007 First Light is not a bad game, it's just an uninspiring one—clumsy and awkward and constantly drawing comparisons between itself and other games that achieve its aims much better. It's a very good Bond tale wrapped in a game that veers between unexceptional and ungainly, and whose genuine moments of brilliance don't make up for its long runs of overfamiliarity.

James Bond has a long history in video games, but his quality missions are far fewer and farther between. I’m happy to report that 007 First Light can join the ranks of successful outings, offering a new and original take on the character that is both fresh and rooted in a deep understanding of the man and the fiction. While the game mostly features enjoyable interactive ideas, its mechanics occasionally threaten to dampen the excellent cinematic flow.

007 First Light is Bond's best game yet thanks to smart design decisions that make this a well-rounded spy thriller. Merging together moments of blockbuster spectacle with slower-paced stealth, this understands the appeal of spycraft and is able to deliver the fantasy in ways no other game can. Starring a young James Bond, this origin story can sometimes feel like just a beginning – but what a way for this spy's career to kick off.

007 First Light might just be the best James Bond game ever. The way IOI has translated the Bond fantasy into a 14-hour globetrotting epic is masterful. It's a game full of spectacle, humour, action, and romance.

It's not perfect, but 007 First Light is a mostly great start to IO Interactive's all-new take on the James Bond universe.

007 First Light is less cerebral and replayable than IO's World of Assassination trilogy, but makes up for it with excellent fistfights and oodles of charm.

It is remarkable, then, that I can't stop thinking about a tutorial montage in the early moments of 007 First Light. It's one of the most engaging and effective tutorials I've ever played, and it's all thanks to what it pulls from popular action movies. The scene in question comes when Bond is thrust into training camp with other trainees in the 00 program.

At its core Modern Warfare 4 is a faster, more ferocious shooter. New movement abilities allow you to seamlessly roar through the maps, quickly vaulting over obstacles for firefights or navigating the map in interesting ways.

But honestly, while there's undoubted pleasure to be found in the usual social rhythms of collaborative sandbox survival, and as much as I've enjoyed the company, co-op is, I think, a pretty terrible way to experience Subnautica 2. Even in early access, this is a game of such carefully hewed ambience - of creeping dread and lingering melancholy, of intimate discovery and lonely survival - it doesn't feel quite right to ride roughshod over it all. And structurally, co-op is a bit of an awkward fit.

I adored the original Subnautica, so I’m pumped that the third game (Subnautica: Below Zero still exists, guys) is finally here. I don’t often put much time into Early Access titles, but I’m looking forward to exploring Subnautica 2’s depths and enduring what will likely be several jumpscares from all manner of Leviathan-class organisms lurking below. It seems I’ll be far from alone given how massively successful the launch has been, so here’s hoping the game is nothing but smooth sailing throughout its Early Access period.

The sheer coherence of Subnautica 2's early access build is also slightly miraculous, given that the developers have spent the past year in legal hell. I encountered no technical problems of note, and the distribution of resources and crafting recipes seems well judged, with codex hints and environmental cues guiding you towards rarer materials. Still, after seven hours, I do feel like I'm playing a remake rather than a sequel.

Hints of tragedy and disaster are everywhere, and after ten hours with the early access version, I'm keen to see just how all these elements - these alien creatures, this doomed world - fit together, and to learn exactly what the Pioneers' real place in all of this is. Already, even in Subnautica 2's far from finished state, it feels like there's simply so much to do; optimising crafting and base-building, locating more blackboxes to unravel, piecing together the story, and ultimately discovering what's hidden away in the ocean's complex cave networks and beyond. It's off to an encouraging start, then, and as much as I fear what's to be found later in deeper biomes, its compelling sense of discovery and mystery keeps drawing me on.

Here is a game that feels like an adventure. And it feels like it was an adventure to make, too. Mina the Hollower took six years to design and build, six years that took it from what sounds like a kind of coding doodle to a panoramic journey across a richly imagined island, taking in platforming and combat, puzzle-solving, and sheer immersion in the world building.

Mina is a gloriously gothic combination of ferocious combat and beautiful scenery, with enough secrets and modifiers to keep the game fresh and fun for a very long time.

Yes, Mina the Hollower is a love letter to Game Boy Zelda titles. It's also a 2D Soulslike, a top-down Castlevania, and somehow, something all its own. You can probably find a precedent for every mechanic here, to the point where it's almost impossible to discuss Mina the Hollower without invoking other games.

Despite Shovel Knight’s myriad spin-offs and continued ubiquity in the indie game space, it’s been more than a decade since developer Yacht Club Games delivered something wholly new. And maybe calling Mina the Hollower entirely “new” is a misnomer, as it is a reverential showcase of beloved game design and visual ideas from the past and present, all arranged into something that manages to be unique and nostalgic at the same time. Mina is not without its frustrations, but its density of discoveries, sense of place, and heartfelt story and characters all deliver an experience I was thinking about often whenever I wasn’t playing.

Mina the Hollower is a game in the Zelda tradition. It's a top-down affair like the original games, and while Mina can jump, they jump just like Link does in - hey! - Link's Awakening. They jump up into the space above the screen, as it were, and you need to use their shadow to work out where they are so you can collect things hovering about them and then stick the landing.

To golf, I press Tab, which pulls the camera back to give me a full-body, third-person view of my FMV golf-self as additional UI panels accumulate on-screen. One represents my character's body, letting me swing my club by clicking and dragging my hands, determining the swing's power and contact angle with the ball based on my speed and movement. It's imprecise, but it's manageable after some trial and error.

My mom would tell me not to count my chickens before they've hatched, but the Paralives roadmap reads like my life sim dreams come true. The only problem is that it's a little hard to follow between a sparse infographic and a detailed Notion outline, but that's easy enough for me to solve and present here.

Paralives takes a different tack; opting for a sort of cosy-game-adjacent level of lower-stress, lower-stakes tranquility. It's an ambience reflected in its aesthetic, as Paralives Studio adopts a muted, sketchbook-watercolour artstyle that's just inherently more chilled, and a soundtrack that can be similarly lo-fi. And it's there in the design of Paralives' relatively expansive open(ish)-world map too.

I suspect this is intentional, but so much of what is shown off is the kind of stuff I've wished to see in The Sims for years. Tiny quality-of-life tweaks here, or mind-bogglingly absent features in The Sims that are happily present in Paralives' early access launch.

Mechanicus 2 is a decent strategy game, but the original was a vibe, as the kids say—if the kids spent a lot of time playing turn-based tactics games where cybernetic zealots fought robot mummies.