It has its moments. Stumbling on other survivors is a thrill, but in reality those encounters rarely lead anywhere interesting. DayZ is an anecdote-generator, but the odds are you’ll need to feed it more hours of your life than they’re worth.

All this for £13! Honestly, this is purist FPS as good as it gets, just a constantly stunning game. Don’t miss this. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Ultimately, I’ve only got so much patience for games where the victor is nearly always whoever doesn’t get spotted first. There’s a reason I haven’t played Plunkbat in months. If you’re into your realism though (or just good noises) Insurgency: Sandstorm is worth a shout.

The whole play experience seems set up to make you feel as if you’ve arrived just after the fun is over. Indeed, the game’s opening, where you wake up having missed the start of Reclamation Day, and must trudge to the vault’s exit alone through drifts of spent confetti, couldn’t set the tone more succinctly. The party’s over before it’s even started.

It’s hard to overstate how impossibly beautiful this game is! How good the animation! I couldn’t look away from it even when it was making me roll my eyes! Like whatever the opposite of a car crash is! Sorry for shouting! I’m sort of cross with it! But also want to play it again! Because it might be the most stunning game I have ever seen! Argh!

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.

A game of everything, a game of nothing. Eternal, unknowable, remarkable, infuriating, Kenshi defies easy judgement. Kenshi is. I implore you to play it. [RPS Bestest Bests]

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.

This remains the magical, bizarre, joyful and utterly peculiar game that earned its place in gaming history. It also remains very short (about four hours at a slow pace?), but also extremely replayable, with so many targets to meet. And it’s very funny, in a super-dark way.

What I can say is that it is delightful and non-threatening, and playing it has typically left me feeling pleasantly drowsy and contented, the way I might after wandering around a brightly-lit midway, munching a corn dog covered in mustard in a gauzy childhood memory of the carnival.

There’s a special appeal, too, for Dota players. It’s remarkable how effectively Artifact captures the structure of a Dota game, where semi-isolated struggles build to climactic battles that see every hero converge on the same lane. Though not always: Artifact’s well of possible situations runs deep, offering variety where other CCGs dry up.

I’m just at a loss as to how this has happened. Just Causes have been buggy, sure. But they’ve never felt at least six months from finished. I cannot fathom how this wasn’t lengthily delayed, because it’s in such a dismal state. Although that said, even if the bugs and AI were fixed, it would still leave behind a version of Just Cause that barely changes anything you actually do since the third edition, yet has made every aspect of doing it so astronomically more annoying. What went wrong? How did such an established and entertaining series end up in such a quagmire?

I’m greedy. I want a bigger, beefier, more flexible Mutant Year Zero. But that’s because the small, linear but smart, powerful and atmospheric Mutant Year Zero I got grabbed hold of me so completely. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Flashpoint is fine expansion in terms of re-engineering BattleTech for extended play, then – far better than kicking us into another pit of mega-story or necessitating a new beginning. Long-term, I’d love to see more vibrancy from BattleTech – wilder planets, more colourful mechs and special attacks, grimier, punchier characters – but I suspect only the latter is compatible with this decades-old setting. Already though, a Flashpoint-augmented BattleTech is a significantly leaner and more adaptable machine than the lumbering brute of launch.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes Ian Loredump shows up uninvited and ruins everything.

Even when things got super easy, I still really enjoyed ordering my beautifully animated, lovingly customised Pope bots around these maps, dripping with architectural oddity and detail as they were, and watching them dismantle their foes with fuck-off power axes.But there’s just no bite to it, and it sadly ends up undermining itself as a result.

Each battle is small and short and self-contained, so Bad North has all the ingredients to be a moreish barnstormer. The problem is that they combine with mixed results, much like the members of my extended family and homemade sloe gin.

Share this game with other people, if you can. Play together on a couch, passing a controller around and commenting on the story together. Wear your fluffiest pyjamas and make chamomile tea. Bring tissues as well. I hope you’re comfortable with crying in front of others, because you will shed a tear or two. I bawled at least four times. Five, if you count the trailer. But by the end, I wasn’t sad. I was just glad this game existed. [RPS Bestest Best]

If you never did on mobile, then this is an exquisite puzzle game to play on PC, and only a fiver for the honour.

It’s by no means a terrible game, but it whiffs on too many elements for the admittedly cool aesthetics to carry the day. There were moments of pure fun, like escaping from the docks as a robot-controlled ship ripped up everything behind me with a massive anchor chain. But there were just as many infuriating, controller-tossing moments that managed to destroy any goodwill the fun times had built up.

The strength of its new dinos will pull me back now and again, if only to float around aimlessly on my favourite Gasbag. But as the last of the planned expansions for Ark, Extinction is far from the swan song that I was hoping for.

Taken on its own terms, Battlefield V is an incredible achievement that’s absolutely worth your time and its AAA price tag. Taken in the context of every battle that’s gone before, what’s on sale is the all-too familiar fantasy of being one insignificant drop in a sea of raging war-soup. It’s a fantasy I’ve lived enough times already.

Hitman 2 is about possibilities; the maps, weapons, and disguises all make it sing. Patience is it’s own reward: if you study your foes, if you watch the movement of guards, the placement of certain elements, you’ll get back what you put in.

It’s easier than ever to be drawn into the world of Football Manager 2019, and set about becoming the next Pep Guardiola — or perhaps for the more modest and realistic amongst us, the next Steve Cotterill.

Listen, if you like crawling around in the dark in an asylum, play Outlast. If you like detective games with weird facial animation, play L.A. Noire. If you like the Call of Cthulhu TRPG, keep playing that.

I’m staggered by how clever it is. [RPS Bestest Bests]

Lethal League Blaze doesn’t flip over the table, but it’s an extremely confident sequel that improves on just about every part of its predecessor. [RPS Bestest Bests]

It’s awful. Colossally awful.