Blair Witch is lumbering and predictable, as horror often is, and the rattling moments come mostly from jumpscares. The rest is a tepid sort of horror.

Too much of the game is spent being annoyed by having to slowly trudge between levers – a crime as old as gaming itself – only to allow it its little follies. The acting is splendid, the writing decent, and as I’ve said, the graphics a fabulous showing off within the Unreal Engine. But in its short time, it frustrates too often, and tries to do too much.

Altogether, Affogato does a reasonable impression of all three types of game it's trying to emulate here, but it also spreads itself too thin in the process. Each part of its demonic triumvirate lacks the full-bodied flavour that really makes them sing when they're viewed in isolation, and while I've enjoyed it plenty over its 15-odd hour runtime, it's mostly just left me hungry for the real thing. It will no doubt be someone's cuppa joe, but I'm not sure it's mine.

Even if you don’t care about disjointed storytelling, repetitive levels or cringe-worthy jokes, I can’t recommend Youngblood. If you’re desperate to shoot bads with a bud, go play Borderlands, Destiny 2, or Far Cry flipping Five instead. MachineGames clearly felt the need to tread some water before Wolfenstein 3, but they damn near wind up drowning.

Much like 80 Days, Sorcery stands as a great example of what text can do, the more fun bits of gamebooks between the bullshit bits, and an excellent classic adventure that soon becomes a fascinating modern RPG in its own right. No dice, scribbled margin notes, or agonising little paper-cuts required.

To me it feels far more like an expansion pack than a whole new game, slightly improving the cutesy graphics and adding in a couple of extra construction materials, but even then it all overlaps a little too closely with the original. A sequel to a game that already looked awfully similar to another series seems like something that should have iterated a great deal further by now. I certainly recommend checking out people’s most elaborate and daft bridges on YouTube – as for creating them yourself, it’s harder to get excited about.

It certainly shows greater signs of life than Deliver Us The Moon (which I'd still recommend playing beforehand if you have the chance, even though it's not strictly necessary in order to appreciate what's going on here), and while it might not be as polished or glamourous as other space games launching this year, it's a worthy continuation of KeokeN's thoughtful sci-fi series nonetheless. The future it depicts may be bleak, but this is a world you'll be glad to escape to, even if it's only for a little while.

Overall, Ashes isn’t bad, it’s just very plain. Gorgeous, but plain. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before and done better. [Single-player review]

I don’t know if droves follow it to Appalachia. But for hardy and forgiving treasure seekers, while there might not be much gold in them thar hills, there’s at least company now.

Battleborn isn’t a bad game in the sense that it lacks work or effort – the team has clearly put in the hours – it’s just that, for me, it’s an uninspiring result which can’t justify its hefty price tag.

As far as Rainbow Six Extraction goes as a whole, I think there's a lot of good here. The missions are challenging, the aliens are clever, and the progression system is rewarding enough to keep you interested. Nothing is going to blow you away or keep you playing for hours on end, but it works as an FPS you can have a really fun time with on occasion. Sometimes that's all you really need, isn't it?

Sanctus Reach’s unit and faction design and flexible mechanics deserve a much better campaign and fewer constantly recycled objectives.

After years of seeing the same thing, it has become clear that Ubi games cannot function on the strength of their formula alone. And they certainly can’t rely on the strength of your mate Greg. They need some hook and less bait. At the very least they need decent story-telling or likeable characters. However, the principal problem that will forever plague this developer is that the transparency and rigidity of their formula will always hinder them. You can always see it skulking over the surface of the game, like a man in stars and stripes facepaint trying to sneak into a cocaine warehouse. It has been detected: insta-fail.

Ultimately, it just makes Outcast: A New Beginning feel very tired and generic - an open world that might have impressed a decade ago, but now comes across as a game both out of time and out of favour. A small word on the game's performance, too, before I close, which (politely) runs like arse. Aside from frequent stutters when moving to new areas at speed, there were also moments where the frame rate had a full-on meltdown, descending into a farcical slideshow. Publishers THQ Nordic have assured me that optimisation patches are incoming for launch day, but oof, the review build was not a pretty sight at times, lemme tell ya. Even without these performance issues, though, Outcast: A New Beginning has bigger, more fundamental problems lying at its heart. It may finally look like the Adelpha you dreamed about 25 years ago, but this weary sequel has never felt more alienating.

For me to enjoy turn-based sneakery, I need more information. Naughty Police is a game where simply moving from A to B is riddled with uncertainty, and the cost of being spotted too often boils down to repetitive busywork. It’s not a price I’m willing to pay.

If you can get it for £4 – and as noted above, you can during most Steam sales – Crysis is worth returning to for at least its first few hours. If you’ve never played it before, I reckon it’d be worth playing all the way to its end. But Crysis Remastered’s spit-polished nanosuit can’t redeem the game’s aging design, or justify the Maximum Price.

It all just starts to feel like you're endlessly spinning plates without any real end in sight. Each campaign scenario is more of the same, too, offering little more than a change in starting position and faction type. For some, £15/$20 will be a more than adequate price of entry for that. But it also feels like Bulwark is on the cusp of something greater, like it's aiming to be an Anno but never quite getting there in the process. It ultimately spreads itself too thin, doing lots of things well without being brilliant, and lacks the depth and momentum to make it feel satisfying on a strategic level. It's a citybuilder that hums along quietly, but lethargically, sputtering occasionally as you change gears, and eventually petering out altogether as both you and the game become completely and utterly exhausted by it all.

I urge you to give this game a go, I get this deep satisfaction from parting the curtains. Don't sleep on Hauntii, for goodness sake. [RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s a greater disappointment because it falls so short of Planet Coaster. Frontier has already made the game that shows Evolution where it went wrong. It’s not that Evolution couldn’t have forged its own path, but it throws away lots of proven systems, often without substituting them for anything else. I don’t want to bad-mouth cool dinosaurs, but cool dinosaurs can only carry a game so far.

What Bossa Studios have done here, then, is make a game that's immediately fun and frustrating and fishy. Its fish are cute as heck, its levels are clever, and most importantly it's one of those games that anyone can play. You could show this to your gran and she'd be like, "Yes my child, I understand. The fish, they must be saved". And I think that's neat, you know? Even though it's a single player game, it'll make those around you just as invested in the fish as you are. I mean, you'd be a monster to leave them alone in their bowls.

You're likely to have similar dust-ups and shakedowns, of course, given the component parts of any procedural machine. But vitally, Unexplored 2 makes the player feel adventurous and special. Even when you've got no money, no XP, and no shoes. [RPS Bestest Bests]

The biggest miss, for me, is the Ages system, which feels like a solid concept that desperately needed more time in the pre-production concepting stage to make work the way it was intended. Pivoting to fantastical alternative eras of history could have made for a wildly exciting story with each campaign. Instead, it far more often ends up feeling like a compulsory family road trip to somewhere you don't want to be, while you pass the hours half-listening to another podcast about the Roman empire.

Chaosbane defines itself in these tiny instances of friction that break up the flow of holding down a button to smoothly mulch through an ocean of solid obstacles. Most of these obstacles are more aggressive than sandy chickpeas, although only some of them are smarter.

The ending is a good payoff to a sweet story, with plenty of chuckles and surprises along the way.

Under its surface there’s a complexity to Cobalt’s systems and a surprising depth that will keep you playing.

More than anything, Lost Sphear serves as a reminder that there’s a lot more to capturing the spirit of your idols than just miming them in your bathroom mirror, and I hope that Tokyo RPG Factory learns that lesson before they release yet another love letter to the exact same game.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 is a fantastic football game, quite possibly one of the best ever. On the pitch, it plays spectacularly well, with both individual players and teams expressing themselves as recognisable entities, and Master League is a superb singleplayer mode, making player development entertaining and simple to grasp...Take it online, though, and things start to fall apart. And the PC port is an ugly downgrade in comparison to the current-gen console versions.

Okhlos feels like an elevator pitch – ‘go smash up a comedy ancient Greece’ – made flesh, without too much worry about expanding upon the concept. I do admire that, there’s a purity and a glee to it, and it’s refreshing to not butt up against a skill ceiling as in something like Isaac, but I guess once you’ve smote one god, you’ve smote ’em all.