Horrendous difficulty spikes aside, Peace Walker is great. It has all the blisteringly beautiful visuals, impressive production values and rewarding stealth gameplay you expect from a Metal Gear game.

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.

The Last Of Us' story was pretty much perfect in terms of what it wanted to achieve. This does nothing to build on or take away from that.

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.

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

As a whole, though, it's an elegantly crafted thriller that stands out as an original, charming and beautiful adventure. As an experience it's well worth the price of admission, but sadly Ghost Trick lets itself down with its overall simplicity and the disappointment of its crucial final act.

A sumptuous remaster, but the games themselves have aged badly.

It’s only the inclusion of a much slicker set of tools to allow the recording of machinima movies and the sharing of customised content that prevents an even harsher score. While there was a significant step up both technically and in gameplay terms between The Sims and The Sims 2, the same can’t be said of The Sims 3 compared to its predecessor.

It's an impressive feat for sure, but to focus solely on that would be unfair to both the talented studio and venerable franchise: there's so much potential unexplored here, and occasional glimmers of ingenuity in Ready at Dawn's efforts show a developer that should be able to do better.

The game's excellent presentation - it's got a vibe of one of those football magazines your friends (or even you, perhaps) used to buy when you were a kid - and responsive, tactile nature make playing it a simple, punchy delight. I might have no idea what constitutes a classic goal, but it's impossible not to notice that Score! is a quality game.

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.

It took two decades and change, but a team of developers has shown they understand what made the old Sonic games great with Sonic Mania, even if nostalgia is sometimes too much of a driving force.

There are some fantastic environments and old school style puzzles in Resi 7. The final section stops being survival horror and becomes a bit of a clunky linear shooter, but the first few hours are scary enough to put you off Louisiana for life.

There's just not quite enough meat on Fight Night Champion's bones to recommend it to owners of previous games, however, and Champion mode itself is little more than a brief diversion you can bash through in an afternoon.

If you're a hardcore fighter fan, you'll be annoyed by the button layout and the associated lack of precision. If you're a newcomer who has yet to play Street Fighter IV, you're better off picking up one of the previous editions; it'll cost you little more than a tenner, rather than the £30 you'll pay for the 3DS version.

It's a not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, just a slightly poor use of the license.

Multiplayer is Rocket League's priority, and it delivers.

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.

While the campaign, UI and added value of betas and TV shows give Halo: MCC a lot to shout about, shoddy matchmaking means one of the biggest talking points for fans is being discussed for all the wrong reasons.

Whatever the antic designs of Dr. Tropy, there is a deeper story here, and it’s one that centres on a far sadder subject: it’s about time.

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.

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.

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

The new character models and HD visuals do a great job of bringing Hillys to life, but only serve to contrast how far game design has come in eight years. We're more critical of camera issues and interface problems these days, spoiled by the likes of Uncharted and Mass Effect. Considering the effort gone into revamping the character models, it strikes me as odd that Ubisoft hasn't addressed these issues too.

I found it mightily upsetting to have something in my hands capable of such beauty, such triumphant gaming bliss, only to have that thing ultimately turn into disappointment and frustration. It's almost more upsetting than playing something that was never up to much in the first place.

There's just not quite enough meat on Fight Night Champion's bones to recommend it to owners of previous games, however, and Champion mode itself is little more than a brief diversion you can bash through in an afternoon.

This is a quite beautiful game at times: attractive, detailed, and beautifully lit. The soundtrack is less noticeable, though the main theme, with driving rhythms and a strident melody that recurs in other tracks is an instant classic. But ultimately the quality of the mission design has taken a huge nosedive from the series peak of Assassin's Creed II.

While there's no denying that the Guild Wars franchise is both popular and technically superb, unless you're after dedicated PvP thrills, it's hard to see it genuinely competing with games like World of Warcraft in the long term.