A streamlined and multi-planet take on Ubisoft's familiar open-world action, paired with an original-trilogy-era Star Wars tale that follows an up-and-coming scoundrel rather than a Jedi or Imperial, sounds like a recipe for an absolutely incredible game. Outlaws, though, is uneven. Some of the settings, exploration, heists and adventures are everything a franchise fan could want in a sandbox scum and villainy game. Unfortunately, a lot of rough edges and a severe lack of storytelling depth holds Outlaws back from its true potential.

This flashy package makes great use of Nintendo's classic catalogue to spark nostalgia, break the games down for a new audience and make the joys of speedrunning accessible. But once you've given your best effort in the 150 or so challenges there's not a lot to do, besides local couch competitions and checking in for the weekly trials.

With strong inspiration from cinematic horror classics like The Thing, The Poseidon Adventure and Alien, this stunning but gruesome tale makes the most of its industrial location, Scottish cast and 1970s setting. The chilling atmosphere can be dampened in places by the heavily scripted, linear structure, and it feels like story beats could have hit harder. But the emotional core and frequent thrills make it well worth a dip.

Warriors fans know what they're in for. It's an entertaining power fantasy with lots of bad guys and explosions, heaps of different characters to learn and all sorts of diversions on the side to power up your teams and weapons. But for all Age of Calamity's painstaking adaptation, it lacks almost everything I loved about Breath of the Wild. It's a skin deep approximation with the aesthetic and characters the only thing intact, mostly concerned with turning the existing areas into linear bombastic shooting galleries and sword fights. All that would be fine if the story or themes were meaningfully expanded here, but they aren't.

Though the replacement of authored characters with procedurally generated avatars has mixed results, Watch Dogs Legion is unique among GTA-style open world crime games as a result. The city is vast and beautiful, your options for vigilante havoc very broad and the potential for it all to explode into a memorably janky anecdote generally sky high.

Attempting to provide both satisfying big-budget narrative adventures and an online squad-based loot-grinding platform, Marvel's Avengers is an extremely impressive effort that falls short on long-term incentives (at least so far), but nails the campaign.

The core flying and shooting experience here is very well done and should satisfy existing PSVR owners looking for something fresh. But from the meh upgrades and strange unlockable suit designs (it's a first person game?) to the rote storyline and repetition, everything outside of the advanced arcadey shooting gallery sections is a bit of a letdown.

Unique touches like the IR games and two-player competitions give this Brain Training a fresh edge, despite how similar it is to the 2006 original. But in 2020 there's nothing here — aside from those two aspects — that couldn't be done on smartphones, and that's probably where Nintendo should have put it.

With intensely interesting lore and characters, an awe-inspiring aesthetic and one of the most mind-crushingly dull gameplay loops I've ever experienced in a high-budget video game, Hideo Kojima's supernatural epic is pretentious and profound, filled with tedium and terrifying wonder.

Raw and emotional, though let down by some annoying or wonky design issues, Sea of Solitude is a worthwhile and beautiful journey through loneliness and regret.

Rather than focus on what it does well, Days Gone does everything. Despite some great tech and compelling core ideas, especially when it comes to its battles against massive enemy hordes, a dull and repetitive open world structure makes Days Gone a chore.

My Time at Portia is a slow game, to the point that digging around in the mines or waiting for bronze plates to smelt can be mind-numbing. But in a way its builds are kind of like knitting; repetitive and slow but visibly building towards a satisfying, tangible product. Plus, there's enough surprise in the living world, the creepy mines and dungeons and the wide fields to keep things from getting too stale for too long.

Back in the Groove might satisfy series fans that just want some new toys to play with, but the sluggish speed and obtuse design of the dated original remains.

Even at its best Crackdown 3 feels like a big chest of explosive, physics-driven toys to play with in a playground that's left wanting.

Playing Travis Strikes Again is an experience I'm glad I had, even if I wouldn't recommend it as a fun game. As a biting reflection of the ridiculousness of hardcore video game fans it's less successful than previous games, and its smaller scale makes the still-repetitive fighting even more dull. But the weirdness remains, and the Kafkaesque story of the Death Drive console paired with Suda51's signature takes on Japanese and American culture — plus the frequently enjoyable mish-mash of retro aesthetics — makes for a satisfyingly eccentric game unlike many others.

Though I'm glad it exists purely from a historical interest point of view, these aren't the best X games or the best early-to-mid-2000s action games, and the commendable packaging and cleaning up here can't change that.

For all its intriguing story beats, stylish techno-'60s aesthetic and well-presented characters, We Happy Few can't hide its origins as a run-of-the-mill survival game.

While the game is well put together I have to question whether this franchise is a good fit. With only two films' worth of content to work with it's clear TT had to really stretch to get this much stuff out of The Incredibles, and that lack of depth doesn't do any favours for the obviously ageing Lego format that's been largely unchanged for more than a decade.

Detroit wants so badly to be an interactive Hollywood blockbuster, but its amazing visuals and cinematic presentation can't make up for some really lame writing, weird performances and an overall lack of grace. But in spite of that, it can be a fun interactive B-movie.

A tabletop-style survival sandbox that you can take on alone or with friends, State of Decay 2 packs in enough scavenging fun to make the occasional malfunctioning weapon or levitating enemy easy enough to endure.

Though it looks stunning and is an impressive achievement in open world multiplayer gaming, a lack of variety and completely frustrating single-player mode keeps Sea of Thieves from staying afloat.

As beautiful as some moments in Fe are, and as vast and disorienting the forest seems, beneath it all is a very linear and basic game with ordinary platforming and a competent but forgettable story. Worst of all, it just doesn't seem like it has a whole lot to say. It gives all the signals of a game with an emotional story and a powerful message, but in the end it just doesn't communicate one.

Aiming squarely at gamers' nostalgia for mid-90s roleplaying games and hitting nothing but a vast white void, Lost Sphear is a fun game bogged down by a muddle of throwbacks and a cacophony of unoriginal, competing ideas.

This is another fun, fleeting, exceptionally good-looking Call of Duty game, but its World War II theme doesn't add much besides bringing some of its mechanics back down to Earth.

There's no escaping the awful loot boxes and ham-fisted progression system here. The much-anticipated single-player mode has its moments but it's not as strong as expected, leaving the online play to serve as the core of the experience. Though there are some smart tweaks and changes that could have potentially improved the game over Battlefront 2015, funnelling all your upgrades and levelling through random boxes massively misses the mark. The production values are sky high and in the moment it can be amazing, but Battlefront II's economy keeps me from wanting to jump back in.

At its core Shadow of War is a tremendous amount of fun, but its good mechanical parts are under constant threat of suffocation from its gormless framework. The player's own story of an endless struggle against (and alongside) powerful orcs is enthralling, but the game's actual narrative is a boring trudge. The loop of killing powerful enemies for new loot is a great motivator, and building your army piece by piece to take strongholds seems like a perfect fit for this game, until you hit a wall and are faced with its app-style payed-for incentives.

For all ESO's recent improvements in general and the smart, nostalgic design of Morrowind in particular, I can't overcome the sense that the world is just less fun and impressive removed from the single-player focus of the main Elder Scrolls games. This is an MMO caught between two very different RPG styles, with the world and its quests begging for solo exploration and heroism but without the depth or focus to back it up.

Prey is a mixed bag. Its setting is derivative but pretty, with its emergent storytelling often making for an eerie and atmospheric good time. But shallow enemies punish the player for their curiosity early on and only become annoying bullet sponges later. That, combined with an ultimate failure of the narrative to follow through on the psychological promises of the excellent opening, make for an experience that is, above everything else, conflicted.