When a discussion about ‘What was the best game of 2015?" stretches through a whole evening in the pub you know that: (a) you need to stop socialising with games journalists, and (b) 2015 has been a corker of a year in videogames.

Strap yourself into the wingsuit of freedom fighter Rico Rodriguez and launch into an explosive open world game boasting four hundred square miles of beautiful Mediterranean islands to explore. Your mission is to liberate your homeland, the fictional island republic of Medici that’s crumbling under the brutal rule of General Di Ravello. To aid your quest you have access to a massive arsenal of weapons, gadgets and vehicles, combined with the freedom to explore your environment from seabed to sky.

Love, loathe or feel totally indifferent about Jedis and Stormtroopers, there will be no avoiding the Force when the cinematic phenomenon that is Star Wars rolls out a fresh instalment in a few short weeks. The latest in a long, long line of Star Wars videogames doesn’t capitalise on the new source material and instead focuses on the universe of the original three films.

Fallout 4 ★★★★★

Take one part Mad Max, mix with two parts Borderlands 2, add an extra mature story that spans 200 years, sprinkle generously with interesting characters, side quests and more collectible items than you could jiggle a digital cocktail shaker at, pour over a gigantic post apocalyptic landscape and serve. Raise a toast to Fallout 4, the perfect tonic for long winter nights.

Guitar Hero Live ★★★★

My first encounter with the Guitar Hero music rhythm games stretches back to 2008. It involved British Sea Power, the Mercury Prize-nominated indie band, trooping into my living room to put an array of plastic guitars and drums through the musical motions. More bemused than amused, the professional musicians, renowned for intricately arranged guitar pop, struggled to hit the correct colour-coded notes in the right sequence as they appeared on the TV.

Since Crossy Road took mobile devices by storm, every developer seems intent on copying its success. Largely by copying its cute isometric retro visual approach and grafting it onto other genres. Even Crossy Road's makers are at it – Shooty Skies applies the same visual style to a "bullet hell" shoot-em-up arcade game. With BlockQuest, as with The Quest Keeper, the genre is dungeon-bashing RPG. And again, this turns out to be a fairly good, if derivative move.

Zombies. Thousands of ‘em. Not just in Madfinger’s new shooter, Unkilled of course. Zombies are everywhere, swarming all over popular culture in that shuffley way of theirs. They are the new Nazis - fanatical in their onslaught and easily killed without a pang of conscience.

This is Madfinger’s third zombie game, following on from its successful Dead Trigger series. Dead Trigger 1 & 2 were also first-person shooters operating on a Free To Play model, so is Unkilled just more of the same?

The Deer God is a platform game set in a lovingly rendered world of pixel art. It is completely unforgiving and will test to destruction both your platform jumping skills but perhaps also your patience.

From the sublime, to the mundane. Last week's insane Metal Gear Solid V gives way to this freeroaming action-adventure cash-in on the Mad Max: Fury Road film. But a threadbare plot and far too much back-and-forth in play does this game no favours. Particularly in comparison to the other big action game out this week.

A unicorn, on fire; the wet slap of flesh on hospital linoleum; homoerotic manhugs from wounded soldiers. The latest and greatest in the legendary Metal Gear Solid series starts odd. But brilliantly odd.

Waking in a hospital bed, covered in bandages is Big Boss. Or Ahab, as what appears to be a face-covered Kiefer Sutherland in a hospital gown insists on calling you. Before you know it Kiefer's helping you make a madcap escape from some distinctly superhuman entities that feel torn straight from the pages of a Manga comic, in a hospital covered in blood, on fire.