Christian Donlan
Beneath the warm familiarity of 3D World lies one of the strangest Mario games in years - and that's wonderful news.
Ultimate Evil feels like a good place to stand back and see what Diablo 3 actually looks like now, with the auction house dead and the first expansion bedded in. There has been time, hopefully, for players to set aside the game they wanted Diablo 3 to be and understand the game that it is.
New 'n' Tasty! is angry because it holds a cartoon mirror up to the injustices of the modern world: to every clothes factory that falls down or blows up because corners were cut in the race to make 99p T-shirts, and to every water supply privatised in the name of hamburgers or fizzy drinks. Graphics lose their luster. Design tricks become predictable and then forgettable. Injustice, it turns out, rarely goes out of fashion.
That those challenges are housed in a weird trans-dimensional coastal getaway where you can kick a physics-enabled beach ball about or lie in a hammock is just one of many unusual things to enjoy about Transistor. Enjoy the artful approach to science-fiction, enjoy the hoops Supergiant's jumped through to position you in the right place to engage with its combat, and you can even enjoy the very fact that the game often struggles to get its deeper messages across. After all, if the developer had something straightforward to say, it might not have had to make a game in the first place.
Luftrausers is a breathless arcade delight - video game dogfighting has rarely been better.
Hectic local multiplayer madness ensues in this punkish flurry of colour and violence.
Compared to the dull, empty-eyed stoicism of so many triple-A games, it's still a welcome blast of idiot humour, too.
It's a colourful, heartfelt and well-judged spin on one of the most reliably engrossing genres knocking around.
The roguelike gets an inventive jolt of genetics in this gloriously witty dungeon crawler.
Resogun really is that rare kind of arcade game that feels like an entirely different beast when played on the toughest setting. It's also the closest the PS4 launch line-up gets to offering a genuine next-gen thrill. Granted, Housemarque's not offering the shock of the new, perhaps - all of the developer's best ideas are actually reassuringly elderly - but it's working with energy, enthusiasm, precision and love. Oh, and voxels. Look at them scatter!