Nothing on this page was written from a preview build or a press event. If a game appears here, somebody at the desk reached its natural end and kept notes the whole way.
Open world
8.6
Forty-two hours, no quest markers, and a map that asks you to read terrain instead of icons. The second act loses its nerve, but the last five hours are among the best we played this year.
Simulation
9.0
Two in-game years, fifty-eight real hours, and a village that changes shape depending on which neighbours you bother to talk to. The highest score we have given a simulation game.
Racing
7.4
The best drift model we have driven in three years, wrapped in a career mode with fourteen tracks pretending to be forty. Superb to play in bursts, exhausting to complete.
Tactics
8.1
Supply lines, weather and morale interlock beautifully once you understand them. The game does almost nothing to help you get there, so we wrote the first four hours down for you.
Puzzle
8.8
A wordless six-hour platformer where every mechanic is taught by the level itself. We finished it twice — once to review, once because the last puzzle deserved a second look.
Base building
7.9
Ignore the oxygen meter; the real game is throughput. Forty-four hours in we were redesigning an entire smelting district for a nine percent gain and enjoying every minute.
Games we are part-way through. No score exists yet, and we will not publish one until the run is complete.
