NME

If you liked Returnal, you will love just about everything about Saros. This is a true elevation, with Housemarque confirming their genius in the ‘bullet hell’ genre. As games mature as an artform, there’s a particular joy in following developers so steeped in the medium’s mechanical history. An easy recommend.

Pragmata is a fun, thrilling sci-fi romp. The combat/hacking mechanic evolves the shooter genre in a refreshing way, while the tale of villainous AI, rogue 3D printers and unlikely human connection blends the horror elements with something more wholesome. This is a sleek, polished package from legendary developer Capcom that makes every minute of its to-the-point 12-hour playtime matter.

There’s no denying that Crimson Desert is a massively ambitious game. Bringing together the most inventive parts of Breath Of The Wild, The Witcher, Elden Ring and a dozen more fantasy games means you can still be surprised after sinking hundreds of hours into exploring the beautiful, varied land of Pailune. However, trying to cram so many different mechanics into a game that also offers players total freedom means it often feels a bit hollow.

More of a show than a game – imagine Alan Wake taking place in Dawson’s Creek – Life Is Strange: Reunion works wonderfully as an involving continuation of Max Caulfield’s web-like, multi-timelined story, for fans already engaged with the weaving franchise plots and concepts. Newcomers may feel dropped in midway though, and there’s little intellectual or skill-based challenge to keep you hooked. The stakes are low, the action slow and there’s little to get either pulse or brain cell pumping. Maybe wait for the TV show…

One of the most darkly beautiful games you’ll ever play – albeit in a very similar way to the Little Nightmares franchise games – Reanimal is a short but deeply immersive, edge-of-the-seat experience, at once touching and terrifying. Its world is hauntingly macabre, its stealth sections truly tense, its chases thrilling and its puzzles simple yet strangely rewarding. It (unobtrusively) holds your hand a fair bit, but you’ll be grateful for a hand to hold as it takes you deep into the more disturbing corners of 20th Century history, promising more dark DLC revelations to this story to come.

In terms of comic book immersion, the pulp horror style of I Hate This Place does a great job to suck fans inside the cartoon frame. It looks darkly delicious, right down to the KAPOW!-style crackles, snaps and crunches that pop out of the screen to highlight crafting fires, underfoot glass or dynamite fuses. For serious gamers though, it’s little more than an enjoyably creepy distraction with its main story largely a (crouched) walk in the park. Side quests are fun but anticlimactic while crafting and RPG elements are pretty much redundant.

Indie gaming reached new heights last year with Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offering thrilling stories that take place in lovingly-crafted worlds for a reasonable price. That indie renaissance continues with MIO: Memories In Orbit, an intriguingly challenging 2D platformer which looks, sounds and handles just as well as the genre’s greatest hits.

Metroid Prime fans have been waiting 18 years for Beyond but it doesn’t quite live up to the hype. Sure, blasting aliens and exploring sci-fi ruins is as thrilling as ever – but zipping about the deserted world of Viewros on your new motorbike is nowhere near as fun as it should be. A lot of the puzzles are similarly underdeveloped. There are flickers of greatness during this perilous mission of survival but more often than not, it all feels a bit pedestrian. It’s not really what anybody wanted from swaggering intergalactic hero Samus Aran’s grand return.

The sequel to a cult GameCube title released in the slipstream of a karting phenom, Kirby Air Riders poses a weird proposition.You’ll take a little while to get your head around the simple two-button control set-up, the eye-watering speed and a host of rampaging rivals, but the pink puffball’s long-awaited return strikes a perfect balance between unruly arcade hijinks and strategic smarts.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 builds on what made last year’s Black Ops 6 such a breath of fresh air, tightening up the gunplay and movement while still finding time to introduce a huge, polished new game mode. It’s not the quantum leap that the last game was, but it’s still one of the best entries in the series to date.