Through a great soundtrack and entertaining story beats, SkateBIRD proves that you don’t need to always look to the skies for a game to leave a lasting impression.

Lone Ruin nails the brief on what makes an appreciable roguelike – combining a slick and sexy aesthetic with a core gameplay loop that can be rapidly picked up, but is deep enough to beg for mastery.

With slick and satisfying gameplay wrapped in a visually stunning package, AllStars has an almost limitless potential that will only go unrealised if a few irritating roadblocks stay unmoved.

Your experience with The Tomorrow Children will vary, especially if you don’t get any players visiting your space. But when everything clicks like a well-oiled machine, there’s a strange sense of appeal here that makes it intriguing enough.

Don't Forget Me is a highly polished short story hindered by its forgettable pixel art style, but its short length plays to its strengths. Highly recommended for fans of the cyberpunk genre, and for anybody keen to have their morality tickled.

Firewall Ultra sticks to what works and is very satisfying, but missed opportunities hold it back from truly being the ultra tactical VR shooter.

Bokeh Game Studio's debut horror title is a game entirely out of time with its genre contemporaries and all the more wild, compelling, and beautiful for it. Satisfying combat and a generational eye for tone and design collide in the year's strangest beast.

Unambitious, dated, and dreadfully lacking in polish, only series fans eager for more classic Saints gameplay need apply.

Godfall doesn’t do anything egregious or worse than any of the other disappointing looters of this generation, but it does almost everything equally as badly in a weird perfect balance. This is what makes it so frustrating. There is definite potential for a gem inside this game, but it’s so busy with being a downright average-at-best looter that it loses all semblance of actual personality, a key component to maintaining a looter game. Impressively non-existent story, incredibly derivative art, classes which mean absolutely nothing, a deceptively small loot pool, technical issues up the wazoo, terrible endgame design and a horrific netcode all add up to a visually pleasing but soulless affair that can’t even begin to escape being categorised as anything more than a flashy tech demo.

Broken Roads is a gorgeous Aussie world undone by incurious writing, ambitious but poorly implemented ideas, and unstable performance issues.

If you’re someone who enjoys third-person survival horror action titles such as Resident Evil and are looking for something to play over a weekend, then Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle’s 10ish-hour campaign may scratch that itch. There are some good ideas here, such as the Frost Grip, but the lack of execution and polish, and some poor core mechanics, means that this is best saved for a bargain price and a rainy day.

If you didn’t catch the Payday bug with the first two releases it’s unlikely you’ll feel the bite with Payday 3, with so much of the game relying on what worked last time around. But if you are a curious first-timer, then Payday 3 is worth at least checking out. Thankfully the game’s launch matchmaking kinks have been ironed out, because Payday’s core cooperative chaos is still a damn fun time with the right squad. But with only eight heists, frustrating progression and some dated gameplay, this heister can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed.

Airoheart attempts to recreate the magic of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in its own image, only to see itself let down by its painfully average storytelling and lack of direction in its dungeons.

Unfortunately, the game's interesting character designs and a decent art style aren't enough to carry it through its mediocre combat, rough audio and low stakes.

Morsels is an ambitious indie roguelite that just doesn’t deliver. The game shines with a distinctive aesthetic identity, but between shockingly unclear mechanics, poor game balance, and unsatisfying moment-by-moment gameplay, it otherwise has little to offer.

Despite a decent story and atmosphere, Winter Ember is a flawed experience that suffers from poor combat and even poorer voice acting and writing. Super fans of stealth games may find some joy here, but for most there are better stealth games out there.

A repetitive and dull gameplay loop that’s thematically allergic to the game’s cast of misfits only begins to describe how heartbreakingly disappointing Kill the Justice League truly is. Rocksteady should’ve died a hero, instead, it’s lived long enough to see itself become the villain.

So who is this game for? I can imagine cosy gamers being delighted by the intricacies of the puzzles as I was, but others might feel this interrupts the simplicity. I can also see how a game like this could spark delight and long-term nostalgia for someone before finding games that incorporate its elements a bit better. Maybe escapism shouldn’t be the marker for a successful cosy game. Maybe it was necessary for me to play something so casually at the end of the year, so that my mind could be freed up to contemplate the wins and losses of 2024, and the resolutions to be attempted in 2025. Critter Café, with its flaws and subtle successes, is at least a fittingly weird game for the end of a pretty weird year.

Perhaps Ubisoft's most mediocre new IP launch to date, eliciting neither excitement nor offence.

Hotel Barcelona is an underwhelming roguelike with lopsided design that simply doesn’t nail the fundamentals that make the genre popular. Head-scratching design choices regarding stingy mechanics that are almost tailor-made to extract joy from your life, mixed with a lack of fluidity and unity of vision make this a hard sell. Even in you love Suda51 and Swery 65, this is not what you hope it will be.

Rustler brings classic Grand Theft Auto to a twisted version of the European Middle Ages, but its reliance on other media for laughs and a finicky release build makes it a title worth trying only for those nostalgic for the vintage entries of a now-juggernaut series.

Monster Crown is chock-a-block full of monsters and retro charm but you might want to wait for some of the bugs to be squashed first.

Arkham board game fans will find little in this adaption that harkens back to the fantastic tabletop challenges. This could almost be a ‘my first turn-based tactics’ game, hampered by embarrassingly arbitrary puzzles, bad technical and vocal performances, and progress that provides meaningless penalties rather than rewards.

This third-person action game is a little rough around the edges and tries a little too hard to be serious, but its premise and combat is compelling enough to get the job done.

Open Roads is a journey I’m glad I went on, though the disappointing circumstances of its development do feel as if they loom over its final form. As a complete package there’s something to love, something to respect and admire, with two lead actors elevating the material well beyond what many others might have achieved. It’s just a shame it couldn’t have been bigger, bolder in its impact and exploration of its themes and its mysteries. Maybe it needed something darker, something stranger to lean into, but the results stand as a simple yet effective road trip that’s worth taking for an hour or two.

Gungrave G.O.R.E is a thorough examination of what games offered us before they transformed into 40-hour cinematic masterpieces. While its appeal may not be broad enough to interest everyone, it establishes itself as a love letter to a time when your gaming experience was absolutely about bombastic style, personal fantasy and massive high scores.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game brimming with potential, and it damn near reaches it on so many occasions, but the pitfalls of its development ultimately drag it down. There's still a lot to like here for RPG fans and lovers of the genre, but it's far from the generation-defining masterwork that the world was waiting for.

Necromunda: Hired Gun features a stunning art direction, but with a garbled story and more technical and design blemishes than you can poke a space stick at, this one's bound to be buried in the under-hive.