster gives new life to the management genre, and even if the launch version does little to improve what I’ve played during the beta, this would still be essential for anyone who dreams of packing in their old job and running a theme park.

There’s a lot wrong with The Martian VR Experience [official site], and it’s almost scandalous that they’re charging for it at all, let alone asking sixteen quid, but the bit where you get to drive a rover across an Unreal 4-rendered Mars with I Will Survive blaring is very hard to argue with. The bit where you cack-handedly chuck some potatoes in a bin, less so.

Despite my complaints, this is more than a triumphant return – it’s an improvement on the original in almost every way, and as close to a masterpiece as anything I’ve played this year. If it had a plot as powerful as its setting, any doubts I have that it might be remembered as a masterpiece would vanish.

If you enjoy low-key wind-down sims like Train Simulator and American Truck Simulator I’d be surprised if you didn’t also enjoy City Car Driving.

If it didn’t look so similar to the completely splendid (if also marred by dull combat) Pillars Of Eternity, if those expectations weren’t weighing on it, perhaps there’d be even more leniency. But as it is, this is a decent enough RPG that feels like its wearing clothes that don’t quite fit.

Is it a must-have VR title? No. But there are precious few of those. It is a pretty decent VR title though, with a strong conceit and pleasant scenery. That makes it notable enough. To be honest, what it really needs is support for sticking your arms out at your side and flapping around like Big Bird, but perhaps the later Vive version and/or Oculus Touch support might let us live out our Michael Keaton mid-life crisis fantasies.

After a few campaigns, it’s left me a little cold.

An incredible amount of hard work and money has gone into it, creating explosive spectacles and heavy gunfights. But that doesn’t stop it from being a hollow chassis, a tin man of a game – shiny, impressive, with absolutely no heart. [Campaign review only]

The most annoying flaw I’ve encountered in a week of play is an immovable combat window pop-up that make attacks in corner areas like Voronezh fiddly. Very occasionally, movement limitations rub me up the wrong way (arguably there should be a simple way of swapping units in adjacent areas, and reinforcing a contested area without triggering a battle) but minor blemishes like these won’t stop me playing one of 2016’s most absorbing and affordable battle sims.

It’s a much better game than last year’s edition though, the time in between having been spent on significant and healthy rewrites of AI processes at both the tactical and strategic levels. That it is the most visually appealing game in the series, in terms of both clarity off the pitch and improvements on the pitch, is a bonus.

This isn’t the expansion or the patch to convince those who weren’t already convinced by what Stellaris has to offer, but it brings plenty of alterations and additions for those already on board. More than that, it’s an indication that the studio have ideas as to how the universe can become more lively, without making it more cluttered at the same time, and that makes the future of Stellaris very exciting indeed.

If rushed through as a six-map story-led affair you’re perhaps going to feel a little short-changed, both in terms of length and in terms of dramatic satisfaction. I very strongly recommend playing it the way I did: it’s been so refreshing. Make each level the focus of a string of weeknights, exploring every corner and taking out every target, rather than ditch it the second you’ve played it once.

What a treat. And a surprisingly deep one, with compelling moments you’ll want to talk about. It’s a pleasure to control, it has impeccable difficulty balancing to keep you moving forward while always feeling like you’re being skillful, and all in the prettiest of pretty pixel graphics. Triumphant.

In multiplayer, Titans feel like an actual godsend at times, screaming down from the heavens as they do like avenging angels. They’re improved since the first game, as is everything else, more flexible and yet more focused at the same time.

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

Where previous Soulsborne DLCs took dark deep-dives into their worlds, embellishing the lore and offering some of the greatest boss encounters, Ariandel feels a bit tangential and tired by those (extremely high) standards.

And while it’s not as impactful as Rusty Lake Hotel, or my favourite Cube Escape, Seasons, there’s an absolute ton going on here for a crazy tiny £2.

It is, quite simply, a thing of wonder, and a late contender for my personal game of the year.

It is safely good. Even with the addition of Operations mode and the behemoths and the return to a more instinctively dramatic setting, it still feels like Battlefield. There’s capture points and there’s guns. There’s deathmatch and there’s conquest. There’s grenade spam and sniper alleys and miraculous dive-bombing pilots who somehow manage to use the terrible flight controls. The Great War might have been unique, but Battlefield 1 isn’t. For some, that won’t be a problem. For others, it might be time to sue for peace.

I’m probably guilty of hoping that, now that the nu-Lara groundwork is established, Tomb Raider might now feel more free to re-embrace the tonal qualities that we loved the original games for. ‘Celebtration’ or no, I shouldn’t realistically expect add-on content for a game which very deliberately employs a dour vibe to somehow depart from that. Happy 20th birthday, Lara. I hope you find your way home one day.

Better responding controls would do a lot of good, but for £6.40 you’ve got a lovely idea, often delivered very well.

GoNNER is this year’s Downwell – a neat, short-form action game that has found the perfect visual style to communicate its near-misses and big hits. Whether you want to show off by pushing its systems to the limits or play at a more relaxed and careful pace, basking in the gorgeous music, it’s an absolute delight.

It’s DOOM without the claustrophobia. A Serious Sam + Borderlands cocktail with weighty, thumping, exciting, speedy combat. Diablo in first-person, with wide open spaces, packs of enemies, giant bosses and more weapons than you can shake a wang at. Shadow Warrior 2 is anarchic, excessive, ridiculous, occasionally spectacular and almost entirely wonderful.

THUMPER, with its minimum of menus and explanation and guidance is absolutely pure, to the point that those who do not enjoy its light-from-darkness aesthetic will think it too small, to samey, too one-note, too much about the same sound playing forever. Perhaps it really can offer nothing to those people, or perhaps accepting that is it very fucking sincerely intended to be the same state of mind held for an eternity will let it seep into their veins after all. For the rest of us, let it take its place alongside Devil Daggers, reigning in hell.

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.

It’s mostly a game of the same old problems – a Louis Van Gaal team in José Mourinho clothing. It falls down on the pitch and fails to execute well on its new ideas. I hope next year brings a better Journey and a better destination.

A MOBA in a non-cutesy, non-fantasy setting, with just enough respect for the genre’s tradition while having the courage to keep things slow, uncomplicated and strategic. Here’s that slap on the back, space videogame. You deserve it.

It didn’t entertain me, it didn’t distract my son, and it’s very broken. Maybe it’ll be a cult classic by Giant Machines 2023, but not yet.

If you crank the difficulty right up, missions are not something to just casually slaughter your way through. You’ll have to think smart, take longer and most of all sneak, something that is not realistically required on normal hardness.

Ambition wasn’t thwarted by technology, but just a lack of common sense. I find myself still wanting to recommend you play it, not least because the action is mostly fine, if very repetitive, and therefore there’s nothing that’s actively unpleasant about playing it – you can experience the wonders it has to offer, just for the price of grinding through the okay-ness of it all.

But goodness, it’s a tiny-but-then-not-tiny, lovely thing with so much character and a wonderful sense of adventure. It’s a gentle seafaring tale I’m looking forward to playing through with a child when I next see my smaller family members but which I’m more than happy to play for my own enjoyment as well. I think I’m on my sixth distinct playthrough at the moment and still discovering new things.

I appreciate how different it is, how on edge it kept me. This is a game trying not to fall into formula. The tense, never tenser, could all go a bit Frank Spencer structure is probably going to offer some great things in terms of Hitman’s now-traditional drip-fed new contracts and elusive targets. Maybe we’ve had enough spectacle and bustling streets now: maybe purebred stealth challenge is a vital change of pace, and escalation.

So few games are capable of putting humans together like this in a den of villainy and letting them become slowly corrupted or instantaneously redeemed. Hackmud does this and does it very well. It is like the early internet it so perfectly mimics: a world of confusion, paranoia and possibility.

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.

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.

£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!

If you’re a little bit curious, or if you enjoyed any of the games with which it shares its DNA, Virginia may be one of the oddest and most fascinating things you’ve played in a long, long time. Vivid Virginia is a hell of a lot more than plain old “walking.”

In its present state, Duelyst is fantastic, and with time it’s likely to only get better.

There’s joy to be found in this zany horrorshow, but it’ll take a seasoned janker to grit their teeth through its issues and fully appreciate it.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 is a fantastic football game, quite possibly one of the best ever. On the pitch, it plays spectacularly well, with both individual players and teams expressing themselves as recognisable entities, and Master League is a superb singleplayer mode, making player development entertaining and simple to grasp...Take it online, though, and things start to fall apart. And the PC port is an ugly downgrade in comparison to the current-gen console versions.

If XCOM and Heroes of Might and Magic meets Star Trek/Farscape appeals to you (it does, doesn’t it?), and you’re happy to force your way past some initially confusing issues with the interface, you’ll almost certainly enjoy Halcyon 6. I have, despite my gripes, but it’s less than the sum of all those parts that I couldn’t help but see the edges of as I played, and I was longing for more engaging combat long before the end. Even if the galaxy continues to grow, I don’t think I’ll return even.

Event[0] is probably too short for its own good, less because of (kill me) ‘value’, but more because it limits how far it can take its idea. What’s there is very glossy as well as clever though. Despite its sometimes very obvious limitations, Event[0] feels like the start of a beautiful friendship.

Master of Orion’s biggest crime is that it’s simply boring.

I had a lot of fun with Hue. It was frustrating sometimes, but most puzzle-platformers are, and it would be boring to get every level right first time. Its faults mostly lie with being over-ambitious in terms of tone and narrative, but I think I’d rather see a game overreach than be content with mediocrity.

Campaign-wise, this is the best expansion Blizzard has ever made.

First things first, Reigns is made for mobile and, frankly, it shows. You’ve almost certainly got a smartphone or a tablet, so put the PC version out of your mind and go buy it from the App Store or Google Play instead. If you absolutely must play it on PC then, sure, it works, because of what it’s trying to do at heart rather than because it’s been tailor-made for our computers.

It really does have the best of intentions though, and if you’re a mega-fan rather than just someone with fond but not entirely specific memories, I suspect you’ll tap right into the rich vein of Fighting Fantasy love here. Me, I need a little more.

More than anything, I’m delighted that it’s tried so damned hard to be more interesting, more involved, more intelligent. That it falls short is a shame, but that it reaches higher than most is to be lauded. Gorgeous-looking, exquisite-sounding, and ambitious in its desire to be interesting, there’s a lot to congratulate. That the experience is punctuated by tumidity in its writing and puzzle design is the issue.

If you’re the kind of person who wishes it still was the eighties and likes the idea of revisiting a button-mashing romp, warts and all, you’ll find a lot to like about this one. But even so, you might find it wearing thin after a while. After all, even the Age of Nostalgia must come to an end.

I only wish that one day, long after this incarnation, there’ll be a Hitman game with true narrative consequence, where a breadcrumb trail of slip-ups might lead the police or some other organisation straight to my door, while another player might produce such smooth and clean “accidents” that no such fate awaits them. That player – the silent assassin – will leave through their front door and disappear. Whereas I’ll try and climb out my window and get shot in the back.

People are going to like it, because it achieves what it sets out to do and because it can yet be mined for greater efficiency of construction and weirder or more specialist designs, but right now I’m not expecting the break-out mega-success of a Factorio or Rimworld. It just doesn’t have the flex. Not yet, anyway, but the slick, compulsive, ever so slightly bland Project Highrise is certainly a strong foundation for the community to take it somewhere weirder and wilder.

The dynamic changes to terrain are impressive and highlight how exquisitely detailed the world is, and even when I reach the sixth expedition and end up cursing the impossible list of tasks I need to complete in order to unlock the pyramid, I find it hard not to start all over again as soon as I’m done.

Attack On Titan is reminiscent of the EDF series, but where that game aims for bombastic frivolity, its run-and-gun ant slaughter ends up feeling insubstantial thanks to a lack of feedback. Wings Of Freedom is similarly straightforward, but the satisfaction of moving and fighting is enough to sustain me for hours. I hope it becomes a series as long-running as EDF.

It’s utterly beautiful, and it sounds so wonderful, but in the end it feels too hollow. As a piece of visual art it deserves extensive celebration. As a game, it needed to be slightly more: slightly more purposeful, slightly more involved, slightly more communicative.

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

Metrico+ really needs a lot more focus. It’s throwing an awful lot at the wall, and while there’s certainly a great deal of smarts at play here, they’re not united, not well contained. Slidey controls do little to help, but in the end for me it’s the lack of a coherent aesthetic that feels the most disappointing. It feels too much like a portfolio, and not enough like a cohesive, deliberate piece of work, and certainly not one that adequately evokes the feeling of infographics.

While Worms W.M.D. might evoke the halcyon days of Armageddon, it’s more than capable of standing on its own as another high point for the series.

The Final Station is a simple game, which is always just compelling enough for its duration. I’ve come to think of it as an efficient, low budget horror movie: it has a high concept it can’t afford to show directly and so it wrings as much as it can from the mystery and the satisfaction of piecing the plot together from snippets. It’s only a shame that its action suffers more from never having a particularly interesting concept of its own.

Valley tries to do so many things. Bless it for that, really. It’s just so damned frustrating that, in its first hour, it was really onto something fresh and exhilarating and beautiful. Then, far too soon, it shrugs it off in favour of not-awful but less inspired and more familiar first-person action-adventuring.

Okhlos feels like an elevator pitch – ‘go smash up a comedy ancient Greece’ – made flesh, without too much worry about expanding upon the concept. I do admire that, there’s a purity and a glee to it, and it’s refreshing to not butt up against a skill ceiling as in something like Isaac, but I guess once you’ve smote one god, you’ve smote ’em all.

What we don’t have is Ubisoft Reflections reaching for something new, something innovative, something surprising.

Mankind Divided is a new version of one of my favourite games of all time and free from the execution problems that hampered that last iteration. The levels are bigger and prettier. There are no dumb boss fights. It gives you slightly more agency over its story. The new abilities are nice, even if they don’t dramatically alter the flow of the game. There still aren’t that many games like Deus Ex around and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an excellent game like Deus Ex.

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.

There you go. I wrote a review of a jigsaw puzzle game for one of the biggest gaming sites on the internet. So there.

Some foundations are laid that might make for stronger follow-ups, but as it stands Batman does not have the emotional punch of The Walking Dead’s better episodes, the intriguing oddness of Wolf Among Us or the shockingly heavy consequences of Game Of Thrones, and worst of all it makes cracks in Telltale’s aged wall highly obvious. I should not feel bored in a Batman game, but bored is what I felt for most of it. Bring back Joel Schumacher, all is forgiven.

It looks just lovely, a bold and distinct cartoon style that’s something I want to see more of. And it’s important not to underestimate how much the voice acting adds, including daft singing characters.

It is flat, and it is tedious, and it is often gross as hell.

Headlander’s hugely charming, basically, and though it doesn’t run too far with the humour of its concept, it absolutely makes the gimmick work from a play point of view. It’s got more steam in its engine than other recent, similarly high-concept Double Fine endeavours too, working hard to stay vibrant throughout.

It’s a stylish, retro-futurist love letter to computing, engineering and ’90s videogame level design. It also feels like the prelude to a better game.

The occasionally dull new characters are mostly redeemed by their motivations and backstories in the end, but it’s hard to overlook Zero Time Dilemma’s visual flaws, which distract from the brilliance of the story. It’s by no means the best Zero Escape game, but it’s a fitting end to the trilogy’s story arc and – animation aside – it’s an excellent way to spend a few evenings.

Human: Fall Flat is unquestionably charming, and tremendous fun when it’s not annoying me so much I want to find the developers and put staples in their toes.

Despite my sense that this chapter is not quite the equal of those before it, it is entirely unmissable if you have played those, still as beautiful and unpredictable and as forlornly romantic as ever, and this time it shows me at least two places I wish I could go and live in forever. And though some water may be overtly trodden this time, be in no doubt that things are moving towards a conclusion.

I find it difficult to picture the person who wouldn’t enjoy Starbound. Parts, sure, but the whole is this sincere, incredibly ambitious sandbox that’s as full of charm, and space-faring pirate penguins, as it is stuff to build and places to explore.

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.

Those golden-era JRPGs are beloved because they were packed with memorable locations, characters, and combat. I Am Setsuna unfortunately falls short on all three counts, and instead delivers an average and forgettable adventure, albeit one with wonderful music.

Even without acknowledging the unusually huge difficulties Kiro’o faced in getting it released at all, Aurion suffers a major blow but stands up as an original, memorable, and rewarding game that deserves every success.

Progressive, witty, and touching, if chronologically troubled, Killing Time At Lightspeed a fine thing.

Replica is a strong concept played out a bit too broadly for its own good, but it’s just smart – and certainly timely – enough to get away with it.

It has a few decent puzzles, all of them boringly repeated. It looks lovely, when it remembers to, but mostly doesn’t. It moves and controls wonderfully, but that’s not so great a feature when what you’re moving and controlling is so bland. I found no pathos, no meaningful peril, no attachment to the ever-dying yet always-living character, and ultimately, no purpose.

The good news is that even at its worst, Furi is something rather special. Even the trudging between fights has some fairly nonsensical but engaging chatter and the scenery is gorgeous. Better still, pressing ‘x’ (or whatever equivalent your gamepad has – it’s playable without but not very effectively), automates all of the walking so that you can sit back and watch, or go and make a brew.

At £4 it’s a really easy decision – get this. It’s fun, spooky, peculiar, unique, and most of all – and I use this word very carefully – interesting. That’s something games too often are not. The Room Two unquestionably is – a properly interesting experience.

This is good VR. Let there be more of it. [Tested with Oculus Rift]

If you’ve a kid who just got into Star Wars via the new movie, goodness me this can’t be recommended highly enough. But at the same time, and I’ve been the one fighting off saying this for years longer than many others, it’s getting stale. It needs to be something new, to invent a new way to create something so adorable, because at this point it’s getting very hard not to recommend just picking up the older, cheaper titles. You’d barely notice the difference.

Mighty No. 9 is the best Mega Man game I’ve played in years, but all of the problems it has come from that too. Whether the gaming scene of 2016 needs a modern Mega Man is a more ambiguous question, perhaps answered by the old adage: be careful what you wish for. Or in this case, what you back.

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.

I happily add 35mm to the swollen pantheon of RPS’ highly-recommended games from the first half of 2016. It is janky at times, but it is something special.

I like the idea of Valhalla and some presentation gripes aside, I like its execution. It’s no great revelation but a pleasant surprise, and being a mundane bystander going about their day instead of the plot-critical centre of the universe is an under-explored concept.

Breached is just too small in every aspect to feel satisfying. I’d love to see this fleshed out into something with more ambition and more purpose.

I found it difficult to get into Crea in the same way I did for its forefathers. It would be easy for me to say that part of that is down to fatigue with the genre – I have been through it all before, after all. But that is not the main problem I have with this latecomer. The fact is, it just does everything less well. The crafting, the researching, the art style, the fantasy monsters. There is constant development, like many of these games, so there is always time for things to be stripped out, and much more to be added in future. But at the moment, Crea feels like a step back in time.

The campaign can feel like a bit of a grind because of [this], but then again I really don’t believe that it’s been designed to be played doggedly for hours at a time. It’s best enjoyed as a precious hour of bright, brash space fantasy/Lego crate come to life to scratch imaginative itches here and there.

This is a disaster, and the biggest surprise about it is that Ubisoft thought it worth releasing.

Catalyst occasionally infuriated me, and at other times simply passed me by in a blur, but on the whole I enjoyed my time with it. The movement is still wonderful. The world is still beautiful. There’s still nothing else quite like it. It’s better than the first game in most ways and there are still umpteen ideas in here crying out for a better implementation. So I’ll end in the spirit of the game, with a refined version of what I said last time: Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is good and you should probably play it, but damn, it could have been superb.

I thoroughly recommend it, for those looking for something erring much more toward the more casual end of the strategy world, the only region of the genre with which I’m comfortable. It’s bright, breezy, light and fun, and perhaps, after all, that’s enough.

Make no mistake, Brigador is a toybox first and foremost – assemble your dream mech or deathtank, take it out for a spin in Bladerunnerville, trash everything, have a bloody great fight. A few UI frustrations can’t take away the innate pleasure of that, especially when it looks so delightfully, tangibly model-like too. It’s not Mechwarrior, no, but it scratches pretty much every other mech itch going, and with style.

There is, perhaps, a slight sense that Marrakesh has been rushed – as well as the logic issues, that sense of revolutionary promise unfulfilled and unfortunate route-blocking I mentioned, I suffered from a ton of blurry textures – but it doesn’t feel seriously compromised. Not quite the equal of its noble forebear, no, but it’s the most visually impressive installment yet and, as a package, Hitman’s three episodes so far are already providing more game for the money than anything else recent I care to mention.

The expansion is so large, so full of stuff, that the puzzle sequence forms a very small part of it. It’s just a very, very frustrating part. Grit your teeth. Take deep breaths. Hope that the pathfinding behaves. You will be able to get back to what you enjoy about Fallout, I promise.

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]

It really feels like Blizzard bet everything on Overwatch’s 21 heroes and it absolutely paid off. Overwatch already feels as timeless as Blizzard’s other games, and it feels weird to realize that this is the first time we’ve seen any of these heroes. I definitely have some concerns about where Overwatch will be headed in the future, but I’m not thinking about that as I teleport across the map as Tracer. No, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get behind that Bastion to take that asshole down. I’m thinking about how good it’s going to feel seeing him crumple into metal parts. I’m thinking about how much fun I’m having. The one thing I’m not thinking about? Going to bed.