MOST people’s new year’s resolutions are usually dull and predictable, like quitting chocolate, joining a gym or learning some sort of musical instrument. Screw that.

My resolutions this year involve rigging elections on a small island, sneaking up on demon samurai, taking stunning photographs of Giza’s pyramids and entering underground bare-knuckle fights.

Obviously, I won’t be doing all of these things in reality but on my Playstation, Xbox and PC.

A good game to have on your radar this winter is Tropico 6, a city management/political simulation game due out on January 25.

The long-running series has you play the leader of a small Caribbean island from the colonial period, through the cold war and into the present day as you either play off or work with the great powers and cling onto your rule.

This latest release features bigger islands, new buildings, more political intrigue and the ability to steal world famous monuments. Tropico is always wacky fun and I can’t wait to force my citizens to erect a huge statue in honour of my tyrannical rule before the inevitable guilt sets in and I start the game again and build a socialist utopia.

The Dark Souls games by From Software are not for everyone. They’re brutally hard and, at times, needlessly obtuse. But, praise the sun, progressing through the games is just so rewarding.

The Japanese developers' latest action-adventure game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is due out on March 22 and it looks just as challenging as the Dark Souls games.

Sekiro’s setting is based on Japanese mythology. So that means no more clunking around a gloomy European fantasy world in a full suit of armour. Instead we play as a fleet-footed ninja/samurai who flings himself around his environment using a bizarre prosthetic arm.

The game looks odd, slightly disturbing and bloody difficult. Perhaps I’m a sucker for punishment but I know I’ll devote at least a 100 hours to this game.

Not much has been seen of Campo Santo’s In the Valley of the Gods since its reveal trailer in December 2017. The game appears to be a first-person story-driven adventure featuring two explorers in the 1920s documenting ancient Egyptian ruins.

If the trailer is anything to go by — and if it comes close to the developer’s previous release Firewatch, easily one of the most intriguing games this decade — then we’re in store for something special.

In the Valley of the Gods doesn’t have a release date yet, but hopefully it’ll emerge sometime in the next 12 months.

Underground game developers Brainwash Gang are busy working on Damnview: Built from Nothing. The 8-bit game is a dark take on community simulation games like Nintendo’s sugar-coated Animal Crossing.

Both games have you play as an anthropomorphic animal but life in Damnview is a bleak struggle. Players can either get themselves a meaningless, precarious job or take their chances in the criminal underworld.

The developers say the game is “about despair, the hostility of capitalism and the need of seeking for a better future.” Your impact on the city streets “depends on you and your decisions, the people you meet, the people you help or the people you choose to hurt. It’s all about survival in the concrete jungle.”

Again, not much has been seen of Damnview since it was revealed last summer, and there’s no date attached to it as yet. But it looks to be a necessary and timely critique on Western society, late capitalism and its savage class system.

Ben Cowles is the Morning Star's web editor. You can chat video games with him on Twitter via @Cowlesz.