Darksiders Genesis marks a return to form for the series, with a classic experience underlying the shift in camera perspective and budget price tag. Some minor issues with controls during puzzles and navigation aren't enough to dampen enjoyment of this surprisingly great prequel spinoff.
A fantastic sense of speed and exciting night-time racing help make Need for Speed Heat the best entry into the series in a while, even though the online component is mostly dead-on-arrival and progression can feel like a grind at times due to a stingy economy.
With relevant and humorous commentary on corporate greed and bureaucracy underpinning this smaller scale but highly replayable new IP, The Outer Worlds excels as a Fallout-style RPG thanks to great writing, interesting choices and memorable characters.
Compared to its predecessor, Ghost Recon Breakpoint takes one step forward then tumbles down a hill.
Borderlands 3 sticks to the formula established in previous games. Despite suffering from technical issues and some pretty obnoxious characters and dialogue, the improvements to core mechanics, a great variety of locations and enemies, and series-best procedurally generated loot make it a more than a worthy sequel that should enthrall fans for dozens of hours.
Crytek have made something that feels truly distinct with Hunt: Showdown. The tense, high stakes PvP action blends well with southern swamp-horror PvE to create a fresh and compelling multiplayer experience, though the extreme lethality of the combat and a current lack of content might leave you hunting for a sale.
Guiding a clan of primates through generations as they evolve certainly makes for a unique experience, and there are times when Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey comes together. But a lack of guidance on basic gameplay mechanics, as well as some clumsy controls and unsuccessfully executed ideas, make for a highly uneven game.
After releasing ‘Quantum Break’ exclusively on Microsoft platforms, developer Remedy is back with their third-person action-adventure title, Control. In the game, you play as Jesse Faden, whose search for her missing brother has led to a place known as the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC).
Blade II: The Return of Evil is a mobile born game that has been revamped and introduced to the Switch for its second instalment.
Establishing and expanding a colony while defending against increasingly difficult hordes of infected makes for a very engrossing experience in They Are Billions, though some questionable design choices make shambling through the lengthy Singleplayer campaign a bit of a slog at times.
Three Kingdoms represents a return to form for the historical side of the Total War series, with an emphasis on much improved diplomacy and inner-faction politics, alongside a fantastic setting working in the favour of this massive strategy sequel - even if the real time battles mostly feel very familiar.
Mordhau's incredibly satisfying melee combat and slapstick ultra-violence make for a riotously good time on the medieval battlefield, though a lack of maps for the best mode and lingering technical issues are cracks in the armor of this otherwise thrilling multiplayer slasher.
Falcon Age is a first-person adventure game developed by the small, Seattle-based studio Outerloop. Your journey begins by awaking in a prison cell on a fictitious planet, colonised by an organisation known as the Outer Ring Community (ORC). ORC has stationed robots to farm the planet for resources and uses its inhabitants for manual labour. You play as one of these inhabitants, Ara, whose days consist of monotonous material gathering under the watchful eye of the enslavers. A chance encounter with a baby falcon allows you to escape from the regime and begin your training as a falcon hunter. Fighting alongside her people, Ara plots a rebellion against ORC to reclaim the land that was once theirs.
Anno 1800 offers up a compelling blend of city building and strategy in the industrial era, with a smooth learning curve and fantastically flexible and replayable sandbox mode that will have you starting and re-starting your trading empire as the hours sail by.
Though Washington D.C. lacks the memorable atmosphere of snow-bound New York, and you probably won't care about the plot or characters, The Division 2 is a significantly more robust game at launch. It offers another incredibly detailed open world and a myriad of small tweaks and additions, with a promising future ahead.
Trials Rising offers up a great set of tracks with a good difficulty curve and the most fleshed out multiplayer options the series has ever had, though forced grinding to unlock later tracks in the campaign and intermittent performance problems create the kind of barriers you didn't want to see.
Tannenberg is more accessible and has a greater fun factor than you might expect from a realism-driven World War 1 shooter, thanks to a great central game mode and consistently exciting and satisfying gameplay. Though you'll need to be on board with bolt-action rifles and accept that you are going to die a lot.
Metro Exodus is a more than worthy successor to Last Light, successfully introducing open levels to break up the more linear sequences, while also retaining the unique look, feel and incredible atmosphere that made the previous games so memorable.
The actual interactive component of The Grand Tour Game is really quite poor, with awful handling and dated presentation making the races and challenges vastly inferior to the segments they attempt to replace, in between clips from the show you've already seen.
Insurgency: Sandstorm sees New World Interactive successfully transfer their particular brand of hardcore tactical shooter to a modern game engine with just a few technical hitches, though you'll need to be content with a familiar Middle Eastern setting and somewhat limited set of maps and game modes.