I respect Hangar 13 for not feeling like they had to join in today’s arms race of ever-balooning open world/action things and sticking to their stated principles in doing so. Though, I think the manner in which they’ve executed that vision has its eyes too firmly glued to the rear view mirror. This isn't a game that pulls the best bits from how things were done back in the day and melds that with positive innovations developed since that point to create a middle ground that could represent a better way forwards. The Old Country feels stuck in the past.

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

The setting is too tame, and the fighting much too familiar to soar – but if another dollop of Far Cry sounds appetising, tuck right in.

I was very close to sticking a Bestest Best on this one, but that awful stealth chunk, combined with how the game failed to put up a real fight just when it needed to most, held me back. Up until the halfway point, though, and for a good while after it, I was having a ball with Sons Of Valhalla. It keeps its ARPG action within the relevant confines of its tactics, and keeps its tactics paced to match to its intense and immediate combat. It’s wonderfully scored and animated. It doesn’t overstay its welcome but then gives you an additional mode and thoughtfully tuned difficulty settings if you want to dive back in. And even with my complaints, I’m eager to do just that. Barkeep, more reindeer piss.

Less good than very good is still good (wrote the professional, terribly), and Spice Wars has been a very pleasant surprise overall. It’s intricate. It’s polished. It’s well considered.

There's poignancy in it as much as the first FAR, but its mood feels a little more barbed, keen to lay a simple but heartfelt warning about climate change on players. For all the delight and wonder we strive to find here, there's no getting away from the surrounding doom or the struggles which follow. Hardship is more central to Changing Tides than Lone Sails. It moves backwards in time to the apocalypse while we move forward to meet it. Reconciling that unease is not something it treats lightly, yet there is still hope to be found. I'm grateful for that. If you give FAR: Changing Tides the handful of hours it takes to complete, I think you will be too. [RPS Bestest Bests]

There’s so much to see and explore, so many concepts to wrap my head around, that Black Desert Online is a truly memorable MMORPG—if not always a great one. It can be hard to embrace what it is instead of trying to force it to be what it isn’t, but Black Desert offered me a chance at escaping from the by-the-numbers slog that MMOs have become.

Ultimately, KeyWe is one of those games that I have to add qualifications to if someone asks if I enjoy it. It's a "fun, but-" kind of game. I wish it wasn't, because underneath the annoyances are some really lovely, imaginative details. The Telepost gets different decorations for different times of year. There are mysterious collectibles to find and store in your little kiwi nest hole. The cassowaries wear halloween costumes. The notes that come with packages to send out are often funny. The kiwis are really cute! But...

I’ve been battered and sometimes frustrated by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, but ultimately there is something admirable about its commitment to challenging you – especially when it simultaneously provides just enough tools to avoid becoming unfair. Between that, its punchy shooting, and some properly superb atmosphere-building, it’s done enough to earn the mantle of Good Game...Is it a good enough game, though, that you should headbutt your way through such a dense wall of bugs? I personally think yes, having not played or really thought about any other games for all the previous five days that I’ve been lost in the Zone. At the very least, that question should probably be more a matter of whether it’s worth playing now, or in six months' time, when updates and the promised mod support might have more thoroughly patched it up. And even in the latter case, that’s probably not an alien concept to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans.

If you’ve been waiting for a full-on simulation with all the bells and textbooks, and nothing less will satisfy you, Mechwarrior 5 isn’t going to cut it. For everyone else though, it’s bloody excellent.

Bum-bo may have to deal with a lot of crap, but it’s all well worth pushing through.

Nowhere Prophet’s ideas fill the game like a balloon, rising towards greatness – a balloon that gets punctured by lacklustre writing and wonky AI. It reaches for The Banner Saga‘s intimacy and Duelyst‘s intricacy, but winds up falling shy of both. Like most prophets, Nowhere is a false one.

Once you've figured out the broad parts of how to save people, it becomes harder and harder to get the details you would like right. I spent an exorbitant amount of time trying to get Tom and Jenny to have an argument about the right thing on the right day, to no avail. It is extremely likely you'll reach a point that you go, "Fuck it, just let 'em burn!", probably more than once, at which point you should turn the game off and leave it for a day or so. This isn't a game that you should pick at for hours. It's one to put back up the shelf for a bit, until you can take it down and look at the problem with fresh eyes. You have all the time you need. Sort of.

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.

It’s seven out of ten epitomised. Pretty decent.

Getting a tidy markup on liquor and toys is not enough to entice me back, though. Not even to get another of the ten different endings. I’d happily give it another shot if it gets all its if-this-then-thats working, because it seems like it could be very good and fun and interesting, but right now I’m quite unwilling indeed.

I've been thinking about this idea a lot as I finished To A T (it clocks in at about 4-5 hours). It is full of moments when the controls change, and you must move them in some new way to brush your teeth, eat food, or whirl like a ballerina. The immediacy of game controls is something that necessarily gets lost the further this game travels into it's almost entirely non-playable final episode. But it otherwise resists the trappings of modern games that remove us from that body-to-button feeling. There's no cluttered UI or silly systems of meta-progression. Like other games by the same creators, To A T understands that the most basic unit of wonder games can offer is still: press button to move shapes.

It feels unappreciative to wish that there could be even more of it, but it’s like that perfect cup of tea. You’ll always want another one.

Floodland brings a nice personal twist to the city-building genre, with the people and the calamity they survived hounding your every move and decision. Blending clans and integrating societies into one another is another deft touch, giving added weight to every pivotal decision. Where Floodland falls down a little is forcing the player to react to periodic roadblocks with an increasingly tight bottleneck of production, somewhat hampering creativity in favour of a set path. It’s not a dealbreaker by any means though.

That Kanda/Kagawa cloud hangs over Dark Ties and Kiwami 3, and expanding Yakuza 3 with minigames taken from later Like A Dragon games does nothing to dispel it. One moment, you can be merrily mashing away at baddies in the biker battles as the co-boss of a girl gang – which would feel refreshingly progressive in any other Like A Dragon game – but in the next you might need to consider adding Kanda and Hamazaki to your squad in order to win the next scrum. Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties is a serviceable remake in a vacuum, but it doesn't exist in isolation. Quirky charm and moreish busywork can’t distract from RGG’s questionable attitude to sexual assault.

There are plenty of grievances I haven’t had room to mention, nor to stress the cumulative misery of clunky writing combined with cheap attempts to go beyond the pale. Even if it weren’t so needlessly and extensively graphic, there’s a fixation on things that can go wrong with a woman’s body that would still leave a sour taste. The story as a whole is a series of rug pulls, but ones which left me standing nonplussed while the rug puller lurched haphazardly from foot to foot. A parade of ghost sharks, clumsily jumped. I suspect Martha Is Dead will be remembered as the game where you peel a dead woman’s face off, but it’s better off forgotten.

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.

Just as Edwards Island looms in the distance behind Camena, the original game looms over its successor. Lost Signals shares a lot of elements with what came before it, and it does those things well (good for a sequel) but it also feels like it doesn’t really expand on those ideas either (not so good for a sequel). If you like playing games for their atmosphere, then Oxenfree 2 will certainly tick a lot of boxes for you, but for fans of the first one looking for more, it's best to keep expectations in check.

But the structure is repetitive and frustratingly random. Strategy devolves into grinding through the same side missions to perk everyone up so they can endure main missions, which quickly repeat a grind of scouring the map for resources, hoping enemy placement and movement won't screw you over, and then slogging through too many enemies with very irritating attacks in a system where just one or two lost actions can doom a whole mission. It's far from a write-off, and some players will love the exact elements I hated, but I've mostly been left with mounting disappointment and frustration at a design that lets down a very likeable game.

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]

I’ll end with this: I can confirm that during at least one race, you get the opportunity to drive around as a dog in sunglasses.

Minute Of Islands' story - which includes a character saying the title of the game, as well as the narrator at one pont saying "no one is an island" - isn't necessarily subtle. Absent people are represented by scarecrows wearing homemade protective hazmat suits. Mo has visions of the machine attacking her, and she also hallucinates about standing on top of her own, giant, dead body. But for all its narrative bluntness, Minute Of Islands is an incredibly elegant game. Much more so than the most other indie games that are about death and grief and sadness and responsibility. In a strange way, Minute Of Islands is comforting as well. Just, you know. Don't actually tell it to your kids. [RPS Bestest Bests]

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

The complexity here is that Horses is about the sexuality of younger people, even if none of the characters are actually minors. The Farmer is the way he is because of how he was raised - there are doodles and a home video that obviously date back to his early teenage years - and now, he is trying to pass those brutal values onto you. The moral is about how puritanism may reproduce across generations, even when taken to the extent that congress becomes impossible, which necessitates certain other, shambolically crude and fantastical approaches to securing a legacy. That your character is a legal adult is a technicality: the game frames you as a mute child, peering up at the Farmer while eating, struggling to say no by means of emojis and shakes of your head. It's easy to imagine the fable playing out exactly the same way if the protagonist were in their early to mid teens.

Newcomers to the genre may find it tedious despite these improvements, but if you’re all about that renovation grind, My Time At Portia is one of the most modern takes on the genre I’ve seen in a long time.

SpellForce 3 is a game that, when pulled apart, doesn’t always come out looking great, but that I’ve still really enjoyed. I get a sort of primal delight in seeing two of my favourite genres blended together competently, and that’s definitely SpellForce — competent. It probably seems like I’m damning it with faint praise, but it’s a cautious recommendation. So many RPGs give you positions of power and authority but then just throw a few arbitrary choices your way; SpellForce lets you actually wield that authority, both as a sword and a hammer.

Session feels back-to-front: so unblinkingly focused on the technical side of riding a skateboard that it’s overlooked everything that makes rolling around on a board actually fun. There’s plenty of room for skateboarding games less arcadey than anything with a Tony Hawk face on it, but this early version of Session is a bleak, sterile thing, and one that only serves as a painful reminder of my own lack of talent in most physical activities. [Premature Evaluation - Early Access Review]

I'm not sure The Crush House is enjoyable, beyond the opening thrill of wielding the lens and toying with the systems, but it is enlightening. It is a triumphant performance of dystopia, one that concentrates the understanding rather than merely wallowing in the shit. It takes enormous insight to make something this ugly.

Outriders is a wildly entertaining time, especially when you get glimpses of the sarcastically gory fun of Bulletstorm peeking through. But the loot mechanics aren’t bewitching enough, or its action varied enough, or levels surprising enough, to sustain the momentum needed to send me back out in search of better space-trousers, no matter how legendary they may be.

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.

The parts I like far outweigh the parts I don’t. I’ve got my weirdo NPCs, my Ark hunting, my Whoopinkoffs and Dimbledicks. I’ve found every Ark, now, but I still plan on gambolling between side activities. I still want to explore, even though I wish I was exploring a world that had been less generically destroyed. Most of all, I want to do more super-powered fighting. I might not even bother swapping from that rifle.

I’d say it’s definitely worth picking up if your XCOM and Jagged Alliance itches currently feel unscratched, but expect something to dip in and out of, not some grand timesink opus.

Despite the fact that I found most of this pretty dull, Thea is an enormously difficult game to stop playing.

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

A game that's much more about the 'trucker' of it all than the stars, but the trucker of it all really does shine. When you exit the airlock to patch up hull breaches, little white spanner icons mark the offending damage. The symbol that marks the airlock to return to your truck is a home. I noticed it early, and then I kept noticing it. The more I did, the more perfect it felt.

There are many good things within Massive Chalice, but they’re frustratingly kept at arm’s length from me.

Teddy and Lissie are still very inviting characters, who obviously have a backstory that is distinct and known to their writers, and are the best reason to play this game.

It’s comfy and I can play for hours, but it’s just not that deep.

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

Blues and Bullets’ ambition is untouchable, but for its own sake it needs to calm right down and focus on what matters most.

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

Look, it’s certainly very possible to spend an enjoyable evening playing Little Hope. But you have to calibrate your expectations towards B-movie, janky schlock-fest. If you go in wanting to have a spooky time that actually freaks your nut, I fear you’ll be disappointed.

Cutting out the parts that became tedious would quicken the narrative enough to undermine it, but those parts became so laborious that they dragged it down instead. Perhaps I missed the point entirely by playing it alone – it is eminently obvious where a second player would fit in to its design – but if I had a lover here right now, I don’t think this is the game I’d choose to play with them. I’ve been in my own haven for far too long.

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.

No Straight Roads feels like a less good version of Sayonara Wild Hearts, and if you want a rhythm action game I can’t really recommend the former over the latter. I would have much preferred that NSR didn’t have the platforming sections and put in another wacky boss fight instead, because they’re funny, weird and pretty, and have better music.

Call of Duty: WW2 is a decent game with satisfying shooting at its core, but there are better playgrounds out there. [Multiplayer review]

A truly beautiful game, uplifting, gorgeous and alive. [RPS Recommended]

Every part of Stellaris is still here; the pieces have just been rearranged, neatly.

The tissue-thin layer of political commentary in House Of Ashes mostly serves to get in the way of what is almost a decent horror romp. It has real monsters! A big length of iron thrown at head height! Flashbacks to the past with a creaky old English voice! A cool combined knife and flare fight! Mushrooms! For God's sake, stop trying to say something meaningful beyond, "the member of your group who has been bitten cannot be trusted." By going back to being a silly 00s survival horror, House Of Ashes has taken a step firmly in the right direction compared to other Dark Pictures Anthology games. But what it really needed was the cast to be two cheer squads from different schools, who were on their way to regionals when they fell into a vampire nest. I'm sure you could come up with another way for them all to have massive guns. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Mahokenshi was just too much of a drag to be truly enjoyable. It has its moments, for sure, and those who thrive on the crushing rhythms of Soulslike games may get more out of this than I did. But when you know those sweet card synergies you just discovered will be brushed away again at the start of the next mission, you begin to feel less like the godly heroes you're meant to be inhabiting, and more like some wandering scrub blundering their way through the fickle realms of chance. Lady Luck is a cruel mistress in the world of Mahokenshi, and I could never quite shake the feeling it was holding its cards a little too close to its chest.

I’ve got a list of other gripes in place of the effusive praise I wanted to give here. You fight vanishingly few heroes for a good while after the introduction. I signed up for hero slaying, but this is all zombies, wolves, and spiders. I can slay these bastards anywhere. The game threatens a good idea in letting you collect healing items on quests that you can then sell if you don’t use. A potentially nice risk/reward that falls flat because, as I said, gold just isn’t that useful compared to how common it is. The main issue is that pacing, though. I’m left in a weird position where it’s too slow to really want to play much more than a pickup game here and there, but a single run just isn’t very satisfying, or tense, or tactically interesting either. So if I don’t want to play for a short while, and I don’t want to play for a long time, I suppose I don’t actually want to play at all? Shit. Sorry, gobs. Extinction it is, I guess.

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.

Layers of Fear is an effective scare ‘em up but the sense of dislocation and the lack of character development left me feeling as if I’d enjoyed a thematically messy series of shocks rather than a cohesive horror story. It’s a collection of scary things that are tangentially related to the idea of creative blocks and familial cruelty rather than an exploration of the artist or his personality flaws. By the time the credits rolled, I knew very little about this particular painter that I couldn’t have learned by reading a brief synopsis.

For the five or six hours it takes to reach the game’s ending, Bugsnax is a delightful and intriguing world to inhabit, just one whose robotic wildlife won’t inspire you to jump back in and finish off your collection. Bugsnax is a faintly naughty, but never crass adventure that feels simultaneously like a love letter to, and a sharply observed satire of, the games that inspired it.

This isn’t a game to mindlessly consume and it’s not going to give you a boost of tasty brain endorphins. Phoenix Springs is a game that demands you slow down, and whose purposefulness will entice some players but put others off. In this way, it feels like an island, entirely its own thing. I don’t completely understand the story - or at least I think I don't - but that’s the point. There are some frustrations with its puzzles, but Phoenix Springs has an incredible point of view and it sticks with it wholeheartedly, and that’s something I can respect the hell out of.

It's a shame that next to the investigating, Atomfall’s shooting, sneaking, and cricket batting don’t deliver the same joys. Still, they’re competent enough not to get in the way, and with a little finesse it’s possible to enjoy extended bouts of that rich, intricate sleuthing without doing a single violence at all. Don’t let those village pub bores get you down: there are far worse places for a forgetful soldier-detective to be.

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.

And then there are the dreamy, pulpy illustrations that open new chapters. Oh, be still my beating heart. Backbone is quite possibly the most beautiful game you'll play this year. Sometimes style over substance is a valid approach. Not that Backbone is devoid of substance either, of course. But be prepared for that substance to have a very different texture than what you were expecting.

It's a pity, because Gamedec has brilliant ideas for subverting the banal cyberpunk formula. It explores the concept of metaverses through an invigorating, dynamic collage of virtual worlds, without relying on the usual signifiers of cyberpunk that its peers have drawn on to evoke scenes of excessive consumerism and exoticism. It captures the uncertainty and frustration of investigative work, sometimes forcing you to make decisions based on gut instincts alone, particularly in situations where information is scarce or when you don’t have the luxury of resources and time to unspool every narrative thread. It celebrates rare moments of joy that arise from making the right deductions, or whenever you see these threads weaving into a meticulous web of schemes and political chicanery.

Oddly, The Invincible is at its best when you are like its simple automatons, following instructions to complete a clear objective. However, as soon as your instructions become unclear, you can find yourself walking in loops or frozen part-way through an action, unsure of what to do. The game is a great example of how engaging first-person narratives can be, but also how any missteps or unearned moments can eject you from the head of the narrator, leaving you cold and confused.

Battlefront: the base game might sell itself frustratingly short on variety, and it seems confused about exactly who its audience is, but its spectacle is such that I’ll spend the night inside a Taun-Taun’s tummy if it doesn’t get away with it.

There are some great actors in here, and the effort gone to for the filming, and the extensive script, deserves credit. But the framework into which it’s all been put is deeply flawed. Which is a huge shame. Someone is going to get this idea right, but it’s not this time.

It’s a bit like Serie A in that way then, is FC25. And while I remain privately furious that the move away from the FIFA licence seems to have left EA without the adequate rights for some of Serie A’s best teams (honestly, you should see the ‘We have AC Milan at home’ travesties in place of the licensed teams), I am pleased to say I’ve had more raw, honest enjoyment with FC25 than I have any of its recent predecessors. Partly because it feels like the PC port got the required amount of love this year, and partly because I feel just slightly more empowered to play a different style of football this year. In my heart of hearts, I know that this inch-by-inch progress doesn’t justify £50 on a ‘new’ game every year. But here I am, playing it anyway and enjoying it like a comfy old favourite jumper that’s just had the elbows repaired.

It's just a shame these puzzles face such frequent interruptions from its wearying, drawn out combat system, as I reckon Sunday Gold would be so much more likable if it was just a straight-up point and click adventure. By forcing it through the tactical turn-based grinder, though, its glistening highs just get repeatedly mulched and ground down over time, turning this 12 hour game (or 15, if you count the three hour boss battle tacked on the end of it) into a dull slog.

Lego Jurassic World ends up being a middling entry for TT’s enormous franchise, but a middling entry by them is still enormously better than most other family games.

For all its quirks, Ska Studios have themselves a solid entry here. I don’t think there were many problems I encountered that couldn’t be patched out, and I had a lot of fun with the game in spite of some annoyances. If Salt And Sanctuary was Ska Studios sheepishly imitating a more successful formula, then Salt And Sacrifice is them confidently finding their stride. For a game about tearing out hearts, it’s clearly had a lot of heart put into it and Monster Hunter fans in particular shouldn’t pass this one up. Just don’t expect perfection.

Honestly, I'm glad I don't have to play any more Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. It lures you in with a stunning map and some lovely parkour around the trees, maybe a touch of shooting, a touch of looting. But as things progress, the Ubisoft algorithm kicks in and the excitement plateaus. Everything you do is predictable and everything you find, another tally mark. Give me a jeep and let me call in an airstrike, then maybe I'd change my mind.

Silt is a fairly short game, though, and playing it over a few days meant I usually figured out a puzzle the next time I came back to it. I'm just not entirely sure that coming back to Silt is the ideal state of affairs. Really the question is: are the vibes good enough to make up for the want of a nicer checkpoint system? I'm not sure they are, both because of Silt's comparative brevity and because it's not as if it's Dark Souls, here. The stopping and starting and reloading felt a bit at odds with the dreamy and/or nightmarish floating in any case. On the other hand, the addition of more checkpoints would proabably be all it needs, so your mileage, especially under water, may vary.

This won’t necessarily be true for other players, of course. But you could well see those tweets as a sort of diagnostic for whether it’s worth you buying this game. If you read them and think “ah, yes… that’s the sort of emotionally laden sea stuff I like to think about,” then the odds are Beyond Blue’ll be worth it for you, despite all its drawbacks. And if that is the case, just be prepared to relax and click on a lot of sealife while it gets to its point.

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.

When playing DMC4: SE you can see how certain parts of the design had grown archaic. How even Dante, as wonderfully flamboyant as ever, was skirting a razor’s edge of self-parody. And how, perhaps, Capcom’s DMC team felt they had reached their limits with the series. This Dante is the product of so many years of refinement that he feels complete. It makes this the kind of game where, despite all the little problems, mastering the core system is so rewarding they just stop mattering. And it’s something of a full stop, for now at least, on one of Capcom’s most original series.

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.

Sadly though, I couldn't find any satisfaction in either the building or the exploring. Everything is just so on the rails. Want to go off and do your own thing? No, silly bear. You're not clever enough to do that. First you need to prove yourself by fetching 10 sprigs of sage. There was none of that satisfying management game feeling where everything was slowly expanding and working and coming together. I longed for the freedom to ignore everything that all the rude asshole characters were demanding of me, and disappear into the wilderness and start a new life. A wilder, more open life where my choices mattered and I couldn't predict what the next day's work would bring. But no. There was no breaking free from the well-intentioned but suffocating bear hug.

Ixion is a properly great blend of management sim and sci-fi storytelling. There are a lot of games clamouring for my attention right now, Darktide, The Callisto Protocol, that new God of War over on the devil's PC to name a few. But throughout my time with Ixion, I was never tempted to sack it off for those bigger, flashier games, which is a testament to its meticulous design, and its engrossing tale of humanity's search for a new celestial roof to sleep under.

For me it felt far too derivative of Inside (it was of course in development before Inside’s release, but looked awfully different), which was itself derivative of Limbo, and without the precision of either. Utterly beautiful when it remembers to be, but more irritating than fun in execution.

If you like XCOM-ish things, The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk should be in your library – just so long as you don’t mind a bit of hamfisted zaniness. I don’t think it’s one you’ll want to replay again and again, but it’s a substantial, well-crafted effort that’s definitely worth your time. Admittedly it’s no Garfield Kart, but it’s unreasonable to expect a developer to produce two once-in-a-generation masterpieces on the trot, after all.

If you need a Spire-like fix, this is a good place to get it. With more variety, a spot of balancing, and a, um, functional second half, it could be a great one.

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

Shredders is at its most enjoyable when it’s not getting in its own way with zany goofball oddness. It deftly captures the sensation of carving neat lines through alpine forests and zooming across vast immaculate hillsides, that incredible feeling when the scissors start to glide through the wrapping paper. It has problems that hold it back from being a better game – gruelling cutscenes, impenetrable menu screens, some glitchy physics surprises – but Shredders is an endearingly sincere and uncynical homage to snowboarding.

It's the second game in a row that I've reviewed and said I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a fan, but given The Awakened was Kickstarted (with some fund-raising incentives that I'm not really on board with to boot) I'm preaching to the converted. In as much as you, like me, might want to see Frogwares continue, both to exist and to keep making their weirdo Sherlock Holmes games, you should check The Awakened out.

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

It’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.

Wrath Colon Aeon Of Ruin could tighten up a few things here and there, and it could have been a bit more outlandish, and it should probably not have led with some of its drabbest levels. But where many of its peers merely ape the loud and obnoxious reputation 90s FPS games had, it's a solid shooter that remembers how they actually played and why they worked.

While I may not identify with any of my guerrillas and their grab-bag backstories, nor feel any sense of real investment in the fate of DedSec as a whole, I’m still attached to this strange band of possessed berserkers. We’ve had a good time together, in this nonsense dystopian playground. When construction goblin finally angers one boat too many, or when Diane discovers the limits to God’s tolerance of Three Lions and is rightly obliterated, I will miss them.

It’s still a bloody good time-troubling tactical shooter though, even if I wish it had more space to explore the world, and more variety in the tasks and locations.

So yes, GreedFall is better than The Technomancer. But being better than The Technomancer isn’t exactly the hardest thing in the world. And despite its clear attempts to be, GreedFall isn’t better than the BioWare classics either. This is a step in the right direction for Spiders, but they still have a lot of work to do.

Mobile, high-stakes combat tied to interesting, ever-expanding abilities is a recipe that can withstand slightly repetitive enemy design and shoddy environments. I still feel the pull to keep playing, to unearth new classes and experiment with all the ways I can mash them together. The only good part of Code Vein is its combat, but for me, that turns out to be enough.

From the first bundle of hours, it’s pretty clear it’s not deserving of a whopping £55. [First few hours impressions]

The biggest drawback to Snowfall, much like After Dark, is that it will probably find a way to clash with one or two of your favourite custom additions. But if you’re a modder, I guess you already live life on the edge. Otherwise, it’s a charming and worthwhile expansion for what is already an excellent city-builder. I have nothing but warmth for it in my heart.

I like Western Front, for sure. Its frustrations detract from a good experience rather than overwriting it, and it's more entertaining than the theme suggests, without feeling glib or shallow. It's a solid go at a difficult niche, blending tactics and strategy well, but is best enjoyed on its own terms, and with perhaps a little more patience than I have.

The result is a game that despite such lovely art, really splendid voice acting from the two leads, and an amazing score, just doesn’t hold together. It’s annoying more than it’s funny, it’s frustrating more than it’s clever, and it’s just so damned incohesive.

It's weird and funny - at times actually laugh-out-loud funny - the music is an absolute bop, and as you progress you uncover how walking turnips and onions came to be. And every single thing in this game would make a really great plushie toy. But I can also see some people getting so annoyed by a boss fight that they never go back to the game, and then they'd never see some of the most fun bits. And that's a real shame.

It will always be described as "Halo meets Portal" and not "John 117 discovers the art of MC Escher" or "Elmer Fudd gets a 360 no-scope". And that's fine. How a shooter is glibly summarised doesn't matter when it's got this many split-seconds of satisfaction. When you headshot a poor sap across the map just as he steps through his portal and then see the limp corpse fall right in front of you, you aren't thinking, "Huh, neat gimmick". You're thinking: "Ha ha ha ha ha". And then you're being biffed 30 feet into the air by an ambusher with a Big Flipping Bat. [RPS Bestest Bests]