In food terms, Takorita Meets Fries is a single, cold chip. As you eat it, you’re aware that there should have been more of them - perhaps there was at one time. It tastes alright, but it needed a little more time in the oven to be satisfying. And a waiter keeps promising that more will come, but on the basis of that one, cold chip, you wonder whether it’s going to be worth the bother.

Death Park is jank horror, but it’s a decent experience; a fun little experience that has arrived just in time for spooky season. For the price of a pumpkin to carve, Death Park is a great way to spend a Halloween evening with the lights off, and one that can be enjoyed further down the line again too.

Don’t Touch This Button! is a game of two halves. The first is a delight, a test-chamber game with a sense of humour to rival Portal’s, as it hangs on the cute and contrary hook of doing the opposite of what the game tells you to do. It might not look attractive in the slightest, but it shouldn’t put you off. But the second half falls off a cliff. It abandons its lovely premise for first-person platforming sections that could have been ripped from any other game.

If you are in the market for a tough as nails shooter, Crisis Wing should be on your radar. It’s brutal, it’s unforgiving, and it harks back to an era when this was all we had to play.

UNSIGHTED is a great game to play, especially when you consider the co-op mode, the Boss Rush mode and the Dungeon Raid you can take part in, and further to that, the amount of replayability based on choices you make is very good indeed. It’s only the slight imprecision in the combat that stops UNSIGHTED from getting a full score, and I can honestly recommend this to everyone.

There’s an enjoyable, well presented adventure on offer with I Am Fish which undeniably has charm. However, the experience is inconsistent thanks to some questionable controls.

Xuan Yuan Sword 7 on Xbox is a uniquely special action role playing game which sweeps players into a fascinating setting; one that fuses ancient Chinese history with folklore. The game world is presented in stunning detail, and the world building feels organic and captivating. It also helps that this is an entertaining game to pick up and play, with rich environments to explore and a great deal of enjoyable variety in the gameplay.

So how do you make a case for Dandy Ace? You could say that it’s easy on the eyes. In the hands too, it feels good, with controls that are slick and combat that delivers heft. But it can feel more like a treadmill than a journey, as too little changes with each run, and you’re left with the sneaking suspicion that you are going nowhere.

As a golf game, Golf Peaks is ultimately lacking, but as a puzzler it does exactly what it needs to - excelling in creativity without ever being too showy. Should you be looking to sink a few at the weekend without wanting too much stress or bother, Golf Peaks will provide you with all the shots you need.

Little Kite will take you around 4 to 5 hours to complete, maybe less if you're clever and nail the puzzling situations. It’s a well created experience, and is great to see something tackle new and fervent ground in its subject matter. The artwork is amazing and the world created brilliantly realised, however the controls feel awkward at times and the speed of the cursor is annoying.

It has a fun, finely-crafted story told through splendid animation and outstanding narration, a gorgeous, adventure-filled world with plenty to explore, and one of the greatest 2D combat systems I’ve ever experienced. Tails of Iron is not only one of the best things I’ve played all year, but it’s a sign of great things to come from an incredibly talented studio.

As someone who grew up on Zucker Brother comedies like Airplane and Naked Gun, who adored the Hot Shots movies, UnMetal felt made for me. It captures their freewheeling spirit, their blunderbuss approach to comedy where miraculously most of it finds the target. Miraculously, it’s also tethered to a perfectly fine, surprisingly taut stealth game that would have been solid without the jokes. As it turns out, come for the humour, stay for the surprisingly tight stealth game.

Fin and the Ancient Mystery is so middle-of-the-road that it could be roadkill; we could squint and imagine ourselves playing the flatter moments of a Rayman or Sonic the Hedgehog. If that pricks your ears up like a fennec fox, then consider this a recommendation.

All Christine has to break the night-time silence is her radio, her own voice, and the titans looming up out of the fog, who are each as alone as she is. Titan Chaser leans into this isolation to create a short and interesting experience that’s worth setting an evening aside to explore.

Murder Diaries will feel very familiar if you’ve played the other games that come from this developer, and whether or not you enjoy these experiences will dictate the fate of this game.

Embr is fun to play, despite being a simple and straightforward game. There’s a lot packed in here, which is a clear attempt to keep players coming back for more. It may well do the trick.

We know that pester power is a thing, and fans of the movie might be harassing you. In that case, your sprogs should know that this is a cooking sim, and not the nestrian adventure they might be expecting. It’s also fiddly, complicated and - on occasion - difficult to make the right meals on tight deadlines, so we would suggest that it rules out the under-sevens. Should your little chef still be interested after all those caveats, though, then there’s the slightest hint of fun to be had in Ooops! 2. Just make sure they graduate to Overcooked! afterwards.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is a decent effort at bringing the iconic brand into the video game scene for real. It’s able to deliver a wide variety of cars and tracks to gamers in a way that is fast and frantic, seeing it occasionally verge on being a really great arcade racer. Physics issues and little minor annoyances stop this from reaching the very highest step of that podium, but if you’re a Hot Wheels fan, Unleashed is well worth a visit.

It’s taken a small indie game from Hong Kong to create the template for graphic adventures on Xbox. It’s taken a while, but we’re finally there. Mr. Pumpkin 2: Kowloon Walled City is compact, frictionless and a joy to play from start to finish.

Struggling is bonkers, disgusting but also different. It’s enjoyable in parts but the frankly exasperating controls take the shine off some innovative gameplay ideas.

A few rough edges do not stop Sable from being a one-of-a-kind adventure about finding yourself while alone in the big wide world. I hope Sable can fix its technical issues soon, because what’s underneath is a game full of discovery, tiny nuggets of wisdom and a plethora of ways to customise your insanely cool hover bike.

There’s no doubt that LoveChoice will take you on an emotional rollercoaster. It’s sensitive and wistful, and you will feel the highs and lows of its characters through the three visual novels. But too often the rollercoaster judders to a stop, and you have to guess what illogical thing the game wants from you before it restarts again. By that time, that sensitive, wistful feeling has gone.

The puzzles in Flowlines VS. are simple and relaxing enough, if not taxing. But, by offering 486 of them and then forcing the player to plod through every… last… one on the hunt for something resembling a challenge, Flowlines VS. loses a large chunk of its audience.

NBA 2K22 is a great basketball game. In fact it's probably the best basketball game out there and actually hitting the court and playing games is thrilling, exciting, and looks brilliant. And alongside that, MyNBA will eat away at your life; fantastically detailed and absorbing, while MyTEAM will cater to the many. It’s only MyCAREER which lets it down

Inked: A Tale of Love is hugely enjoyable - and whilst you’ll probably realise this from the first few moments, it never disappoints from there on out. The controls aren’t perfect, but the experience as a whole is great; one that is helped by a very good price point.

So what do we have with Virtuous Western? Well, it's nothing more than a nice idea, with average execution. It has some brilliant ways of dispatching enemies and solving puzzles, and the easy achievements are a nice addition. But plonking a puzzle game in the Wild West ultimately falls short here, because the game simply lacks any sense of challenge.

Omen of Sorrow on Xbox is a pretend fighting game at best. It may try to look the part, but it is barely coherent or logical in execution. Fighting fans can give this one a miss without a second thought.

Tales of Arise is great at almost everything it attempts, but it does just falls short of having the wow factor and possesses a couple of niggling factors to boot. Nevertheless it’s absolutely worth picking up if you’re after an action-RPG to sink a load of hours into.