The most glaring problem is how The Suicide Of Rachel Foster fails to meaningfully engage with its central themes.

The game's story keeps unravelling towards a genuinely tearjerking ending, digging into its themes of community, resilience, and rebuilding in surprising and consistently interesting ways. It keeps a steady, compelling rhythm, switching between the normal fishing and cooking to something more dramatic and then back again. And watching the town slowly come back to life, not despite setbacks but building on what they leave behind, is beautiful.

At The Gates has an impressively complicated set of interlocking systems, but the amount of time and patience it takes to actually get anywhere is ridiculous.

I’m not convinced that playing a nation like South Africa or Canada will ever be quite as engaging as playing Britain or Germany, at least not when it comes to the war itself. They still have to play catch up, and they’re always going to depend on the superpowers. Together for Victory doesn’t simply buff the Commonwealth nations to make them more viable however – it gives them more options and more nation-defining decisions, especially in regards to creating an alternate history. It’s an entirely different focus, and a welcome one.

It's not exactly Saints Row, but it's not exactly its own thing either. It just is, and the lack of creative purpose makes me think it exists almost exclusively for balance sheet reasons, which isn't a nice conclusion to come to. I wish we lived in a world where the people who made the pun food trucks and the big, weird city and conceived the interesting duality of the Idols gang (and their cool helmets) were given a large pot of money and several years to make whatever game they wanted, no strings attached, no legacy series hanging over them. But that's not the world we live in.

Look past the slightly dubious plot and there's much to enjoy about The DioField Chronicle's combat, but when it's a full-priced game I cannot in good conscience say it's 'worth a punt' when half of it leaves such a sour aftertaste. You'll stop caring about this band of mercs long before they do anything to try and redeem themselves, and there simply are better RPGs and better strategy games out there to sink your teeth into instead. It's a shame, especially when its free first chapter demo looked so promising just a couple of months ago, but alas, the central cast just absolutely lost me halfway through. It may not be the greatest plot twist you've ever seen, but at least you'll be on the right side of history this time.

I love being exposed to new places and histories, but the distancing of Aurelia’s structure had me looking for a way to get closer; that brush with the familiar pulled me right in for a moment and I wanted more of the same.

The game offers an immediately recognisable concept, that manages to innovate and surprise, and it’s entirely unlike anything else I’ve played before. Just like a secret clubhouse, it’s likely to lose its allure if you spend all your time there – but it’s exciting as hell to to visit in a snatched moment.

It’s a shame, because it’s a wonderfully ambitious mashup of systems wrapped around a lovely, if extremely cliched, caricature of the golden age of gangster fiction. When negotiations break down and you end up in a shoot-out with enemies that look like they’re dressed for a wedding, Empire Of Sin feels like a farce worthy of a Coen brothers movie.

It’s undeniably repetitive. I like the game a lot, and in a large part because of its simplicity. But it’s certainly walking a fine line, possibly limiting how many times someone might want to take another trip down its randomly generated tower knowing they’ve encountered many of its surprises.

Straightforward, simple, but slick and solid. Cossacks is comfort food, but it feels sufficiently of today despite its cheerfully throwback heart. I had a good time, and most of all I realised that I’m more than ready for this once so staid of genres to come back in earnest.

Despite those reservations, I'm won over by the birds themselves. I haven't unlocked all the levels yet but I'll crack on to help Big Friend. My hands may never adapt to the precise gravity of these joyful idiots. But bailing as a sparrow is relatively painless. With time, I will become unflappable.

There are so many smart ideas in here, and the concept is neat, even if obviously derivative. But the execution doesn’t hold it together, with disappointing responses to extremes, and a strangely anticlimactic progression. I feel like if this were given another six months, the game could be as interesting to play as it is in ambition. But as it is, it’s not there.

It’s just so self-sabotaging at every point. Astonishing amounts of work have gone into this, to creating such a vast detailed city, writing an apparently infinite story, building something on such scale. And then this has been dramatically let down by the dreadful AI, a woeful inability to edit, and the mindnumbing monotony of its identical missions. I’m fascinated by it, but I absolutely cannot recommend it.

Each character class I’ve found so far has been really distinct, and I still have a few to encounter. Warsaw has the makings of a genuinely fascinating, unyielding tactical game with a lot of heart and reverence for the events it’s based on. Still, as is, it’s currently a hard sell unless you’re really intent on a challenge that, while thematically resonant, often feels more arbitrary than it is complex.

But this just wasn’t for me. Ultimately, there’s only so excited I can get by the prospect of being (let’s all say it in Chod’s awed whisper) an entrepreneur. Maybe I’m just becoming more prone to escapism as I age, but there’s just not much of a thrill for me in getting really, really efficient at flogging grape juice and tables to people.

A cursory attempt to yank the story off the rails by picking every antisocial, confrontational dialogue option resulted in the plot following the exact same trajectory, with somewhat snippier interactions with the cast and a few new lines of incidental dialogue based on clan choice. Being an elder vampire means that people will put up with a LOT of your bullshit, it seems. Aside from some Fallout-esque epilogue slides based on your few choices, there's not much you can do to steer the story. Not an inherent flaw if you're willing to judge this game on its own terms, but a final nail in the coffin for those hoping Troika's legacy lives on through this game.

Disintegration has a lot of room for improvement, but I enjoyed my time with it, and it succeeds in finding a balance between its shooting and strategic elements. It’s the kind of game I hope gets a sequel, one which is bolder in pursuing its ideas, and not just in its character names.

I’ve not gotten an enormous way through We Happy Few, because I’ve severely disliked the hours I’ve sunk into it. I think it’s probably, really, just a mediocre game, but it’s one that’s made me feel drained and discombobulated with its incoherence and that deeply peculiar atmosphere of feeling like it should be a great game, while never actually being one.

The basic act of hitting something doesn’t feel quite right, even when you’re whacking someone with your massive motorcycle hands. There’s this feeling of disconnection, some of it coming from the way your enemy can blink away at speed, and some of it, probably, from lag. A recent patch claimed to address that, but it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Hopefully that will be ironed out further down the line. But even if it is, I’d steer clear of Bleeding Edge. The characters may be inventive, but everything else is bleeding out on the floor.

This is a shambolic RPG barely held together by an underutilised photography aspect and an entirely inconsequential shapeshifting ability, wrapped in the familiar trappings of a rural life simulator. The Good Life is tonally stupid, structurally broken, surprisingly deep and occasionally self-aware. It is a confusing and strange and mostly horrible experience, which I feel personally worse off having been through, but am somehow glad that I did.

The pleasures of a focused strategy title like Civilization lie in juggling the numbers in just the right way to succeed. Those found in a freeform city-builder like Sim City come from unleashing your unbridled creativity on a blank canvas. By sticking on a rigidly deterministic (and, thus, politically questionable, however well-intentioned) reading of two centuries of European history, Urban Empire fails to tap either of those joys, revealing its incessant march towards the present is not an ongoing process actively shaped by individual players, but a foregone conclusion simply waiting to be ushered in.

I’d say “I’m sorry, Unto”, but I’m really not sorry because I hate this sluggish, clumsy little arsehole and I wish he’d stayed dead the first time. Some of you will like him (and it’s worth giving it a go via Game Pass to see if you do). But that’s your problem now.

With just three maps to choose from, all of them set in the same jungle and pretty much indistinguishable from one another, it will only take a dozen matches before you’ve seen every which way that things can shake out. It’s at this point that Predator: Hunting Grounds really does feel like the interesting-but-limited multiplayer component of a much larger game, and no amount of loot crates with customisable cosmetic skins, unlockable sniper rifles and fancy new dresses for the Predator can hope to liven things back up again...It’s a shame too, because I could spend ages running around the jungle as everyone’s favourite Schwarzeneggar-botherer, leaping over temples and howling at the sky in unbridled agony each time this supposedly rock-hard alien has to give himself his little injection of health medicine. There’s a really excellent Predator in here, waiting to be set free.

I hope Blackbird can turn Legion's ailing fortunes around. Not simply because good RTS games are rarer than white rhinos these days, but also because I genuinely think Legion has potential. It's not as derivative as its theme makes it appear, and despite the ruckus it caused, the idea of earning new units through play is not entirely without merit. Nonetheless, with the campaign being as anaemic as it is, right now I'd only recommend Crossfire: Legion if you already know your way around fast-paced, competitive RTS games. [Early Access Review]

I did eventually power through to Follow the Light’s climax (also disappointing, for reasons relating but not specific to the aforementioned not-actually-missing child issue), and the only thing that could tempt me back is some kind of dedicated free-sail side mode. It’s frustrating: a game that’s so good in places at weaving that sensation of impetus, of literally moving forward with the wind at your back, also being so willing to bog you down in busywork. And I’d rather be dashed on the sharpest rocks in Scandinavia than have to poke at one more circuit breaker.

It’s short, it’s brutal to the point of unfair, and I haven’t even mentioned half the things you need to manage, because I don’t wish to either spoil or overload you.

What I really need is a group to play with and I’ll be recruiting across the upcoming long weekend.