For Nova Strike to succeed, it needs to be a little less demanding. It needs to reward just a tad more. It needs to ease off every once in a while, letting the player feel like they are in control. Perhaps it's the random nature of how the levels and chapters have been put together, but there's little room for manoeuvre with this one.

Two Point Campus: Medical School continues its excellent run, this time taking us back to where it all began which despite potential risks, pays off handsomely.

Figuratively and literally, Starfield is the next evolution for a Bethesda game; taking that framework and that sandbox before applying it 1000 times over. There are memorable characters, quests and locations, but these help you tell your own journey too as you forge your own path and create your own plots within this unfathomably large sandbox.

Anyone who cares about the rich history of games as an art form needs to play The Making of Karateka. This is a five-hour journey with decades' worth of impactful stories baked into it.

Catan - Console Edition: The Helpers ends up being a safe but welcome first expansion to the base board game. It’s a touch on the expensive side, and it would benefit from usability improvements to turn-length and Quick Games, but Catan fans (Cafans?) will find they get a lot of enjoyment from trading for this one.

The tracks are cleverly made and it runs well, but Smurfs Kart needed far more than that to register a scoring position.

What we’re left with is half a game. Gnomes Garden 8: Return of the Queen stops abruptly halfway, thanks to a critical save bug, and it’s a flip of a coin whether you will emerge with your save game in one piece afterwards. At the moment it’s a no-brainer - don’t dare play this. Wait and see if 8floor address the issue.

Puzzle by Nikoli W Kakuro is inelegant, and far from the quality we expect from the masters at Nikoli. We’re going to leave it for only the rainiest of rainy days.

Quake II is a great value package, well priced and showered with love and care. It may not go on playlist rotation, but it’ll be hard to turn down a game of Quake II when asked.

While there are some interesting RPG frills around the edges of Envasion, this is a Space Invaders-like shooter that lacks speed, bombast and variety. Envasion, sadly, is one to evoid.

Cube Airport is not very innovative, so even though it won’t take much longer than an hour to finish, it feels tedious.

If you fancy yourself as a tank commander, fill your boots with Chrome Wolf. But the controls are a big stumbling block. Finding yourself getting stuck on a corner, before being thrust into yet another fight, soon takes the shine off.

What a strange experience playing Cat Souls was. Our interest curve would look a little like a ski slope. We loved the pitch of using the titular ‘souls’ as platforms, yet Cat Souls does next to nothing with it, leaving us deflated. But over the levels, we realised what had happened. The designers had been distracted by other ideas, as if a sudden laser pointer dot had appeared.

If you feel like you’ve seen most of what puzzles in games have to offer, you might want to try Teslagrad Remastered.

If you want to brainlessly toss away an hour or two of your evening, then Hidden Shapes: Cat Realm + Trick or Cats is where it’s at. You’ll emerge from the session afterwards feeling like all of the mental knots and tensions have been massaged into nothingness.

Sure, The Rabbit Crazy Adventure is functional, and we managed to cross the finish line, but that’s no measure of a good game. It’s about as crazy as those people who say ‘you have to be crazy to work here’.

I’ve loved the twist on the standard chess mechanics that comes with Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate. It feels like a different game each and every time you play, challenging but not impossible to grasp.

There's some cheap and easy Xbox Gamerscore on offer if you must boost your numbers, but otherwise Zombie Derby is a game that'll be over in an evening, swiftly removed from the hard-drive thereafter.

Cassette Beasts might not be as immediate as a certain pocket-monster game on another platform, but its depths are more cavernous. If you’ve been aching for a beast-battler that treats you as an adult, well, what’s stopping you? Go collect ‘em all.

Spectrolite is fun in short sprints, but there isn’t yet enough content to give the game the legs it requires for marathon sessions. The parkour mechanics are tight and precise while the difficulty is staunch yet rewarding; just don’t expect too much in the way of accessibility options.

RIDE 5 is perhaps the most welcoming motorbike racing game to date, while retaining the exciting and challenging gameplay the series is famed for.

Death Becomes You is a great visual novel that improves and becomes extra twisted with every playthrough. And that’s crucial for a game offering so many possible endings for you to reach.

The finished quality of Aery - Flow of Time is a shame, because you can see the game underneath. It’s clearly better than what came before, but you’ll need a swatter for all the bugs that obscure the view.

You can slice, shoot and smash your way through enemies to your heart’s content in Broforce Forever, in an over the top romp that does just about enough to avoid weariness setting in.

If you like cats, enjoy hidden object games, and want to hand some cash to charity, then consider A Castle Full of Cats to be a hearty recommendation.

We can’t help comparing the £4.19 Fruit Adventure with the 79p shovelware we often get on the Xbox Store. There really is nothing in it: in the equivalent of a blindfolded taste test, we would have told you that they’re one and the same.

The key takeaway with F1 Manager 2023 is that your enjoyment of the game will differ immensely depending on your knowledge of F1. What is here, as long as you are a real F1 nerd, is capable of captivating for hours on end. However, with niggling issues within Race Moments, a lack of sense of progression, and the engineering side difficult to get to grips with, F1 Manager 2023 is the nichest of niche titles.

If you enjoyed the first Blasphemous, then getting hold of Blasphemous 2 is a given. Everything that was great about the first game has been built on in the second, with nearly all issues addressed.