Games Radar+

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit brings back that sense of wonder we all felt when we cracked open our first video game and realised there was another world behind the screen. Only now that other world is in our living rooms.

It’s the closest I think I’ve got to a horror story you play, rather than a game, and it’s that that kept me glued to progressing. I wanted to know where it was going, if my guesses were right, what happened to people and what might happen to Tasi. At times it had the feel of a playable page-turner, and one I had to see through to the end.

Complete with its own special blend of humour, unique mechanics, and a pleasant laid-back feel, this is one puzzle adventure that will satisfy your curious side and offer you something a little different. Oh, and if you're anything like me, you'll be left with an overwhelming craving for a slice of toast.

Both football games need to step up significantly on next-gen. As home consoles enter an era of unprecedented potential, in terms of pure fun neither FIFA 21 nor PES 2021 get anywhere close to those respective series’ PS2 heyday.

Nitpicks aside, though, Crash 4 earns its title as a worthy sequel to Warped, one that preserves the series' timeless charms while bringing bold iteration where it's needed. Toys for Bob's clear love and understanding of what makes Crash tick manifests in every aspect of It's About Time's design, but to call it a love letter would be to unfairly gloss over the important strides it makes for the franchise itself.

Star Wars: Squadrons offers an exhilarating take on dogfighting in a galaxy far, far away, which helps elevate a functional single-player story and provides a strong foundation for a focused multiplayer experience.

Like an early card match at a pay-per-view event, WWE 2K Battlegrounds is meant to keep the crowd entertained before the main event re-enters the arena, but it's rarely as flashy or fun as its concept implies.

Super Mario 3D All Stars' package of three of the best 3D Mario games are just enhanced and tweaked enough to be an enjoyable revisiting, but without removing the classic charm.

Marvel's Avengers has a glittery and joyous core campaign that manages to stack up to modern-day Avengers stories. Its gameplay is varied enough between heroes that there are shining stand-outs and ones that belong in the bin. But its chintzy game-as-service portion takes up too much time and bandwidth, ultimately crippling its chances of being a great game.

Vicarious Visions has built an engine that could actually push the series in a new direction, with the focus on skating rather than gimmicks that came from the annual release cycle that the series was stuck in. Here's hoping this is more of a warm up than a victory lap.

This year's game features six distinct modes spanning Exhibition, Franchise, Face of the Franchise, Superstar KO, Ultimate Team, and The Yard, but the breadth of a half-dozen game modes veils a lack of improvements in half of them.

Tell Me Why - Chapter One is brilliant if you think of it as the opening entry of a mini series, but only pretty good as a game. This is very much an exercise in sowing, but hopefully Chapters Two and Three can be more about reaping.

Wasteland 3 doesn’t bring much new to the table, both as a CRPG and as a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction. But, it’s a terrifically executed role-playing game that rewards player investment from beginning to end.

UFC 4 offers improvements without ever proving itself an essential buy for fight fans. Welcome tweaks to clinches and small career mode additions show EA Vancouver still has a few ideas up its bloody sleeve, but like light heavyweight icon Jon Jones, its latest MMA effort can’t help but blast itself in the foot.

Shot craft rarely fails to satisfy, but it is less successful as a career simulator. Further refinement and polish in that field - as well as more official courses and playable stars - would be welcome if the PGA branding is here to stay. For now, like one of Bryson DeChambeau’s post-lockdown drives, it’s on the right trajectory.

Project Cars 3 is a great way to get into sim racing for newcomers thanks to its overtly gamey career mode, but the move into proper ‘simcade’ territory feels odd and unfulfilling.

The team needs to quickly expand its operations to fix its congested servers but this is, in the grand scheme, a better problem to have than most of what may ail a game studio, and it stands as representative of Fall Guys' immediate and endless charm. The battle royale genre has seen so many successes over the past three years, and by fusing it with a frenzy of party game elements, none have rewritten the rulebook as memorably as Fall Guys.

Gripes aside though, the latest Paper Mario title is a joy to exist in. An excellent story, charming characters, and the ability to team up with your oldest foes makes The Origami King a triumph. Yes, it may not be the new Thousand-Year Door RPG, but it's something special that should be celebrated.

It would be understandable for developer Sucker Punch to feel nervous about releasing a game so close to the critically-acclaimed The Last of Us 2, and as PS5 glimmers on the horizon, but it shouldn't. This is a worthy swan song for the PS4, and a tribute to the Japanese culture it so clearly reveres.

Is it worth your time and money to start playing Rocket Arena as soon as it comes out? If you're looking for a new and approachable take on shooters, and if you can overcome some of your preconceived notions about how many giblets a well-aimed rocket should produce, the answer is "yes" - followed by a series of enthusiastic explosion noises.

Spread over a few hours this could have been a great superhero experience, but stretching it out to a longer run time dampens what few magic moments it has.

Naughty Dog's PS4 swansong is an astonishing, absurdly ambitious epic that goes far and beyond what we could have imagined for a sequel to an all-time classic

I have no idea who I'd recommend Disintegration to. It feels too shallow for strategy fans and too flimsy for shooter fans. If there is a group of people who really liked the turret section in Binary Domain and thought it would be improved by the addition of pet robots and another 10 hours, maybe they could extract some amount of fun from Disintegration. Unfortunately, I could not.

Eco Lifestyle can feel like an uphill battle, but that's one of the best aspects of The Sims 4's gameplay. You have to earn your stripes, put in some serious work, and balance a lot of things at once in order to make a demonstrable change in this world. Funnily enough, that's not very different from IRL.

This is no worthy exploration of man's cruelty to the natural world, and I suspect marine biologists would have something to say about much of the science, but it's the perfect distraction from a world gone mad, and weirdly therapeutic. When you're not filling the water with blood or launching an innocent human into the air with a flick of your tail, the waters are a pretty playground, and there's always mischief to be made in the resorts, water parks, and marinas. Just don't dob me into the killer whale I sponsored when I was 12.