Dave Ozzy

There’s a fantastic premise at the core of Die With Glory on the Xbox. Rather than striving for victory, you’re looking to die spectacularly. But that premise never quite gets realised: the deaths are never outlandish, and the quests to get to them are too simplistic.

Without a fun world to explore, Moon Raider can’t fall back on its charm or style, as it only has a limited pool of it, and it doesn’t feel good enough to play. Moon Raider has been stripped back too far, and what’s left is a pencil outline of a Metroid game, and that’s not enough.

There’s a niche group that will love C14 Dating on the Xbox. It’s the thinking person’s dating sim, when the genre is crowded with sleazeballs that most right-minded people would want to avoid. It’s an archaeology-themed game that skirts close to being a sim, and plenty of budding Time-Teamers will revel in that nerdiness.

What The Dub?! on Xbox is a one-trick pony, then, but it’s a trick that will keep you and up to five friends cracking up for a good hour or two. Whether you come back to it is another question, but seeing straight-faced actors spouting your drivel is probably worth that low price of admission.

There are twenty-or-so decent levels of platform-puzzling in One Escape on Xbox, but it’s surrounded by another forty levels of filler. With more ways to get caught, and more options to avoid getting caught, this prison escape might have warranted a purchase. Without them, it can feel more like a sentence than an escape.

If you’ve ever enjoyed a Jackbox Party Pack, or watched a movie and thought “I could write a better script than this”, then What the Dub?! might be your jam.

Random dungeons, random perks and continuous progress: it’s a winning mix, and it elevates Space Robinson beyond mediocrity and into the realms of ‘just one more go’.

Less a strategy game and more a three-hour long tutorial, Mittelborg: City of Mages on Xbox manages to remove pretty much anything that would lead to interest or a satisfying choice. If it was brave enough to hand the reins to the player, it might have gone somewhere interesting, but - as it stands - this is a lightweight board game with most of the pieces removed.

If managing your bills and outgoings under lockdown isn’t quite romantic and adventurous enough, then welcome to Mittelborg: City of Mages, where you’re in charge of an entire fantasy city. Who knows what the electricity bills are like with a horde of thunder mages.

Have you ever wandered around a train station, utterly bemused about where to go? Or been stuck with endless delays, lugging a heavy bag around crowds in the search of a bagel? You’ve probably thought that you could do a better job of organising a train station; no one could do it worse, right? Well, dream of dreams, your opportunity is here. May we introduce Train Station Simulator.

The shooting is accurate and feels good, and it’s possible to reach a state where you’re chaining headshots and being crushed beneath a pile of Achievements. But, lest we forget, Gangsta Paradise has virtually zero ideas and variety, and it somehow manages to make its two hours feel thin.

With the umpteen Jackbox Party Packs that we’ve received over the years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that every quiz game has to come with a gimmick. Old Ape Games are here to show us that this doesn’t have to be true, as Papa’s Quiz delivers a simple quiz game, presented well, and with tons of personality to boot. Papa’s Quiz is out now on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.

We wondered whether a space-sim could be hammered into the shape of a racer, and Orbital Racer on the Xbox gave us an emphatic answer: no, it can’t. Without physical tracks you’ve got no sense of direction, speed, or points of interest. You get desperate for a chicane, a pit stop, anything to enliven the chugging space tour.

A Fantasia of jazz and line-art, Genesis Noir on Xbox is a voyeuristic tour through the beginning, middles and end of the universe. The laid-back, blissful pace won’t be for everyone, and a reliance on toys rather than actual objectives will irritate some. But side-step the bugs and a couple of gameplay hiccups, and you have a ride that has a groove that, once tuned into, will take you somewhere deliriously unique.

Until now, Microsoft’s deep pockets have given us Bethesda acquisitions and the gushing font of games that is Game Pass, but there’s one thing they haven’t been able to buy: big games from Japan. But 2021 may change that. We have already been given the first Dragon Quest on a Microsoft console, and we’ve just about survived an avalanche of Yakuza games. April, to continue the trend, is offering us not one, not two, but three killer joints from Japan, and the Xbox is all the better for it. A little April shower of games for this month’s Up Next, then, which is appropriate, as you get to play a cloud in one of them. Yep, a cloud.