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Gift Reviews

One gift at a time, examined properly: what it actually is, who it suits, what it doesn't do, and whether it's worth the money as a present rather than as a purchase.

A roundup tells you which gift wins. A review tells you whether the one you already have in your basket is the right call. These pages take a single product at a time and answer the four questions a gift buyer actually has: what is this thing, who does it suit, what does it not do, and would something cheaper have been the better present?

We have not tested any of these products, and we will never pretend otherwise. We own no units and run no lab. What we do instead is read the manufacturer’s published specification and the retail listing, look at what real owners consistently report, check compatibility against the console you’re actually buying for, and put a live, dated price on the page. Then we do the job the spec sheet can’t: judge the thing as a gift, for someone who doesn’t play games and can’t evaluate it themselves. That’s set out in full on how we pick.

You’ll notice there are no scores here, and no stars. A number would dress spec-reading up as testing, and it would tell you nothing about the only question that matters — whether it suits the person whose name is going on the label. Every review ends with at least one situation where we’d give something else, with a live price on that alternative too.

New this month, and the first game in here rather than a piece of hardware: our Mario Kart World review — the Nintendo Switch 2’s flagship and the priciest thing on its shelf, judged on what the open world and the elimination mode really add, and on the two situations where we’d hand over the cheaper Mario Kart instead.

Newest: our Nintendo Switch Lite review — the cheapest way to put a Nintendo console in somebody’s hands, and the only one that physically cannot be plugged into a television. Whether that is the feature or the dealbreaker depends entirely on the person you are buying for, which is what the page is built to help you work out.

Weighing two specific products against each other? The comparison pages put them side by side. Starting from scratch instead? Go to gifts for gamers, which is sorted by who you’re buying for and what you want to spend, or straight to the games worth gifting if the present should be something to play rather than something to plug in.

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