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.