Home to some of the most immersive experiences, detailed graphics, and engaging features in the sports game industry, NBA 2K23 has set the bar of excellence for what a world class sports game is truly made of. Though its clear-cut inconsistencies across the next and current generation editions diminishes its overall potential, NBA 2K23 has still risen to the top as one of the best sports games of the year.

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.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is a visually stunning and emotive fable that pierces through the noise of the most contested of release periods as a captivating triumph.

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.

Metal: Hellsinger merges rhythm, violence, and the fury-laden chugs of metal to create a unique kind of carnage that's a pleasure to conduct despite, at times, feeling repetitive.

The Last of Us Part I is a beautiful thing to behold, honouring your recollection by surpassing it.

From control to innovation, Madden 23 delivered one of its best full game experiences to date. However, a push for creativity has led to stark inconsistencies from year to year, leaving many unsatisfied with modes like Face of the Franchise.

The problem with the new Saints Row is not just that the characters are boring, or that the combat is by-the-numbers and benumbed by unempowering perks, but that the brief snatches of fun—the wingsuit deployed from a high rise, the hand-brake turn through a curtain of tyre smoke—are nothing new, and are done better in other games.

This is where Stray succeeds. It offers us delectable opportunities to act out the behaviour that so bewilders us, in very celebration of that bewilderment.

What we have here is a developer that is happy to nudge us with knowing jokes, but who doesn’t dare to frighten us. We might call it a Craven effort. As for the ending, there isn’t one—just a montage of postscripts, detailing the fates of the various characters. Only, we already know their fates, having been at least partially responsible for them. As the credits rolled, the sweetness of the humour had grown stale, and I felt distinctly unsated, though hardly hungry for more. I hate to say it, but Supermassive has made a Butterpop.

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.

What saves Norco is that the visions on offer belong as much to the imagined as the troublingly real.

You can sense, in Weird West, a developer both returning to his obsessions and toiling on a fresh frontier.

Despite its obvious muses, Tunic manages to rise above mere flattery, by paying deeper homage to the medium itself.

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.

Polyphony has delivered an airtight flight from the everyday, rich in escape yet rooted in anything but fantasy.

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

There are no other dynamics quite like it in games; they acquaint us with an array of miseries and charge us money for the privilege.

Maybe the visions in Sifu lie in the traumatised mind of the main character, who remains more elusive than any of his foes. The game’s tagline ponders, “Is one life enough to know kung fu?” But, in the fractured figure of its hero, a deeper realisation occurs. It may not be enough to know yourself.

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.

Where Solar Ash goes from an intriguing ambient platformer to one of the year’s most fascinating releases is in its fixation on living as an act of being stuck.

With Halo Infinite, 343 Industries seems to want to break the cycle and start afresh. The irony is that it has done so by drawing closer to the past.

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.