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.

Desperados III may dismay profanophobes and Commandos 4 devs short of confidence, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else not warming to it swiftly. I can’t wait to see where Mimimi take the engine next. With WW2 spoken for, I’ve got my blistered quicksave/quickload fingers crossed for Medieval Nottinghamshire. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Eco Lifestyle adds some of the most interesting stuff to The Sims 4 I’ve ever seen. I just wish they had taken it a bit further towards its natural conclusion.

It’s as close to a perfect restoration as you’ll get, and the treatment these genre-defining games deserve.

I love the thrill of threading a conveyor through my domain and hunting down an errant input port, in a weird shark-like sort of way. I love cleaning up a kink that’s been unknowingly bottlenecking me for hours, then watching a dormant part of my factory spring back into life (and I love that I can now place signs as reminders that make those happen slightly less). Most of all I love passing by old projects, grinning at hodge-podge engineering that’s still thrumming away, playing its part in the overall colossus I have somehow crafted. Nothing devours a weekend like Satisfactory, whose demands are so often in that sweet spot where the work is complicated enough to yield capital S Satisfaction without tipping into choredom. No management game has made me feel as powerful, letting me relish in how my labours have sculpted the world on such a scale. And nowhere else, or rarely, have I appreciated such loving attention to detail, be that in the bloops of an unfolding miner or the toot of a departing train.[RPS Bestest Bests]

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but it’s at least as good as Slay The Spire. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Quantum League is a delightfully inventive, smart, and surprising gem. I’d love to see a future where not just competitive FPS fans, but anyone with an interest in game design has at least given it a go. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a future where they nerf the grenade launcher. [Early Access Review]

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.

Valorant’s gunplay feels just as weighty and precise as CS:GO’s, with a structure that hits all the same highs and lows. Abilities sometimes let you outsmart people rather than simply outshoot them, and I’m excited about playing in a squad of friendly and coordinated pals. If and when they fall away, though, I expect I will too. Riot say they’re taking toxicity seriously, and this is good to see. But they acknowledge they’re fighting an uphill battle, and I’m not at all convinced they’ll be able to foster a competitive environment that doesn’t routinely make me miserable. This launch week, though? When my friends are playing, and the game isn’t dominated by people with far more experience than me? I’m going to have a blast.

Here’s the real masterstroke behind Nimbatus’ design. There are several sets of skins, all of which can be mixed and match to make even cooler looking flybots. But they’re all unlockables except the default set, meaning you need to play the campaign to gain access to them. And for once, the cosmetics genuinely are worth grinding for. So I guess I’m just going to have to head back to the hangar, and get better.

Some games only become fun once you work out what they expect from you, and I spent most of my time with Wildfire wondering if I was playing it wrong. Maybe I was, but if there was a fun way to play it, I never found it.

My only real major disappointment with Atmomicrops is that the advertised simulation bits turn out only to be a few light nods to the genre. It’s got some simulation-shaped aspects, sure, but they’re flimsy plastic ferns in comparison to the very much alive and dynamic creeper vines of its shooty-dodgy core. This said, the farming does make fighting more interesting simply by providing a worthwhile distraction, leading to almost unbearably chaotic instances of frantic multitasking. As long as you know what you’re getting into, and are up for sewing a few hours of practise in before you reap the rewards, I think it’s well worth your cashews. Which I’ve only just realised are a play on ‘cash’. Ooh.

On paper, Crucible was built for me. It’s a MOBA-infused hero shooter with an emphasis on mobility, with a diverse line-up and some interesting new ideas. In reality, I’d rather play any of the many games that grapple with just one of Crucible’s heads, and pulls it off far better. This hydra might be sprawling, but none of it looks healthy.

The quality of the writing itself was fine, and genuinely made me smile in places. I just think it’s a tricky subject to wade into without a coherent plan for what should be said. And I know “it’s just a game,” etc., but when sharks are as perilously threatened as they are, and one of the big reasons is that people think of them as a threat to be annihilated, it’s just a bit depressing to see the idea celebrated. And whatever might be claimed about the game’s writing undermining that, I’m sorry, but that’s what it does. Maybe I’d care less if Maneater was fun enough overall to earn a pass. But as you’ve hopefully gathered by now, it’s not.

It’s a robust piece of design that you could well consider a triumph, given just how many ways in which the concept of an ARPG based on a construction game phenomenon could have ended in disaster. And I’m confident in recommending it as worth its price to even the most jaded click-stabber, especially one with even a passing familiarity with Minecraft. But the fact it’s been executed so competently leaves me wishing the developers had been a bit more reckless, frankly. A bit more experimental, in adapting its parent property to an alien genre. Because while the results might have been profoundly weird, it’s weird things – like Minecraft itself was, when it first appeared – that change the landscape of gaming.

It’s just the content, I suppose, that doesn’t charm me any more. It was like playing the FPS version of a top down ARPG like Diablo or Wolcen. Yeah, I’ll shoot the waves of oncoming enemies. No, I don’t particularly need to know why. I’ll do it again in another mission in a minute. Blah blah blah, strip club, blah blah blah, chop shop. Oh Saints Row. It is not you that have changed, but I.

It made me so paranoid that I second guessed everything I thought about the game. It’s a shame that the ending, when it happens, is a bit abrupt, but even after it ended I couldn’t decide what had happened. It’s only a couple of hours long, but Old Gods Rising stewed me in my own juices so thoroughly that I woke up, confused, at about 2am, looked at my aforementioned boyfriend as he slept, and thought “he was definitely in on it with Maz… he looks too smug”. That’s got to be a well crafted story, hasn’t it? As long as you don’t mind not having all the answers at the end.

This is far from the most polished remaster I’ve played, and the original was a hit-and-miss affair to begin with. Judged in terms of Platinum’s own end-of-level trophies, this earns a silver award at best. But then that preposterous theme tune kicks in, sweeping your misgivings away for a precious handful of minutes. When you hear that music, you feel like you can do anything – even draw a circle correctly on your very first try.

But the thing is, and maybe this is me just not being good enough at card games, that eventually all the conversations get too hard. On the one hand this is fine, because Signs Of The Sojourner is sort of about life, and you can’t win at life, nor should you think of it that way. But on the other hand, the bittersweet story – meeting people, making new friends, losing old ones – is a lot of this game’s appeal, and I got the sense I was missing out on loads of it because I wasn’t getting through conversations successfully.

Overall, Horizon’s Gate is a joy to play. Its simple art style, combined with its excellent soundtrack and sense of exploration make it a naval sim that captures the inherent charm of discovery.[RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s a winner. Sixteen tons of detail, sixteen tons of character, sixteen tons of riotous bug blasting, spelunking co-operative goodness. Deep Rock Galactic is a company I’ve got no qualms about selling my soul to for hours more to come. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Runeterra might not be packed with interesting decisions, but it is loaded with charm. It’s nice. It’s soothing. That’s enough.

For anyone hoping it would bring a little modern fluidity to a long-stagnant genre, you might have to moonwalk upwards from this one. But for Ragers, it’s a sturdy score-attacking blowout to while away some hours, perfecting your flying knees and enflamed uppercuts, arguing over who deserves the trash salad.

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.

Particularly nifty is the ability to port your trucks back and forth between maps. If you lose one in a snow drift and can’t yet afford a bigger vehicle to dredge it out, it’s feasible to head back to Michigan and raise the funds in safer environs. That’s the other children’s story SnowRunner resembles: The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly. No matter the size of your stuck truck, you can nearly always send in something heavier. It’s the simplicity of principles like these that makes the ‘Runner games remarkably accessible, even as they grow in complexity and ambition.

It feels unappreciative to wish that there could be even more of it, but it’s like that perfect cup of tea. You’ll always want another one.

This is 100% a Gears Of War game, that also happens to be a top flight strategy effort. Arguably the best of its kind on the market, in fact, despite a bit of trouser trouble. It’s a spectacular thing to play through, and it’d be more than enough to merit the fifty quid price tag if it deleted itself on completion. Thankfully, however, the replay value is much greater than you’d expect. [RPS Bestest Bests]

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.