Red Dead Redemption 2’s excessively detailed world tries to suggest reality. Fall and you get covered in mud; while covered in mud someone might make a coy comment about how they hope it’s not shit.

The world is full of little flourishes and behaviours that suggest its NPCs are real people with genuine reactions. But the more I play, the more they feel like puppets putting on a show.

Far Cry 5 suggests a world on the brink of a violence apocalypse, but the game's sanitised gameplay and clean-cut power fantasy ultimately ring hollow. If the series wants to make a case for human savagery, it should look back to Far Cry 2, a game that wasn't afraid to let things break.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey packs a lot of activities into its massive world, letting players wander to their heart’s content hunting down cultists or doing side-quests.

As a result, the game’s main story is split into multiple branches. Frustratingly, this structure makes some of the game’s best quests and most important story beats optional.

Spider-Man has taken on his share of street thugs and supervillains, sometimes teaming up with the police to face down foes and rescue the people of New York. While Spider-Man on PS4 undoubtedly shows Spidey’s allegiance to his community, it also casts him as a big fan of police and their tactics that sometimes conflict with that civic mindset. From cheesy detective impressions to Rikers prisoner beatdowns, Spider-Man’s uncomplicated approach to crime clashes with the reality of day to day life.

Fallout 76 will have nukes. Provided players find the keys, they will be able to fire these nukes off whenever they please. This gameplay feature, announced at yesterday's Bethesda press conference, is presumably meant to encourage player-created drama in the upcoming online survival game.

It's also the clearest signal yet that the Fallout series, under Bethesda's leadership, has forgotten where it came from.

David Cage's Detroit: Become Human wants to talk about difficult questions. The game from Cage's studio Quantic Dream, is a story of android prejudice and rebellion touches upon questions of the soul and the nature of being. But Detroit is also a bloated action movie romp. One sequence, a series in a pattern for Cage, denigrates the female protagonist. It's pointless voyeurism, and I'm sick of it.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III mixes the series' familiar first-person shooting with a wild cyberpunk storyline. The narrative breaks apart the further the player progress unless it finally explodes in a level that mixes World War II, zombies, and dying dreams. That level, Demon Within, is both the high point of the campaign and a horrifying cry for help from the game itself.

The Shadow of the Colossus remake brings the PS2 classic to a new group of players, boosting up the graphics and changing the controls to make things a little less clumsy. For some those changes will improve the experience, but even small changes can have unexpected consequences.

The enemies in Echo copy any action that you perform until they're highly dangerous walking death machines.

Call of Duty: WWII wants to tell a harrowing tale of heroes and sacrifice by following the US Army's 1st Infantry Division throughout the war. The game's squad-building mechanics are supposed to have impact, but they mostly mean having a dude sometimes toss you a medkit.

Wolfenstein's BJ Blazkowicz is one of the original first person shooter protagonists. He is a muscle bound action hero, the all-American army man. Through examining BJ's body, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus paints a thin line between power fantasy and Aryan ideals.

Last night, I finished a playthrough of Binary Domain on Kotaku US' Twitch channel. The 2012 sci-fi shooter is rough around the edges but creates meaningful, intelligent interactions between players and their AI companions.

I've been playing through Deadly Premonition and Binary Domain on Kotaku's Twitch channel. One is an offbeat crime thriller and the other is a clumsy shooter about robots. They're pure pulp. They're also two of the best games I've ever played.

Giant robots are awesome and Gundam Versus has some of the best. But can a game offer you too many options? Heather takes a look in this critical video.

Dujanah is a gorgeous and bizarre indie game full of glitch cats, existential spider-men, and death. With key narrative moments and a small arcade of games that focus on death and dying, it imparts an important lesson of acceptance. We take a look in this critical video.

Sephiroth, Liquid Snake, Ganondorf; video games have some wonderful villains. But making bad guy who is both frightening and sympathetic is a challenge. Yakuza nails it, creating what might be gaming's best antagonist. We take a look how they pull it off in this critical video.

I first played Half-Life in 1998 and played it again over the last month for a series of livestreams on Twitch. It's been 19 years since the game was released, and what I experienced in 2017 made me reassess the game. It's a chaotic, if sometimes sloppy, masterpiece.

Focusing on themes of grief and trauma, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice employs a number of level design and mechanical tricks to help players empathise with the main character's struggle. We take a closer look in this critical video.

Sonic Mania is a lot of fun but one of its most exciting features is a dangerous string of bosses. Reshuffling and changing what Sonic can do adds a lot of danger to each encounter. We take a look at the boss design in this critical video.