When a great game presents itself, all its moving parts sing in harmonious unison. The intriguing and engaging story supports the beautiful visuals, the varied and challenging gameplay sits perfectly within the narrative and the gameworld feels full of promise and potential. Repetition doesn’t repeat itself, there’s no grind - just the experience of exploration and adventure and at its very best you just can’t get enough of it. Welcome to the fantasy world of Horizon Zero Dawn: you won’t be disappointed.

A sniper is a thinking man’s soldier. The aloof assassin is always outnumbered but never outgunned, a patient predator and considered killer. It sounds quite glam, doesn’t it? But it’s a soup-for-one profession and ranks high on the dullness detector. There’s all that hanging around to contend with. Checking your kit, waiting for the right conditions. Waiting, waiting, always with the waiting. A bit like fishing, without the desire to boast about the one that got away.

It was the year of Pokémon Go, and it was the year the mainstream offered sequels. There were also some gems on console and mobile platforms. Steve O'Rourke and Steve Houghton look back on the developments in the world of gaming in 2016. 

CONSOLE

Time Locker takes a simple concept first seen in Piotr Iwanicki’s 3D shooter, Superhot and repurposes it for a top-down 2D endless run & gun game. In most shooters, rapid movement and frantic aiming are the norm but in Superhot time only advances when you move. You can stand still and take in your surroundings, including the trajectory of bullets and enemies frozen in the air, and then move to dodge or intercept them. As soon as you move a millimeter, however, the clock starts ticking and everything starts moving again.

The annual Call of Duty instalment once again steps into future warfare, but this time in a far-flung age where off-world colonies have sprung up, thrived and now threaten the order of things.

In the single-player campaign, you play as Captain Reyes, an elite soldier who takes the helm of the Retribution, one of Earth’s last remaining warships. You take to the stars after a Pearl Harbor-style attack on your homeworld that serves up a typically spectacular opening set piece where much of your fleet ends up crashing and burning in the city streets below.

Just as there are only seven different stories for fiction in the world, there are a paltry number of videogame genres. Every year games developers have to not so much reinvent the wheel, but polish the hubcaps or add a few new spokes to try and deliver something fresh to an ever-demanding audience.

The Skylanders titles are at the forefront of the toys-to-life genre. Players place plastic figurines on a physical "portal" connected to the console, with the characters then appearing on screen, in a 3D world filled with loot, upgrade items and battles. Each character has different attributes, with many available to purchase at additional cost.

Mafia III starts strong, really strong. You find yourself in the blood-stained boots of Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam veteran, returning to his Deep South homestead after a last tour of duty. It’s 1968, racism is rife and New Bordeaux, a faux New Orleans, isn’t a pleasant place for an African American to reside. 

Clay lives in the poor part of town; his old crew have got themselves mixed up with mob heavyweight Sal Marcano, who double crosses the gang, leaving the soldier's homecoming drenched in the blood of his fallen friends, a reminder of what he left behind in 'Nam.

Football can be a soap opera at times, filled with pantomime villains, character drama, broken hearts and unfulfilled ambition. And that’s before kick-off. With these theatrics in mind it makes sense that EA introduces the new headline feature for the annual instalment of the very long-running, highly profitable FIFA franchise.

Tin Man Games has carved out a successful niche, producing electronic versions of the classic Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (as well as its own, original, Gamebook Adventures series). Created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the Fighting Fantasy books turned their author’s love of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons into branching narratives in which readers/players decide how to progress through the story, punctuated by battles and tests of luck using dice-rolls.