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.

It doesn’t have the cleanness or the slow-burn escalation of your old-school C&Cs or the first Warcrafts and StarCraft, so certainly don’t approach it as a return to the old ways, but if you want a giant sci-fi army bashing buildings and monsters to death while a crazy lightshow rages, Legacy of the Void is hard to argue with on that basis.

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

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

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

These are minor transgressions. They don’t come close to souring a delightfully bloody pudding, a tour de force of grizzly decapitation. The highs in Doom Eternal come thick and fast and towering, in the midst of battles that demand total attention. New-new Doom nails that marriage of twitching and planning, the calculated deployment of rampant aggression. It makes you feel godly. I haven’t been able to try the multiplayer mode, but it promises asymmetric, player-orchestrated arenas that sound much more intriguing than the underwhelming marine-on-marine action of the last game. And if winds up as another disappointing side-show, so what? [RPS Bestest Bests]

Like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Devil Daggers and Hyper Demon might look the same at a glance but the differences are enough to make it an exciting new experience.

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.

Mouthwashing's a hard one to review, namely because I have to dance around the story in fear of spoiling it for you. I hope I've at least got across how it tells the story and how it really is a well-told, succinct descent into a crew's deepest darkest secrets and struggles. Trust me, you'll want to play it in one or two sittings, mainly because you won't be able to peel yourself away from it. The only times you might, are when it doesn't signpost those solutions well enough. Go forth and swill your mouth out with this one, I say.

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

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

Owing to its unconventional release date, Omori hasn’t really been on the mainstream radar, but I came away impressed. It takes a story that might have come off as trite or even insensitive in the wrong hands and imbues it with a memorable darkness, aided by a tight combat system and some outstanding artwork. If you’re in a bad place - and lord knows many of us are - Omori might not be the game for you right now, as it goes in some intense places. But neither should you let this dark tale of a childhood lost slip away. Bleak as it might be, it may be one of the year’s most memorable RPGs.

It's great to see this animation house have such a clear and strong command over their subject matter, and I hope Let's! Revolution! is but the first in a long new dynastic line for them. It may not be a game that can stretch to perhaps hundreds of hours of play time like some of today's roguelike heavyweights, but I'm having a grand old time with it so far, and right now that's enough. I cannot stop playing it, nor do I want to. So Let's! Give It The Attention It Deserves! [RPS Bestest Bests]

Subnautica is at the top of my mental list of the greatest survival games. [RPS Recommended]

Since its episodic beginnings, you know what you’re getting into. With Ian Hitman, you know you’re getting some world-class level design, some tense moments of dark comedy improv, and a type of clockwork murder toy that nobody else makes. As a final act, Hitman 3 is as capable and pleasing as its trilogy-siblings. As a trilogy, it is one of the most fun-loving games of the previous decade. It is like Ian himself – reliable, dry-humoured, uniformed. The best murderer money can buy.

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

There's certainly a lot to like about Sea Of Stars, and it does indeed capture those JRPG golden years to an absolute tee. But if you're less beholden to the glory of the genre's past, then you may wish its star burned just a little bit brighter.

Heaven is only a fleeting fiction, next to the protean immensity of the deck.

It’s not free of issues. Necro-surgeon Dessa Banks has an ability that’s so universally useful I ended up anchoring my plays with it for a good stretch, and it wasn’t even the one where she can resurrect people by shooting them. The ending missions prioritise story setpieces over the final exam gauntlet I was hoping for, and I found myself drifting toward autopilot even a few missions before those. There’s probably one too many fat smears of frosting in the conspiratorial layercake plot to comfortably keep track of your first time through. But the fact I’m even excited about a second playthrough of a 15 hour game I played for work should hopefully convey something. This very moment, I keep diving back in to check details and grab screens, and end up replaying entire missions. There’s more! Survival maps. Optional puzzles. The same level editor the developer has, with the option to share your maps with others online. Hard mode. Is this all window dressing? Maybe. But man, what an absolute treat of a window. Do say "hi" on your way down.

Runeterra might not be packed with interesting decisions, but it is loaded with charm. It’s nice. It’s soothing. That’s enough.

Baba Is You is immediately completely superb, a puzzle game where you literally rewrite the rules as you play.

Machine Games have reproduced the experience of the Lucasfilm movies in a 99% accurate form. And they have done so in a manner only a megafunded Bethesda studio with a lot of Nazi-killing experience could. Yes, the video gamey seams stand out as you scarf down croissants for health and hear another bigot coughing behind a wall. But just as I'm not interested in Baker's performance reaching some unobtainable ledge of authenticity, I also don't want my adventure to abandon the language of games where it doesn't make sense to do so. I'm happy for this to be exactly the kind of expensive, cinematic, blockbuster explorathon it seemed predestined to be. Sneeze away, little Nazi. I know where you are.

In short, its more varied puzzle pieces, greater environmental challenge and clearer visual presentation all add up to make Mini Motorways a worthy evolution of Dinosaur Polo Club's minimalist transport formula. Despite appearing first on the Apple Arcade, Mini Motorways feels right at home on PC, and its intuitive mouse controls make for a much better architect's pen than a motion controlled remote. Add in daily and weekly challenges to its bumper crop of mainline maps (with more to come every few months after launch, as well as new game modes and the same breadth of updates we saw in Mini Metro) and Mini Motorways is a fine second outing for this vehicular puzzle series. Dedicated Mini Metro-ites may find Motorways a tad too familiar for it to enter their own god tier of video games, but if you're hungry for more of what Dinosaur Polo Club do best, then this is one diversion you won't want to miss.

You can like it for the formidable performances and the unbelievable replications of different periods of cinema, for the sets, the artistry, the surprises, the big thinking and the weirdness hiding just the other side of the curtain, for the attention to detail and the vaulting ambition, for the way it's thoughtful in how it stages certain things. But, for me, Immortality wasn't as thoughtful about other things. Perhaps I've just had enough of Sam Barlow's ideas about women on camera for a little bit. I'd quite like him to have ideas about something else next time.

OlliOlli World has gone for that most coveted of design goals - "easy to learn, hard to master". I think it succeeds. For those who join me in obsessiveness, it may become responsible for hundreds of game pads laid low by kickflip-induced stick drift. Such is the intensity and frequency with which you will twiddle them sticks. I know. I stand before you a man touched by a divinity only those raised by gaming magazines of the 90s can fathom. I can say, with integrity, without embellishment, that this game is so fierce it will give you literal skin sores. It is blisteringly good. [RPS Bestest Bests]

There's a lot more I liked in the 30+ hours it took to hit the credits, but I only have one life, not millions, so I can't type all day. Just know that those who prefer the quiet quicksaveyness of the Dishonoreds will grumble at the inability to use all their powers, the shift to shootybang, the disappearance of non-lethality and corpse hiding - all the signposts of a true immersive sim. [RPS Bestest Bests]

So let's not overcomplicate it. Minishoot' Adventures is an outwardly straightforward game, but its straightforwardness is deceptive. As I was playing, a stupid question formed: given its conceptual obviousness and simple pleasures, why aren't there more games as good as this? It's a stupid question because it has an obvious answer: because it's incredibly difficult to make a good game and because what seems straightforward in retrospect almost never is in creation. Maybe Minishoot' Adventures isn't a "great" game, but it sure is a great time, and that's plenty.