Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey replicates the fumbling, trial-and-error progress of evolution, which often isn’t fun, but there are monkeys in the game, and that is brilliant.

The fourth episode brings a welcome jolt of movement and energy, with an urgent pace and the introduction of a new, intriguing character. Some of the branching choices still feel shallow.

Man of Medan's story and characters fail to reach the heights of Supermassive's homage to the slasher flick, Until Dawn. The Dark Pictures Anthology isn't off to the greatest of starts.

Control is Remedy at its best: pulpy, weird, and immensely satisfying to play. Its setting is a potent concoction of '60s brutalist style and wacky sci-fi. Performance issues hamper the shootouts, and the characters are a little cold, but it's the setting and atmosphere that win the day.

Telling Lies expands on the concept Sam Barlow created with Her Story, with a web of intriguing characters and mysteries, but the more overblown aspects of its plot detract from the personal drama.

Dry Drowning is surreal and silly; it draws you in with earnest and ludicrous writing, perhaps not in the way the game's developer intended.

Wolfenstein Cyberpilot's formulaic combat and missions underwhelm, but the premise and the novelty are intriguing, offering a fresh slant on a dark vision.

Night call is thick with moody atmosphere and noir style; its writing is hit and miss, but it's tough not to be entranced by the central concept.

A wondrous world and keenly felt themes are slighted by unsubtle writing.

The Sinking City is well worth playing for the initial rhythm of its casework and the freshness of its setting, but its mechanics, like its mystery, end up flooded.

Judgment tinkers with the Yakuza template enough that it provides something for fans, as well as those who have always thought about visiting Kamurocho.

While the rewards in hidden areas aren't as satisfying as you might expect from a game like this, Gato Roboto's tense, creative boss battles with a talking rodent are an absolute delight.

Blood & Truth is an exciting shooter with some deft VR touches; its forgettable plot and characters are made up for by the intricate details of its world.

Credit must go to Bloober Team for setting a different course for its sequel; it's just a shame that it didn't bring the chills and scares that littered the last outing.

When you and your two pals are sharing item pick-ups, driving in each other’s racing lines, and skimming past one another for a boost, Team Sonic Racing shines. It offers something different in the kart racing genre.

An exquisite atmosphere and fresh premise make up for some slightly obtuse puzzles. Observation brims with ideas and images that fill your head.

The satisfying action and relentless chaos of Rage 2 peppers a formulaic open world with thrills.

A Plague Tale: Innocence has some clunky writing in places, and its play gets stale after a time, but it prevails with a compelling mystery and a beautiful world.

After the slump of the second episode, the drama picks up its pace and the central relationship is tested in some interesting ways.

Granted, the chase sequences are frustrating and the story falls a bit flat, but there's some wonderful attention to detail in Close to the Sun's environments, and tension is present even in the game's calmest moments.

Mortal Kombat 11 sees the franchise at its strongest yet, with finely-tuned scrapping and an ample amount of content providing one of the most rewarding fighting games of the generation.

Days Gone is a grim, beautiful B-movie; its action and writing are full of pulpy thrills, and by the end of it, I found myself liking a character called Deacon St. John – an achievement in itself.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the work of a studio at the height of its powers – beautiful, cruel, and moving.

Hypnospace Outlaw is a perfect recreation of what the internet once was, and in some ways still is: a glorious mess of friendship and anarchy. It’s probably good we don’t have auto-playing music anymore, though.

Shooting the bad men and tinkering with your loot in The Division 2 is good enough to keep you coming back to something that’s regularly monotonous and lacks any real message.

RICO has a cracking central idea, but it's strained by awkward mission design, shaky performance, and a whippy aim that often misses the mark.

Devil May Cry 5 revels in its own gleeful stupidity, presenting a world in which the most valuable commodity is style.

The Occupation is a game of intriguing ideas and sublime atmosphere; the tension of its real-time thrills gives way to a romance with journalistic sleuthing.

Anthem is gorgeous to look at and can be fun in places, but for now it feels decidedly half-baked.

Whilst the concept is there in the title, the intricacies of Ape Out’s are revealed the more you play. Every aspect creates a dazzling jazz mixtape that reverberates from eyes, to ears, to thumbs. And you’re an ape. Which is great.

The sharp difficulty and rough edges of Dirt Rally 2.0 give way to a rewarding racing model, with a surfeit of meaningful options for the obsessed.

Jump Force has all the ingredients of an epic manga crossover, but fails to execute them in a memorable way.

The mission structure is repetitive, the story’s utter wallop, and the baddies are there for shooting practice. But, damn it, it’s fun being an over-powered superhero scaling a building in Crackdown 3.

Far Cry New Dawn is your regularly scheduled stop-gap Far Cry, with some lovely tweaks like the ranked enemies and weapons, and a fantastical element that reaches its natural conclusion.

Metro Exodus injects life and light into the series, but its mechanics are still starting to creak; it’s a good end to Artyom’s journey, even if the story seems muffled.

Kingdom Hearts III is overflowing with heart, and mostly unconcerned with the head; as such, it’s in dire want of wickedness.

Resident Evil 2 is more than a remake of a classic game, it's one of the most accomplished horror titles you'll play for a long time.

This puzzle-platformer’s puzzles and platforming might be merely alright – and the music is a proper irritant – but Pikuniku is full of so much cheer and loveliness elsewhere. It’s bursting with character in a story that’s equal parts silly and uplifting.

Below’s moody gloom and atmosphere is spoiled by mechanics that really cramp its central quest.

The definitive Super Smash Bros. game, Ultimate is not only a pure and unadulterated joy, but also a fantastic fighting game stuffed to the gills with characters and other content. A little smasher.

Gris plays to your aural and optical senses by delivering something exquisite in that area, but lacks a compelling story to prop itself up alongside equivalents.

Just Cause 4’s thrills give way to repetition and a dull mission structure, but it’s a ridiculous roller coaster while in full swing.

When combat is between you and one other, Darksiders 3 can provide some decent, button-mashy fun, but the real fight is with the baffling world design and some cheap deaths.

Fallout 76 is an ambitious game that’s burned by it. The online features hamper what could have been a great Fallout game.

Battlefield V offers a compelling single-player and multiplayer package, although it's not the complete reinvention that you may have hoped for.

Hitman 2 walks familiar ground and provides the type of delightful moments you expect in the maps on offer, as well as a multiplayer mode with bundles of potential.

Call of Cthulhu's atmosphere, especially early on, is delicious, but it's let down by wayward pacing and plot and some muddy graphics.

Few worlds are as well-realised as the one Rockstar has created for Red Dead Redemption 2. Thanks to some wonderful scripting and stellar performances, the characters you randomly meet in the wild are captured as well as the ones you spend most of your days around camp. How do you follow Red Dead Redemption? You make Red Dead Redemption 2.

SoulCalibur VI is an addictive and satisfying fighter, and more importantly the strongest the series has been in years.

Despite the lack of a campaign and any tonal consistency, Black Ops 4 boasts a thrilling entry into the battle royale space.

A pleasant story about two best friends who refuse to be separated by a great evil, My Memory of Us is brought down by some awkward controls, but remains impossibly nice throughout.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey sees the franchise at its strongest and most ambitious yet. With a compelling story, solid RPG mechanics, and heaps of content to soak up, you'll be spending months immersed in its sprawling Greek sandbox.

A slow start and and a shifting tone give way to a strong central relationship and some tough choices. The road ahead intrigues.

A beautiful Britain, an exuberant driving engine, and generosity of spirit make Forza Horizon 4 a masterclass.

FIFA 19 is the finest playing game in the series. The Journey may be after running its course, but the fluid representation of football, the added element of Dynamic Tactics, and the madness of the updated Kick Off mode are all wonderful.

The challenge of Transference's puzzles tapers off, and there's little subtlety when it comes to certain themes, but great use of some grim audio make this a decent little horror game.

A seductive art style, hazy synth sounds, and some well-designed puzzles give The Gardens Between a pleasant mood, but it doesn’t stay in the mind long after the credits.

Stay’s compelling lead character and gripping dialogue ensures you’ll want to see Quinn’s journey through to the end. It’s just a shame it spends a bit too much time testing your patience with irksome puzzles and some needless waffling.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider takes the series’ formula and pushes it, polishing the platforming and bolstering its tombs, but the game’s power ebbs as the main quest is bloated with distraction, and the writing is still patchy and dull.

While some of the antiquated trappings of open world games from years gone-by are present, Spider-Man manages to remain a delight through great acting performances, a compelling story, terrific combat, and joyous swinging.

Rebellion has wrought a breezy shooter, angled it towards multiplayer, and burnished it with wit, but its minute-to-minute action is repetitive and feels imprecise.

While its impact isn't as great as the original, Guacamelee 2 is a reminder of how good combat and traversal can feel when married together as they are in this 2D platformer-cum-brawler.

While We Happy Few's story contains some genuinely wonderful twists and turns once it gets going, it's dragged down by frustrating survival systems, shoddy combat, and an empty world.

Tanglewood presents you with a beautiful world to platform and puzzle through, and delivers a potent rush of nostalgia, but it's merit is tied inseparably to its hardware, and risks gimmickry.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season is off to a cracking start, thanks to the dynamic relationship between Clem and AJ and some of the strongest dialogue in the series to date.

The originality of its vision and the thrust of its narrative more than excuse some sci-fi clichés, and you’re left with a breezy adventure game which compels with its ideas, if not always with its play.

It doesn't try and reinvent the wheel, but Overcooked 2 is still a fantastic and barmy co-op romp that will entertain you and a group of mates for hours on end.

Dead Cells is, at times, constrained by the genres it so heavily draws from, but its vibrant pixel art, furious combat, and rigorous execution make for a winning formula all its own.

Octopath Traveler is a deep, diverse, interesting, sometimes risque and sometimes funny JRPG that you should play.

While this Switch re-release doesn't add as much as some may hope, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is still a delight.

It’s not bad, but it lacks imagination outside of the singular gimmick that you can change vehicles at any time, and ends up just being rather average.

Dark and beautiful, you’ll come for Hollow Knight’s visual appeal, but you’ll stay for the challenge and responsive combat.

As a teaser for Life is Strange 2, Captain Spirit does its job, but here’s hoping there’s more subtlety to the writing for the next big thing from Dontnod.

Mario Tennis Aces is a good tennis game let down by an Adventure Mode that often feels as though it's cheating you.

Vampyr serves delicious ladles of angst and drama with a hearty slice of excellent, morally grey choice system that will genuinely surprise you, all wrapped up in a wonderfully gloomy London. It's just a shame the combat turns a bit sour.

Detroit: Become Human wants to move you. It wants to elicit an emotional response through its story. The thing is, it really doesn't. The flowchart is a nice inclusion and adds some variance, but when the narrative is as cringey and ham-fisted as it is you won't want to play through it multiple times.

Quarantine Circular, while lacking the same focus as Subsurface Circular, is another engaging untangling of science fiction concepts with interesting characters, and it leaves you waiting for the next instalment.

State of Decay 2 has some lovely elements that will make you want to keep playing, and yet others that make you want to turn it off again, so you get caught in a fretful loop of not knowing what to do with yourself. Like some kind of restless corpse shuffling back and forth with no purpose, perhaps…?

The Thin Silence has a satisfying, creative approach to puzzle solving, alongside a sad story told in equally sad snippets. Though you can reset puzzles and try again as often as you need, you might sometimes still be left at a loss.

God of War achieves a very impressive balance between the epic and the mundane, between the ultra violent and the domestic. It's undoubtedly the coolest and most interesting God of War to date.

Rare's piratical playground looks lovely, but you have to make a bit too much of your own fun. The sound and the fury of the waves is lovely, but for Sea of Thieves to be properly good it needs to give the players more to work with.

In its quieter moments Hope County is a picturesque backdrop to terrific Prepper Stash puzzles, and an over-the-top fantasy playground when the volume is turned up. Taking on Eden's Gate is compelling, horrific, and an awful lot of fun.

Fighting and exploring is more free than ever, and the story, while wanting in certain areas, introduces a few great characters. Some activities and side missions lack a punch, but how many games do you get to wear a giant orange on your head?

A game about a game within a game, Legendary Gary is weird and cool and utterly, genuinely unique. Some parts may be frighteningly familiar, and surprisingly emotional.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance has some nice ideas and pretty countryside, but is ultimately still buggy, broken and, perhaps worst of all, boring.

Fe is all very lovely and (literally) harmonious, with fun layers of platforming. Coloured flowers and singing is a nice enough way to spend a rainy afternoon.

The Station is futuristic sci-fi puzzling delivered with polish, but the trouble is that what you receive doesn't feel very new.

Dynasty Warriors 9 still has the 'levelling hundreds of dudes without breaking a sweat' core loop so you feel like a badass, but the open world removes some of the depth. Fans can still enjoy, but it won't win any new hearts this time.

Kitty Powers is back, and she's giving you a lot to grab onto. Love Life isn't paced quite as well as Matchmaker, but organising the entire relationship of a town full of couples is a great challenge. Kitty always leaves you wanting more.

Celeste is special, because not only does it serve up a delight in precise platforming and environmental puzzle-solving, it also tells an emotional story of a girl trying to overcome her depression. While there are times where it feels like the mountain drains you of your will, it’s important to never stop pushing.

A cyberpunk exploration of humanity, manipulation and getting tanked, The Red Strings club is lovely and melancholy and well worth a look.

This long standing series makes an outrageously good current gen debut. The size and scope of the environments, and the monsters in them, is awe inspiring, making Monster Hunter: World a true (lizard) king of games.

Whether or not you like fighting games or Dragon Ball, extremely dramatic villains and hench dudes with giant hair hurling fireballs at each other (all set to unceasing guitar solos) is kind of inherently enjoyable.

If you like cats and you like visual novel dating sims then you will 100% like Purrfect Date.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm, despite a great second episode, ends feeling rushed and loses the focus on Chloe and Rachel's relationship.

Reigns: Her Majesty manages to defy a lot of your expectations, and will keep adding more surprising cards into its deck as you play.

A good core game of cool Star Wars battles on fun and interesting maps is bogged down by clumsy, convoluted progression systems, and the single player is interesting but unfinished.

Assassin's Creed Origins has vastly improved combat and an astoundingly beautiful world to explore, but it felt a little afraid of going all in with its new direction.