At once a little simple and a little over-stuffed, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is still above all a game of immense charm and fluid, free-form style.
Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes. But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there's nothing to bind it together.
Micro-developer Lunar Division melds scientific rigour and faithful devotion into one, creating an entirely singular game about the depths of space, the limits of your own mind, and the divine beauty of mathematics.
Mixing repetitive, imprecise combat with annoying characters and a landslide of nonsensical, proper noun-stuffed lore, Immortals of Aveum is almost so bad it's good. If only.
Like the Blizzard hits of old, Diablo 4 is a designer's game at heart, built on intricacy and depth. A sense of fearful overcompensation holds it back.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor lovable unpretentiousness is what makes it such a blast - but a lack of true focus holds it back.
A half-interesting game is buried by a mess of its own making - and represents an industry conundrum that will only continue to grow.
Navigating a tonal minefield with just enough confidence, Company of Heroes 3 is a big, refined, and beautifully textured addition to an already brilliant series.
Disparate parts pull together to form a beautiful game that's only more potent for its awkward adolescence.
Much like its endless enemies, Darktide's many small issues add up to a real nuisance - but stupendous atmosphere and vicious action just about prevails.
Much like its heroes, God of War: Ragnarök learns to love itself for what it truly is: gargantuan, excessive, and wonderfully absurd.
This year's Modern Warfare 2 has some good moments, some beautiful cinematics and some typically moreish multiplayer - but it's a cowardly retconning of the original's story.
FIFA 23, like so many FIFAs before it, sums up the best and worst of football culture - a joyeous game in the vice-like grip of profiteers.
A lean and tightly-restrained mashup of more than just Rock Band and Doom, Metal: Hellsinger captures the earnest spirit of an underloved genre.
Sam Barlow's epic mystery of self-reference and cinema is an elaborate, ingenious enigma - one that would be even better if it didn't want to be solved.
Roll7 blends genres with total mastery in Rollerdrome, one of the most breathlessly stylish and casually, outrageously cool games you'll ever play.
That, above all, is the reason to play Milky Way Prince, and the reason why it exists. Games of this subject matter can at times feel like a kind of development-as-therapy, where the creator exorcises a daemon through the retelling of a personal trauma. That can be an almighty powerful experience; it can also, on occasion, feel a little crass. Milky Way Prince moves somewhere beyond that, to a place where it can resonate with, and ideally also challenge its audience. But subject matter aside, you should play this for the same reason you might watch the early, uneven short-features of great directors, or read the first scrappy, hundred-page novels of a favourite author: to experience a prodigal talent, just as they begin to discover what they can do.
There is real anguish and intimacy here, real experience, real softness, pensiveness, complexity of thought, from the deeply clever, immaculately balanced systems to its extraordinarily well-realised art, static drawings of those characters that each feel like a glossy, coffee table magazine cover of their own, such is the incredible texture, colour, posture, pain behind the eyes. Citizen Sleeper is speaking to you, but in this case I really recommend you simply listen - not least because there's depth to be found in your own silence, and because the things it does have to say are absolutely worth hearing.
Norco is a beautiful, surprising, human, and utterly magnetic debut.
Despite an endearing commitment to its relentlessly positive tone, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands almost feels designed by a dice roll.