This is such garbage. For goodness sakes don’t buy this as DLC, but don’t even bother if you were lured into getting a season pass at the start. What a pile of piss.

There’s definitely some dark stuff in there and the characters have a real spark of life in them, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing - and that’s kind of how I feel about Vertigo as whole, too.

This likely reads as an overwhelmingly negative review, and it’s deserved – No Man’s Sky is massively flawed, and systematically poorly designed. But it’s also a massive playground of potential and opportunity, and its sheer ambition, for all its massive stumbles, is rewarded in play. It’s bloody awful that the whole time I’ve been playing, the dozens of hours on PC this weekend, I’ve been thinking about the PS4 hastily hooked up to the TV at the other side of my office and wishing I were still playing over there.

It’s absolutely true to say that you get out of Sword Coast Legends what you put in, but right now there just aren’t enough reasons to put much in.

It’s sailing on, happy to be what it is – another pirate game with a skeleton crew.

Much like crabs themselves, I am tremendously glad this game exists, but it’s something I’d rather appreciate at a distance.

It goes back to the game seemingly utilising cyberpunk as an aesthetic, and an excuse for computer-magic, without really exploring the human concerns involved. There’s a billboard in the intro cinematic that literally just says ‘Neon’. Another advertises ‘Hack Cola’. I don’t want to make a joke about an AI writing a cyberpunk script for fear of falling into some sort of terrifying Rococo’s Basilisk-esque logic hole, but you get the picture.

The nicest thing I can say about Terminator: Resistance is that if a Terminator were sent back in time to wipe out its code, the timeline of gaming in general would almost certainly proceed unchanged.

Kalypso and Yippee seem determined to banish memories of the ropey release build (As I type this, my install is being modified by a fresh 1GB patch – 1.08) as quickly as they can. If they stay the course and keep delivering fixes at the current rate, by March, Commandos 2 HD Remaster could be entirely error free. I’m reasonably confident the repairs will be completed satisfactorily. Whether Pyro’s masterpiece will ever get back the minuscule black crosses and red circles, it wore, without controversy, for nigh-on twenty years, remains to be seen.

I almost walked away during the opening moments, when Sylvio seems like yet another cobbled together mess of repetitive graphical assets. I figured I’d play until the first jump scare and then quit. Instead, I found a game that uses its limited resources to find clever ways to scare the life out of me. It’s a quiet horror game – an anti-screamer, right down to the calm almost-whispers of the protagonist – and it’s a triumph.

It’s clean and painstakingly handcrafted, with superbly chosen colour palettes, striking linework, and cracking use of lighting effects to bring life to grisly, glowing ghosts.

It's so full of love and pretty reveals, and empty dwarf pubs that feel hand crafted, and overheard orc conversations where they bitch about goblins. If you have a group of friends that you already play games like this with, then I'd say it's well worth bringing campfires and cosy stew to as many corners of Moria as you can.

Reforged, like a lot of remasters today, is good for a run around if all you wanted was to give your nostalgia a long leash – long enough to punch some elves in the face, say. But if Warcraft III was a game you not only once loved, but love still; if it’s a game you’ve been playing for the better part of 20 years… Well. It’s not hard to see how Reforged could end up being a bit of a disappointment.

It's worth sticking around in the forest once you've actually dealt with the witch, too. Like Death Stranding's residents, Witch Strandings' animal folk still need someone to take care of them every day, letting you continually add to your ever-growing point score, but their demeanour and local surroundings also change in tangible, noticeable ways. You start to see the effect your handiwork has had on them more clearly, and the completionist icon-clearer in me does want to see what a completely clean, hex-free forest looks like. So I think I'll be sticking around a little while longer in this strange, haunted woodland. My wrist might not thank me for it, but I'm sure a soft blanket will cure my aching bones.

It’s a clumsy, dull, shallow, lacklustre trudge through cold soup. And fails at the most important aspect of any game in the genre: making me want to have another go.

There’s beauty to be found here, among the stars. But it’s going to take a more dedicated role-player than myself – or at least someone far more interested in systems for their own sake – to buy into this flimsy simulation for very long.

There's no incentive to actually fu.king do anything, and in between the things you can't be arsed to do are just vaste swathes of nothing. I'm convinced everything in Forspoken would be 100% improved if it was about 60% smaller. The world would be compact, but it would be dense, more interesting, and appropriately scoped. It might have characters in it beyond the same few urchins standing on the streets in Cipal dong one of three "I'm scared" poses, and cutscenes that don't have a fade to black every five seconds for no apparent reason. It's so annoying, because I think a lot of the core ideas here are very cool, and it's one of those games where I want a sequel where they do everything better. Given the nature of these things, I expect we never will.

All of these issues are fixable (some quite easily, I’d hope), and just a little extra content could do so much to hide the edges of the game.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a developer try to recapture the magic of Jagged Alliance and I hope it’s not the last, but I found Rage pretty hard work to enjoy. Much like the mercs themselves, for every positive trait it may offer, there tends to be some frustrating problem to deal with too.

It's by no means bad, but it's a disappointing game that fails to capture the appeal of any of its component genres, and fails to generate anything interesting by combining them.

It needs changes to how it actually works, which is a lot to ask. But the biggest fight I’ve had with Anthem so far is against Anthem.

The appeal of being a humble, vulnerable bee going about their business in a more detailed, freeform way seems obvious. Bee Simulator has its upsides, but this just isn’t the one. My bee t-shirt, and I, are still waiting.

I think Skull And Bones might be one of the most boring games I've ever played. There might be value in it for those looking for a leisurely sail, or folks who enjoy the time management side of making deliveries optimally. For everyone else, boat-lovers, live service fiends, and people who like fun, the game will be nothing more than a tedious slog through unrewarding waters.

There’s a common narrative that Call of Duty campaigns were at their peak in the late ‘00s. That may be true in pop cultural terms, multiplayer having long since overshadowed solo modes for the typical COD fan. But this Modern Warfare reboot began with Infinity Ward firing on all cylinders, embracing brave themes and experimental designs in single-player that excused its occasional stumbles. It’s a shame to see the engine it built sputter and fail, betrayed by a stopgap schedule-filler with nothing to say. [Campaign Review]

I like the game at CE’s heart, but interacting with it is simply unpleasant.

Without having been in one myself I can’t say with any authority that Disaster Report 4 isn’t an accurate representation of the kinds of things that happen after a real earthquake, but I’m willing to guess that it falls short of a true simulation. It’s certainly about as ridiculous as the unfolding apocalypse happening outside our own windows – where society has seemingly ejected its collective mind to stockpile eggs and demand that the army open fire on joggers – but it’s about as passive as our lockdown too. Disaster Report 4 depicts a strange and consequence-averse crisis, in which you’re usually little more than a hapless observer.

In 2019, a massive and meticulously-crafted open world just doesn’t cut it. Any life breathed into Ghost Recon Breakpoint will have to be pumped into it by you and your friends, and you’d do better to save your breath for other games.

Part of me feels as though this is a brilliant, beautiful Space Hulk tech demo blown up and looped, and I’m not sure how long that can hold my interest. It’s a good time for a while, but for a long life its many rough edges need smoothing and more flesh needs adding to its bones.