I love Rocket League. I love it because it’s a near-perfect example of game design; an invented sport that understands how to create feelings of triumph and tension, sometimes flipping the script in a few seconds of controlled chaos. That’s rare enough for me to recommend the game strongly to anyone who isn’t allergic to online play but there’s more: Rocket League takes place in a world I want to be a part of. It’s a place where sport is carnival, the playing field is level (no paid-for boosts or buffs here, just cosmetic unlocks), and competition doesn’t require blood, sweat or tears.

There are some great actors in here, and the effort gone to for the filming, and the extensive script, deserves credit. But the framework into which it’s all been put is deeply flawed. Which is a huge shame. Someone is going to get this idea right, but it’s not this time.

How about telling people that this is a fraction of a game at the point of sale? It’s only a tiny £2.80, as you’d hope for something less than two hours long, but the principle remains: if something’s episodic, you say so. Starting with putting it in the title.

Age of Wonders III does the big fantasy conquest thing if that’s what you’re looking for, and Stardock’s own Fallen Enchantress is worth a look as well. Sorcerer King deserves plaudits for being something altogether different rather than yet another iteration of a game we’ve been playing for decades.

This is really superb. Wonderful new puzzles, not over-complicating or trying to be a level of impossible above what came before, but still offering new challenges and new scope for the same tools. And a whole new story that lives within Talos’s original, but is communicated entirely through community discussion, and feels extremely reactive to the dialogue choices you make. It’s everything you could want an expansion to be.

Smart, subtle and sinister, Cradle is a wonderful work of science fiction that doesn’t quite fit inside the space Flying Cafe have designed for it.

Vran does enough to make itself distinct, and it does it well enough to create the imperative to keep going and going.

A minor diversion at best, without the comic timing or cunning to turn anyone to a life of crime. A weekend of crime, perhaps, at most.

Good performances, some very nice animation (albeit embarrassingly similar to Telltale’s look), and a couple of passable puzzles, just aren’t enough to compete with some astonishingly dreadful design decisions, the monstrously slow pace, agonising traipsing, unskippable repeated dialogue and laborious cutscenes, violently pisspoor platforming and action sequences, complete lack of introduction or explanation of who anyone is for people new to the long-dead series, ghastly controls, cheap and tacky on-screen prompts, obviously designed for tablet interaction, and god-awful instant deaths.

Blues and Bullets’ ambition is untouchable, but for its own sake it needs to calm right down and focus on what matters most.

The climbing is unquestionably repetitive, but that’s not something that puts me off at all. It’ll be the deal-breaker for many, I’m sure, but for those not put off, this is a delightful little thing.

What it offers though is a solid combat system backed up with enough different flavours, little moments of triumph, pats on the head and surprises amongst the very, very quickly familiar terrain to be compelling, like a big bowl of popcorn sprinkled with chocolate. It’s unfortunate that as a hybrid, The Witcher 3 does so much more with a lot of the same elements.

It’s short, it’s brutal to the point of unfair, and I haven’t even mentioned half the things you need to manage, because I don’t wish to either spoil or overload you.

It’ll keep you busy for a long damn time too, even if you only play it once – though, of course, for many there’ll be later playthroughs in co-op or at at unlockable higher difficulties. I think it’s the (admittedly presumed) desire to be the spiritual sequel to Diablo II which holds me back from heaping breathless praise on Grim Dawn, though.

That Dragon, Cancer is an important game because it tries, but not because it succeeds.

This is such a treat, and I fear that the (perfect) name will mean too many people look past it. I love that it’s not mocking anything in particular when it apes early 90s arcade games, and yet feels like it’s mocking the entire universe at the same time. I love that it feels cruel, yet I couldn’t make a good argument to justify why, especially when half your time is spent jumping about a magic pony. So trust me, pick this one up.

Perfect Angle looks like a neat little puzzle about rotating obscure 3D shapes until they align to form objects, but somehow sports the most astonishingly dreadful narrative of all time.

Underneath it all is a sweet little game, that takes its cues from 16bit gaming in many right ways.

It doesn’t have the cleanness or the slow-burn escalation of your old-school C&Cs or the first Warcrafts and StarCraft, so certainly don’t approach it as a return to the old ways, but if you want a giant sci-fi army bashing buildings and monsters to death while a crazy lightshow rages, Legacy of the Void is hard to argue with on that basis.

Despite the fact that I found most of this pretty dull, Thea is an enormously difficult game to stop playing.

It is a game about embracing engineering and being unafraid to encourage craziness, so long as it can be physically done. It is a game that does the very idea of Science, with a capital S, proud.

If you were hoping for a new squad-based game with the finesse of XCOM, or the many tactical choices of Jagged Alliance 2, this is not it. Mordheim is dumb. Mordheim is flawed. Mordheim tries hard and doesn’t succeed. This is not a happy Christmas, everyone, but the misshapen horror of Faschnat. It’s your present from Krampus.

This is so immediately accessible, so ridiculously replayable, and so satisfying to get better at, that it transcends. And if those sorts of games are your thing and you’ve not already delved in during development, then flipping crikey, get this immediately.

The brilliance of Undertale, its delicate balance that it manages for most of the time you’ll spend playing it, is that it understands how to be scary and funny all at once.

A quiet, careful joy, spinning an impressive tapestry out of relatively few threads.

There’s a clever stealth game here, without question. I’d just like it so much more if it ramped up faster and cooled it with all the chest-thumping.

This is an improved version of the game but, in singleplayer and in 1v1, it retains the same rigidity as the original release.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a substantial and in some respects lavish cyberpunk romp, which, if looked at purely in its own right, is only really guilty of a bit of visual and narrative flab.