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.