Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is a football game that feels, almost wholeheartedly, like it’s not really about football. This is a sports drama through and through, focusing on the interpersonal relationships, the individual journeys, and the yearning for acceptance that epitomises our teenage years, rather than sporting glory. You play as Destin Bellows, a young man with a heart condition, who appears to hate football and attends South Cirrus Academy, a school where football is banned. None of this really screams the word ‘football’ – or ‘soccer’ if you’re so inclined – and yet, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road also revels in the joy, the purity, and the companionship that football can bring. This juxtaposition also makes it one of the best sports RPGs you’ll find.

I’m a sucker for sports dramas. Maybe it started with The Mighty Ducks, a movie that took a rag-tag team of unlikely players who went from being woeful nobodies to the best team in the league. With Emilio Estevez! While there’s no Young Guns alumni here, there’s that same sense of camaraderie and overcoming adversity throughout Victory Road, starting from incredibly meagre beginnings, before working your way towards rebuilding the school’s football club and setting forth on a path to sporting greatness. It’s the characters that pull you through this drama though, rather than the extraneous bumps in the road, and you’ll quickly embrace Destin and his myriad teammates wholeheartedly.

Level-5 have made this character focus easy, because you won’t be playing football any time soon, at least not in the central story mode. My save file had clocked up an oddly impressive 4 hours before I played my first 5-a-side game against an ageing group of shopkeepers, and I kind of love the investment that’s been built into Victory Road’s narrative. To a certain extent, you won’t care that there’s no football, and when it does arrive, with its quirky stop-and-start gameplay, special moves and occasionally clunky controls, you’ll want to persevere, learn and get a grasp of it so you can lead the team you’ve built to victory. It’s something that wasn’t ably captured in Victory Road’s early beta testing, and it feels a lot more natural within its proper context.

The original Inazuma games were mostly exclusive to Nintendo’s DS and 3DS, using the stylus to move your players around the pitch, and selecting special moves as you went. It was a system that I loved across multiple games, and I was sad to see it go, but Victory Road’s updated take does a good job of replicating and replacing it, with more action and reaction than you needed before.

It’s best to think of Victory Road’s matches as a series of RPG encounters, strung together in quick succession, rather than a football match. Every time your player meets an opposing player, whether you’re playing offence or defence, it begins an encounter. Depending on the player, you’ll have basic options like passing, shooting, or dashing past, but you may also have special moves available to you, each wilder and more unbelievable than the last. That can mean creating clones of yourself to confuse defenders, or unleashing a shot that’s the result of a thousand kicks, but, with the level of variety on offer, it makes matches continually action-packed and exciting. It’s definitely not regular football, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Destin’s tale is easy-going, and occasionally a little slow, but it’s all so amiable, and the characters are so likeable, that I found I didn’t mind all too much. Destin loves to investigate and collect data, so there’s a fair bit of running back and forth, and that’s interspersed with funny turn-based RPG battles/conversations that use rock-paper-scissors mechanics as you try to argue your way to victory. I preferred the original Japanese voices over the English dub, but only marginally so, and if you prefer to play in your native language, it’s perfectly satisfactory.

While the central story mode strings you along without any matches, there’s a secondary story that gets you into the action much quicker. Chronicle Mode brings a time-travelling tale to the Inazuma timeline, sending you back in time to form the ultimate eleven, in the hope of preventing a world-ending apocalypse. Newcomers might raise an eyebrow at first, but returning fans have been here before. Chronicle Mode manages to perform a whole bunch of functions at once: introducing people to the series’ extensive history, getting into the football sections quicker, and bringing an Ultimate Team-like experience to the game to boot. It’s a winning formula, and one that shows how strong the revised gameplay formula is.

Level-5 have given players an absolute avalanche of places to play in Victory Road. From the two story modes, you can then set forth with your created team into a tournament, in either single player, multiplayer or online modes, or there’s another mode where you can play with full-powered historical teams from each of the previous games. If you need a break from all that, you can even create your own Inazuma Bond Town where you can meet up with friends online, filling them with all sorts of decorations, buildings, people, cats or giant statues of Mark Evans. To be fair, it’s probably the weirdest inclusion here, and yet, it feels thoroughly Inazuma.

All of this is wrapped up in a lovely 3D anime aesthetic that ties really well with the traditional cartoon cutscenes. It often feels like you’re playing an interactive cartoon – a fact heightened by the story modes’ many cutscenes, and chapter-by-chapter framing – with Level-5’s design department clearly working at the height of its powers. It definitely bodes extremely well for this year’s Professor Layton and the New World of Steam.

Gamers are always looking for the next level. A bigger sword, a more powerful gun, magic that turns your foes into globs of pink mush. But what about levelling up your gaming setup? A headset would always be my first call, and then maybe a pro controller or high end mouse, but what then?

Woojer have their own ideas on that, and they’ve been toting their haptic-infused devices for several years. While the Woojer Vest – now on its fourth generation – is the headline grabber, the Woojer Strap is the more accessible option, giving gamers and music lovers an extra layer of immersion by strapping a single device to your body, its haptics shocking, rumbling and thumping in time with the action.

Priced at £124 – with a healthy holiday season discount down to £95 – the Woojer Strap 4 is the latest iteration of the single-unit device. In the box, you’re getting the Woojer Strap 4 central unit, an elasticated strap to wrap around your body, a USB-C to USB-C charging cable, and a double-ended 3.5mm cable to physically connect your audio devices.

As gaming devices go, the Strap 4 is pretty straightforward. The unit itself has some weight to it and feels incredibly robust in your hand, crafted from solid plastic throughout, and available in a series of different colours. To the front, there’s a customisable LED ring with rubberised physical volume and intensity controls within it.

The top edge features the power button and Bluetooth pairing button, while the bottom includes a USB-C charging port and two 3.5mm audio sockets, one for input and the other as a dedicated output. I thought the older model’s copper finish looked great, but the addition of RGB allows the Strap 4 to match your gaming setup, and the extra layer of customisation gives you some individuality too. If you’re not an RGB fan? You can just turn it all off.

You’ll need a mobile device for the Strap 4 setup, and it proves pleasingly simple to connect the device to the Woojer app, where it takes you through pairing to your device, and then the secondary pairing of your headphones to the Strap 4. This all worked first time, which almost never happens, and you then find yourself with the main control page, which gives you an input and output display, as well as power remaining and the current latency setting, which you can alter if you find that the Strap 4’s haptic output doesn’t quite match up with whatever visuals you’re looking at.

Besides that, you can directly control the volume and the intensity, though there’s physical buttons for these as well, and, if needed, you can dive into the haptic sensation mode, which alters the behaviour of the haptics through Broad, Focused and Gaming settings.

The app also gives you decent control over the LED lights. There’s a full spectrum colour wheel to dial in the exact tone you want, adjust the brightness, and choose between a series of different effects to keep things interesting. While you’re playing, it’s not exactly something that adds all that much to the experience, but it’s certainly more futuristic, and if you’re out and about listening to music, you’ll certainly turn a few heads.

The Strap 4 experience is definitely easier to get into than the Woojer Vest. It’s small and portable, doesn’t take up much space, and requires minimal setup. You can just throw it on, and start watching, playing or listening to whatever you want, and I really liked how simple it felt. In turn, it immediately lifts your experience, with the added haptic feedback from your audio immersing you deeper in your content than ever before.

You can wear it in a variety of ways, though Woojer seem to recommend particular setups for particular input types, so for music you’d wear it around your waist, or horizontally while playing VR . Fundamentally, you can go for whatever feels best and most natural to you, and I gravitated most towards wearing it across my body, with the strap over one shoulder and the unit in the centre of my chest. This makes the haptic sensation fire directly into your chest, and explosions and heavy hits thump and rumble straight into you. Just like the rumble motors in a controller, it brings the action to life that bit further, and I find it hard to go back to playing without the extra layer it provides.

I loved using the Strap 4 for regular flat-screen gaming, listening to music and rewatching the most recent Star Trek movies, but VR is where it truly makes a major difference. With your senses cut off from the outside world, the rumble feels more nuanced and powerful, and whether you’re playing Beat Saber and throwing yourself directly into the music, or going for something more action-heavy like the new Deadpool VR, the Strap 4 brings a new level of immersion for a relatively low entry price.

While it can’t compare to the full experience you feel with the Woojer Vest, in terms of value for money, I think the Strap 4 hits the sweet spot between what it brings to your experience and the asking price. If you’ve already got a great headset, a pro controller, and a VR setup, the Strap 4 is practically a no-brainer as the next step in your gaming setup.

The only limitation, and this goes for all Woojer devices, is that this is a physical representation of audio output. That means your experience relies on how the audio is delivered, getting the levels right, and it will change on a game-by-game or song-by-song basis. It means there’s a certain degree of variation and inconsistency that some users might find disappointing, and hopefully Woojer can find a way to tap into the rumble and gamepad haptic signals in future. Once you’ve become accustomed to that abstraction, though, I still don’t think you’ll look back.

Role-playing video games have been around almost as long as D&D itself, but for every step they take towards modernity, many of the fundamentals remain the same. Octopath Traveler 0 is a game that’s more aware of that than any other AAA release this year. It readily leans on RPG fundamentals like turn-based combat, grinding for experience and epic storytelling, while aping the 16-bit visuals of classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. It’s also a reworking of the mobile title, Champions of the Continent, but, for all of that, Octopath Traveler 0 looks and feels every inch the modern RPG.

Admittedly, we’ve been here before. The first two Octopath games took eight separate characters, and interlinked their eight narratives to great effect, but it was the HD-2D visuals that instantly won them an avalanche of pixel-art admirers. Octopath 0 immediately pulls the same trick by being undeniably stunning to behold, updating the look of the classics with a shimmering, living filter that brings every scene to life in remarkable fashion. I don’t think I could ever get bored of this art style, and three games in (and with a bunch of other HD-2D games alongside) that looks likely to pan out.

While the visual style remains the same, the overarching structure and narrative framing have changed, this time putting a created character at the centre of everything. Your silent protagonist gets their own name, look, and even a favourite food, but they don’t say much of anything at all, while other characters readily monologue through conversations to their heart’s content. You get used to it, but I did miss the individual characters of the last two games.

That said, the teams at Square Enix and DokiDoki Groove Works have crafted an interesting and companionable bunch of characters to surround yourself with, and there’s a huge number of them, and their backstories, to involve yourself in. Whether touched by tragedy, or seeking knowledge and influence, there’s hundreds of narrative threads to pull on, some of which go nowhere, while others contribute to your own, world-altering quest.

Outside of the thirty recruitable characters, virtually every person you come across can be spoken to, investigated, bartered with, or hired, whether through your persuasive talents or by beating them in combat. It’s an enjoyable, and often productive, diversion, and it makes every town and village feel as though it’s brimming with life and character, even when these backstories are often just a few lines.

The core narrative is split into three strands: Power, Fame and Wealth. At the outset, each of these is headed by a particularly hateful lead antagonist, from the murderous playwright Auguste – who’s definitely stolen the Guardians of the Galaxy’s Collector’s schtick – to the beautiful Herminia whose drug cartel stands to corrupt half the population of the continent. You can tackle these in any order, with the other strands remaining frozen while you work your way through the others.

Your hometown, Wishvale, finds itself decimated at the hands of these evil-doers, setting you and your friends off on a quest to collect the eight divine rings, and you find yourself chasing each of them down, enacting your revenge while also rebuilding your homestead.

Town building is a big part of Octopath 0’s gameplay, and it’s well done, even if you might find it a little limited and straightforward. You can build various homesteads, shops and facilities and gain certain boons by inviting people to live there, while the layout and expansion of Wishvale is up to you, albeit within the framework that you’re given to work with.

You’ll find yourself decorating and tinkering for hours, and getting to see your creation in the beautiful game engine is well worth it. There’s a small fly in the ointment for Switch 2 players, who don’t get to use quite as many objects as PS5 or Xbox Series X|S owners (400 compared to 500), but there’s still enough customisation to truly make this place feel like your own.

Octopath Traveler 0 evolves the series’ turn-based combat, though it does feel fundamentally the same as its predecessors. Boosting attacks and breaking enemies is the key to success, wearing down their defences by discovering what weapon types they’re weak to. This time, you can have a massive 8 different characters in your party, with half of those in the back line providing support, while you can also recruit helpers to throw in with you.

It’s a shame that the difficulty level often bounces between ridiculously easy and teeth-gnashingly tough, but it does even out the further you go. If you’re a fan of turn-based combat, Octopath 0’s rendition remains interesting throughout, with the multiple characters bringing some of the mobile-centric chaos and carnage that you’d expect with multiple effects and attacks going on, while failure means you often have to strategise and plan to progress.

If you head into the menus, there’s plenty of the traditional levelling and equipping you’d expect to find, and you can unlock skills in the order you want, which is a nice touch, although you have to bear in mind how much SP they cost to cast when you’re starting out. There’s a huge amount of customisation available, with characters able to learn others’ skills, while your central protagonist can also change jobs – choosing from eight, obviously – learning new skills and improving their stats as they do, and letting you experience some of that variation the previous games had with multiple characters.

One of the biggest worries with Octopath Traveler 0 was whether it was going to feel like a mobile port, and thankfully, it doesn’t. From the huge cast of voice actors, through the multiple quests and asides, to the town-building and exceptional production values, Octopath Traveler 0 feels every bit the full console game. It definitely has a different flavour to the previous titles, and I can see some fans struggling with the shift, but in many ways, it feels fresh and unique when placed alongside its predecessors.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a nostalgia-soaked love letter to nine-year-old you. A side-scrolling beat ‘em up that looks like it just stepped out of a 90’s arcade, Cosmic Invasion features the character design of Marvel’s comic heyday, pixel-art visuals that ape Capcom’s Super Hero fighting series, and a tag team mechanic that is pure X-Men vs. Street Fighter. In short, with this much 90’s nostalgia powering it, how can Marvel Cosmic Invasion possibly fail?

Marvel big bad Annihilus wants to take over the universe and it’s up to you and three friends – either online or local in very slick drop-in drop-out multiplayer – to stop him. The story is suitably silly and slight. The, thankfully skippable, static cutscenes bracketing each level are completely incomprehensible scrolling beat ‘em up hokum, but the opening animated intro and accompanying theme-song is an unadulterated delight, perfectly capturing the essence of the iconic X-Men cartoon. You’ll be listening to it on repeat on your chosen music streaming platform of choice, let me tell you.

With an impressive character roster of 15 heroes, Cosmic Invasion certainly offers a stacked cast of Marvel do-gooders. There’s the expected A-listers like Spider-Man, Wolverine and Iron Man, but also a few more niche picks, such as Beta-Ray Bill, Cosmic Ghost Rider, and Phyla-Vell. Whilst I would have personally liked developer Tribute Games to delve a little deeper in the weeds of the Marvel character back catalogue – Marvel Rivals did this  with Jeff the Land Shark, turning the diminutive hero into a fan favourite and star of numerous comics in the process – the overall depth and breadth of the line-up really can’t be faulted.

What can be faulted is the variance in how much fun the characters are to play as. Flying characters suffer the most, the cost of being able to hover around the place a bit is seemingly being lumbered with a vastly reduced move-set. Storm is a total snore-fest, with only a handful of attacks on offer, whilst Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Phoenix and Phyla-Vell struggled to get much play time, simply because they can’t do very much. A couple of basic attacks, a range attack and a special? It’s not much terribly exciting. Plus, the insistence on flying heroes and enemies is unnecessarily fiddly, it’s often difficult to tell where you and your enemy are, resulting in a lot of accidental punching of thin air.

Wolverine and Black Panther are both superb, however, with varied combos and juggles putting their flying counterparts to shame. She Hulk’s range of pro-wrestling themed moves are brilliant fun to unleash, and Venom and Spider-Man deliver all the web-based antics a fan could hope for. The impressive sounding 15 character roster is quickly reduced down to five heroes you’ll actually want to play as, with the rest acting in a support role, leaping into the action with a brief bonus attack at the touch of a button.

If the heroes are well catered for, the villains they’ll be punching are not. Considering the vast universe of characters Tribute Games could call upon to include, they picked some lame ducks here. Most of the time you’ll be beating-up the exact same bug-like minions, only they’ll be painted in slightly different colours from level to level. Sure, there’s a few Sentinels to take on and some symbiotes, but mostly you’ll spend your time battling big mutated bees. Where’s the Kree? The Skrulls? The Chitauri? For a game set in the galaxy-spanning Marvel Cosmic comics, the lack of decent bad guys to duff up feels like the waste of an iconic licence.

Boss fights are also quite boring, even if they do feature a decent range of Marvel villains. No matter if you’re facing Knull, The Phoenix, or MODOK, your enemy will launch the same limited range of attacks and will soon be defeated without much effort. Indeed, for a game aping a 90’s coin-up, Marvel Cosmic Invasion is unexpectedly easy, offering little challenge and only occasionally pushing back against the player. My partner and I only had one or two re-starts and saw off the entire game in a couple of hours. We had little use for the tag-team mechanic either. Sure, you can swap in and out characters to deliver a massive juggling combo – so long as you don’t pick a flyer as a partner – buy why bother when a few punches will kill most opponents?

Worse, the levels themselves are oddly dull and repetitive. Scrolling beat ‘em ups are hardly known for their variety when it comes to level design, but Streets of Rage 4, Absolum, and Tribute Games own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge prove it can be done. With no weapon pick-ups, no vehicles to drive or mounts to ride, no new moves to unlock, and the aforementioned limited range of enemies, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, even with its short run time, ultimately becomes a bit of a slog.

Despite all of the over-the-top visuals with nostalgia dripping loveliness then, playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion is just a bit, well, boring.

Sweet Surrender is a VR roguelike, and it comes with everything that label brings. You’ll be making your way through the environment picking off enemies, looking for weapons, cash, and upgrades, and swearing every time an enemy shaves off a bit of your health and you come closer to the end of a run. But it’s all in VR, and it’s cool throwing daggers that are somehow poisonous to robots. Oh yeah, everything is a robot – including you.

Originally launching in 2021 for Quest and PC VR, this PSVR 2 port has come after a bunch of upgrades and additions tot the game. There’s some great twists to the roguelike format and general gameplay, thanks to Sweet Surrender being in VR. The upgrades you can find throughout a level are chips that are fitted into slots by your wrists, for example, but the boosts they provide will only apply to the weapons in that hand, forcing you to really think about what upgrades you’re choosing and where you put them. A revolver that usually only shoots one, very powerful bullet before reloading on an arm with upgrades that triple its capacity and double its damage is a force to be reckoned with, but maybe something that heals you when you find cash would be smarter, to make up for the inevitable health loss.

The weapons themselves are mostly the standard fare – pistol, shotgun, SMG, and so on – but there are more interesting options, such as a katana that burns with plasma when you pull the trigger, or a spear that can shoot electricity. Melee weapons are particularly risky to use, as they force you to get into melee range, giving enemies a good opportunity to shoot you full of holes. Thankfully there are also a bunch of other items you can find, such as grenades, boosters that increase damage, and a holographic shield that feels pretty satisfying to use. At least, until you misjudge it and it runs out of energy in time for a bunch of bullets to the face.

When all this comes together the combat is pretty satisfying, rewarding accuracy for targeting weakspots on the various robot enemies. It’s fast and frenetic, and you can quickly lose a lot of health by getting surrounded. In classic shooter fashion, I found that the best way to fight is to find a bottleneck and take enemies out as they come into view. It does make you feel a bit like a robotic assassin, which is cool, but after a while the temptation to wade in with a plasma sword and a shield comes back because it’s more fun. It’s just that it’s more fun for less time, because you’ll die quicker.

Once you’ve had a few runs, Sweet Surrender starts to feel a bit limited and repetitive. You do have to expect repetition in a roguelike, but you will start to see the same rooms and layouts repeating themselves very quickly. The upgrades and weapons you find can also duplicate and repeat themselves within a run, so there’s limits to how far you can really extend your build.

It doesn’t help that this game has very little of the meta progression that has come to define run-based gaming in recent years – it’s a more classic rogulike than a modern roguelite. There are different classes to unlock – Medic, Grenadier, Sniper and Reaper – but there’s no overarching upgrades beyond that, and they don’t actually change the experience all that much beyond some boosts to certain types of damage or more healing. I’ve settled into building my character with one arm for shooting and the other for healing every single time I play, regardless of the class I’ve chosen. Beyond that, you can get shortcuts to let you skip areas, which is nice, but does mean you’re skipping past the items in those areas as well.

Then there are a bunch of immersion breakers and frustraters. Whilst implanting chips into your arm for your upgrades is cool, the experience of actually doing it is a bit of a pain. Just viewing the UI to see your current upgrades is fiddly, requiring a precise twist of your arm that can sometimes trigger in combat and get in the way. I’ve also found the controls to be very finicky for accessing hip holsters, shoulder holsters, and chest item storage. I’m constantly grabbing the wrong thing, including the rifle on your back when you’re trying to get the pistol from your hip, a good foot away from where your hand is.

There’s also a lot of dropping things, as the game doesn’t use the PSVR’s touch sensitive buttons, so you’re only holding an item if you’re specifically pressing the button properly. This becomes uncomfortable, but if you switch it to toggle it becomes nearly impossible to throw things properly, so you just have to live with it. Two handed guns like the assault rifle can be a bit awkward to aim down the sight on as there’s some jitter to the tracking, though you can just use them one handed like a pistol anyway.

Sweet Surrender does look pretty good, with a pseudo-cel shaded art style that allows explosions and things like electricity to stand out a bit. It’s not going to astonish you, but it suits the style of the game pretty well. There some nice attention to detail as well, such as there being an actual trigger on the plasma sword that is pulled when you trigger the plasma. The sound is decent as well, with the best bits being the gun sounds and the warning sounds of nearby traps. Again, nothing to amaze, but it does its job well enough.

Robot apocalypses are two a penny in video games, and ARC Raiders follows this fine tradition of having the world dominated by deadly machines who will attack and kill humans on sight. We’re a fairly hardy bunch, though, so we’ve burrowed underground to found the city of Speranza, with a select few coming out to the surface to scavenge from what remains of our civilisation. These fearless individuals, known as Raiders, are risking their lives and their possessions every time they head to the surface, with danger coming from the robotic ARC as well as the other Raiders who are fighting over the scraps.

At least, that’s what the developers wanted to happen; in reality, something rather more wonderful has occurred. Strangers are working together, sharing loot, and helping each other out in firefights against the ARC. You can go and shoot someone in the head if you want to be a dick, and there are still players who do that, but from my experience, most players are friendly and want to work together.  This is even more impressive when you consider just how fractured and divided the real world is. It also makes the times when some butthead with a sniper rifle picks you off from a roof 500 metres away even more depressing. Welcome to the future.

ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter, so you get to keep anything you can carry back out of a mission, and if you die? Well, you’ll come back empty handed, an even loose whatever kit you took in. That makes setting your loadout for a run on the surface and how much you’ll risk a key decision point.

There are two weapon slots with twenty weapons available, some of which can be bought and some which can be crafted, and its the usual mix of shotguns, pistols and rifles.  Each weapon can be upgraded three times to improve its performance, and you can further customise it with stocks, larger magazines and sights. Guns chosen, it’s time to select an Augment which increases carry space, weight capacity, and shield compatibility. Yes, despite wearing rags and having to recycle ice cream scoops for metal, you have a Dune-style full-body shield to absorb damage. Grab some appropriate ammo, of which there are four types, and your final job is to add some grenades and healing items into the quick access slots.

There are five playable maps in ARC Raiders: Dam Battlegrounds, Buried City, Spaceport, The Blue Gate, and the new Stella Montis map, which was unlocked after the game launched. While it’s hard to make an apocalyptic landscape visually exciting, there is enough difference between them all to make them interesting.

The gameplay loop consists of sneaking around and scavenging items from buildings whilst avoiding the larger ArC enemies. For the first few runs, the smaller enemies are quite a threat and can end your scavenging run very quickly but you soon learn their weak spots or how to evade them altogether. Initially, I did think this was rather boring; you are essentially opening loot boxes under duress. It’s like ripping apart a pack of Pokémon cards while a stick of dynamite fizzles nearby, and most of the time, all you get is a garlic press. Thankfully, the team back at your base has a constant supply of missions which encourage you to go to new areas, and there are remixed versions of each map with modifiers that reduce the number of exits or add fierce lightning storms to spice things up.

ARC Raiders also has a couple of Destiny-style world events such as the Harvester, which requires you to sneak past a Queen – that’s a giant crab robot, not a contestant on Drag Race. Inside the Harvester there’s puzzles to solve while under the threat of being toasted alive, so you need good timing as well as a good aim. It’s a nice little diversion but the game really could do with more of these, and hopefully Embark can add some soon.

Extract successfully from the map via one of the exit stations, and it’s back to your home base to sort through your loot of toasters, ARC parts and rags. There appear to be hundreds of items you can find, some of which are useful, some of which can be recycled into parts, and some of which can be sold. If you enjoy flicking through pages of junk and deciding what to keep, then Arc Raiders is definitely the game for you. Managing your stash and working out what to do with each item is a painfully slow process on a console and the impatient among us – it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me – would benefit from three nice buttons labelled “Sell the trinkets”, “Recycle the junk” and “Keep the good stuff”. Of course, this is less of a problem on PC, where you can zip around menus and sort your stash much more quickly thanks to having a mouse. It’s just much slower and more fiddly on consoles with a gamepad.

On top of your stash you gradually unlock six workbenches that can be used to craft new weapons, health items, shields and other useful tools, all of which require specific materials to upgrade, and tasks from vendors that require specific objects. Tracking what you need for each task is a chore at best and like all apocalyptic games, none of it makes sense. Your chicken – yes, chicken – that scavenges extra resources for you while you are out needs a dog collar and then a cat bed as upgrades. As you only get to see the next step of the upgrade path after your completed the current one there is a good chance you recycled that cat bed to make a bandage a couple of hours ago, which is very frustrating.

After wading through your stash, redeeming some XP in a skill tree, upgrading your weapons and buying a few extra supplies, it is time to head back out to the fun part of the game. How that plays out really depends on if you are going solo or as a team, with the game prioritising matchmaking within those queues. Matched in with solo players I have found the game to be slower and more reliant on stealth, but almost every player I met was friendly and helped out if needed. Go in with two friends as a team and the game plays rather differently, there seems to be many more PvP battles, though there are still some friendlies. Going in as a team also makes the game so much easier, as you can cover each other’s back and the smaller ARC bots really don’t stand a chance when taking fire from multiple directions.

I rather liked the two seemingly unintentional game modes that this created. Jumping in with team gives you are more gung-ho approach where you can be rather more brazen in your exploits, while scurrying around by yourself and meeting the occasional strangers who are also trying survive really enforces the apocalyptic feel of the game.

However, that sense of camaraderie with other Raiders is doing a lot of the heavy lifting as without it, ARC Raiders is fairly generic. The ruined wasteland and scrappy costumes have been seen in a thousands games since Fallout, the crafting and item degradation is nothing new and has been around since, well, Fallout, and the enemy design is really lacking in imagination. Three of the ARCs are just balls that roll around, another three are flying drones, and there are four variants of crabs, ranging from small scuttling creatures to house-sized behemoths who constantly launch missiles at your face.

I have also encountered a couple of technical issues on PS5. Most notably is the pop-in which is really quite noticeable as objects and textures do just appear from thin air even when you are quite close. I have also had a couple of runs where the game either refuses to accept half of the button presses on the DualSense, or decided my character is going to walk in a certain direction no matter what. Quitting out the game completely is the only way to solve these issues, which is really annoying if you have spent ages building up a decent loadout and then have to lose it because of a bug.

Finally, a quick word about Embark’s use of AI voices for the vendors in the game. Your opinions on AI are your own, and I’m not going to tell you otherwise, but I can tell you that, even with Embark hiring actors to create their AI voice banks, the NPC’s sound rubbish. Embark may have saved a few krona using AI, but the end result is nowhere near as good as getting people back into the recording booth.

I’ve been fascinated with headphones from an early age. My dad was a broadcast journalist and a real geek, filling our house with space-age tech like reel-to-reel players, condenser microphones, and CB radios. Most important, though, were the headphones. Huge, unwieldy things for my tiny head, they still opened my eyes – and ears – to just how good music could sound, and that fascination has stayed with me ever since.

So my interest was piqued by SIVGA’s latest, the Robin SV021, a closed-back, wired audiophile pair of over-ear headphones, which boast earcups crafted from wood. While they look genuinely beautiful, the sound they produce is even better.

Each of the Robin SV021’s earcups are handmade from Rosewood. If you want a pair of headphones that’s immediately different from the metal and black plastic-toting ones elsewhere, it’s a great place to start. Imprinted with the SIVGA logo, the external surface is perfectly smooth, and the wood carries a warmth and softness that plastic and metal simply can’t. I did worry about their durability, but after cramming the Robin into my bag on more than one occasion, they remained unblemished.

Elsewhere, the headband is wrapped in leather, with a thin slice of memory foam beneath it, while the frame, extenders and hinges are made from rigid, burnished metal. It’s all finished off by a pair of the plushest, softest ear cushions I’ve come across in a while, and they feel absolutely fantastic, moulding around your ears and providing a decent level of passive noise cancellation as well. The Robin SV021 look and feel utterly premium, and they definitely punch above their £150 price point.

Audio is handled by dual wiring to each earcup, with the two ends of the braided cable leading down to a single gold-plated 3.5mm jack. While the braided section is noise-free, the single cabling to each earcup will produce cable noise if rubbing against clothing, which does make it less appealing for listening while on the go.

That’s not its main draw, though. The Robin SV021 are reassuringly universal, and I’ve spent my time hopping between a MacBook, Nintendo Switch 2 and my PC. It has a relatively low impedance at 32 Ohms, and it performed well with every device I tried, with plenty of volume while retaining an excellent level of detail.

The SIVGA Robin SV021 sound excellent. The 50mm drivers are capable of moving plenty of air around, and there’s a wonderfully wide soundstage here, giving instrumentation and audio some real room to breathe. I’ve been playing a huge amount of Octopath Traveler 0 on its way to review, and the orchestral soundtrack has been delivered exquisitely by the Robin SV021, with that wider soundstage making it feel as though you’re experiencing a live recording.

They’re absolutely perfect for gaming, thanks to their lightweight design and ultra-soft ear cushions. I was able to wear them for hours, and they may well be the most comfortable headphones I’ve reviewed this year.

Checking in with my music collection, I loved how enveloping Gunship’s Tech Noir sounded, with the throbbing synth tones delivered with an exacting level of detail. The intro’s sci-fi spoken word sits clearly apart from the ominous notes beneath, while the bass response is excellent, with plenty of warmth and clarity. The Robin SV021 are certainly warmer-sounding rather than clinical, and they’re easy to live with across a range of different genres and content types. Crucially, they make you want to listen to music.

At £150, the Robin SV021 are aimed at the mid-range audiophile who’s looking for something a little different. Despite their closed-back design, they boast a wide soundstage, and their well-balanced tuning provides a hugely enjoyable listening experience no matter what you’re using them for.