Lego Bricktales is a breath of fresh air, and a tremendous surprise. It’s not the longest experience in the world – but I loved every minute of it, and still feel compelled to go back and improve some of my less satisfying builds. Tricky controls be damned – it’s a low-key game of the year contender.

Everything that made that original game special, and ultimately a cult classic, is faithfully and lovingly reproduced here. It’s a safe reimagining, but simply on merit of all the small modernizing touches, which add up to a lot, it’s also pretty clearly a better game than the original – and considering how much I loved that game, that’s no small feat. I can see many more hours in my lair ahead – and with potential updates and DLC down the line to address some issues, true world domination could still be ahead.

If you’re looking to delve into a supernatural story laden with satisfying, tactile puzzles, then Fear the Spotlight is a grand way to spend two to three hours of your time this autumn. Though, if you were hoping for something that would keep you on your toes and have you losing sleep, you might be better off waiting for the other titles that publisher, Blumhouse Games, has up its sleeve.

Your mileage with WarioWare: Move It will inevitably vary. What do you want from this game? If you want the classic microgames experience, it isn’t really here. If you want a killer multiplayer game to play with the family over the holiday season (assuming everyone is able-bodied), it’ll be ideal. I can’t wait to play this more with friends. But I don’t see any reason to boot it on my own again any time soon.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is an impressively bold step in a new director for Tango Gameworks, and it pays off beautifully. Tango’s artists and designers are working wonders with zany and menacing creatures, set against the wonderful backdrop of a colour-struck Shibuya. While its leading pair and open world design stumble at times, Ghostwire’s wonderfully weird side stories and engrossing combat, more than pick up any slack and work in harmony with the game's more zany and offbeat elements to create a world that hasn't just got looks, but one hell of a spirit, too.

Can it tackle some of the greats in the genre? Your Warzones and Fortnites? Absolutely not, but that’s obviously not the goal here. It will, however, surely tempt a portion of players away. Hopefully, the players it can suck away from other games is enough to slowly grow a community here. With that, and a slow drip of new archetypes, weapons, and other significant changes I can totally see Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt becoming this slow burner you hear about every now and again. A great game to jump in and try right now, and a title you should keep an eye on in the years to come.

Layers of Fear (2023) starts out strong with the story of The Artist, and loses itself amidst its own ambition during the story of The Actor. Bloober Team’s once meaningful exploration of a character’s descent into madness quickly becomes redundant amidst a sea of film references and blurred storytelling. Layers of Fear is certainly a cohesive remake that brings the original games together, and there’s no denying that it looks great, but its second act feels incredibly lost when contrasted against such a strong start. Layers of Fear (2023) is one major case of whiplash, that’s for sure, but it does showcase Bloober Team's potential to do good if it can nail down the focal points of the stories it tells.

Everyone’s going in expecting madcap mayhem, and there’s often no one more stony-faced than someone sitting with their arms folded waiting to laugh. But if nothing else, Grasshopper Manufacture’s latest knows how to make you crack a smile.

A flawed masterpiece is a masterpiece nevertheless, and perhaps the most important reason that modern, quality ports of Shenmue exist is that there truly is nothing else quite like it. It deserves to be experienced.

Dead Island 2 is every bit the head-stomping blast that it promised to be. There are a few creases that Dambuster ought to iron out over the coming weeks, but if you’re hoping for mindless chaos and exceptional entertainment across the grindhouse slaughterhouse that is HELL-A, you’ve got it in spades right here.

I’m not sure I’m yet at the point where I’ll be able to play Ghosts ‘n Goblins with the proficiency that so wowed me to witness as a child. But playing it always gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling that’s entirely at odds with the fiendishly challenging, unforgiving nature of Knight Arthur’s adventure. It’s an all-time classic, and seeing such a game resurrected so lovingly on new platforms is always welcome.

The Master Books are bursting with interesting tidbits that helped me to contextualise each game and the storyline as a whole better than ever before, but there’s relatively little within the games themselves to make this a real must-have if you still have access to previous collections and releases.

Whatever angle you’re coming from, it’s fair to say that PGA Tour 2K21 will likely satisfy your golf game needs. If you’re new to this sort of game, you’ll be gently introduced by well-crafted tutorial mechanics and charmed by the quiet chill of it all. If you’re a lapsed EA Tiger Woods player, you’ll likely be impressed by the systems and mechanics HB Studios has built up over the last four games to differentiate their take. And if you’re a Golf Club veteran, this is another solid entry, iteratively improving on those that came before. It ticks all the boxes, and it’s great to see fully-licensed PGA Tour golf back at the forefront of sports video games once more.

Phoenix Point is all a little too like XCOM to move the genre forward in any huge way.

As any Trekkie will tell you, discovery is addictive, and Journey to the Savage Planet is almost all discovery.

Peach’s foray onto the stage is is full of whimsy and many moments of sheer joy, just as 2023's Super Mario Wonder is, but the difference is that this is Peach’s game – and hers alone. Despite the Sour Bunch trying to sully the Sparkle Theater’s reputation, Princess Peach is here - as a Cowgirl, Ninja, Detective, and so forth - to put a stop to that. And she puts on a wonderful, replayable, empowering performance while doing so.

Hollowbody is a testament to the work of Hamley, and is phenomenal within its own right, but the dedication to various cult classic horror and sci-fi games only adds to how enamored I was with the game; this is how you make a game heavily inspired by other media while making a whole new experience entirely, in a nutshell. But don’t get me wrong, Hollowbody is so much more than its inspirations, made up of multiple moving parts that provide fans of the survival horror genre with something new and refreshing.

The Ascent’s ambition is often the most surprising thing about it. I went in expecting a decent, simple cyberpunk top-down shooter. Instead, I got a compelling action game that feels great to play, and an introduction into a world I can’t wait to see expanded in future sequels. The Ascent is the type of indie superstar game you bring up to prove how much can be accomplished by a small team today.

The fact that I’m willing to part ways with the original game even in the face of early performance woes and the fact that ultimately Cities Skylines 2 has a fair bit less content than the original, with its oodles of expansion packs and DLCs, says a lot. This is an excellent sequel, and an exciting foundation for what I’m sure will be a bright, addition-packed future. For those with weaker machines or a focus on performance, you may very well want to wait. But in this initial release we can see the foundations of a generational classic. It just might take a few more years to reach that full potential – just like its predecessor.

Making games is hard, regardless, and the fact that the team was able to put together a package like this that's so earnest, so passionate in its revisit of a world enshrined in PC gaming's history, is more than impressive. It's an admirable feat that I hope isn't lost on the general gaming crowd who don't know too much about the games outside of their time playing them. I would recommend Stalker 2 to fans of the Stalker series, obviously, and as anyone with a love of open world FPS games and distinct sci-fi. The good thing is it's available on Game Pass, so you can pay less than full price and try it out.

With those caveats aside, Onimusha: Warlords is a damn steal at £15.99. Where most publishers are trying to squeeze as much as possible out of people, juicing those nostalgia glands for every penny, here we have a sensible price point for a decent older game that’s been blown up to look passable on a modern screen.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is not the perfect follow-up to Max's original story, and truly nothing could have been. But, as is mirrored by Max's own character arc, the intention here is clearly to look forward rather than backward, to a future that is bound to be messy and experimental, but meant to be approached with curiosity about what's to come rather than regret over what's been and gone. As ever with Life is Strange, the vibes of this game are perfectly suited to the story it sets out to tell — even if the details get muddled sometimes.

For all its inconsistency, Outsiders still boasts some of the most intense and exciting PvE shooting around - just sometimes it’s you in a puddle on the floor instead of the waves of nameless goons. It’s silly and nerdy and dark and takes no prisoners as it violently demands your attention from start to finish.

Where Shadowkeep’s story will take us remains to be seen, but the inclusion of Destiny’s core mechanics in a brilliantly revamped location has reinvigorated Destiny 2 just as it was starting to get a little stale.

In its core mission, Sonic Superstars is successful. It recreates the foundation of 2D Sonic – some of the finest platformers ever made – well. Unfortunately, the new elements layered atop that are rather hit-or-miss. I personally don’t think this is anywhere near as good as Mania. But it’s good. In fact, it’s good enough that I expect fan debate about which game is superior to be fairly heated – which is a sure-fire sign that Sega is on the right track.

But whether you’ve grown up with Goku and friends, or you’re a first timer who’s never fancied sitting through 300 episodes without getting to play a part in the action, this is still a great way to experience the classic story.

The interplay between the AI, your abilities, the physics of the world, and your guns is some of the best I’ve seen, and I never thought I would be saying anything like that about a sequel to Brown Shooter: Apocalypse. There’s much more to this than its kooky, pink-hued marketing campaign. If you sleep on it, you’re sleeping on one of the best – if not the best – single-player FPS games of this generation.

However you feel about Evil West, the $50/$60 asking price is too steep for what’s on offer: the nature of its level design, limited enemy variety, and forgettable story will get in the way of your enjoyment, even if you’re only there for the combat. As engaging as it is, that action just doesn’t make up for Evil West’s shortcomings elsewhere.