Flawed though it may be, sometimes a distinctly B-tier game is exactly what the doctor ordered – especially at this time of year, in a sea of mega-hyped triple-A. You have to know what you’re getting into, accepting the poor narrative and slightly botched execution of some of its cleverer ideas, but Code Vein still has a recent amount to like. Come for the combat and the intriguing blood code system – and stay for it. The rest? Well, hopefully it’ll be better next time.

It’s another year, another pretty mixed bag, even if it does feel like things might be trending in a slightly more positive direction. Here’s the thing though, like those Seahawks, things’ll only keep running in place unless Madden can offer some more meaningful change going forwards. Here’s hoping having the series’ cheeky sibling back on the block, with its marching bands and moral quandaries about exploitation, can help spur that shift.

There’s nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, but even by the time I’d faced down the Arch-illager in his tower – no more than a handful of hours after starting – I was already sick of Redstone Golem mini-bosses, and Dungeons seemed to have exhausted its borrowed ideas. Like Diablo, this is a game designed for multiple playthroughs on increasing difficulties, but few players will feel compelled to return to a seam that’s all dried up after a single day’s exploration.

All in all the game is a blast. It is a bit janky, and very much a love it or hate it ordeal. Some of you will bounce off it in a few games, and some of you will get a giggle out of how explosively violent it can be. Fans of Let it Die bizzarely are in the same boat, and their love will depend greatly on their infactuation with the general gameplay experience. It strikes me as a game made by people who wanted to create something distinct for the sake of variety in a popular genre saturated with familiar traits. People who are probably fun to drink with. Not much about Deathverse: Let it Die is familiar, and it’s free. So like, try it out!

In truth, Scorn doesn’t tell a particularly fascinating story, but it hardly matters; the way in which it’s told is done to perfection, and provides an incredibly refreshing horror experience that truly gets under your skin.

It’s the sort of arcadey sports experience that doesn’t really happen any more. Most sports games now are simulations – so I’m so glad to get another game that carries the spirit of older, arcadey, more silly sports games. The adventure mode’s shortcomings don’t dent that significantly enough to stop me from recommending Mario Golf: Super Rush – but just don’t go in expecting an all-time-great sports story mode.

Vampyr is a remarkable game that gives me genuine hope for the future of single-player RPGs. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in ambition.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a good game oozing within the sticky flesh of this Frankenstein, though; it just feels like it’s not what Striking Distance wanted it to be. It’s not the next step in horror gaming, the evolution of Dead Space, or a proposition unlike anything you’ve seen before – it’s the opposite. An amalgam, less than the sum of its parts, whose main focus becomes overwrought and frustrating by the time you’re halfway through its short run-time. The scariest thing about The Callisto Protocol, sadly, is all the potential that’s been wasted on a small moon in Jupiter’s orbit.

Speaking as someone who has played Until Dawn on PS4 many, many times and counts it as one of their favourite games — while I won't go so far as to say that I like this new version more than the original, I certainly don't like it less either. Both versions have their minor pros and cons when compared with one another, but in the end, it's all Until Dawn: a game that is simply too good and too important to be locked away and left behind as a relic of a bygone console generation.

If you buy Immortals of Aveum, know that there is a good time here waiting for you. However, I deem it likely that it'll be on sale rather soon. If you're starving for some magic in your FPS pick it up, but even with some mystical flair and an admirable attempt at bringing mystic arts to a very gun-heavy genre, Immortals of Aveum ultimately fails to reach the heights of your Bulletstorms or Wolfenstiens.

I still would recommend The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me on release if you can handle the technical issues at present. If Supermassive Games manages to implement some updates and fix the performance issues, then I’d perhaps even recommend it – highly! – to seasoned horror fans. In spite of its flaws, The Devil in Me tells a riveting tale of a horrific killer in a thoughtful manner, opens up important discussions about human obsession with sanctifying spectacles, and it shows great potential for the future of the series. It’s just a shame about… everything else.

Personally, I’m genuinely excited for future Dark Pictures instalments. And I’m still playing Man of Medan, figuring out its hidden traps and machinations, despite my frustrations with it.

From a pure level design perspective, it’s a huge improvement over Wolfenstein 2. Unfortunately, it seems to have forgotten a lot of what made both New Order and The New Colossus such great games in the process.

So overall, with all things considered, is Rainbow Six: Extraction a good game? Yeah, it’s alright. For my tastes, it doesn’t quite go far enough in some places, and it has lost a bit of that identity that makes Rainbow Six games special, but if you’ve got a few friends who are curious about it then you’ll have a blast jumping into it. It retains that slow, methodical gameplay that is so addictive to a certain kind of player, so I have no doubts that this game will remain a weekly venture for a community out there, somewhere. Whether or not it can retain that playerbase is something we’ll have to keep an eye on.

But if you’re hoping to scare yourself senseless and expose yourself to plenty of shocking scenarios as a reagent for the Murkoff Corporation, with or without friends, The Outlast Trials is undoubtedly worth its retail cost of £24.99 / $29.99 (via Steam) at launch, but if you’re expecting a game that you’ll replay well into 2024 and beyond, I’d temper your expectations.

Sea of Thieves just needs more. It needs more ways to play, more mission variety, more enemy variants than just different coloured skeletons, and more meaningful progression. If these things don’t appear soon, I can see player numbers dropping off substantially after a short while. When it is the players themselves that create the game’s standout moments, potential player drop-off is a huge problem.

You can see the make-up of a good game at the heart of Thymesia, but it seems the team was only capable of delivering a prototype; the building blocks of something greater, before it tapped out. You can easily spend ten-ish hours with the game, and potentially longer if you decide to experiment with builds, but at $25 (or $22.49 with the launch week discount), it might be a hard sell.

It’s a suspense thriller that could’ve been written at any point in the last century, were it not for the gripping addition of player choice. In a month that’s seen Man of Medan push interactive fiction into multiplayer, and Telling Lies build on the investigative purpose of Her Story, there’s no comparable innovation here beyond those tactile controls that feel like you’re manipulating scenes in real-time. But there are shocking truths buried at Delphi House, and maybe that’s enough to soothe the soul on a long Sunday.

With so many other incredible JRPGs released in 2021, it’s hard to recommend Astria Ascending. It does have a very pretty artstyle, which is what will draw most players initially. The battle system and customization options can be enjoyable to tinker around with, but the lackluster story and unpleasant cast of characters really bog down the whole experience.

I am hopeful that 2042 will be a more interesting Battlefield game at some point next year, but having been through varying degrees of rough launches with this series - from BF 2142 through BF 5 - I can’t say I have the stamina to perform the dance of chastising DICE for technical problems and missing features, only to turn around and celebrate when the game is inevitably ‘good now, actually’ a year into it.

This one game about an entitled goat does everything I wish the original Goat Simulator did and more. The goatfits, the whimsical joy of discovering a level like the Cellar of Doom, and witnessing just how much disarray one uncontrollable goat can cause will make Goat Simulator 3 one of the best co-op games to sit back and reset with. Watch this space, because me and Pilgor are quite the unstoppable duo – and this won’t be the last you see of us.

That’s how it goes while you inhabit Just Cause 4. Constant iridescent glimmers of the game it wants to be, tethered by a grappling hook cord to mechanical clunkiness.

Exoprimal will be a rollercoaster of surprises for the majority of players. Making your way through the fifty-or-so matches it takes to hit credits, experiencing all the spectacle on display in this curveball of a game, is in my opinion worth the cost of admission for Game Pass users, and perhaps at a discount for all others. It'll remain a presence on my PS5 home screen, for now at least.

One thing I really appreciate about DioField is its length, however. Which is to say: it’s relatively short. By strategy RPG standards, anyway – Disgaea this ain’t. You can blast through the main narrative, with a smattering of side content, in around 20 hours. You probably won’t want to do much more side content, anyway, as it’s relatively uninspired. In this, to me DioField reads as a relatively short and experimental game. Which I’m fine with. To some, however, this might instead come over as bad value for money.

Look, if you want to jump around and punch people, there are hundreds of other games. If you’re really keen to play a DC action game, featuring a modern and admittedly brave step away from the big black bat, then Gotham Knights is fine enough. It’s just that in the shadow of former Batman titles, in the shadow of Batman himself, it doesn’t impress. It disappoints.

Despite these annoyances, despite the fact that it’s a game designed with decades-old sensibilities, I enjoyed my time with it. It doesn’t have the conclusion we’ve been waiting two decades for and it barely drives the story forward at all, but the climactic battle is as satisfying as that 70-man tussle in the first game’s harbour.

It’s still a really exciting, interesting and different fighter. That last bit is crucial – despite similarities to the Gundam games, there’s nothing else quite like Dissidia on the market, and some will certainly find themselves hooked on its unique, hectic type of battle.

On the whole, Kirby’s Dream Buffet is a neat idea on the surface. When brought to life, it could’ve genuinely been a contender for one of the Switch’s top party games had it featured a little more variation, and some better multiplayer support. That said, the future of Kirby is now very much cemented in 3D, and I still look forward to where the pink puff ball ends up once they’ve decided that they can’t stomach another strawberry.