SUPER SMASH BROS ULTIMATE

Developer Sora Ltd, Bandai Namco Studios Publisher Nintendo Format Switch

There are some who would argue that Ultimate warrants a place in any end-of-year list, if only for its sheer volume of modes, features, fighters and options – take your pick, you’ll struggle to find any area where it’s lacking. One of the reasons Smash makes our top ten is not that it’s busting at the seams, but because it feels like everything Masahiro Sakurai and team have somehow crammed into a tiny Switch cartridge has been lavished with the same amount of care.

It works only because there’s been enough attention invested in a battle against a character pretending to be someone else from an obscure Japanese-only adventure game as in ensuring Simon Belmont walks like he does in the Castlevania games. Or, for that matter, in the way Ryu and Ken can, uniquely among Smash characters, recreate their signature moves with Street Fighter’s quarter- and half-circle inputs – and this way, the hadoken is more powerful than if you simply release it as a neutral special. Or even that it features a unique (albeit short) campaign for all of the 70-plus fighters. If you’ve ever wondered how Duck Hunt’s dog-and-mallard double-act might fare against Monster Hunter’s fireballspitting, spiky Rathalos – hey, we’re not judging – then Classic mode’s the place to go.

But the new Spirits mode is the real headline here, giving solo players the long-term hook Smash has lacked in the past, while effectively acting as a training camp for multiplayer, as it pits you against dozens of opponents, each with special abilities or stage hazards to overcome. You can, of course, turn all of that off elsewhere, playing simplified versions of each stage with no items. Though while vanilla Smash has its fans, for our money this beautifully bewildering fighting game still works best as a knockabout dust-up between friends, kitchen sink and all.