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.

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

Don’t be deceived by the simplistic 2D presentation – Terraria is one of the deepest games currently available on PSN or Xbox Live Arcade.

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s bizarre and funny and quite unlike anything that’s been done before by a major video game studio. And for the most part, it works.

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.

It’s not that the Spartan warrior’s step has lost its spring – it’s as lively and bloody as ever. The exhaustion comes from familiarity, that bitter breeder of contempt. Aside from a few rough patches, Ascension is a reasonably competent God of War game. But it’s undermined by an unshakable sense of déjà vu.

Lego City Undercover nails the best aspects of open world games in its own way, and with the inclusion of Lego building mechanics, it feels enough like its own thing rather than a sanitized version of an existing thing.

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.

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.

Ultimately, Hitman: Absolution marks a faithful, gorgeous and only occasionally maddening return for a series that’s been gone far too long. It may have trouble finding fans among twitchy gamers with short attention spans, but guns and brains should never be mutually exclusive. And those kids can get off my damn lawn.

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.

Is it so weird that I’d rather pay $5 up front for a game based on fun, addictive core design principles than a “freemium” game that ends up feeling like an interactive advertisement for bundles of coins or gems or Smurfberries or whatever the currency of the moment is?

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.

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.

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.

Yet it’s Little Inferno’s weird, dark, off-kilter tone that makes it so refreshing and intriguing. You’ll come for the pyromania puzzles, but you’ll want to see what happens when the smoke finally clears.

For all its larger than life swagger and cartoonish bravado, it’s actually kind of refreshing to see Gears of War take a less-is-more approach with this game. Size certainly matters, but what you do with what you’ve got counts even more.

For its art style, deceptively dark vibe and experimental approach, Don’t Starve is certainly worth a look. But for every playthrough that leads to eye-opening adventure, there will be another that’s a bit of a tedious slog. It won’t leave you hungry, but it may not fill you up.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.