The campaign takes place in 2029, with the Federation of Central Usea largely occupied following an invasion by the Republic of Sotoa. You begin as an unknown pilot rescued at sea and brought aboard the ageing aircraft carrier Endurance, before being given the identity of the legendary “Wings of Theve” and becoming a symbol of hope for the remaining forces.

If I’m honest, I didn’t initially pay much attention. I’m in a plane, and I’ll shoot the bad guys! But I was surprised how personal the story feels, and this is aided by between missions having first-person sections aboard the carrier where you can spend time with your squadron and get to know the people you’re fighting alongside and really ‘live’ the character.

Some of it is cheesy, but by the end I genuinely cared about my squad mates. It could easily be Top Gun 3. Of course, the flying is what really matters, and thankfully it’s excellent. Ace Combat 8 remains firmly on the arcade side of aviation. You’re not spending twenty minutes learning how to start an engine or worrying about realistic missile capacity. Flight Simulator, this is not. You get a choice of two control systems, then get into the air, find something that needs destroying and fire missiles at it.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no depth. Positioning yourself behind an enemy, timing a missile correctly and then immediately banking away as the warning system tells you something is locked onto you is incredibly satisfying. Some of the larger encounters are just insane chaos; with missiles, aircraft and explosions seemingly everywhere. It can be overwhelming – the HUD gives you a green box around most things, so there is an awful lot to pay attention to until you’re used to it.

There’s a good selection of aircraft to unlock as you progress, along with different weapons and upgrades. I found myself experimenting much more than I expected, particularly when replaying missions where a different aircraft or weapon could completely change my approach. The ability to change the colour schemes of planes (in multiplayer) is good as well, as you can forge your own identity in the sky.

The mission variety is another highlight. You’re not simply shooting down identical groups of fighters repeatedly. There are enormous aerial battles, ground attacks and missions built around specific objectives and environmental conditions. The campaign constantly finds new ways of putting you under pressure.

Jump into the multiplayer though, and it’s moves up a notch. In an open ‘lobby’ area of a military base, you run around with other players and reach areas (which can also be accessed via menus) to launch different modes, or customise planes. Team Deathmatch does what it says on the tin, but there are a variety of co-op and PvPvE modes which replicate the excitement of a campaign, but with your mates. A progression system sits across modes here, meaning there reasons to keep playing and crown yourself the ‘Ace’ of the sky.

Visually, it’s spectacular. On Series X, the aircraft themselves look almost photorealistic at times, but it’s the sky that impressed me most. The clouds are incredible, particularly when you’re diving through layers of them while trying to escape an enemy missile. Condensation covers the cockpit as mist obscures your view. The weather and lighting can completely transform the atmosphere of a mission too.

Combined with the soundtrack – which becomes suitably enormous whenever the game decides something dramatic is happening, which is quite a lot – some battles genuinely feel like playable scenes from an action film. On more than a few occasions, I’ve had to take a deep breath.

There are some frustrations. Certain missions rely a little too heavily on throwing huge numbers of targets at you, and failing towards the end of a longer mission can be annoying. Unlocking everything also requires a fair amount of grinding, particularly if you want some of the more expensive aircraft and upgrades.

The story won’t work for everyone either. Ace Combat takes itself incredibly seriously while simultaneously asking you to accept completely absurd situations. But then, if you’ve seen Top Gun, this would fit in perfectly fine.

By the time the credits rolled, I had really enjoyed the campaign. Ace Combat 8 doesn’t reinvent the series. Instead, it takes everything Ace Combat already did well and makes it bigger, prettier and considerably more cinematic.

It’s ridiculous, dramatic and over the top. But when I’m flying through the clouds, missiles streaking past the cockpit while the soundtrack is going absolutely mental in the background, it’s hard not to recommend this to anyone.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X

It’s a marble run building sim from solo developer Pixel Pea Games and publisher Mythwright, and it’s the Berlin studio’s debut game. That’s remarkable, because it plays like something made by a team ten times the size. You get a big toybox of track pieces and freeform tools, and the freedom to be as sensible or as ridiculous as you like. Spoiler: you will be ridiculous.

Let’s start with the stuff. There is an incredible amount you can do here. Loops, twists and drops are the bread and butter, but then the boosters turn up, followed by ramps, and cannons that fire your marbles across the room like tiny glass artillery. There are anti-gravity fields for when you’ve decided physics is optional. There are even xylophone blocks, so your marbles can play a tune on the way past. I’m not saying I spent a good while trying to build a marble orchestra, but I’m not saying I didn’t either. You can build in wood, metal or plastic, pick your colours and name your creation, and the pieces behave the way you’d expect them to, which is all I ever ask of a toy.

The themes are the other big win. The Living Room is the cosy nostalgia hit, the Fairytale Tavern brings a bit of fantasy, and the Space Station is where the sci-fi parts live. Each one changes the feel of what you’re building, so you’re never stuck staring at the same backdrop wondering where it all went wrong. A little Challenges menu hands out rewards for tasks, which gives you a nudge in a direction if you want one, but nobody is holding your hand and nobody is timing you.

Then there are the marbles themselves, which have more personality than some games’ main characters. You can give them colours, patterns, faces, hats and tiny flailing arms. Yes, arms. Watching a marble in a top hat windmill its way down a spiral with a look of mild panic on its face is one of the finest things I’ve seen in a game this year. I’d say I have a favourite, but I’d have to admit I got attached to a lot of them.

And now the part I didn’t expect to love: failure. Every build is a hypothesis, and a hypothesis can fall apart. My marbles regularly ran out of track, took a leap of faith and sailed off the edge of the table, rolling away into oblivion. It’s weirdly satisfying. There’s no game over screen, no sad trombone, just a little glass ball bidding the world farewell and heading off to join every marble I ever lost under the sofa. It’s a failure mechanic that makes you laugh instead of reaching for the rage-quit button, and it’s the reason you’ll rebuild the same section fifteen times with a daft grin on your face.

This is the kind of game that could easily be a one-evening wonder, but there’s a lot of staying power in it. Races can be as simple as a couple of marbles to a finish line or as bonkers as hundreds of them at once, and watching a whole field of them pile through a course is a spectacle that never gets old. Steam Workshop support means you can share your creations and download other people’s, which turns every browse into a lucky dip of other people’s genius and madness. It’s the sort of thing that has you saying “I’ll just do one more tweak” at nine o’clock and looking up to find it’s gone midnight. It’s a proper hat-wearing-arm-flailing-cannon-firing-marble-em-up (it’ll catch on).

Streamers get something special too. Twitch integration lets chat drop marbles into your course and join your race, which is a brilliant idea that costs the developer very little and gives the community a lot. Imagine a few hundred viewers all cheering on their own little glass champion while you frantically try to stop your track from collapsing. It’s chaotic, it’s silly and it’s absolutely perfect for the format.

And the price. Cozy Marbles launched at £8.99 on Steam, with a launch discount on top. For a game with this much depth, this much charm and this many hats, that’s daylight robbery, except you’re the one doing the robbing. I’ve paid more for a coffee that I enjoyed far less than watching a marble in a wizard hat fire out of a cannon. It’s a bargain, plain and simple.

Is it for everyone? No. If you want a story, a ranking system or a big boss at the end, you won’t find them here. Cozy Marbles is a toy, a very good one, and it asks you to bring your own imagination. But if you ever lay on the floor building a marble run, or watched a child do it with the sort of focus usually reserved for defusing bombs, this is going to hit you right in the nostalgia. I’ll happily admit I went in expecting a pleasant way to kill an evening and came out with a head full of track layouts.

Best of all, when a marble goes missing, I don’t have to move the sofa.

Reviewed on PC

The setup is simple. A hundred players split into three teams (Valkyra, Lonestar and Manticore) and scrap over a randomly placed 2x2km control zone on a 256km² map of derelict, industrial Eastern Europe. Most players inside the zone earns points, and first to 100 wins. It grew out of a King of the Hill mod for Arma 3, and you can feel that lineage: it’s big, it’s loose, and nobody tells you how to play. It’s a sprint-to-a-two-kilometre-circle-and-argue-about-it-em-up (it’ll catch on).

So where do Call of Duty, Battlefield and Counter-Strike come in? Neatly, actually. Battlefield supplies the scale: 100 players, vehicles, helicopters, artillery and a destructible battlefield you can build on, right down to your own forward operating bases. Counter-Strike supplies the money. Everyone starts with $10,000, cash is earned through kills, objectives and teamwork, and each life begins with a trip to the shop. Call of Duty supplies the loadout itch: pick your weapons, gear and vehicles, level up, unlock more toys, go again.

Because teamwork pays, squads that coordinate outspend lone wolves, and that gives matches a lovely rhythm. You can chase the Hot Zone for double cash, buy a ghillie suit and snipe from a distance, or ferry supplies to teammates by helicopter. Local voice chat lets you talk tactics or, as the developers cheerfully admit, troll the enemy. A hardcore mode strips out the killcam and most of the HUD for the masochists.

It’s early access, so this is a story so far. Wardogs landed on Steam on 10 September and sold 1.25 million copies, then promptly met its own popularity. Servers buckled, queues stretched for hours, and the Steam user score dipped to 57% before recovering to a Mostly Positive 78%. Bulkhead then got its head down. Patch 0.11 split the server browser into Community and Official listings. Patch 0.1.2 on 30 September fixed the WD-L020 crash, capped a vehicle fly-through exploit and beefed up server security. Reports are now weighted, so serial or malicious reporters carry less influence.

Season 2 arrived on 15 October with four new weapons, four vehicles, rain, and a faction balance experiment after one team was found to be winning far less than the others. Player numbers have cooled from the launch frenzy (Steam is averaging roughly 142,000 in October, down about 40% on September), but that is still a very healthy crowd.

There are grumbles. Vehicle handling drew criticism before launch, balance is a work in progress, and cheating is the big question as the game grows. Bulkhead says it’ll stay in early access for 12 to 24 months, so it’s all still moving, but it’s something to keep in mind.

What I like is that it’s a properly different diversion from the usual FPS menu. There’s no battle pass, no pay-to-win, cash can’t be bought with real money, and cosmetics are earned through play. It’s not for everyone, and the rough edges are real, but if you fancy big, messy, three-way warfare with a shopping habit, this is a very enjoyable place to spend an evening.

After the disappointing MXGP 24, this feels like a significant reset for the series. MXGP 26 moves to Unreal Engine 5, completely reworks the bike physics and introduces dynamic track deformation. The result is a motocross game that can be genuinely rewarding once you get used to it, but it’s certainly not an easy one to jump into. Initially, I crashed. A lot.

The bikes have a real sense of weight to them and you need to think about your positioning, throttle and how you’re approaching jumps rather than simply holding the accelerator and steering. Get a landing slightly wrong or hit the edge of a berm awkwardly and there’s a good chance you’ll end up separated from your bike. Thankfully, there are a large number of assist options to aid with traction control, rider weight-shifting and even steering sensitivity.

It can occasionally feel unfair, particularly when the physics do something unexpected, but once I started learning the tracks and understanding what the game wanted from me, I really enjoyed it. There’s a great feeling when you finally string together a series of jumps and corners properly and start shaving seconds from your lap times. The dynamic terrain feature adds to this, and is probably MXGP 26’s best feature.

Tracks don’t remain perfectly intact throughout a race. As the bikes repeatedly travel over the surface, ruts begin to develop and the racing lines visibly change. It isn’t simply a graphical effect either. You actually have to react to what’s happening underneath you, particularly later in a race. There is a practice arena where you can basically hoon about – I tried riding back and forward in a line to build a big rut, and then ride perpendicular to it to see the effect. It worked as expected – a big dip/lip! Fantastic stuff. Combined with the different dirt and sand surfaces, it makes motocross feel noticeably different from conventional circuit racing. Add rain into the equation and races can become impressively messy.

Visually, it’s also a big improvement. On Series X, MXGP 26 can look excellent. Bikes become increasingly covered in dirt, crowds and trackside details give events some atmosphere and the deforming surfaces are particularly impressive. It’s not always flawless – there are still some rough edges, particularly with pop-in on textures at the start of races – but this is easily the best the series has looked.

Unfortunately, once you leave the track, things become considerably less impressive. The biggest problem is the lack of a proper career mode. You can compete in the MX2 or MXGP Championship and race through the official season, but that’s basically it. There’s no journey from MX2 into MXGP, no meaningful team management, bike development or sponsorship system and very little sense that you’re building a career. Complete a championship and you’re essentially sent back to the menu.

That’s particularly disappointing because the official licence itself is well represented. You get the 2026 MXGP and MX2 riders and all 19 circuits, and there’s a decent amount of customisation available for your own rider and bike. I just wish there was a better structure giving me a reason to use all of it.

Outside Championship there’s Grand Prix, Time Attack and online multiplayer, but the overall package still feels surprisingly bare. Online multiplayer can result in some quite full races, but the netcode (in the 6 or 7 races I’ve had) has been consistently shonky, which is unforgiveable in this day and age.

Despite the assists, it’s also not especially welcoming to newcomers. There are assists and difficulty options, but the game doesn’t do a particularly good job of teaching you the finer points of controlling a motocross bike. There’s no rewind either, so mistakes are punished heavily. Personally, I don’t mind having to learn a difficult racing game, but a proper tutorial would have made those first few hours considerably less frustrating. For new players, this could be a little too much, as the assists seem like they’re there more to aid riders that are getting into the game, rather than players trying to learn it from scratch.

That’s ultimately the strange thing about MXGP 26. The developers have done the difficult bit. They’ve created a solid foundation for a really good motocross game. The riding is challenging and rewarding, the track deformation genuinely affects races and visually it’s a huge step forward, but they’ve forgotten to build enough of a game around it.

I enjoyed my time with MXGP 26 considerably, and when everything clicks, the racing itself is excellent. I just wish there was a proper career and more progression to keep me invested.

Hopefully MXGP 27 takes what works here and builds on it, because the foundations are definitely there.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X

You play as the First Guardian, exploring the ruined world of Arsilthus after the destruction of the Great Relic. It’s very obviously influenced by Souls games, with a bleak fantasy world, difficult enemies, huge bosses and a story that you largely piece together yourself. However, it does have enough ideas of its own to avoid feeling like a complete copy. 

The combat is probably its biggest success. Unlike most Soulslikes, attacking doesn’t use stamina. Instead, stamina is mainly something you must manage when defending, blocking or dodging. It sounds like a small change, but it makes combat much more aggressive. You are not punished for going crazy with strikes, and instead ensuring that your defence is more considered when you brace yourself for the onslaught of the enemies. 

There are five weapon types, and I enjoyed experimenting with the different skills and relics as I progressed. There are also no traditional character levels but rather your strength comes from the equipment and relics you find, with relics providing different passive effects that allow you to shape your build. This shifts the typical Soulslike approach somewhat and moves it more akin to ‘looter-shooter’ territory. I actually liked this system because it meant exploration felt directly connected to becoming stronger rather than simply collecting a lot of experience points just to up my dexterity by one click.

Bosses are a huge part of the game – and there are an enormous number of them. However, this is both a strength and a weakness. Some encounters are excellent and gave me that familiar Souls feeling of repeatedly getting destroyed before finally learning the attacks and winning. Others are nowhere near as memorable, and eventually the sheer number of boss encounters makes them feel less special and you are more engaging with a boss-rush style game.

There are some quite beautiful and atmospheric locations, and I enjoyed heading away from the obvious route to find caves, equipment and smaller stories. The game also has an interesting approach where many of the enemies and bosses have tragic stories behind them. I actually found these individual stories to be more interesting than the main plot. 

Unfortunately, exploration can also feel surprisingly empty. There are large areas where I spent quite a while wandering around without discovering anything particularly worthwhile, and the lack of useful map features occasionally made returning to something I’d discovered earlier unnecessarily frustrating. 

Then there are the technical problems. It doesn’t really ever feel completely polished. The camera can be a nightmare during certain fights. Animations occasionally look awkward and the performance isn’t as consistent as I’d expect from a modern PS5 game. The voice acting and presentation can also feel noticeably lower budget. None of this completely ruined the game for me, but there were definitely points where I died due to what I felt I had been due to me fighting the controls or camera rather than the enemy. 

It’s a shame because underneath all of that is a surprisingly enjoyable action RPG. Once I had become more comfortable with its systems, and I had a build that suited the way I wanted to play, I was enjoying exploring the world far more than I had at the beginning.

I’m left with mixed feelings. There is too much repetition, the story never completely grabbed me and technically it needs more polish. But I also spent time enjoying exploring its world, developing my character and I had some genuinely satisfying boss fights. 

It’s certainly not one of the best Soulslikes I’ve played, but it’s also more interesting than a number of others out there. If you can tolerate some rough edges, there’s a good action RPG buried underneath them. 

Reviewed on Xbox Series X

The sequel moves the action to the USA and once again puts you in charge of your own lawn-care business. You start relatively small, taking on contracts and gradually building up your company, buying better equipment and taking on larger and more complicated jobs.

The actual mowing remains as satisfying as the first game. There’s something incredibly relaxing about arriving at an overgrown lawn and slowly turning it into something neat and organised. Finding an efficient route around a garden, getting the cutting height right and watching the percentage creep towards completion shouldn’t be particularly compelling, but somehow it is. It leans into the classic endorphin-releasing mechanic of Powerwash Simulator, with the pleasure of being ‘in’ nature.

One of the biggest improvements is the grass itself. It has been completely reworked for the sequel, with different heights, weeds and flowers making lawns look considerably more natural. More importantly, it’s much easier to see where you’ve actually cut. That might sound like a tiny improvement, but in a game entirely about mowing grass, it makes a massive difference.

There’s also now a lot more to do than simply sitting on a mower. You have additional equipment including string trimmers a leaf blower. Clearing leaves involves blowing them together and eventually collecting them using a tarp. I didn’t expect leaf blowing to become one of the highlights of a videogame I’ve played this year, but here we are. It provides some much-needed variety and has exactly the same oddly satisfying quality as mowing.

The career side has also been expanded. Your headquarters is now an actual location you can walk around rather than everything being handled through menus. You can manage contracts, maintain your equipment, expand your fleet and hire employees as your company grows. It’s hardly Football Manager with lawnmowers, but it does a better job of making it feel like you’re actually building a business rather than simply selecting the next level.

There’s a good selection of licensed machinery for those who know their lawn mowers, and I enjoyed gradually moving onto bigger and more capable machines. Different locations also require slightly different approaches, ranging from fairly straightforward residential gardens through to much larger commercial jobs. Locations can change when you return to them too, so revisiting somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean completing exactly the same job again, with different types of debris and weeds/leaves all over the place.

On Series X, it looks good rather than spectacular. The improved grass is obviously the star, and seeing a messy lawn transformed into neat stripes can look surprisingly impressive. However, there is this effect of ‘flickering’ as the grass moves in the sunlight and wind, which can make your eyes got a bit funny. This was worse in the first game, and whilst improved, is still a bit of a pain after a while of staring at a lot of green.

There are two problems really: one is the jank, and one is repetition.

Despite everything added, it sometimes feels a bit rough. Graphical improvements are welcome, and it doesn’t look bad, but when your character stops and starts in a weird judder, and then sort of falls up a kerb, it is jarring.

And even with the new equipment and expanded career, you’re still going to spend an enormous amount of time driving backwards and forwards cutting grass. Some of the bigger contracts can outstay their welcome, particularly when you’re hunting for that final tiny patch you’ve somehow missed. If the basic idea doesn’t appeal to you, nothing here is going to change your mind. Powerwash 2 learned that this frustration in the first game could go a long way towards enjoyment once fixed. The developers here didn’t quite get the memo.

Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 isn’t trying to be exciting. It’s a game I can put on when I don’t particularly want to concentrate on a complicated story or spend an evening getting destroyed in Arc Raiders. I can stick something on in the background, mow a few lawns and watch my business gradually grow. It’s repetitive, occasionally tedious and absolutely not going to appeal to everyone.

But I also can’t deny that looking back at a lawn I’ve just spent half an hour meticulously cutting and seeing perfectly straight stripes is ridiculously satisfying.

It’s a bigger and better sequel that understands exactly why people enjoyed the original. And it’s still more fun than mowing my actual, real-life lawn.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X

Interested? Head here for how to buy!

The setup will be familiar to anyone who’s picked up a 3D platformer in the last thirty years. There are three food-themed worlds and more than 40 levels, moving from the vegetable nightmare to a sweets-and-candy world and a barbecue-soaked desert. Garfield can jump, cling to walls, curl into a ball, ground pound and kick his way through the vegetable henchmen, and three hits sends him back to the last checkpoint. Lasagnas are the main collectible, and gathering them unlocks furniture for Jon’s house, which acts as the hub between levels. Jon, Odie, Arlene and Pookie all turn up, while Nermal and Squeak play villains alongside Chef Monday.

The first thing that hits you, though, is the voices, and they’re not like any Garfield you’ve heard before. Whether you grew up with Lorenzo Music in Garfield and Friends, caught Bill Murray in the live-action films, or sat through Chris Pratt in The Garfield Movie, nothing quite prepares you for this. Fans of the TV shows or films will find the whole thing quite unsettling at first, a bit like hearing a mate’s voice come out of a stranger’s mouth. You do get used to it, eventually. Sort of.

There’s still a fair old dollop of charm here. The worlds are bright, colourful and clearly made by people who like the source material, and the costumes are the best ideas in the game. A turkey outfit gives Garfield extra hang time, a surfer outfit lets him ride across water, and a cowboy outfit hands him a lasso to swing about with. They’re daft, they suit the character perfectly, and I’d have happily taken more of them.

It’s also easy, properly easy. You’ll rarely be in danger and almost never stuck, and the generous checkpoints mean a mistimed jump costs next to nothing. That’s hard to hold against it, though, when it’s so clearly aimed at a younger audience. For a kid taking their first steps into 3D platforming, it’s a friendly, low-stress place to start, and nobody’s going to throw a controller across the room.

It doesn’t help that the genre has had a strong few years. Astro Bot throws a new idea at you every couple of minutes, and Super Mario Odyssey remains the gold standard for packing a level with surprises. Next to those, Escape From Monday feels like it’s working from a checklist: wall jump, ground pound, collectible, boss, repeat. You’re rarely asked to do anything you didn’t already do a couple of levels earlier, and it never quite finds the moment that makes you lean in. You could argue that a game happy to coast is the most faithful Garfield adaptation possible, and I’d almost agree. Everything works, but very little made me sit up and take notice, and in this company competent isn’t quite enough.

None of it’s a dealbreaker, mind, just a game that plays it a little too safe. Time trials let you replay stages for speed, and the full run should take somewhere between six and nine hours depending on how thorough you are with the lasagna hunting.

Garfield: Escape From Monday is the best Garfield game in years (not the highest of bars, admittedly), with plenty of warmth, three cracking costume gimmicks and a world built with obvious affection. What it doesn’t have is the invention to sit alongside the genre’s heavy hitters. Seasoned platformer fans will find it a bit too comfortable, but if you’re a Garfield fan who can get past the new voices, or you’re after a gentle first platformer for the kids, there’s a pleasant enough lazy afternoon to be had. It won’t be knocking that signed picture off the spare bedroom wall any time soon, but the kid who wrote that letter is exactly who this game is for. Just don’t expect it to get you out of bed on a Monday.

Reviewed on PC & Switch 2

The game comes from Milestone and Mattel. Milestone made Hot Wheels Unleashed and Unleashed 2: Turbocharged, both built around tracks, but this time the tracks are gone. In their place is an open world scaled down to Hot Wheels size, split across four themed islands. Wheelswood is a die-cast city of skyscrapers and narrow side streets. Tentacle Bay swaps the concrete for beaches and clear water. Gearville is a dusty desert of factories and canyons, and Drifty Temples is all cherry blossom and ancient pagodas. A system called The Launcher lets you sky-jump between them without the need to actually do the driving, which you’d think would be counter-intuitive but is a bit of a time saver.

Each island is ruled by a Rush Master. You work through events to unlock their challenge, beat them, and claim their car and their title. Beat all four and you’re crowned the one true Rush Master, which is a lovely thing to be able to say at parties and will almost certainly make you an absolute hit with whichever gender you choose to aim to impress. There’s no story to get in the way, just you, a garage and an excuse to go fast. That’s quite cool, but some context to things might have added a little intrigue.

Races are only part of the picture. Daredevil challenges have you chasing special cars spotted in traffic and adding them to your collection if you win. Delivery Stunts ask you to get a car somewhere quickly while every bump takes its toll. Tourist challenges hand you photo prompts and send you to scenic spots, which makes a nice breather when you’ve been flooring it for an hour. Then there’s Stuntman, where the whole point is smashing as much of the scenery as possible. It’s a bumper-first-through-the-scenery-em-up (it’ll catch on), and it’s every bit as daft and satisfying as it sounds.

Here’s where the cracks show, though. The open world is cool, but it’s also restrictive. You still have to stick to certain paths, and you can’t go fully cross-country the way you can in The Crew or other open world racers. Having a toy-sized map to play in raises the expectation that you can tear across it however you like, and the game doesn’t quite deliver on that. It also feels a little empty at times. There’s plenty to do, but between events the world can feel more like a backdrop than a place.

The age target plays a part in how it feels too. This is clearly aimed at a younger crowd, and that makes it a little less engaging for me than something like Forza Horizon. That’s not a criticism of the game for doing what it set out to do. I’m just not the audience it’s most interested in.

What picks it all up is the cars. There are more than 150 of them, split across four classes: Versatiles, Titans, Drifters and Speeders. Each handles differently and has its own upgrades. The roster mixes classic Hot Wheels originals with real-world brands, and Ferrari makes its Hot Wheels game debut here. You earn new ones through events and challenges, and you can customise them right down to the wheels. Being able to collect such a huge range genuinely excites me, and it’s the thing that kept me coming back. If you’d rather make your own fun, there’s a track creator too, and you can add AI opponents to your creations by placing action markers. As someone who spent far too many evenings building tracks on the carpet, that one hit home.

Friends and family aren’t left out either. Split-screen supports up to four players, and there’s online multiplayer with cross-play on everything except Switch 2. I’m all in on split screen gaming, and being able to smash into others sit shoulder to shoulder with me adds a really cool element of fun.

Generally though, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a fun, colourful game that’s held back by an open world that’s more restrictive and emptier than it first appears. The sheer novelty of the thing, and the thrill of filling a garage with tiny cars, give it a lift it wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s not a Forza Horizon rival, and it’s not trying to be. But if you grew up pushing little cars around the carpet, or you’ve got kids who do, there’s a lot of fun to be had here.

Reviewed on PC

You play as a Mind Diver, using experimental technology to enter the mind of a woman called Lina. Her boyfriend, Sebastian, has disappeared and, at the same time, Lina is rapidly losing her memories. Your job is essentially to explore what remains of those memories, repair the missing pieces and gradually work out what happened.

The way this is presented is easily one of the best things about the game. Rather than simply selecting memories from a menu, you actually swim around Lina’s subconscious, or ‘Mind Ocean’, discovering different moments from her past. It gives the whole game a strange, dreamlike atmosphere that fits the subject perfectly. If you think ‘Inception’, you’re not too far off from the premise of this game.

Once you enter a memory, you can move around, listen to conversations and inspect the people and objects around you. Parts of each memory are missing, and you have to work out what belongs in the gap. You can pick up objects, people and other details and insert them into these gaps. Get the right answer and the memory continues, often revealing another piece of the story.

I really like this idea. You actually have to listen to what people are saying and pay attention to fairly small details rather than simply following objective markers. There were a few occasions where I had to go back through previous memories because something I’d originally dismissed suddenly became important. This backtracking may annoy some, and if you’re the type of person that games while listening to a podcast or chatting to mates, this probably isn’t for you.

The downside is that the basic gameplay loop doesn’t really develop much beyond this. Once you understand the system, you’re essentially repeating the same process for the rest of the game. Some of the later puzzles become more involved because you have more memories and objects to consider, but I would have liked a little more variety. There were also a couple of solutions where I knew what had to go where, but I had to complete a few bits in a specific order to get to the end point. 

Fortunately, the story is strong enough to carry it. What starts as a fairly straightforward mystery gradually becomes much more about the main characters themselves. You see their relationship through fragmented moments – the good parts, arguments, mistakes and things that take on a completely different meaning once you know more about what happened. As the context is revealed, by the final part of the game I was more interested in understanding the main characters’ reasoning than simply solving the case.

Visually, it’s unique. The characters and locations were apparently created using 3D scans of real actors and places, giving everything a slightly rough, almost reconstructed appearance. Initially I wasn’t sure about it, but it quickly grew on me because it feels aligned with the setting about memories and imperfect recollections. The voice acting is particularly good and it is important as so much of the game relies on listening to conversations.

It’s not a long game – and I actually think that’s a strength. It’s not quite in the realm of ‘interactive film’ but it’s certainly not a 15 hour gameplay experience.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. The puzzles aren’t always clever and the gameplay can become repetitive, but the atmosphere, presentation and story kept me interested all the way through. It’s less a traditional detective game and more an interactive psychological mystery about memory, relationships and how differently events can look once you have the full picture.

Reviewed on PS5

Set 72423 gets you 1,403 pieces, a posable brick-built Shrek and Donkey, and a minifigure-scale Puss in Boots, all perched on a swamp base complete with a “Beware Ogre!” sign, sunflowers, and, fittingly, an onion. It’s £109.99 in the UK, and aimed squarely at the 18+ display crowd, and it looks it. This isn’t a toy you hand to a six year old to pull apart and throw at the cat, it’s a shelf piece for people who fancy Fiona more as an ogre than a human and aren’t scared to admit it.

The build itself is a genuine pleasure from start to finish. It’s well paced, never dragging in the way some big licensed sets can when you’re fifty pages deep into what feels like the same grey brick over and over, and the instructions are some of the clearest I’ve put together in a while. Crystal clear, step by step, no head-scratching moments where you’re squinting at a diagram wondering if LEGO have quietly invented a new dimension. My one bit of practical advice: get yourself some decent lighting for a few of the darker sections. There aren’t many of them, thankfully, just the odd cluster of similarly-shaded dark green and brown pieces where a dim room will have you second-guessing which nub goes where, but when they crop up they crop up hard.

Posability is where you have to manage your expectations a bit, and I think that’s true of pretty much any brick-built character model like this. You’re not getting an action figure. Shrek’s hand has a bit of movement in it, enough for a wave or a shrug, and Donkey’s mouth can be posed open or shut depending on whether you want him mid-quip or just stood quietly, but beyond that both figures are largely locked into their display stance. That’s the trade-off you make for the sculpting quality on show here, and it is properly good sculpting. The shaping, the colour blocking, the way Shrek’s bulk is conveyed without the whole thing looking like a green brick wearing a face, it all works far better than it has any right to.

What really won me over were the small touches you don’t clock until you’re deep into the build. There’s food tucked away inside Shrek’s stomach, a lovely bit of hidden detail that serves no purpose whatsoever beyond making you grin when you spot it, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that separates a good licensed set from a great one. It’s not showing off, it’s not on the box art, it’s just there for the people who go looking. Puss in Boots, being a standard minifigure rather than a sculpted piece, feels like a slightly different animal sitting next to his brick-built companions, scale-wise he’s doing his own thing, but he’s a nice inclusion for anyone building a wider Shrek shelf and I’d rather have him in the box than not.

Worth a specific shout as well: there isn’t a single sticker anywhere on this set. Every bit of detailing, from Shrek’s face to the swamp signage, is printed straight onto the piece. That’s a small thing for some builders and a genuinely big deal for others, anyone with limited dexterity, a shaky hand, or just a well-founded hatred of getting stickers on at a slight angle and having to live with it forever will appreciate this far more than the box blurb lets on. More licensed sets should do this as standard.

Is it perfect? Not quite, I’d have liked a little more movement in the limbs, but very little at this price point in this hobby is going to give endless possibilities. This limited articulation will bug people who want to actually play with their purchase rather than just display it, and £110 is a proper outlay for what is, ultimately, a very fancy shelf ornament. But as a shelf ornament it’s a brilliant one: well paced to build, beautifully detailed, stuffed with little touches that reward a close look, and accessible to builders who’d normally get filtered out by fiddly stickers. This is a love letter to the film built one brick at a time, and it mostly sticks the landing, no stickers required.