Ride 6 continues the series’ unbeaten track record of providing the most realistic-looking and feeling motorbike games on the market. However, while the multitude of new bikes, cameos from iconic racers, and intricate riding physics may prove its passion for the sport, it often struggles to communicate that passion to its audience.

Byking has delivered more than a fitting send-off to this series. In many ways, this is a complete My Hero Academia game experience. However, these strengths make it all the more painful when My Hero Academia All’s Justice fails to reach its full potential. Despite the simplicity of its mechanics and more conservative approach to storytelling, attention to detail and earnest love for its source material make My Hero Academia All’s Justice a competent if unremarkable conclusion to the series.

Nioh 3 has nothing to offer that hasn’t already been put out by other, better soulslikes. Outside of the occasional interesting boss fight, I found nothing but tedium in Nioh 3’s bland and deeply unengaging world.

At its best, Code Vein 2 provides comfortable, anime-flavored escapism. It’s shallow stuff, but it's combat offers a reliable source of mindless fun if you’re willing to wade through the mediocre world and performance issues.

Anno 117 Pax Romana is a structurally sound colony builder set in a Romanized world filled with flair and gravitas. For those who struggle to find joy in expanding their influence, the busy UI may disrupt the experience and confuse. It’s a game designed for risk-takers who won't hesitate to make tough choices to reap the rewards of a tantalizingly broad array of intuitive city-building mechanics.

Football Manager 26 isn’t quite the football reincarnation that some fans were hoping for, but what it has to offer is likely enough to keep fans coming back for more. Some frustrating choices made in the UI overhaul mar the experience, but the long-awaited addition of women’s football, as well as major changes to in-match tactics, make this a solid entry in the series.

Despite well-written central characters that, at their best, radiate charm and intrigue, Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is an overstretched affair darkened by the shadows of its own limitations. Those looking for a well-realized vampire fantasy will find part of what they’re looking for here. However, should they stray from the central story or look too closely at The Chinese Room’s Seattle-by-night or the systems that underpin it, they will find themselves disappointed.

If you can find a friend, Little Nightmares 3 is a moderately enjoyable, if bland, diversion. However, co-op joy is required to insulate you from the otherwise forgettable and tedious experience at the title’s core. While fans of the wider franchise may find nuggets of lore to chew on here and there, Little Nightmares 3 provides little groundwork for those new to the franchise. Even long-time series fans will need to brace for Little Nightmares 3’s dip in quality.

Sonic Racing CrossWorlds offers plenty of arcade fun, especially in multiplayer. If you have friends over and are looking for a great racing game, you’ll find what you’re looking for here. Equally, if you enjoy online play, Sonic Racing CrossWorlds will scratch an itch. However, due to shallow progression systems, players may find themselves lacking the incentive to play more alone. That said, fans of the Sonic franchise will eat well here, since CrossWorlds’ soundtrack, as well as its literal tracks, are brimming with adoration for the blue hedgehog and his storied history.

Foregoing genre-advancing substance and texture for impeccable style, Ghost of Yotei feels like a cowed shadow of its full potential. Those looking for a departure from checklist-oriented open-world gameplay will be disappointed. The title lands as generic, risk-averse, rigid, and safe.

RoboCop Rogue City Unfinished Business is a repetitive slog coasting on the goodwill of a venerated licensed IP to mask a deadening mix of mediocre shooting, repetitive levels, and a bland story.

Despite an inviting, off-kilter world and quality writing, Avowed abides by an almost arcane dedication to process and formula that drains it of its weird, compelling marrow. It's good, easygoing fun, though it won't linger long in the mind beyond the credits.

Despite offering a gritty medieval RPG sandbox with a layered, dynamic open world stacked with detail, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is haunted by the same demons as the original.

A middle of the road, B-tier serving of polygonal slop that, while decked out with some power fantasy-satisfying grand-scale combat, quickly turns into a repetitive slog with very little in the way of a meaningful pay off.

Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions’ simplistic gameplay and barebones content are fun for a couple of hours, but provide little more depth than it likely would have as a minigame in Hogwarts Legacy.

F1 Manager 2024 is certainly the best game in the series to date thanks to the small improvements on last year's game, but with few significant changes and how hit and miss the new mentality system currently are, while it might be a good game in its own right, it's not a sizeable upgrade on 2023's iteration.

Flintlock The Siege of Dawn epitomises the 7/10. Sporadic performance snags aside, it’s the ideal summer game – approachable and fun. It’s the sort of thing you’ll play once. Inessential but still worth your time.

The First Descendant is a bland dish presented on exquisite plating, whose stunning boss fights and interwoven upgrade systems are overpowered by shallow missions and grim monetisation. Nexon doesn’t invite you to a power fantasy, it sells you one by letting you pay to skip tiresome progression mechanics.

Smaller in scale than HoYo's other gacha games, Zenless Zone Zero is off to a good start. While the game suffers from pacing issues and a lack of variety, the combat is excellent in ZZZ. It helps it's backed up by an intriguing story and solid gameplay.

Despite varied factions and excellent maps, XDefiant’s shootouts are let down by a lack of identity and sluggish weapon progression. Outside an emphasis on making skill-based matchmaking optional, the game plays like every shooter from the last decade, leaning into nostalgia over attempting a breakthrough. While technical pitfalls can be resolved with seasonal updates, XDefiant needs novelty to sustain a player base.

MotoGP 24 scratches the itch it needs to thanks to the strong foundation laid down by previous entries. But while new features and increased realism are appreciated, they rarely feel like meaningful additions to last year’s game, leaving MotoGP 24 sometimes feeling more like an update of MotoGP 23 than a whole new title.

If you take just the combat and the music from Stellar Blade, you’ve got a fantastic game. Sadly, this is not the whole package.

There’s more than enough here for almost every baseball fan to find something they enjoy, which is ultimately the goal. Not everyone’s going to love Road to the Show, but they’ll like something else. Not all of MLB The Show 24 is good, but there is a love and respect for baseball present. It’s not a home run, but it is a solid hit.

Snow Day’s moment-to-moment slapstick humor and inventive combat are undermined by unfulfilling progression and an acute lack of content.

Rise of the Ronin is a competent open-world game that suffers from too much bloat. While there are story pacing problems and too many meaningless interactions, Rise of the Ronin is the best iteration of Nioh’s systems translated into an open-world game.

Where it innovates in design, Outcast: A New Beginning simultaneously stumbles over its own two feet with a clunkiness emblematic of other games in its niche. The game isn’t better or worse than its competitors – but it’s different enough to deserve some attention.

WWE 2K24 has a game mode for everyone, top creation capabilities, and an engrossing Showcase Mode celebrating 40 years of WrestleMania that will transport you through history.

The Thaumaturge shows plenty of promise, but lets itself down somewhat by failing to play to its strengths. Warsaw and its history and culture is a joy to experience when the game properly engages with it, but an insistent focus on a comparatively dull main story ultimately detracts from this for a fun yet frustrating experience.

Skull and Bones is a solid pirating adventure that has its moment but is often weighed down by a sluggish grind and outdated quest design.

Despite the myriad troubles, Granblue Fantasy: Relink has turned out to be rather excellent. But with several lacklustre aspects, there is a real sense of disappointment that Relink could have been so much better.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy is the best and most convenient way to experience three hilarious gems from the series with enhanced visuals.

While offering some beautiful build and buy items as well as some more controversy to a game that feels too clean, it can't make up for the empty experience For Rent gives.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet take the long-awaited step into a fully open-world, but one poorly implemented and marred by frustration. A compelling story and characters are a saving grace in what is ultimately a fun game, but Pokemon's attempts at modernising continue to fall disappointingly short.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet take the long-awaited step into a fully open-world, but one poorly implemented and marred by frustration. A compelling story and characters are a saving grace in what is ultimately a fun game, but Pokemon's attempts at modernising continue to fall disappointingly short.

Possibly a spin-off too far, Persona 5 Tactica conceals a reasonably fun tactical turn-based strategy game behind a wearisome visual novel-style story.

Modern Warfare 3 is a worrying misfire with a shoehorned campaign, saved only by excellent gunplay in multiplayer and its reworked Zombies.

While Realms of Ruin looks great and plays it safe, zoom out from its Warhammer character models and fundamentals to spot unreliable troop controls that turn traps into tombs.

RoboCop: Rogue City is a game dripping with love and appreciation of the source material, made by RoboCop fans, for RoboCop fans. But frustrating late game combat and clumsily resolved story beats raise questions of whether it's for everyone else, too.

A gritty and tough combat game that is both fun and rewarding. UFC 5 will keep you coming back until you are the champ.

If Cricket 24 can capture the full essence and atmosphere from it's new licenses, the game can be elevated to new heights.

Despite its faults and playing it very safe, Assassin's Creed Mirage is a step in the right direction for Ubisoft, an exercise in concision and a solid attempt to rekindle what made early AC games memorable.

The rating would be much higher if the game wasn't being held back by the prevailing bugs. The sky is the limit for FC once EA iron out the creases.

Immortals of Aveum has the potential to be great, with its fun and varied combat, but is ultimately let down by a lacklustre story, poor writing, unlikeable characters, and dull side content. The game frequently introduces interesting concepts, but repeatedly fails to capitalise on them, leaving behind an underwhelming mish-mash of underdeveloped mechanics and uninteresting story beats.

Stray Gods is at times a heartwarming and expertly crafted musical experience. However, certain narrative choices, along with some minor audio and performance issues, leave the game feeling like it could have spent a little more time in the oven.

Pikmin 4 is an incredibly charming and fun experience for the most part, but its new additions aren't quite revolutionary enough to stave off a feeling of repetitiveness in the later hours.

AEW Fight Forever title is a solid debut for the rapidly rising wrestling company, offering a healthy mix of gaming nostalgia and outright chaos. But whilst their debut title is a fun pickup for wrestling fans, unless Yuke’s keep on top of their updates, there are doubts as to whether this title will stand the test of time.

Final Fantasy 16 is a rich, visually arresting spectacle with engrossing set pieces let down by a bloated story and stifled combat.

Though held back from greatness by gameplay flaws and performance issues, System Shock still presents a fascinating world and interesting story that'll be more than worth the effort for dedicated players.

Frankly, it’s a relief to see real neck-biters treated with the proper pulp care. Arkane Austin gets right to it: teeth, claws, and clear agendas.

Dead Island 2 is the loud, boisterous, vibrant cousin to Dying Light 2, with a meaty combat system, insufferable characters, and a much smaller but densely packed world.

Minecraft Legends is a worthy spin-off from the main game, but doesn't break any new ground in the real-time strategy genre, instead acting as an accessible entry point for the younger generation.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is an engrossing, dense, and hard-fought slog, but nevertheless a slog weighed down by some heavy recycling and inconsistent difficulty.

Even when the trappings are more traditional, as they are in Return to Dreamland Deluxe, Kirby is Kirby. You get to the end with the distinct feeling that the tilts and tumbles haven’t stopped, that you haven’t quite pinned down its charm, and that you will be back, before too long, with an urge for more.

In the end, Gotham Knights is, like the studio’s earlier contribution to the saga, Batman: Arkham Origins, a decent game haunted by the notion of not being the main event.

FIFA 23 is the best feeling football game currently on the market, the gameplay is much better this time around than it was in FIFA 22. It's just a shame the lack of attention to the single player game modes, and Pro Clubs, lets the rest of the game down.

If you want a transporting reverie, a game you can slip into as if you had closed your eyes, then here it is. No trek required.

There just isn’t enough juice in the combat, the cover shooting, or the endless hoovering of collectibles.

Most potent of all, there is a strain of urban fear running through its design—not of monsters but of the city itself as an isolating entity, rendering you unreachable.

If only Dalcò, rather than honouring his heroine by smothering her search for truth in confounding gloom, had abided by her love of illumination.

Whether OlliOlli World charms you or chafes at your patience will depend on your appetite for such whimsy.

Indeed, if, like me, you have a weakness for the zombie-hued, and for the sway and flail of first-person platforming, then Dying Light 2 is easy to recommend.

More than any other studio, Ubisoft is willing to mutate its existing IPs until they scarcely resemble what they once were.

There remains about Pokémon Brilliant Diamond the glint of something far gone, and there is something warmly reassuring about the place.

There remains about Pokémon Brilliant Diamond the glint of something far gone, and there is something warmly reassuring about the place.

If these games shaped or changed you, you might find the notion of their being shaped and changed, in turn, an unwelcome one.

Its narrative is fractious and slight, compared to Sledgehammer’s previous work, but the chance for a chaotic, target-rich experience with friends exerts a stronger pull than usual.

Where Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy proves most winsome, however, is in its twining of the intergalactic and the terrestrial.

We have been given a finely tooled zombie shooter, but it lacks the power of the original. This has less to do with its diminished darkness—Left 4 Dead was a far gloomier ride, lit by the panicked sway of torches—and more to do with us. And with the years. There is plenty to enjoy here, and I heartily recommend it to any who relish killing the dead. But Turtle Rock Studios wants to take us back to another time, and it’s 2 Late 4 That.

As it happens, though I played for much longer, I had had more than my fill after the first four hours, with no desire to venture back in. Strange to tell, I mourn the very things—the scalable vantages, the unlockable skills—that Ubisoft has left behind for the sake of freshness.

Whether you demand more than comfort from your games will inform the way you see Kena: Bridge of Spirits; is it merely a graphically sumptuous example of design that you wish we would leave behind, or is it a vivifying tribute to a rich precursor legacy?

It offers an otherworldly break from the busyness of life, and, when you do return to Earth, you will do so with a smooth landing, and without stress.

In an odd way, then, Glass Bottom Games has captured the truth of the situation; contrary to its mission of cuteness, it has made a game that feels hollow-boned, caged by unflattering mechanics.

True Colors is the best game in the series since Before the Storm, and it will satisfy your narrative craving for a time.

The lack of challenge in The Artful Escape, not just in its play but in its emotional texture, somewhat shreds the odyssey.

Grasshopper jumbles together the conventions of the hack and slash with a slew of other ideas, and, if it all hangs together, it’s precisely because of the Hang: the relaxed air of logorrhea and pop cultural reference that wafts through it.

There are, of course, multiple endings, and the minutes leading up to each resolution can be flavoured with violence and revelation, or laced with deceit. The question is: Do we care?

If you squint, you could be playing Outriders—with less satisfying shooting, granted, but with a superior world grafted onto the action.

Last Stop is most enjoyable when it isn’t going anywhere. The end of each episode may hook you with a cliffhanger, but, when you look back on the game, the story fails to hang around. Instead, the scenes that stick in the memory don’t mean much at all.

In The Ascent, which offers a menu of main and side missions and runs to over twenty hours, there is only one strategy: shoot those in front of you until they are in front of you no longer. True, we get the standard stream of skill points, to feed into our preferred areas: aim, balance, movement speed, etc. And you can upgrade your cyberdeck, the better to melt the circuits of enemies and locked doors. But it all comes back to open-plan gunning, and it takes more than ballistics to persuade us of real freedom.

The humour is thankfully intact, but the mysteries grow as ornate and heavily threaded as Sholmes’s overcoat.

It’s to Flight School Studio’s credit that, though the clashes at the game’s core left me underwhelmed, the whole thing didn’t feel hollowed-out. This is down to Annika, who sits at its heart and drives it on.

If I didn’t feel the sugary twinge of sentiment in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, it is down to its pastel starkness.

The fun of playing these games, especially these days, lies in the director, Ryuchi Nishizawa, whose approach to genre was one of precise and genial disregard.

If the DNA of Biomutant sparks a re-evolution of some of the genre’s dull spots, perhaps we can forgive the dull spots present here.

Though it comes with a crop of upgrades, and its graphics have been brushed to a smooth shine, what it offers, despite its title, is the joy of the old.

Reaching the credits, I sat back, exhausted and disappointed at where the series had ended up.

Taro’s approach is of a restless rarity; he swaps genres as though trying to scratch an itch.

In that image lies the appeal—and for some the off-putting twinge—of Oddworld: a bleak and black-hearted concoction, laced with snickering humour and shot through with hope.

The best time I had with the game was a ten-minute stretch that contained (a) no crashes or bugs, (b) the right level and world tier—essentially, a measure of enemy toughness—and (c) a harmony of tactics, sorcery, and gunfire.

The puzzles compel, while the narrative stalls, and there is something worthy in that mismatch. I only wish that breakup at its core yielded something worth holding on to.

It’s worth pointing out that few other studios have the confidence to take this approach to horror: not to jolt you with sudden frights or to ration your ammunition, but to probe and puncture your emotional ease by putting foulness in such close proximity to the childish.

We get a story whose late twists are telegraphed within the first hour or so, and an ending drenched with homage to the Shape of Water. The journey, however, is worth taking. I relished the spectacle of a stranded ship, its hull gashed with Godzilla-sized claw marks. And, in the wavering depths of a dream sequence, Norah swimming down towards a pair of glowing eyes. Still, that sort of thing is par for the course, when you’re in Lovecraftland. What rescues the game from the descent into cliché isn’t a rise to sanity. Nor is it the call of the sea. It’s Harry. You believe in Norah because she believes in him, and even when the plot goes bats you want to see them back together. Who would have thought that the solution to madness might be marriage? Thanks, Old Pal.

Bloober Team has summoned a rich atmosphere, under all that writing, and one or two sequences offer glimpses of a purer game.

As much as Hitman III was a pleasure to play, it left me longing for the mood of the old games—for that European concoction of sirens and splashing rain, drenched in Jesper Kyd’s cold scores. I’m as excited as anyone for Project 007, but I wonder how long we will be left looking for 47—a wraith in a red tie, who has proven elusive enough to slip IO’s grasp.

What I didn’t expect from the new Call of Duty was downtime, and the suggestion, at least in the first half, that guns, while great for going in blazing, can provide just as potent a thrill when holstered.

I would prescribe The Pathless to anyone feeling numbed and locked by our days of inanition; it’s perfect if you feel your home becoming an isle on the edge of the world.

Far more than the combat—whose charm ebbs away on a tide of repetition after the first few hours—the draw of The Falconeer is its suggestion that, while we may be shaped by our stories, they don’t pin us down, that the mere act of living is to take flight from the past.

Sadly, that string of hours, spent clambering up towers and defogging the map, bounding across the fields in a hopeful, happy loop, was the last of the fun on offer.