At £4 it’s a really easy decision – get this. It’s fun, spooky, peculiar, unique, and most of all – and I use this word very carefully – interesting. That’s something games too often are not. The Room Two unquestionably is – a properly interesting experience.

This is good VR. Let there be more of it. [Tested with Oculus Rift]

If you’ve a kid who just got into Star Wars via the new movie, goodness me this can’t be recommended highly enough. But at the same time, and I’ve been the one fighting off saying this for years longer than many others, it’s getting stale. It needs to be something new, to invent a new way to create something so adorable, because at this point it’s getting very hard not to recommend just picking up the older, cheaper titles. You’d barely notice the difference.

Mighty No. 9 is the best Mega Man game I’ve played in years, but all of the problems it has come from that too. Whether the gaming scene of 2016 needs a modern Mega Man is a more ambiguous question, perhaps answered by the old adage: be careful what you wish for. Or in this case, what you back.

It makes me too sick, and because the underlying experience collapses from operatic space disaster into rinse and repeat all too soon, I am not minded to endure that awful lurching sensation. Despite that, some of my VR confidence has been restored. Maybe this thing can happen after all.

I happily add 35mm to the swollen pantheon of RPS’ highly-recommended games from the first half of 2016. It is janky at times, but it is something special.

I like the idea of Valhalla and some presentation gripes aside, I like its execution. It’s no great revelation but a pleasant surprise, and being a mundane bystander going about their day instead of the plot-critical centre of the universe is an under-explored concept.

Breached is just too small in every aspect to feel satisfying. I’d love to see this fleshed out into something with more ambition and more purpose.

I found it difficult to get into Crea in the same way I did for its forefathers. It would be easy for me to say that part of that is down to fatigue with the genre – I have been through it all before, after all. But that is not the main problem I have with this latecomer. The fact is, it just does everything less well. The crafting, the researching, the art style, the fantasy monsters. There is constant development, like many of these games, so there is always time for things to be stripped out, and much more to be added in future. But at the moment, Crea feels like a step back in time.

The campaign can feel like a bit of a grind because of [this], but then again I really don’t believe that it’s been designed to be played doggedly for hours at a time. It’s best enjoyed as a precious hour of bright, brash space fantasy/Lego crate come to life to scratch imaginative itches here and there.

This is a disaster, and the biggest surprise about it is that Ubisoft thought it worth releasing.

Catalyst occasionally infuriated me, and at other times simply passed me by in a blur, but on the whole I enjoyed my time with it. The movement is still wonderful. The world is still beautiful. There’s still nothing else quite like it. It’s better than the first game in most ways and there are still umpteen ideas in here crying out for a better implementation. So I’ll end in the spirit of the game, with a refined version of what I said last time: Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is good and you should probably play it, but damn, it could have been superb.

I thoroughly recommend it, for those looking for something erring much more toward the more casual end of the strategy world, the only region of the genre with which I’m comfortable. It’s bright, breezy, light and fun, and perhaps, after all, that’s enough.

Make no mistake, Brigador is a toybox first and foremost – assemble your dream mech or deathtank, take it out for a spin in Bladerunnerville, trash everything, have a bloody great fight. A few UI frustrations can’t take away the innate pleasure of that, especially when it looks so delightfully, tangibly model-like too. It’s not Mechwarrior, no, but it scratches pretty much every other mech itch going, and with style.

There is, perhaps, a slight sense that Marrakesh has been rushed – as well as the logic issues, that sense of revolutionary promise unfulfilled and unfortunate route-blocking I mentioned, I suffered from a ton of blurry textures – but it doesn’t feel seriously compromised. Not quite the equal of its noble forebear, no, but it’s the most visually impressive installment yet and, as a package, Hitman’s three episodes so far are already providing more game for the money than anything else recent I care to mention.

The expansion is so large, so full of stuff, that the puzzle sequence forms a very small part of it. It’s just a very, very frustrating part. Grit your teeth. Take deep breaths. Hope that the pathfinding behaves. You will be able to get back to what you enjoy about Fallout, I promise.

There are moments in this where I’m just cheerfully jetting around, my hands moving me and my head gawping at dinos, and it feels like a natural and pleasant way to pass the time. As opposed to battling controls or being acutely conscious that my boxed head is wired up to a PC...The right software may yet save VR gaming, and while Time Machine VR is not a revelation, is does offer some promising signposts. [Tested with Oculus Rift]

It really feels like Blizzard bet everything on Overwatch’s 21 heroes and it absolutely paid off. Overwatch already feels as timeless as Blizzard’s other games, and it feels weird to realize that this is the first time we’ve seen any of these heroes. I definitely have some concerns about where Overwatch will be headed in the future, but I’m not thinking about that as I teleport across the map as Tracer. No, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get behind that Bastion to take that asshole down. I’m thinking about how good it’s going to feel seeing him crumple into metal parts. I’m thinking about how much fun I’m having. The one thing I’m not thinking about? Going to bed.

It’s not CD Projekt’s best work, but it’s worthy enough. It’s good story, a well told story, but simply nowhere near the excellent craft of Hearts of Stone, which used the increased space but tighter focus of its DLC for a character piece.

My point is: while all this is happening, it feels fantastic. Fantastic and frenetic.

None of this diminishes the fact that I’ve had a wonderful time playing Total War: Warhammer and am far from finished with it. But the more I play, the more convinced I become that this is a game that makes a devil’s bargain. It feels exactly the way a Warhammer-themed Total War game should feel, and creates tons of dramatic battles and storylines over the course of each campaign. But to reliably generate all that excitement and tension, it secretly disconnects many of the strategic systems that hold good Total War games together. So do you want a good Warhammer game, or a good Total War game? Because I’m less and less convinced that you’ll find both inside Total Warhammer.

I’m aware how dreadful the AI is throughout. I’m aware that despite its attempts to move things on it’s extremely derivative of a genre that’s wearing itself thin. But I want to recommend it anyway. It’s got this weird bubbling heart underneath it, a clear desire to be a great game despite not being able to reach it. It’s packed, varied, and so bloody enormous. It’s a real muddle, and a muddle for which I’ve developed a real soft spot.

Propulsive, thrilling and breathless, DOOM is the triumph I never expected. I just can’t see there being a better shooter this year, I really can’t. [Single-Player review]

Battleborn isn’t a bad game in the sense that it lacks work or effort – the team has clearly put in the hours – it’s just that, for me, it’s an uninspiring result which can’t justify its hefty price tag.

I think the ending could have been better embellished, provided a little more closure and be a bit less rushed. And gosh does it desperately need speeding up a mite. But I had a splendid time with Kathy Rain, and thoroughly enjoyed a game where I couldn’t see where it might be heading. Kathy proves a complex and interesting character, and, well, I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. Which is the simplest recommendation of them all.

The great experiment of the game was not so much the change of scenery, from history to science fiction, it was the decision to create a Civ-like game of expansion with some complexities and aspects of simulation borrowed from grand strategy. It’s in the simulation of a living galaxy that most of the complexity has been lost, but what has been gained is a precise and finely tuned machine. Less erratic and surprising than its ancestors, but much more elegant in its design.

It is definitely visually improved, but still looks very dated. And the remastering apparently didn’t include addressing the game’s many issues. But at the same time, this is still Shadow Complex, well loved, and definitely a decent time. Just a decent time from six years ago and looking and feeling like it.

The game’s huge for its genre, a good dozen hours at least of bouncing, flinging, zapping and triple-jumping. The new sections only make it better, the new skills fit in perfectly. Few games come close to being this well made, this lovingly animated, and so madly pleasurable to play. If you played it last year, it’s well worth going back (and in May, it’s only £3.75 to update your version on Steam), if not, then goodness me, it’s time to put that right.