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).