Steve Hogarty
Rocksteady's latest is a giddy little action-shooter bogged down by conventional loot-chasing guff
A satirical take on beloved 90s dungeon builders, Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master struggles to capture much of the Bullfrog magic.
A steampunk-themed side-scrolling shooter with a shotgun that's also an umbrella, Gunbrella crams plenty of frenetic, brolly-based combat into its brief playtime
A classic arcade space shooter with an action RPG twist, Everspace 2 could have dropped out of a wormhole to the early noughties.
The much-anticipated sequel has suffered a rough launch into Early Access, but push through the bugs and this space exploration sim still falls way short of its ambitions.
A weird meme turned survival horror game with a compelling elevator pitch, Choo-Choo Charles sees you stalked by a half-spider, half-train monster.
A simulation of the everyday reality of being a nuisance sheep, Goat Simulator 3 is more than just the sum of its fart noises.
An Animal Crossing inspired life-sim populated by the world's most fiercely defended intellectual property
In contrast, Session feels back-to-front: so unblinkingly focused on the technical side of riding a skateboard that it's overlooked everything that makes rolling around on a board actually fun. There’s plenty of room for skateboarding games less arcadey than anything with a Tony Hawk face on it, but this early version of Session is a bleak, sterile thing, and one that only serves as a painful reminder of my own lack of talent in most physical activities.
My Time At Sandrock takes every life sim feature under the sun and rolls them into a winning package.
A love letter to the world of snowboarding, Shredders is a passion project that mostly sticks the landing.
A beautiful but barebones combat flight simulator, Tiny Combat Arena is only just taking off.
A strategy game about tens of thousands of tiny idiots trying to break your stuff, Diplomacy Is Not An Option is as gratifying as it is light
A strange, funny, and ambitious fully-acted propaganda simulator, Not For Broadcast puts you at the control desk of the mainstream media
A delirious action RPG set at the end of a dying universe in which time, space and combat mechanics are collapsing in on themselves.
A chaotically structured open world racer, Riders Republic feels like the free roaming SSX sequel we never had.
The Good Life is a shambolic RPG that barely hold together, wrapped in the trappings of a rural life simulator. It's tonally stupid and structurally broken, but also surprisingly deep and occasionally self-aware.
Bugsnax is a faintly naughty, but never crass adventure that feels simultaneously like a love letter to, and a sharply observed satire of, the games that inspired it.
Iron Harvest is a throwback to one of the last golden ages of the genre, often feeling as old fashioned and crusty as that association entails, but frequently reminding us of the essential appeal of extremely large robots chilling out in timelines where they shouldn’t be.
It’s as close to a perfect restoration as you’ll get, and the treatment these genre-defining games deserve.