The Alters achieves something tense and new by merging strategy base-building with third-person exploration and a sci-fi story about cloning yourself. But repetition and complicated busywork mar the overall effect. Read more

Mario Kart World offers neat twists on the classic Mario Kart formula, but its open-world ambitions are somewhat let down by some classic Nintendo quirkiness. Read more

For years, the rule in Hollywood was pretty simple: familiarity but with a twist. Cheers, but it’s in a coffee shop, and everyone’s in their twenties. Lost, but it’s in LA with Joseph Fiennes. Sure, this didn’t always work – I still think fondly of you, FlashForward – but it worked a lot of the time. Crucially, it was easy to grasp why it should work. We love formulas, and we love gentle variations on the formula to keep us guessing, to keep us nimble. But at the heart of it there’s familiarity, and familiarity is a very, very lovely thing in the right circumstances. Read more

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour costs £7.99, and for a while it does feel a bit like you’ve paid someone to show you their carefully alphabetised 5K completion medals. A big part of the tour is a stamp rally. You are a tiny little person moving through dioramas formed by massive versions of the Switch 2 hardware and its accessories, and whenever you reach a new feature – a button, a port – a little stamp station pops up and you collect the stamp. Read more

It’s that most thrilling time, the dawn of a new hardware generation. It’s gaming Christmas! As a critic, that means it’s time for that finest tradition – an intense period of bedding in with a new piece of hardware, vigorously road-testing it so that we can inform you, our delightful readers, if this thrilling new piece of tech is worth your money. Read more