Gungrave G.O.R.E is clunky and basic - two words that no hack and slash shooter this side of the Xbox 360 should be associated with.

Despite not realising its full potential, Jack Move is good at what it does and should definitely be considered if you’re after a condensed JRPG.

I absolutely adore The Eternal Cylinder, even more so now it has been optimised for Xbox Series X|S. Many games attempt to be bold, creative and offer an experience unlike any other. This is a game which does just that. You’ll struggle to find escapism better than this.

Babol the Walking Box feels like the original Crash Bandicoot, but worse in every conceivable way. The Crash Bandicoot PS2 jewel case has been stomped on, smashed and then presented as a budget platformer for you to play on your Xbox.

The Devil in Me isn’t the best game in The Dark Pictures Anthology, but it isn’t bad at all. It’ll keep you entertained all the way through, and it's a brilliant laugh to play alongside others - the scares that play out when you have a room full of people are second to none.

We would happily go on another date with ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area. They’re a talkative partner, slightly self-absorbed and clearly dealing with their own issues, but they are also charming, witty and not quite like anyone else we’ve met.

Modern Warfare II is most definitely a Call of Duty game; a good one to boot; things are going in the right direction with this iteration.

Cramming so many games and levels into a box as small and cheap as the Cronostase Electric Collection is undoubtedly an achievement. But we kept sifting through the sheer amount of stuff, on the hunt for something challenging and different. But only one, maybe two of the games had the spark of potential.

WRC Generations takes a decent stab at the rally scene with some great clock-beating racing, a deep career and a beefy challenge system. Away from that though and it all feels as though the series needs a little reset.

Cazzarion: Demon Hunting looks bad, is poorly designed and is no fun to play. It’s about as close to “nil points” as you could imagine, but technically it runs (more like limps, but still) on Xbox Series X so I have to give it at least half a mark.

The story starts slow, but picks up pace, and the combat is fun, so Star Ocean The Divine Force does enough to get a decent mark in my book, without ever threatening to set the world on fire.

Bones of Halloween is as hollow as a carved-out pumpkin. It works (albeit ploddingly), but that’s the best you can say about it. If you want a quickfire 1000 Gamerscore then please, go ahead, but, if you’re at all discerning, then this horde-mode arena shooter should be left out on the step to rot.

For many, it will be the ambition of taking a character from nothing before throwing them into a huge adventure, one full of heart and soul, which will be the key to Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

With Opus Castle being free, it may be worth a download to grab the Gamerscore on offer, but you won’t enjoy it and probably won’t return for further chapters.

We can see what Bricky To Me could have been. It’s a proof-of-concept, a pilot episode for what a platformer might be as a roguelike, and it just about does enough to make it seem like a good idea. But there’s no getting round the lack of content and variety in Bricky To Me, which makes it an unconvincing game on its own.

If you've got even the slightest interest in a proper platforming experience, you should be swinging for Grapple Dog, hook and line.

There’s room for improvement in Football Manager 2023 Console, but it’s still a brilliantly addictive experience. Unless you have a gaming PC, this version is a must for any football fan.

If you’ve played your share of Let’s Sing games, then Let’s Sing 2023 represents a slight stumble. The songs - at least to our ears - err on the side of filler, and there’s no changes to the template, not a single one. The playlist is getting a little tired, Ravenscourt: time for some new tracks.

Super Ninja Miner makes us want to commission a Kickstarter for its benefit. All it needs is an investment in its graphics, an artist to fall in love with it and give it some spit and polish. Because the presentation really is all that holds Super Ninja Miner back.

To an outsider, it can be tough to explain why Save Room works so well. It is a fully fledged game of a somewhat throwaway mechanic, but at the same time that mechanic is synonymous with the survival horror genre. So, by that token, Save Room is absolutely a game that should exist.

The usual frustrations stick in regards to the story, plot and tiresome mechanics, but Sonic Frontiers is a marked improvement and one of the best 3D Sonic games in years.

We couldn’t get in sync with RUNOUT. Try as we might, the screen was too hard to read, the mechanics too quick to come and go, and the basics of the platforming too fiddly, contorting our finger positions into shapes that we haven’t encountered since playing Goldeneye on N64.

We adored Slime’s Journey because it was just pure platforming craft, delivered in the simplest of manners. For £4.99, it’d be greedy to ask for anything more.

What Bratz: Flaunt Your Fashion amounts to is a static playmat. Your kids can dress up their doll and wander about it, looking for treasure chests, and there’s some enjoyment to be found in that. But once you start engaging with the world around you, talking to interviewees for the Bratz magazine, you realise how flimsy everything is.

Vampire Survivors feels amazing value. It is ridiculously cheap and has a gameplay hook that refuses to let go. I worry that many may take a look at the simple visuals and the Xbox Store description before fast turning away, but I urge you to please try this game. Vampire Survivors is without doubt up there as one of the finest indie games of the year.

If you like a shoot ‘em up, then Sophstar is an easy sell. It is challenging and manages to pack a good amount of content into a small package. Even if you don’t usually like shooters, the sheer variety of ways to play and tackle the levels will mean that you are likely to find a combo that works.

It may be something of a marmite genre, but Broken Pieces tells a story worth hearing, despite its elements not quite fitting together perfectly.

There isn’t much in Arkanoid Eternal Battle to entice new players; nor battle royale aficionados looking for something different as those new mechanics are very basic.

OlliOlli World: Finding the Flowzone is a wonderful send off for one of the best games of 2022. The friendly interactions between the characters is always a joy and that, along with the art style, never fails to bring a smile to your face.

For the price, it’s killer. Geometric Sniper is a goofy, fun-filled sniper game that shuffles in some hidden object stuff seamlessly. Better still, its missions are far cleverer than you might expect, so you’re going to need your brains while your opponents lose theirs through a bullet hole.

Pandaty felt too much like homework we didn’t want to do. Its levels are washed out, the humour seems to come from another planet, and it demands patience and skill without giving much back. What’s black and white and grey all over? Yeah, it’s Pandaty.

Garfield Lasagna Party is not the first party game that we’d direct you to. It sits somewhere below the average thanks to its slow board game mode, which desperately needs more than one layout to keep things fresh, and a collection of minigames that are as mixed in quality as Garfield’s own comic strips.

More an expansion pack than a full sequel, Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories is a hard one to score. It’s still the best horse-riding sim on the Xbox, and its structure has received some much-needed grooming. But it’s not enough of a revamp to warrant the price, and the campaign is slimline. If ‘more of the same’ sounds like a good thing, then saddle up.

It’s faulty, flawed and impossibly slow, and we’d rather play twenty Aery games in a row than one Paper Flight. Considering EpiXR Games’ prolific output, we should probably be careful about what we wish for.

Like rhythm action games? Like Russian shoegaze and post-punk? Like baseball? The number of people who say yes to those three questions can probably be counted on one hand. But if you are instead open to those three experiences, then Kovox Pitch is one of the most surprising and unconventional games of the year.

New Tales from the Borderlands takes the core structure of what makes a Telltale game so good, but forgets to flesh it out with an interesting cast, intriguing narrative, or a reason to care.

We were surprised about our reaction to 7 Days of Rose. It was like a reflex: a gag at how smarmy and inauthentic it was. As a visual novel, it’s fine - well presented with several endings. But we found the main character to be as unlikable as the relationship is unlikely, and we struggled to play the game as our eyes were continually rolling.

A Frog’s Job is almost everything we want from a budget platformer: crisp graphics, sturdy levels and innovative gimmicks in the time-stopping and phlegm platforms. All it needed was a lick more ambition, and A Frog’s Job could have been a contender.

Paper Cut Mansion is a game with two sides. On one half of the paper is a gorgeously wrought, intriguing and constantly surprising little dungeon crawler. We loved that half, and it was the game we wanted to play. On the other side of the paper is the roguelike, and it soaks through and ruins the other side. It’s too repetitive, too much of a slog to enjoy.

For all the clear, Antarctica-sized holes in Super Sunny Island, we had a bit of fun with it. The levels are mindless but also frictionless, and the controls work well. After a hard day’s work, we found it positively relaxing, churning through minute-long levels without a quibble.

There are classics, some not so classics, some old, some new, some borrowed and some blue, but you can be sure that Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is a fitting collection for a company with such a fabled history.

Clever use of an interactable radial wheel aside, Police Simulator: Patrol Officers should be handing in its badge for lack of care to the community, well before its shift is over.

We wouldn’t go so far to say that Lonesome Village is sensational, or better than the other life-sims that have graced the Xbox over the past year. But there is certainly something compelling in the simplicity of its loops, and there’s not an ounce of combat or pressure as you enjoy the merry-go-round.

Paper Ghost Stories: 7PM is not a particularly long experience, feeling like a prelude to a much bigger world. But for the very cheap price, it is well worth giving it a go.

All three new cabinets in Arcade Paradise have goals to aim for, and can appear on your to-do list, fitting in perfectly with the others in your arcade. They offer a chance to return to the arcade – not that you should have ever left it – with some new games. And we hope they’re the first of a few additions to come.

If Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island is anything to go by, then we’re in for a treat with further DLC drops. It’s very much more of the same, but that same has been twisted into fiendish shapes and the stabilisers have been kicked off. You should see the state of the notebook that we used for the puzzles. It’s like the Zodiac Killer sent us some light reading.

Charon’s Staircase can feel a bit like putting on a pair of comfy slippers, sipping some cocoa and kicking back with a good old-fashioned ghost story. But other moments frustrate, with some not-so-fun puzzles, brightness issues, and a familiar last act.

The Chant has some really interesting new game mechanics, and a structure and story which are both very original. However, there is a sense that the narrative is rushed through and the horror feels low budget rather than something stranger.

The Last Oricru is a bit of a mixed bag, even if it is mostly one filled with goodies. What it does, it does pretty well, but basic things like a hysterical camera that is keen to show you anything except the bloke smacking you with a sword, do put a dent in the enjoyment. Playing cooperatively is a great idea, and having a friend along can make things better, but even then there are better entries in the action RPG genre.

Silver Nornir is an interesting entry into the KEMCO stable. The story is bonkers, and the combat is good, but you’ll need to balance that against the very annoying controls and the lack of any overworld to explore.

Do you have 79p and want a Poundland version of Super Mario Bros? The choice, as they say, is yours.

Grab Hatup from the shelf if you fancy some quickfire achievements, or the comfort of a simple platformer. But if you want something more challenging, or with a flourish of ideas, you might want to shop elsewhere.

There's only really one cohort of gamers Caterpillar is aimed at - those looking to give their Xbox Gamerscore figures a quick boost.

As a family, we enjoyed JoJo Siwa: Worldwide Party. The music immediately went on our daughters’ playlists, and the blend of platforming and rhythm action was reasonably smooth. But while it tries hard to remix things and offer new takes on the gameplay, it can’t disguise the repetition.

Two people played our copy of Miraculous: Rise of the Sphinx. The young reviewer adored it, prancing across rooftops and taking down gangs of enemies with simple button presses. The older reviewer snarled and tutted their way through it, distracted by graphical bugs, poorly conceived bosses and a condensed runtime.

Ghost Song is a game worthy of your attention. An experience that is as sad as it is lonely, as its world peels back its layers, exposing its truth to you.

Batora: Lost Haven is a cracking adventure boasting a powerful character driven story. Despite simple and sometimes unvaried gameplay, there’s enough here to keep you invested until this tale’s conclusion.

There are many brick breakers out there, but few have the unique feature set that has been applied to Shatter Remastered Deluxe. The whole ball manoeuvring works really well, especially on the square playfields - we don't like it quite so much on the circular arenas - and the inclusion of a good few game modes help extend playtime.

If you’ve got nostalgia for the gruesome scamps, then Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike and the Quest for Stale Gum is massively rewarding. It packs in all the characters you could possibly recognise, stuffs them in a surprisingly deep little platformer, and then presents it with affection.

Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef should have been the one I shouted about, telling all to come and play, but instead we have a game that has a ton of potential that it just doesn't fulfil.

Gas Station Simulator is most definitely one for the genre fans; those who love to toll and juggle the many different tasks presented to them. But if you are new to the sim world and fancy something a bit different this might be a good one to ease yourself in with. It has a fun vibe and doesn't take itself too seriously, with a good tutorial helping ease the pain.

Saturnalia is a truly original survival horror game. It's almost an arthouse game in which the narrative and characters are brilliant, even with the claustrophobic location.

At the end of the day, if you liked Overwatch, you’ll like Overwatch 2, or Overwatch 1.5 as it should probably be. If you didn’t, you won’t, and with the game playing community seemingly more toxic than ever

Gunfire Reborn may not set the world on fire, but it is capable of delivering a damn good time to anyone that fancies a rogue-lite arcade experience - especially if that person is after plenty of loot or the chance to enjoy RPG elements.

Silenced: The House rushes through a story of revenge involving a whole load of scumbag teens but fails to captivate with its below par writing quality.

There’s a chance that you’ll have had enough of 41 Hours after just 41 minutes, never mind the 20+ hours that are claimed for full completion. There’s a good idea here, but it is one that has been ruined by poor execution.

One True Hero is endearingly charming and funny. It’s ambitious, and when there’s a miraculous few seconds when a bug doesn’t ruin it, it can also be as well-designed and taut as a modern Zelda.

If score chasing is something you cannot get enough of and a hit of nostalgia sweeps over you whenever Missile Command is mentioned, you’ll find some decent fun in Missile Command: Recharged.

Whilst it attempts to channel the classic 3D platformers, Trifox feels much more like its own competent video game. The twin-stick and mix-and-match abilities can afford the player lots of freedom to play around with. But don’t let the cute platforming visuals suggest this is an easy ride; Trifox is challenging without ever being unfair.

Saomi serves up a moderately challenging platformer that will sharpen your reflexes. But even for the modest price tag, Saomi is missing something fundamental. It just doesn’t inspire interest or feelings of surprise.

Game Type DX is in the awkward position of being too unremarkable to stand out as a shooter, and too meek to stand out as a parody. It falls into the pit of being anonymous, which is the exact obscurity it aimed to avoid with the rerelease.

Tempus - Level Escape will be able to provide you with an experience that is relaxing and intriguing, complete with some brilliantly designed puzzles. Running at just a few hours in length, the visual storytelling is a delight, helped by a concept that is completely original and unusual.

Park Story is every bit the Scottish fable. It’s thick with humour, colour and character, and we were endlessly surprised by it. There’s a Legend of Zelda template at play, but mostly it’s scrawled over and rethought to create something new. We just wish it wouldn’t randomly and unexpectedly headbutt us like it does

Dragon Ball: The Breakers already appears to be waning in regards to the player base and that comes as no surprise. The lengthy matchmaking, the poor gameplay mechanics and the damn ugly graphics used for environments are just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s an alternate dimension where Temple of Horror is the sounding of a horn: EpiXR Games can do more than just flight simulations, and they’re coming for other genres! But we’re pretty far from that dimension. Temple of Horror is such a limp horror game that its legs are falling off.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is a deep, serious game that needs a lot of time investment, but if you can find that time it is unlikely that you will feel short changed, what with the sheer amount of content on display.

Chameneon is difficult. Cruelly so, perhaps, dabbling as it does with physics and relentless obstacles. But if you’re up for the challenge, there really is no other reason not to pick it up.

Last Beat Enhanced is an old school beat ’em up which tries to create an original experience capable of paying respect to the classics, yet it feels more like a generic offering borrowing ideas.

One Hell of a Ride has an identity crisis. It presents itself as a carnage-filled Twisted Metal, yet hasn’t spent enough time on the weapons to make them anything other than an afterthought. As an arcade racer, it’s too precise and simulation-like, without offering variety in races or tracks. To top it off, it’s single-player only.

PGA Tour 2K23 is a decent effort, but one that EA Sports PGA Tour should easily blow out of the water in a few month’s time.

You’ll find some enjoyment in Last Days of Lazarus, but at times will feel hampered by the mechanics of the game, especially in terms of the cursor and interaction with items.

There’s not much mystique to it. Little Mage Adventure has got all the challenge and satisfaction of putting the bins out, but thirty times over.

Perhaps there is an L.O.L. fan in your home who is attracted by the premise and complications, and - even better - they have friends to join them. Because L.O.L. Surprise! B.B.s Born to Travel, when it has all of these ingredients present, can be a generous, sturdy little Overcooker.

What Aery - Last Day of Earth lacks in colour and variety, it makes up for in supreme chilledness and the odd surprise. It’s not the best in the Aery series, then, but it’s certainly a contender for the oddest.

The Witch’s House MV will lure you in with the promise of horror, but the excellent puzzles are the reason you’ll stay.

If you have yet to play any of The Dark Pictures Anthology games, there is no better place to start than at the very beginning with Man of Medan; even more so now that it is optimised for Xbox Series X|S.

Winter Games 2023 will be a game that you find yourself playing for an hour or so tops, before the repetitive nature and poor presentation start to properly grate.

We recommend Airoheart with some fierce caveats. It is Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past fan fiction, but it’s really good fan fiction, created by someone who doesn’t just love the series, but understands what makes it work. But that person comes with an agenda: that a game of this type should be as unhelpful as possible.

What Letterbox by POWGI lacks in ambition, it certainly makes up for with a clever concept that really tests your vocabulary.

Kao the Kangaroo was an underplayed gem of 2022, so we would have taken any old reason to come back to it. But the Kao the Kangaroo: Oh Well! DLC really is ‘any old reason’.

Puzzle by Nikoli W Akari has landed on a new brand of puzzles that feels utterly timeless, and fiendishly difficult to boot. If the world has any sense, they will ditch Wordle and start imploding their minds with these Sudoku-Minesweeper hybrids.

Whilst the story and combat work well, and the exploration is fun, apart from some serious difficulty spikes the main issue with Dragon Prana is that the story feels bloated.

If you’re a fan of the sim survival genre, then you should lap up and relish Medieval Dynasty. There are nothing short of hundreds of hours of things to do here, and that will appeal to those who love enduring - and flourishing - in these worlds. The quests are good, the world is interesting and the opportunities are tremendous, but I do worry that there is little to keep anyone but the most hardened interested.

The Jackbox Party Pack 9 brings new ideas without losing that winning formula, which makes this not only another brilliant entry in the long running series, but a contender for the best compilation yet.

We expected Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova to arrive in a red shirt, virtually dead on arrival. Instead, we’ve got a game with substance and style, and there’s nothing more Star Trek than that.

Gotham Knights is the game that everyone wants to hate, but that shouldn't be the case as there is a lot to love here. It's a good open-world game that explores a brilliantly realised Gotham City, powered by some fun, fluid combat and a wicked world that is easily explorable. Hanging around the rooftops as you take in the main story, smaller incidents or even as you hunt secret challenges allows Gotham Knights to shine, even if the Batcycle sections don't feel particularly great.

The DioField Chronicle is a great looking game, with some good storytelling and some average RPG mechanics. But it all adds up to a fine first entry that leaves us eager for more.

The Last Hero of Nostalgaia is funny from the first step. From its nods to Soulsborne games like notes on the floor giving you hints, to its joypad smashingly difficult boss battles, The Last Hero is a really solid and incredibly wholesome feeling title.