THIS week, Battlefield 1 blasts onto Xbox One, The LEGO Harry Potter Collection flies onto PS4 and Batman makes a Return To Arkham on Xbox One. Elsewhere, Playstation VR makes its first steps into a living room near you with Driveclub VR and Tumble VR.

GAME OF THE WEEK:

Title: Battlefield 1

Platform: Xbox One

Genre: Shooter

Price: £41.99

ASIN: B01F5D1MIA

An awesome early Christmas present for shooter fans

This is one triple-A title that has come too early to hold off buying or playing until Christmas. And why should you, anyway, when the action is this good? The single player War Stories set the tone for a truly incredible recreation of the WWI environs, treated with a level of sensitivity and emotion that EA has to be applauded for. And it paves the way for a multiplayer experience that longtime Battlefield fans will revel in, as intuitive destruction and dynamic weather ensure that no battle is ever the same. Through your actions, the pristine world around you changes into a battle-scarred landscape before your eyes, changing the world forever, while the dynamic weather forces you to adapt your tactics. The difference in playing the same map on a bright day, in heavy fog, or rain has to be seen to be believed. The addition of horses, primitive planes and tanks certainly refresh the action from previous games, and this is by far the best release from the franchise for a long time. (91%)

Title: LEGO Harry Potter Collection

Platform: PS4

Genre: Action

Price: £30.99

ASIN: B01LYGKEQY

A magical bundle of brick-building action

The Hogwarts high jinks continue as LEGO brings Years 1-4 and Years 5-7 to PS4 for the first time with both games remastered on one disc. This compilation unites the creative skills of the brick-building masters and the expansive world of Harry Potter, delivering a journey full of spell-casting, potion-making, puzzle-solving, lessons, duelling, and much more, for gamers of all generations to enjoy. Where the official games of the films failed, these cartoon-style action romps produce astonishingly accurate and carefully constructed environments, perfectly interspersed with amusing parodies from the film series throughout. In a bundle of content this big, you'll encounter a few chapters that feel a little recycled in terms of presentation and objectives, but that's a small gripe for an action-platforming-fest that's big on laughs and overall entertainment value. Put simply, there's always room for an extra portion of Potter. (83%)

Title: Batman: Return To Arkham

Platform: Xbox One

Genre: Action

Price: £29.99

ASIN: B01FW6WY14

The Dark Knight shines bright on Xbox One once again

The Batman universe has enduring appeal (now even available in VR) and this Return To Arkham offering gives gamers the chance to experience the remastered Dark Knight delights of two critically acclaimed titles from the last console generation - Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City. Exposed to two dark and atmospheric adventures that take you into the depths of Gotham City's high security psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, as well as the heavily fortified city around it, you'll enjoy countless opportunities to experiment with Batman's legendary gadgetry. Striking from the shadows to confront The Joker and Gotham City's array of notorious super villains, here we're treated to an all-star cast from the DC Comics collection, and an equally impressive voice-acting roll-call, including Mark Hamill as The Joker. It's open-world action gaming at its fantasy finest, and both titles continue to shine on our newest gaming systems. (89%)

Title: Tumble VR

Platform: PS4

Genre: Puzzle

Price: £7.99

ASIN: B01HFJG5J8

A tower-building bonanza of early VR action

Virtual Reality is finally here and, of the many launch titles, there's a gem of a puzzler here, resurrected from the early days of PlayStation's Move controllers, more than five years ago. With more than 70 fiendishly addictive levels of balancing, building and demolishing, Tumble VR proves to be a mighty test of your physical and mental dexterity. Here you'll get to be hands-on with gravity-defying building tasks where the highest tower gets the biggest score, or take on tricky balancing acts with blocks of all shapes, sizes, weights and dimensions. And if you can't satiate that desire to blow things up, there's also a mode where you can lay mines in tactical positions to topple towers, scoring points for the biggest blast radius. VR feels like a natural enhancement to the original premise for Tumble, rather than a gimmicky add-on and, aside from some potential PS camera issues when you move around your structure in the smallish playing space, this puzzler puts you firmly in another world for your amusement, which is ultimately the objective that every VR game should seek to achieve. (80%)

Title: Driveclub VR

Platform: PS4

Genre: Racing

Price: £29.99

ASIN: B01LXR2JQZ

Drop yourself into the virtual driver's seat

Another of the existing PlayStation titles to be given a VR shot in the arm is Driveclub. As one of the best racing games out there, the original first person perspective will move new virtual reality drivers seamlessly into the on-track action, delivering a new level of immersion that will have you leaping off your seat as those crunching vehicle crashes hammer home more viscerally than ever before. Here, the online virtual reality multiplayer race modes and action-packed single player career are joined by drifting and time trial challenges, while new and classic Driveclub tracks are brought to life through the power of VR, including five all-new urban locations. Visually, it's incredible at every level, with more than 80 cars recreated with immaculate detail for you to explore at your leisure, and the surrounding environments are guaranteed to cause a prang or two as your eyes drift away from the road in front of you to marvel at the vistas either side. It's an immersive thrill ride that effectively showcases the power of VR and is still a darn good racer you ought to take out for a spin. (84%)

WHAT'S HOT AND WHAT'S NOT?

Rockstar Games has at last given gamers an official indication that Red Dead Redemption 2 is on the Wild West horizon, after re-theming its social media accounts to feature the trademark red and black artwork synonymous with the game, along with an image of seven silhouettes of cowboys walking in front of the setting sun. This scant but oh-so-important activity sent the internet into a frenzy with the images retweeted tens of thousands of times in the hours that followed the posts, before the long awaited trailer was released a few days later. Now we wait until autumn next year for the game itself!

Meanwhile, in the charts this week, FIFA 17 stayed strong at the top of the charts, fending off the challenge of Gears Of War 4, which debuted at two. Mafia III slipped to three, while WWE 2K17 launched into four in its first week of release.

GAME CHART ALL FORMATS FULL PRICE

1. FIFA 17

2. Gears Of War 4

3. Mafia III

4. WWE 2K17

5. Rise Of The Tomb Raider: 20 Year Edition

6. Forza Horizon 3

7. Playstation VR Worlds

8. Skylanders Imaginators

9. Until Dawn: Rush Of Blood

10. Rocket League

Leisure software charts compiled by Chart Track, (c) 2016 UKIE Ltd