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.