There’s no other game like Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, even if it does lose the plot when it celebrates the art of stories and the power that they possess.

Fisticuffs! Glorious competition, settled on a stage between two individuals who are ready to put everything on the line to see who’s the best. In many ways, fighting games are the essence of competition boiled to its purest form and unleashed with all manner of face-melting techniques that favour the skilled. 2019 may not have been bursting at the seams with fighting games, but what entries there were in this cult favourite genre were some of the best excuses ever to throw down a gauntlet and pick a fight online.

It’s easy to understate just how damned good-looking Red Dead Redemption 2 can be on PC. If you have the requisite hardware, the game is really, really, really, ridiculously good looking.

Developers Slitherine Games and The Aristocrats reckon that they’ve got what it takes to crack a Klendathu shell to get to the gooey goodness inside, as they’ve just announced Starship Troopers: Terran Command.

You could argue that every video game is an action, and you’d be right! For this award though, we’re looking at those games whose inherent activity that you have agency over is just so gosh dang good that you can ignore everything else about it. The games whose ability to rock you like a hurricane more than makes up for a silly story, occasional glitches or even a lack of ambition.

With an industry that’s obsessed with getting the most bang for buck with any new game, few live service games truly manage to rise above the obvious cash-grab trap and find themselves settling into a groove of establishing a community and then toiling away to create new content on a consistent schedule. That’s not to say that one such game doesn’t exist.

As we wind back the clock and have a look at what 2019 had to offer gamers, it feels only fitting to start the first of our annual time travel trips to shine a light on the best new experiences that popped up throughout the year. In an industry where sequels dominate and current games are positioned to stretch as much longevity out of a property as is humanly possible, it’s new ideas that are seen as risky business.

Satellites rain death as factions fight for control of a Broken Earth. Protect your team's harvesters, build factories and vehicles, and assault the enemy base. Earthbreakers is team FPS action in an RTS world!