Better responding controls would do a lot of good, but for £6.40 you’ve got a lovely idea, often delivered very well.

GoNNER is this year’s Downwell – a neat, short-form action game that has found the perfect visual style to communicate its near-misses and big hits. Whether you want to show off by pushing its systems to the limits or play at a more relaxed and careful pace, basking in the gorgeous music, it’s an absolute delight.

It’s DOOM without the claustrophobia. A Serious Sam + Borderlands cocktail with weighty, thumping, exciting, speedy combat. Diablo in first-person, with wide open spaces, packs of enemies, giant bosses and more weapons than you can shake a wang at. Shadow Warrior 2 is anarchic, excessive, ridiculous, occasionally spectacular and almost entirely wonderful.

THUMPER, with its minimum of menus and explanation and guidance is absolutely pure, to the point that those who do not enjoy its light-from-darkness aesthetic will think it too small, to samey, too one-note, too much about the same sound playing forever. Perhaps it really can offer nothing to those people, or perhaps accepting that is it very fucking sincerely intended to be the same state of mind held for an eternity will let it seep into their veins after all. For the rest of us, let it take its place alongside Devil Daggers, reigning in hell.

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.

It’s mostly a game of the same old problems – a Louis Van Gaal team in José Mourinho clothing. It falls down on the pitch and fails to execute well on its new ideas. I hope next year brings a better Journey and a better destination.

A MOBA in a non-cutesy, non-fantasy setting, with just enough respect for the genre’s tradition while having the courage to keep things slow, uncomplicated and strategic. Here’s that slap on the back, space videogame. You deserve it.

It didn’t entertain me, it didn’t distract my son, and it’s very broken. Maybe it’ll be a cult classic by Giant Machines 2023, but not yet.

If you crank the difficulty right up, missions are not something to just casually slaughter your way through. You’ll have to think smart, take longer and most of all sneak, something that is not realistically required on normal hardness.

Ambition wasn’t thwarted by technology, but just a lack of common sense. I find myself still wanting to recommend you play it, not least because the action is mostly fine, if very repetitive, and therefore there’s nothing that’s actively unpleasant about playing it – you can experience the wonders it has to offer, just for the price of grinding through the okay-ness of it all.

But goodness, it’s a tiny-but-then-not-tiny, lovely thing with so much character and a wonderful sense of adventure. It’s a gentle seafaring tale I’m looking forward to playing through with a child when I next see my smaller family members but which I’m more than happy to play for my own enjoyment as well. I think I’m on my sixth distinct playthrough at the moment and still discovering new things.

I appreciate how different it is, how on edge it kept me. This is a game trying not to fall into formula. The tense, never tenser, could all go a bit Frank Spencer structure is probably going to offer some great things in terms of Hitman’s now-traditional drip-fed new contracts and elusive targets. Maybe we’ve had enough spectacle and bustling streets now: maybe purebred stealth challenge is a vital change of pace, and escalation.

So few games are capable of putting humans together like this in a den of villainy and letting them become slowly corrupted or instantaneously redeemed. Hackmud does this and does it very well. It is like the early internet it so perfectly mimics: a world of confusion, paranoia and possibility.

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.

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.

£14 is a lot for two hours, and as I think I’ve perhaps covered above, it’s an abysmal game. The Welshest game I’ve ever played, but still abysmal. Great TV show for the most part, but one that keeps annoying your viewing pleasure by asking you to click on a dot. Graphics are amazing, though!

If you’re a little bit curious, or if you enjoyed any of the games with which it shares its DNA, Virginia may be one of the oddest and most fascinating things you’ve played in a long, long time. Vivid Virginia is a hell of a lot more than plain old “walking.”

In its present state, Duelyst is fantastic, and with time it’s likely to only get better.

There’s joy to be found in this zany horrorshow, but it’ll take a seasoned janker to grit their teeth through its issues and fully appreciate it.

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.

If XCOM and Heroes of Might and Magic meets Star Trek/Farscape appeals to you (it does, doesn’t it?), and you’re happy to force your way past some initially confusing issues with the interface, you’ll almost certainly enjoy Halcyon 6. I have, despite my gripes, but it’s less than the sum of all those parts that I couldn’t help but see the edges of as I played, and I was longing for more engaging combat long before the end. Even if the galaxy continues to grow, I don’t think I’ll return even.

Event[0] is probably too short for its own good, less because of (kill me) ‘value’, but more because it limits how far it can take its idea. What’s there is very glossy as well as clever though. Despite its sometimes very obvious limitations, Event[0] feels like the start of a beautiful friendship.

Master of Orion’s biggest crime is that it’s simply boring.

I had a lot of fun with Hue. It was frustrating sometimes, but most puzzle-platformers are, and it would be boring to get every level right first time. Its faults mostly lie with being over-ambitious in terms of tone and narrative, but I think I’d rather see a game overreach than be content with mediocrity.

Campaign-wise, this is the best expansion Blizzard has ever made.

First things first, Reigns is made for mobile and, frankly, it shows. You’ve almost certainly got a smartphone or a tablet, so put the PC version out of your mind and go buy it from the App Store or Google Play instead. If you absolutely must play it on PC then, sure, it works, because of what it’s trying to do at heart rather than because it’s been tailor-made for our computers.

It really does have the best of intentions though, and if you’re a mega-fan rather than just someone with fond but not entirely specific memories, I suspect you’ll tap right into the rich vein of Fighting Fantasy love here. Me, I need a little more.

More than anything, I’m delighted that it’s tried so damned hard to be more interesting, more involved, more intelligent. That it falls short is a shame, but that it reaches higher than most is to be lauded. Gorgeous-looking, exquisite-sounding, and ambitious in its desire to be interesting, there’s a lot to congratulate. That the experience is punctuated by tumidity in its writing and puzzle design is the issue.