Amsterdam-based studio Guerilla Games, best known for PlayStation’s grim but visually impressive Killzone franchise, spent more than six years on Horizon Zero Dawn, and it shows: in the beauty of the game’s visuals, the depth of its backstory and the tightness of its design. Hopefully this isn’t the last we’ll see of this high-tech savage land. (Horizon Forbidden West, maybe? Please?)

Despite its problems, The Last Guardian is an incredible piece of imaginative world-building. As a game, it mostly succeeds. As something we’ve been anticipating for nine years… well, that might be too tall an obstacle for even a giant flying dog to get over.

In any other year, we’d probably be more in awe of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. But in 2016’s heavily contested battleground, its just one powerful combatant among many.

Titanfall 2 rises to the challenge of building something worthwhile on its predecessor’s foundation, and it’s fresh, fun and full of surprises. Happy endings aren’t always common in boy-and-his-’bot stories, but here’s hoping these mechanical marvels will stick around for a good, long time.

I’m impressed by how well The Coalition has remained faithful to the core of Gears of War while putting their own mark on the series. A memorable single-player experience blended with a robust suite of co-op and competitive multiplayer options, Gears of War 4 is a surprisingly great return to a franchise I thought I could live without...Genre-defining? Not quite. Maybe that will come with Gears 5. Or Gears 6. That’s the thing about a Fenix – they always rise again.

While I’m not sure any game will replace my nostalgic, rose-coloured memories of the original Deus Ex, Mankind Divided is a small but satisfying step forward for the franchise, offering tons of player freedom in a dark, dangerous and intricately detailed future.

My only hope is that the developers at Silicon Studios haven’t reached their own end layer with this series. They’ve essentially perfected the Bravely formula, and I look forward to how they might change things up in the future.

It’s a game with a bigger world – and a bigger heart – than any other Uncharted, full of love for the games that have come before it and the fans who have been on board since 2009’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune introduced us to Nate, Elena, Sully and friends.

Jack’s time-based superpowers are a ton of fun to use in combat, but environmental puzzles and platforming sequences, such as a cargo ship caught in a looping time stutter after plowing into a bridge, feel like they’ve been shoehorned in simply to give players something to do between firefights.

This clever time-warping feature transforms the game from a twitchy shooter into a series of strategic, almost puzzle-like set pieces.

I may have done a lot of nitpicking, but Birthright is still undeniably a solid Fire Emblem entry.

Although storyline is a little thin – Crane is in search of the leader of a mysterious cult which seems immune to the zombie virus – there’s enough variety in this new rural locale to make the game feel entirely fresh.

Despite the exotic setting, there’s still a pervasive sense of familiarity about Primal. Liberating outposts, saving allies from enemy attacks, swinging on grappling hooks, going on hallucinogenic drug trips, hunting specific critters to unlock upgrades, gathering plants to make ability-boosting concoctions... Hell, Far Cry 4 had us riding elephants and commanding a tiger to shred enemies, so even those experiences aren’t entirely fresh here. Sometimes Primal feels like a brilliant 10-hour Far Cry spinoff that got stretched out into a 25-hour, full-priced game.

While it’s far from the typical video game adventure, That Dragon, Cancer is a reminder that games can be so much more than just wish-fulfillment power fantasies. It’s an important and unforgettable experience, full of pain, love and grace.

The game is a slow burn, and you have to work hard for virtually everything you earn, but the payoff is almost always worth it. This is one of the most uncompromising games to come out in years, but it’s reason alone for “hardcore” RPG fans to consider getting a Wii U if they haven’t already.

Just Cause 3 doesn’t hold too many surprises, particularly if you’re familiar with the previous titles in the series. But it offers an almost unlimited number of ways to create your own flavour of mayhem, and is a source of constant “did you just SEE that?” moments. If the next Michael Bay movie features a dude hanging upside from a helicopter while blowing up a bridge with a missile launcher, you’ll know where it came from.

Despite its widely-spaced checkpoints and ad deluge, Pyro Jump Rescue is an engaging little action game that's guaranteed to make you say "Aw, one more time" when you screw up.

I think die-hard Halo fans will love Halo 5: Guardians, as it’s a game made almost exclusively with them in mind. The rest of us might find ourselves a little lost, a bit let down and wistful for an old horizon that once reached for the heavens.

Yoshi’s Woolly World doesn’t do much that we haven’t seen before in Nintendo’s long history of these sorts of games, and its exceptional cuteness factor helps overcome some of its slightly derivative design. But in a season so focused on doing vicious harm in virtual worlds, its lovely to take a whimsical stroll with this delightful dinosaur daredevil.

While Disney Infinity 3.0 doesn’t try to mimic the visual realism of the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront or the sly, knowing humour of the Lego Star Wars titles, Rise Against the Empire is a well-crafted, kid-friendly salute to the classic Star Wars trilogy. My old Luke, Leia and Darth Vader action figures are long gone, but now I have new ones lining my desk. For, you know, research purposes.

One of the biggest criticisms levelled against Destiny from day one was its lack of a coherent storyline. The Taken King addresses that in a big way, with a dramatic opening cinematic, an easily understood narrative (very bad alien is assembling very large slave army to take over the solar system) and lots of lovely little character moments.

Until Dawn goes off the rails a bit in its final third act, when it trades creepy psychological horror for something more tangible but also more ridiculous. But it’s a weirdly compelling story that does a great job of making you, the player, feel invested in how the tale unfolds and how many of these kids make it out alive. It’s like an adults-only Scooby-Doo mystery with blood, swearing and sphincter-clenching scares.

Fury Road was a big, expensive, risky film that paid off because of the irrepressible will and talent of its director, George Miller. In video game form, Mad Max lacks that same kind of originality and danger. It’s familiar and formulaic, competent but rarely exceptional. This Max could have used a little more madness.

A new face and name certainly brings a sense of freshness to Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, but the novelty isn’t enough to make up for the lack of content. While there’s a decent game of golf here, it won’t be occupying the top of the leaderboard any time soon.

I’ve never played anything quite like Guild of Dungeoneering, and while its lo-fi look took some time to win me over, it’s become my go-to game for quick, bite-sized gaming that still satisfies an overall sense of achievement.

I’m convinced you don’t have to be the world’s biggest fan of the series to enjoy Lego Jurassic World, though it certainly helps. I’d actually bet that people who have dismissed the second and third films as nothing more than cash grabs will gain a new-found appreciation for the movies after playing the Lego-themed campaigns.

It's a throwback to the good old days of gaming, when fun mattered more than anything.

Massive Chalice’s personality and ingenuity ultimately win out over its shortcomings, and it’s certainly worth a try for strategy fans who don’t want anything too ponderous or serious. But its cup does not, as they say, runneth over.

Batman: Arkham Knight is a game that shows what can happen when a talented development studio is completely invested in a fictional universe and has mastered the technology to bring it to life. We’ve become the Batman before, but never quite like this.

If you can overlook the horror of it all – something that’s surprisingly easy, given that Hatred is far more toothless than it thinks it is – there’s several hours of mindless if mechanically competent gaming here, artificially lengthened by a punishing degree of difficulty.

The lack of a chat feature just ends up making Splatoon a game that rewards smart teamwork but doesn’t give players tools to communicate.

The Old Blood is just OK. It’s a great deal for the price – as a $25 digital download via the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Games Store and Steam, it’s a rarity in an era when 25 bucks might get you a couple map packs’ worth of downloadable content – but I’ve discovered there’s such a thing as too old-school.

Simply put, if you’re playing with a friend who’s sitting beside you on the couch – the campaign has no online co-op – you’ll likely love Revelations 2. If you’re stuck relying on the mostly-useless AI, you’re in for a far more frustrating experience.

Like the dusty old Monopoly board buried in the back of your closet, Mario Party 10 offers familiar, predictable enjoyment, although the fun factor really boils down to who you’re playing with more than the game itself.

Long before high school physics cast its shadow over my childhood, I used to build complicated plastic models just to douse them in lighter fluid and blow them up with firecrackers. Screamride, clearly, is aimed at me.

Like the stories from which the characters are borrowed, Code Name S.T.E.A.M. truly is the video game equivalent of a page-turner, and I dare anyone not to be sucked in by its charisma.

It’s tough to get excited by video game zombies these days, but by blending a detailed open world, cool parkour moves and a satisfyingly deep system for character and weapon customization, Dying Light has clawed out a novel space in this crowded genre. Long live the undead.

We need more game developers and publishers willing to gamble on made-from-scratch worlds and ideas, but The Order: 1886 feels like it might have fared better as a film, graphic novel or TV series. As a game, there’s just not enough propping up this shining suit of armour.

Another rampage through Los Santos in the eyes of your character, rather than looking over his shoulder, is both a surprising and surprisingly impressive feature that adds a lot of value.

It may not be deep, nor entirely original, but it’s ridiculously fun.

In a holiday season rife with games that are riddled by bugs and glitches of all sorts, it’s beyond refreshing to know that I can sit down and repeatedly wail on Mario or pummel Samus into submission to my heart’s content in lag-free glory. Smashing truly never felt so good.

True to its name, Unity is a cohesive collection of the fundamental elements of the Assassin’s Creed experience, and feels like a much-needed reset for a franchise that was starting to become bloated and scattered.

Advanced Warfare brings some new elements to the experience that make it stand out, but some of these changes only serve to remind us how rigid the Call of Duty box is, and how unwilling the franchise is to think outside it.

At its best, The Evil Within offers a few scares and decent, if bland and predictable, combat; at its worst, it’s unoriginal, uninspired and plodding.

Sunset Overdrive is a welcome response to the gritty, drab and deadly serious shooters that make up the majority of this genre. It sometimes tries way too hard to be funny, but more often than not it’s a riotous riff on things that gaming holds dear, and an intoxicating action saga in its own right. As long as you can survive the woozy cough syrup hangover the morning after.

Do not start playing this game if you have somewhere to be – work, school, surgery, your wedding – in the next several hours.

Perhaps fearing their game would be too short, development studio The Creative Assembly have artificially stretched Alien: Isolation’s length far beyond necessity or logic. From the endless backtracking to and fro across the Sevastopol to alien-free sections that have Amanda dealing with difficult-to-kill rogue androids, the game’s pace ebbs too low too often.

Even though the story arc is guided, playing through Wasteland 2 engenders a real sense of ownership.

This is a smashing return to form for one of Nintendo’s most popular franchises, endlessly energetic and electrifying.

Really, it’s all a shallow excuse to get players into as many different vehicles as possible, and that’s perfectly fine, because just like the Fast & Furious movies, no one plays Forza games for the engaging plot.

The Lego games have shown that kid-friendly games can have a fantastic creative spark, but Disney appears to err on the side of safety.

But this invigorating combat and intriguing enemy hierarchy system exist in an empty-feeling world, and not even the lovingly written lore in the game’s appendices can inject much personality into Mordor.

It has strengths. It has weaknesses. And whether or not it burrows its way into your own psyche depends on your tolerance for familiarity, that breeder of contempt, that warm blanket of comfort.

Dare I say, Ultimate Evil Edition feels like it was built for consoles.

For its vibrant visual design, wonderful music and sheer whimsical weirdness, Hohokum is well worth experiencing. But at times it seems to be meandering back and forth between a video game and a piece of interactive art, unsure of which world it belongs to.

It’s tough to recommend for PS3 players who have already played the game, as the $55 price is a bit steep for some enhanced visuals and a bit of added content. But PlayStation 4 owners who haven’t yet experienced The Last of Us absolutely owe it to themselves to pick up this modern classic, and take a journey with Joel and Ellie across the heartbreakingly beautiful ruins of our world.

It’s very clever and exceptionally well-designed, but it’s not a wildly innovative game, and in the years to come I’m not sure it will be as fondly remembered as the games that inspired it.

With its gorgeous visuals and seldom-explored historical setting, Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a beautiful and original game, one that taxes our brains while stirring our emotions.

Despite this game’s gleaming high-definition sheen, there’s little doubt this granddaddy of the karting genre is beginning to show its age.

It’s engaging, enjoyable and offers massive bang for the buck, but has too little to say about our eroding digital privacy and stars an anti-hero who you’re likely to forget as soon as the credits roll.

MachineGames have done a wonderful job capturing the essence of the old-school shooter while avoiding its pitfalls, and presenting it in a way that will attract new audiences. The result is a game that’s as good as you remember its forebears being, even though it facilitates the player in ways that games from a decade ago didn’t. This is Wolfenstein for the new generation, and it’s worthy of the legacy.

While there are certainly some issues holding MLB 14: The Show back from being a classic in the sport game genre, there’s far more good than bad. The attention to detail, the plethora of content and the rock-solid gameplay make up for any problems.

Despite the solid core golf mechanics and snappy visuals, Mario Golf World Tour feels a bit scatterbrained, which is surprising given Camelot’s pedigree with Nintendo sports titles.

Trials Fusion, the latest title in the series, offers the same experience as previous entries – great for fans, but it all feels a little too familiar for those who have already spent many hours racing, crashing and restarting in previous Trials games.

Kirby is a legitimate stalwart in the Nintendo pantheon, and while the series has had a lot of ups and very few downs, I’m willing to go on record and say that Triple Deluxe is one of the best, and can stand alongside any of the Kirby classics.

There’s nothing unexpected about this journey, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

The game allows for user-created mods, and downloading new levels and tweaks might give this kid some extra legs. But I suspect most players will have a few hours of fun and then file this game away as an occasional novelty to pull out when they’re especially bored, drunk or just need to give their goat a good thrashing. That’s not a euphemism. Probably.

Ground Zeroes probably won’t alienate fans of the series, and in terms of giving players a taste of what to expect in the as-yet-undated Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, it delivers. But between its poor value proposition and its jarring darkness, it’s not likely to make Snake and company any new friends.

As a technical showpiece, Infamous: Second Son doesn’t disappoint: it’s an absolutely amazing-looking game, and edges out Killzone: Shadow Fall as the PS4’s most visually impressive title to date. But it doesn’t have quite enough substance to balance out its sizzle, like exquisite icing slathered on a cake that turns out to be lacking an ingredient or two.

What’s odd about The Stick of Truth is that for all its irreverent humour, it’s a strangely conventional role-playing game, with combat styled after the turn-based battles that have been around since the original Final Fantasy days. Once the novelty of the South Park wrapping wears off, it spends more time obeying gaming clichés than parodying them.

This sweaty, intertwined combat threesome – Pilots versus Pilots, Pilots versus Titans and Titans versus Titans – gives Titanfall a unique energy and fluidity that I’ve never seen in a shooter before.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough "suck" puns in existence to properly illustrate how badly this game misses the mark.

It’s the game world’s attention to detail that makes Thief’s frequent immersion-shattering moments that much more jarring, from A.I. characters who zone out or repeat the same dialogue over and over (yes, guy on the street, you’ve mentioned your favourite whorehouse literally 20 times now) to the fact Garrett can pocket dozens of golden candelabras but can’t carry more than one empty bottle.

What ultimately makes Left Behind special is the same thing that made The Last of Us one of the best games of 2013: characters we can relate to, care about and invest in. It’s well worth the pain of one more goodbye.

Clever, colourful and weirdly comforting – there’s little to dislike about The Lego Movie Videogame, even if it feels assembled from the same bricks as its predecessors. Not everything is awesome, but it comes close enough.

The puzzles, while never exactly difficult, are for the most part clever and satisfying. But just as Vella finds a way to confront the maiden-eating monster, and just as Shay starts to unravel the truth behind his space-faring daycare, and just as we start to see how these two wildly different worlds might be connected… boom, the first act comes to an abrupt end.

Rivals is an arcade racer through and through. Despite the near-photorealistic graphics, action is as over-the-top and arcade-y as it comes. You’ll deploy awesome Bond-like gadgets to give yourself an edge, put your car into perfect drifts simply by tapping a button, go faster than any sane person would go and make a laughingstock of the laws of physics.

While the more-than-the-kitchen-sink approach to customization and content provides plenty to do, it’s clear that until the entire combat system is overhauled, gamers won’t be able to create art on the canvas.

I almost feel like Ryse wants to be the Xbox One’s Gears of War – a new intellectual property by a studio known for visually stunning games, and a title that can perhaps kick off a franchise. But Ryse is too shallow, too simple and too familiar to be anything more than a fleeting bit of fun.

If I want serious adult drama, I’ll watch The Walking Dead. But for sheer, unadulterated fun, Dead Rising 3 has my thumbs, eyes, brain and heart. Or, as a zombie would call it, a well-balanced breakfast.

COD players, myself included, will still play Ghosts for the sake of having 20 or so new maps to play on over the course of the year, but in a franchise that’s the same year after year with slight changes, it’s reasonable to expect things to materially improve, not to take even a small step backwards.

In fact, here’s a handy metaphor for Killzone: Shadow Fall’s ending: Imagine finishing a meal in a restaurant, and then for dessert having the chef drop his pants and take a huge, steaming turd on your plate. I don’t care how good dinner was – and in this case, it wasn’t anything to call the Michelin Guide folks about – but when the very last thing you’re served is easily the worst part of the entire experience, it can’t help but leave a lingering bad taste.

While it’s clear Traveller’s Tales has some kinks to work out as it ambitiously continues to tackle the open-world genre, there’s no doubt it knows how to craft a title that lovingly honours whatever the subject matter is.

The seafaring aspect of Black Flag is where much of the fun lies, but things feel a little too familiar every time Kenway sets foot on land. Climb buildings, collect items, infiltrate fortresses, assassinate targets. If you've grown weary of this formula, you'll count the minutes until you're back out at sea, plundering ships, harpooning sharks and diving for sunken treasure.

As the most successful and dramatic HD upgrade ever, and of one of the better adventure games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD seems like a no-brainer if you own a Wii U and have any love for Zelda games.

It’s really good. Just not, ironically enough, all that original...What ultimately keeps Arkham Origins from being as exceptional as its predecessor is the weight of the franchise itself. Origins has the disadvantage of being a prequel to a game that’s nearly impossible to top, by a new studio that understandably doesn’t want to drop the ball.

Much like Quantic Dream’s gritty 2010 PlayStation 3 title Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls fuses traditional film-based storytelling techniques with video game elements to create a new way of getting players emotionally invested in its characters and story. It doesn’t always work – and sometimes it feels a bit cheesy or ridiculous – but when that connection does happen, it’s something quite amazing.

I love games that experiment with a unique visual and emotional palette. But compared to amazing PlayStation indies like Journey and The Unfinished Swan, Rain is just a passing shower that fails to soak through to the skin.

Its problems range from finicky little things like twitchy helicopter flying controls to much larger issues, such as unsettling bits of cruelty that don’t always register as satire, or the still-unsolved challenge of maintaining any sense of plot urgency in a game where players are free to abandon the storyline and spend hours skyjacking blimps, tooling around in a submarine or taking in-game smartphone selfies and posting them online.

The Wonderful 101 is a game that requires patience, skill, a willingness to learn and an almost Zen-like ability to overlook its shortcomings. But if you can get there - if you can make peace with this game, and enjoy it for what it does right instead of the things it does wrong - it really can be something wonderful.

Whether you have an intimate knowledge of the series like I do, or you’re part of a new generation of fans perplexed by which Tales title to begin with, you’d be doing yourself a great disservice if you didn’t pick this one up.

Rayman Legends is a sprawling masterpiece of a platforming game that’s just plain better than any recent Mario game, the gold standard for 2D platformers on Nintendo consoles.

I feel bad for saying this, but Mercenary makes me excited for Sony's recently announced PS Vita TV peripheral, which will allow many Vita games to be played on your big screen TV using a standard PlayStation 3 DualShock controller.

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD Remix is full of beautifully animated worlds and nostalgic throwbacks to classic Disney movies. Unfortunately, it brings virtually nothing new or fresh to this aging series.

Dream Team follows the same basic formula found in the past three games in the series, but molds all of the different mechanics together into a title that just gets better with every passing hour.

With a deluge of big-budget, high-profile games on the horizon, it might be easy to overlook a quiet, unusual game like Papers, Please. But don't do that, comrade. The consequences would be dire.

By setting most of the game inside a virtual Steelport, developer Volition had free rein to come up with new and ridiculous gameplay mechanics, and the addition of superpowers lends Saints Row IV a distinct Crackdown vibe. Who needs to jack a car when you can run faster than anything on wheels?

Sure, this ‘puzzle’ may sound really basic, but it exists to help familiarize you with the game’s mechanics, and rest assured, complexity and challenge soon go up several notches.