Telegraph's Reviews
The controversial fighting series returns, but beneath the blood and guts is a confident, generous and thoroughly modern brawler.
State of Decay for Xbox One is a smart and convincing zombie fantasy, but its ambition often leads to troublesome technical issues.
This unorthodox take on squad-based strategy can be muddled and mulish, but it’s also thrillingly distinctive.
Tim Schafer's warm, humanist adventure is a game of two halves, but its triumphs outweigh the flaws.
By having the courage to rewrite the racing game rulebook, Project Cars manages to carve a space for itself alongside the genre's finest.
The story of Wild Hunt is a personal one, set in a huge and unrelentingly beautiful world. And moving through it in that way makes you feel like a part of it, rather than an honoured guest, all eyes swung expectantly towards you.
This is a generous remastering of a classic role-playing adventure.
OlliOlli developer Roll7's newest project is a frantic shoot 'em up that revels in its messy, hedonistic chaos.
This side-scrolling spinoff of the famous series is a striking, well-executed game, but it could have been a lot more.
This generous standalone prequel to the excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order may be leaner than its parent game, but its breathless rhythm entertains from the off.
Nintendo's quirky online shooter is an ink-stant classic, spoiled slightly by a lack of options.
This is a remarkable, progressive, absorbing game, one sure to prompt fervent discussion among its players, no two of whom will have shared the same experience. Your actions and deductions may not lead to a virtual arrest or conviction, but the curiosity of your inner Columbo will surely have been sated.
I enjoyed Wooly World's fuzzy embrace and flashes of invention, though left it feeling somewhat ungratified. However, I also managed to get a different viewpoint. This was the first game my wife played to completion in several years. And even my two year old son managed to flutter his way through the first few levels using the easier 'mellow' mode, which gives Yoshi wings. Seeing the grin on his face as Yoshi gobbled up pieces of scenery and delirious giggle at the ground pound reminded me of the balance Nintendo face.
There it is again. The feeling. I'm Batman. This is what has made —and continues to make— Rocksteady's Arkham series so good. Knight, for all its foibles and frustrations, consistently gives you that injection of adrenaline. It is supposed to be Rocksteady's final Batman game and you get the impression this is a developer pushing the absolute limits of its series, perfecting it in some areas... breaking it in others.
Rory McIlroy's first PGA Tour might eventually have enough to keep golf fans amused.
You might need some prior connection to Rare to appreciate the nostalgia, of course, but Replay makes you stop and think 'blimey, Rare really were very good'.
Life is Strange's progression from a promising, awkward experiment to a confident, bold narrative is one of the year's most interesting gaming tales.
It's car football, but not as we know it, as Psyonix's exhilarating mix of chaos and control marks it as one of the year's best multiplayer experiences.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is an extraordinary piece of work, with things to say about pacing, writing, world-building and the communication of emotion that feel profoundly valuable to the industry. Along with its peers in this curiously expanding genre of being-in-the-world simulators, it will undoubtedly feed more furious debate about what games should be and what playing them should involve, but its great achievement, for me at least, was to render any such question spectacularly irrelevant during the time that its experience lasted.
It's all highly unsettling, and the most important things about the game -- its mood of fumbling desperation, its clapped-out London settings, its focus on exhaustion and disempowerment -- remain startlingly unchanged after the transition in platform and the stripping of the Wii U's clever propwork.