Review: Marvel's Spider-Man 2

More often than not, the third outing in a given franchise is often considered the worst. Return of the Jedi, for example, was considered the worst of the original trilogy, as was Blade Trinity and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, a movie that suffered from far too many villains but did bring us the always great bully maguire meme. 

The same is true of video games, but every so often you get a third entry that surpasses its predecessors in just about every way, taking the lessons learned from previous games and applying it with such skill as to make it feel fresh and intimately familiar all at once, and that is where Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 lives. 

Yes, that is a 2 at that the end of the title, but the second game, Miles Morales isn’t a throw away product, but an essential step in getting to a game so well designed as its newest brother, and boy is Spider-Man 2 well designed, never falling to open world traps like so many other games of its ilk, and nailing every aspect of what the previous two games setup for it. 

This time around you switch between both Peter Parker’s Spider-Man and Miles Morales…Spider-man. At random points you will play as Peter’s long time love interest Mary-Jane Watson, but the game wisely stays away from being a local or online co-op game. Some missions require Peter, some require Miles and some can be completed by either. It is one of the best aspects of the game as you never feel like you are missing something nor do you require setting up a play session with a friend, partner or child to get the most out of the game. 

Set after the events of both previous games, we see Peter still showing Miles the ropes of super-hero life with a spectacular opening sequence that highlights one of the series core tenants of being said hero while also trying to hold down normal things like a job or high school without getting into trouble. That sequence features an impressive fight with a giant SandMan as he for some reason goes berserk in the heart of New York. 

Once that is complete, an old friend arrives in the form of Peter and Mary-Jane’s best friend Harry Osbourne. The trio, and especially Peter and Harry, reunite and you are treated to touching moments of normalcy from old friends picking up where they left off. It’s a great series of events that drop the action back down to people just living their lives and makes the story all that more engaging. 

Soon though, that super-hero life comes calling, as a new nemesis heads to the big apple in the form of the mysterious Kraven the Hunter and his army. Armed with advanced technology and a single minded obsession with the hunt, and in the minds of the grunt enemies you will face, Kraven himself, they begin to spread throughout the city and become the primary threat for the majority of the game. 

In gameplay terms this means much the same as it did for the gangs in the first two games. As you swing and fly around the city, you will come across random crimes being perpetuated or groups of hunters randomly attacking civilians and can go and fight them. These are decoupled from completing a given area of the city, unlike the first game, and makes for a good change where you don’t feel like you have to do them as they are really just XP farms. 

I did say you can fly around the city, and one of the smartest decisions in this game is the inclusion of the web wings, turning Peter and Mile’s suits into wingsuits they can use to switch from swinging to gliding. It’s a really cool addition and makes navigating the city even easier than it already was, with a few challenges thrown in for fun side quests. Having wind tunnels dotted around that give you a massive speed boost when gliding and letting you get from one part of the city to another is also very useful and another smart addition. 

The combat is much the same as the first two games, honed to perfection. It is expanded with suit abilities for Spider-Man and new Venom powers for Miles, with each hero getting their own skill tree along with one for both of them. The basic combat is the same as the first two games though, so if you didn’t vibe with it in either of those, then you won’t here. It’s expanded, yes, but it is essentially the same. 

There are some cool additions that don’t impact how you play. Dropping down into a random crime encounter could see you actually dropping in to help the other Spider-Man fight the battle, which results in team up finishing moves that are super cool. Some other characters will show up as well in this same vein, it's a neat little thing that adds to the feeling that this version of New York is a living and breathing city, something that has become increasingly important in open world games. 

Some of the main missions and side quests allow for the use of the same stealth mechanics used in previous games, and as in those it is very satisfying to stalk above a group of enemies slowly webbing them up. As you progress, you get access to web lines, which allow you to form your own paths over such areas and give a better degree of freedom in how you approach such areas. There is an argument to be made that this makes the stealth sections of the game almost trivial, especially when combined with the ability to perform multiple perch takedowns at once, I would disagree but that's just me. 

One of the best things these games do is not fall into the open world trap of having so much to do on the map that it becomes a boring checklist. Part of this is that simply moving around the open world is so much fun that moving between objectives is a joy, but also there is just enough to tick off one or two on your way to the next main mission without just seeing icon after icon after icon on the map. It’s a great system and makes even earning the platinum trophy an experience you want to do and, more importantly, something that is actually fun. 

The side quests themselves never feel tacked on and while most devolve into combat arena’s, they all have a point that adds to the feel of the world you are operating in. For example, a set of Mile’s side quests involve the classic Spider-Man villain Mysterio who is fresh out of prison and trying to go straight. It’s cool to have more to the side stuff than just beat this set of bad guys to a pulp and while yes, this was the case in the first games, here the writing is so much better for these missions and again, really add to the feel of the world. 

Now, there is the matter of that other villain. I have been trying to dance around spoilers but since the very first trailer showed Venom, I think I am ok. At a certain point, Peter gets the classic black suit, which slowly increases his aggression. This comes through in the writing, like I say slowly at first -  a snap at Miles here, a punch that is a little too powerful there but as the story progresses and the suit starts to take over Peter goes more than a little emo with it. It’s a great way to handle the second half of the game, and once Venom finally reveals himself the story ramps up to a great degree. 

The main problem with this is it creates a game of two halves, one where you are fighting Kraven, and the second where you are fighting Venom and the grunt enemies he creates. It would be fine, but there is very little difference between the two, really boiling down to an extra set of side quests and changes to the random encounters. This also means that Venom is woefully underused and you don’t get that classic sense of him hunting Spider-Man down but then again, and as with everything with these games, Insomniac are telling their own version of the story, I just wish Venom was actually in the game more. 

There is a lot to love in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 but as I said before if the first two games didn’t hit for you then there is little here to change your mind. I did encounter a couple of bugs, the worst of which was a crash to desktop but considering the number of hours I put into it and I had that once and maybe two instances where one of the Spider-Men gets stuck on level geometry I am not sure I can say its buggy, it's just something to be aware of. 

I have found with all three games in this series it is the main campaign ending that makes or breaks the game and while the label of bad cannot be leveled at any of them, each one has good and bad points. With this in mind I went into this game thinking it will be the end that will truly show me how good it is. While Miles Morales is still my personal favorite, the ending here is a damn fine one and expertly sets up a fourth game, one which I very much hope they get to make. 

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is an expertly crafted open world game with brilliant combat, perfectly honed traversal mechanics and some of the best writing gaming has to offer. It looks gorgeous and as all the games in the series have had is a masterclass in voice acting. The only real thing I can point to as a problem is again, if the first two didn’t land with you then there is very little if anything here that will change your mind. For everyone else, you will find the game you already love at it’s peak. 

Review: Starfield

Games can have long gestations, and Starfield is a prime example. Sometimes this works in the games favor, sometimes not so much and Starfield’s nearly decade long development has left it somewhere in the middle. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s also not the revelation many were hoping for. Let me explain. 

Many have called Starfield since its first reveal “Fallout in Space”. I never played a Fallout game before (my shame on this is high before you start!), but I did play a silly amount of Skyrim, and for me it's more Skyrim in space but with guns. If you played either of Bethesda’s previous games then you will pretty much know what you are getting here, and that is both a good and a bad thing. 

The game introduces the new universe of its most venerable of creators with an opening sequence showcasing what the development team dubs its ‘NASA punk’ aesthetic, though if you are familiar with the term ‘dirty technology’ popularized by films such as the Alien franchise then you will be immediately familiar with the concept. 

It depicts workers working, miners searching for minerals on a distant planet and does actually quite a good job of showing the dev’s ideas for how space exploration would go based on the technology and development of it that is happening now in the world. It’s a cool look and while not the most original take on how humans would actually reach the stars, gets the point across nicely. 

Unfortunately, a few minutes into this sequence is where the game’s biggest problem, at least for me, starts. You encounter an artifact while mining that gives you an eerie vision and kick starts the main story of the game and while it looks awesome, well that’s about it, it looks awesome. I will come back to this later. 

From there a robust character creator allows you to customize your in-game persona, along with various traits that give you different dialog options and a few other things throughout your play through. For example, picking the Kids Stuff trait means you can go visit your parents on the main hub world of Jemison, but also that 2% of all your credits are sent back to them every week. Each trait has both upsides and downsides, but the three you can pick give you a good starting point for your character. 

One cool thing I found about the Kids Stuff trait is that when you go see your parents their look is directly inspired by the face you craft in the character creator. It doesn’t sound like much, but seeing how your character would have inherited certain features from their parents is a neat touch and really shows the level of thought that has been put into the game. 

From there, you are recruited into an organization called Constellation, which is dedicated to studying the artifact you found in the mine as well as being granted your first ship. The game begins to open out from there, and as you start to go to various planets you find everything from absolutely nothing, to small outposts to large industrial operations. 

Unfortunately, this boils down to little more than combat arenas. Some side quests give more depth to such locations, but just picking a planet and traveling to it, you can scan it from orbit to find these points of interest. When you land it is rare to find a place completely empty, but these aren’t scripted characters with quests, more just a band of pirates or marauders trying to pick the place clean of anything valuable with a ‘shoot first’ mentality. So you gain XP, weapons and spacesuits (the game's equivalent of armor) and some of the hundreds of resources, but any kind of depth is lacking outside of the scripted missions. 

I am torn on this aspect of the game, because there is certainly more of an exploration element than many have given it credit for, however, that exploration rewards you with stuff and not especially exciting stuff at that. There is a chance you will get a legendary weapon or suit, especially if the enemies are a high level, but other than that its ammo and resources. If the game had more moments where you find something random and cool on just a few of the planets then it would make it worth it but as it stands it just forms part of the overall grind. 

Exploration in Starfield won’t be for everyone, as the devs seem to have over compensated for the idea that people like fast travel by making anywhere fast travelable, from anywhere. It would make sense if you had to take off in your ship first and then could jump to the planet in question but that’s not the case. Pulling up the star map while on the ground and finding a planet and hitting ‘set course’ if you see you in orbit if you haven’t already been in just a few seconds, or on the ground at a POI if you have. 

It makes it so that while sure, you can explore from your ship and do the cool jump animation, there is little to no point. It also, and this is a crying shame, makes the ships themselves feel kinda redundant. As I said previously if they just made it so you had to be in orbit to be able to fast travel it would give the ships a bit more of a purpose, but as it stands you have to make the conscious decision to do that, rather than the game promoting it. It also flies in the face of the idea that the game is about space exploration and not just a series of quests strung together. 

To be fair, there are plenty of quests, so it's not like you never have anything to do. Just walking around one of the inhabited planets will see you overhearing conversations NPC’s are having amongst themselves that will have the UI pop up a ‘Activity found’ notification and give you a small side quest to do. It’s a cool way to do the discovery of such things and certainly gives these area’s a better sense of life, though the fact that many of the voice lines that create these activities repeat every time you go to a place and don’t do the mission takes the shine off it. 

Some of the larger quest lines are really good, but never the main one. The Crimson Fleet quest line, and the Freestar Ranger line are cool stories of misadventures in space, things that again, feel like they are the logical progression of humanity's voyage to the stars. Plus the Freestar Rangers one makes you a space cowboy/girl, which is never not cool. The main quest though, is a real disappointment. 

The Constellation quest line which forms the main story of the game is good in some spots, as it provides lots of NPC’s to interact with, some of which you can even romance and a good excuse to travel to some of the more distant planets on the map. However, it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the game. Without getting too spoilery, the main point of it is to find temples that let you into just one room, with what is admittedly a very cool device at the center. Once this activates, you have to travel through points of light dotted around the room and once you have done that enough times you are granted a little cutscene and what is essentially a new super power. You then rinse and repeat this until you have enough to move the story forward, but that doesn’t mean you have got them all. 

These powers range from a gravitational wave that knocks enemies back to surrounding yourself with a bubble of atmosphere that stops your oxygen levels dropping. All are universally pointless. I tested a couple out when I got them, but found that I completely forgot about them in combat or any other instance because they are just not needed at all. It’s an addition that just isn’t needed, isn’t fully explained by the story and adds an unnecessary layer of mysticism. The game would have been much better served with the main story being some tale of political intrigue centered around the various factions, but instead we get pointless powers that don’t fit with the logical progression the rest of the game espouses. 

The main gameplay is your relatively basic FPS, with various weapons ranging from, and I am not kidding here, an AK-47 (or the ‘old earth rifle’) to particle beam weapons and even swords and grenades/mines. You get a good selection of weapons and there are different rarities of all of them along with four categories for each…which gets confusing quickly. 

Basically, the categories denote how powerful a given weapon is. You would think that picking up something that says ‘legendary’ on it would do the same job, but apparently not. The four categories are base, calibrated, refined and finally advanced, with each increasing the power of the weapon. Then you have the rarities, which are common, rare, epic and legendary and these add perks to the weapon that do something like give extra damage to alien creatures or apply a bleeding effect. 

Honestly, the perks are fairly pointless and just confuse the system. It would have been better to add the perks to the mods you can add to weapons and just have the tier system. It would have made so much more sense and give you more of a reason to put points into the weapon engineering skill on the rather vast skill tree rather than this mess of a system that I was constantly confused by. 

The gun play isn’t great, but is perfectly serviceable and gives good reasons to put points into the various combat skills on the skill tree, as they do actually make life a little bit easier, but I do mean a little bit. I was able to get headshots with the sniper rifles with only one point on the rifle skill and nothing on the sniper skill so it does the job, but I always felt it necessary to have one of each type of weapon on me at all times, preferably with each having a different ammo type so that I always had options in some of the more combat heavy areas of the game. 

To be fair that is just my own paranoia, you really only need to carry a couple of weapons at a time to save on encumbrance, which yes, is still a thing. Being over encumbered just makes your oxygen level drop more quickly depending on just how over the limit you are, and prevents fast traveling. It’s not really a problem, but again, is kinda pointless and doesn’t really add anything but annoyance to the game. While better than the system in Skyrim, it’s only real purpose seems to be to gate progress so you aren’t just loading up on tons of resources and crafting all the best stuff as soon as possible. 

Speaking of the crafting system, it's…complex to say the least. There are hundreds of resources in the game, both organic and inorganic, that are used to craft weapon and spacesuit mods, food and medical supplies and the basic components needed for the base building aspect of the game. It’s another system I am torn on, as I do believe there are simply too many resources and it makes the whole thing frustrating to deal with, but also it encourages planetary exploration and base building so there is a reason for it. That’s not to say you can’t simply buy them from certain vendors, and there are even some that specialize in resources, but getting one to ten items of a given resource from them is not quite the same as mining it yourself. 

You mine inorganic resources by going to an empty spot on a planet, putting down a beacon and constructing a base. What you can build is limited by certain other resources you can build at industrial workbenches dotted around outposts, cities and eventually your ship, but if you have the stuff you can create fairly expansive bases with defenses against local wildlife and pirates. 

Scanning a planet from orbit lets you see what resources are available on it, and if you choose the right spot you can mine two or three at a time and even create habs and landing pads for your ships. It’s a cool aspect of the game and can get the creative juices flowing, as well as being the best way to get resources. Pick a planet that is high level and has an abundant amount of alien creatures and you also pick up plenty of inorganic materials as well, plus that ever useful xp if you want to grind some levels out. 

The base building is vastly overshadowed, however, by the ship building. While you get various ships throughout the course of the game, and can even board and hijack ships that are attacking you, building your own is extremely satisfying and can get very creative. People are already creating various famous spaceships from other media, as well as ships for different functions in the game. This might range from light and fast fighters to heavy cargo haulers and everything in between. 

Getting it right and creating a cool looking ship is pretty easy once you understand the nuisances of the system, but you can’t just start building, you have to have a ship to modify in the first place. It’s a bit daft but not a big problem, since as previously stated various ships are granted to you over the course of the game. I just don’t understand why you can’t click ‘create new ship’ and start from scratch, seems a weird omission to me. 

Spending hours tinkering in the ship and base builders will be a highlight for some, and a chore for others, it really depends on what you like, but if there is one thing you can’t level at Starfield it's that you don’t have plenty to do. Quests and activities come thick and fast, and I finished my time with the game with plenty of stuff to take on if I so chose, but with a hundred and twenty hours behind me, I was ready to leave the universe of Starfield behind, despite the fast travel system meaning that jumping around to finish everything out would become trivial at best. 

I did have some technical issues with the game, mainly due to the fact I initially installed it to an SSD that wasn’t my M.2 drive and that caused some issues with assets loading in. Once I moved it, while I still got audio lagging behind in spots and frame rate dips just walking around, the game played smoothly and looked great even on my most modest of systems. There was weird jank, like your robot companion Vasco being stood on the nose of your ship, outside, as you came into land, but was silly and not game breaking. I did have a couple of crashes to desktop, but they were few and far between. 

Ultimately, if you like Fallout or Skyrim, you will probably like Starfield. It has some very cool ideas and the base and ship building systems are robust enough to keep you engaged for hours. The problem comes from the fact that it is very much like the previous games from its creator, and games as a whole have moved on from the systems employed in those so that the whole thing feels more than a little dated. 

Don’t get me wrong, the graphics can be beautiful and the voice acting, though repeated too often in some spots, can be spot on, but the game just doesn’t feel like a modern RPG. It sometimes doesn’t respect the players time and can give off the impression that the devs tried to overcompensate for that and that created a whole other set of problems for it. It’s a shame, because the universe it creates is really cool, so long as you don’t take into account the frankly stupid rinse and repeat of the main quest line. 

I really want Bethesda to get another go and create a Starfield 2 with updated mechanics and take on board all the fair criticism leveled at it. Some, in my opinion, have been way too harsh on it, some not so much, but the base of the game is a solid foundation to be built upon with a sequel. If you like Bethesda’s games, then there is plenty for you, if you don’t then there is nothing here that will change your mind. With a hundred and twenty hours of the game in my belt however, I can honestly say it's a game worth a go, even if it isn’t perfect by any means. 

Review: Final Fantasy XVI

How do you update a series that’s main incarnation is now on the number sixteen? Well, in the case of Square Enix, you watch all of Game of Thrones and say “Let’s do that but with more magic!” and thus, Final Fantasy XVI was born. 

That’s the story however, what about the gameplay? Well you do the same as what your last couple of games have been doing and remove the menu driven, turn based combat and turn it into a character action game. Just like the Final Fantasy before it, i.e. Final Fantasy VII Remake, this works excellently and combat is just as fun and smooth as that game. 

The Game of Thrones inspiration can be seen from the off, as the sci-fi elements common to a lot of Final Fantasy titles are gone, replaced with more classic fantasy elements of swords, shields and…well I was going to say horses, but this being Final Fantasy they ride the good old Chocobo. You play as Clive Rosfield, son of Archduke of Rosaria Elwin Rosfield and heir to the throne, or he would be, if it wasn’t for his little brother, Joshua. 

Joshua is the dominant of flame, for the powerful Eikon Phoenix. Basically Joshua can channel fire magic and become a giant flaming bird. As per the law of the land, the Phoenix dominant will become the next Archduke of Rosaria. Clive, being the good brother and good guy that he is, becomes Joshua’s first shield or bodyguard and is charged with keeping the dominant of fire safe. 

This being Game of Thrones inspired, let’s just say that doesn’t prove the easiest of jobs. Without getting too spoilery, lots of political intrigue and the like ensues, especially after a time jump of roughly fifteen years. This jump highlights one of the story's more intriguing elements, namely that magic users are not exactly worshiped in this world - far from it. At best they are slaves, treated as property to be used by those who have enough money to own them. 

It’s an interesting take on the generic ‘magic is just a thing people can do idea’, and bearers (as they are known) are people who can wield magic without the use of crystals mined from the bottom of colossal mother crystals. These are sold so people can power stoves, put water in wells and all sorts of other tasks. Bearers are also bought and sold, used as slaves for those same tasks as it is more cost effective up to the point the curse of their magic turns them to stone. 

The lore of the magic here is excellent, a really cool take on some of the more obvious tropes of fantasy fiction. Some of the best side quests look at this in nuanced detail, becoming some of the best content in the game. Depending on how you feel about this it is either a shame that the main story doesn’t focus enough on this aspect of the lore, or what it does focus on gets a bit overused and can hit you over the head again and again. 

While I personally, as you can probably tell, like the lore quite a bit even I got a little bored of them constantly going back to the slavery aspect of the world. This was mainly down to it never being the main focus of the story, despite the potential it had. However, I do admit that sixty plus hours of it was probably going to be a bit much. 

So many games put the best stuff in side quests of late, so it's a trope I am getting used to. To be fair, the main storyline isn’t terrible, by any stretch, and again the Game of Thrones inspiration shines through very quickly. Do not be fooled however, the writing here isn’t half as good but it does push the narrative forward with some cool twists and some obvious ones. 

Final Fantasy XVI is far more violent than previous games, again in part from its inspiration, with blood flying as Clive cleaves through enemies at a pace only rivalled by Dante from Devil May Cry. There is a lot more swearing and some rather spicy scenes, nothing gratuitous, but certainly more adult than any previous game in the series. It makes a distinct departure for the series and one I am all for, though it might not be to everyone’s tastes, and to be fair, not all enemies are human, there are certainly plenty of monsters to fight around a semi-open world.

As for the actual gameplay, as previously stated the game is closer to Devil May Cry than traditional Final Fantasy games, and that is no bad thing. Slicing through enemies with the traditional comically oversized sword is awesome and as Clive’s abilities grow so do your combat options. In real terms this means that you can change up special moves, as Clive has the power to utilize the abilities of certain magic types to give him more powerful attacks. 

These attacks might be something like Will-o-The Wykes, which creates fireballs that float around Clive dealing damage to any enemies he is close to, or the ultra powerful Flames of Rebirth, that hits all enemies around Clive multiple times. As your options grow, you can eventually mix and match these abilities to customize Clive to your play style. This does however take ability points to unlock, which is a strange thing to have on the skill tree and seems a bit of an artificial way to expand the list. It’s not a deal breaker, just weird. 

The combo possibilities are really cool, as each special move has a separate cool down and if timed correctly you can go on a spree of spectacular attacks that can obliterate an entire gang of enemies in one hit. Especially when combined with Clive’s ability to semi-prime. This is where he can partially summon his Eikon, increasing his strength, healing and power regeneration. Powering up, then unleashing special attack after special attack feels and looks awesome, not least in part because watching a boss’ health bar drain down to less than half in a matter of seconds is brilliant. 

There are then the most spectacular battles in the game, namely the Eikon battles. Eikon’s are the game's version of traditional Final Fantasy summons, but can only be called upon by the dominant for each. As Clive’s brother Joshua is the dominant of the Phoenix, he can call upon and become that summon. Once Clive gets his dominant abilities, he too can call upon his Eikon. Unfortunately this is not an at will ability, it's not even an ability of last resort only to be used once per battle. 

Eikon battles are scripted sections of the game, spectacular encounters in the kaiju vs kaiju vein where a fair amount of control is removed from the player. To be fair this isn’t so much of a problem as you do still have some and previous games have not allowed you really control summons at all so it's not a major thing. The biggest thing about these sections in terms of control is that it can be a bit fiddly to see target reticules in some of them to be able to launch abilities, which is then compounded by the pace of the action which I found makes it very hard to see what is going on and concentrate on what you need to do. At least in my case, my brain simply got overwhelmed. 

It doesn’t change the fact that the visuals in these sections, and indeed the entire game, are awesome. Running around stunning scenery, firing off all those amazing abilities and the art direction in general makes for a feast for the eyes, making it a pleasure to explore the semi open world of Valisthea and its warring countries. 

The sound is great too, the main characters have tremendous voice actors that really imbue the weight of the story beats to them. The main downside is that you will hear the same NPC voice lines over and over again. To be fair, this isn’t a problem to just this game, any game with a lot of NPC’s floating around suffers the same issue but there is a lot of backtracking in Final Fantasy XVI which escalates this particular problem as the same lines will fire every single time you go to a specific location. 

Like all of the issues in the game, it's not a deal breaker, it just brings an otherwise excellent package down just a little bit. That’s the thing about Final Fantasy XVI, it's just a bit below excellence and it's a real shame because everything about it clearly shows a labor of love from its developers and a focus on telling a very different type of story than previous games in the series gives it a refreshing take on the Final Fantasy formula. 

The biggest problem with the story is that it isn't a complete departure from series tropes, and eventually becomes very anime and therefore extremely Final Fantasy. I know it's where others have dropped off from the game and I can completely understand that, it is very much a case of your mileage may vary. 

I really like Final Fantasy XVI, it has some spectacular moments, excellent combat and a compelling story up until it returns to familiar tropes of the overall series. I would have liked to see a bigger focus on the Game of Thrones inspired political intrigue and warring nations of this most intriguing of worlds and some better writing around the concept of the bearers slavery, but what's there is good enough, just not quite as excellent as it should be. 

Final Fantasy XVI can be described as a Final Fantasy game for people who don’t like Final Fantasy games and it’s a statement I can fully agree with. If you don’t normally like this style of RPG then give this one a go, because it is like little else in the genre. You will be rewarded with some excellent combat, an intriguing story and awesome visuals and that just might turn you on to a whole new genre. 

Review: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

I am a firm believer that a Star Wars game doesn’t have to feature a single light saber or space wizard to be good, I mean, just look at the Tie Fighter and X-Wing games. However, if you are going to put Jedi in your game, make sure you do it right. Once again, Respawn has crafted a game that gives you that power fantasy of spinning laser swords and mind powers with effortless ease, and while it might have some issues, Jedi Survivor is quite simply an excellent game. 

Picking up some five years after the events of Fallen Order, now Jedi Knight Cal Kestis is engaging in acts of rebellion against the empire with a new crew of the Mantis. What’s brilliant about this opening mission is that it isn't an abilit-tease, the main powers you had at the end of Fallen Order are with you from the off in Survivor. It makes a refreshing change to the standard formula of such games and allows you to pick up with Cal as though you were never away. 

Sadly, that mission goes more than a little bit south and Cal is sent limping into space aboard the Mantis, where the game’s campaign properly kicks off. Arriving on Koboh, he and the ever adorable BD-1 find friends old and new, using this open world area as a base of operations to continue the story and explore the surroundings. This idea walks the line between discrete levels and open world environments and works surprisingly well, giving you the right amount of both. 

Regardless of if it's Koboh or another planet, the areas you run around in are expansive, with plenty of nooks and crannies to hide collectables in and in some cases they have the requisite bit of hard platforming to get to them. The downside to this is that, for the most part, those collectibles are pointless, as apart from one specific type they are otherwise cosmetic items for Cal, BD-1, his light saber or his blaster and barely add anything to the game other than the satisfaction of ticking off that item from the map. 

There are gameplay relevant upgrades, like more healing stims for BD-1, skill points and the two new combat stances. At the start of the game you have the ones from the first game, so the single, dual and double bladed stances, but as you get into the campaign you gain two new ones: Blaster and Cross guard. Crossguard is a two handed, heavy attack focused stance that deals heavy damage to enemies, while Blaster makes your sword attacks look more like traditional fencing while giving you the ability to shoot fools with a gun. 

Honestly, I barely used the Cross Guard stance, busting it out only when I absolutely had to. The best combo I found, as you can have two equipped at once, was double blade and Blaster, as they gave the best of both worlds. Cal is so agile that having a stance that basically stopped you moving around a lot just seemed pointless, though it is very much a personal thing and your playstyle might suit other combinations. The finishing moves for the Blaster stance are just awesome though, so I highly recommend using that for at least a bit. 

If you have played Fallen Order, then you know pretty much what to expect from Survivor, and that means that if the first game didn’t capture you, it is unlikely that the sequel is suddenly have it click into place - it is very much more of the same in terms of minute to minute gameplay, though that gameplay is just more refined and tighter here, and considering how good the first one played this is a welcome change. The feeling of tearing through mobs of storm troopers a swirling ballet of destruction has rarely been matched, simply bringing a smile to your face. 

One of the better aspects of the game are the new force tears. These are mystical challenge rooms that make you fight certain enemies with certain stances or complete platforming sequences that really showcase Cal’s acrobatic abilities. The tears are a really cool new aspect and definitely live up to the challenge room moniker, with some of the platform ones especially being findish in their demands of you. The rewards for completing them might not be stellar, but playing them is all the reward you need. 

The game pulls from all of the various Star Wars era’s, presenting you with Storm troopers, clone war’s era battle droids and super battle droids to face and even pulling in the new High Republic mythology. For those who don’t know, the High Republic is set some two hundred years before the events of The Skywalker Saga, so it’s cool to see things from that time depicted on screen for the first time. The games main big bad also comes from the High Republic, and while fairly standard as Star Wars bad guys go, it's certainly a new spin on things, even though not much is made of just how old he actually is. 

The story goes places, to say the least. Without spoilers, there is one massive twist that I just didn’t see coming at all and I was genuinely shocked when it happened. It sets up the final third of the game really well, and while there is a slightly unnecessary and very difficult boss fight during that sequence it certainly showed that game stories can still surprise you even after all these years of trope after trope. 

All that said, the game does have issues. I did experience a bit of frame rate dip at certain points and while it wasn’t anything game breaking, it was disappointing especially when playing in performance mode. Checkpointing can be frustrating, taking you back a good ten minutes of progress to the last save point, which in one sense is completely understandable, but it can be frustrating to re-battle smaller enemies over and over again just to get back to the boss battle you died at. 

The two major problems I have with Survivor though are thus: The hidden loading screen behind a door with a flashing light, and Cal’s face. Let’s tackle those in order. There is only one of those hidden loads, one Koboh, at the cantina. It happens when you go into the Cantina and it is loading the inside and when you are leaving to hit the open world. The non-cynical part of me says that this is completely understandable and Koboh is an open world on one side of the door so it would take a minute to get everything setup but the rest of me just feels like its a step back. 

It goes back to the time of the original Mass Effect when you would be deceived by the pretty animated loading screen that is the elevator on the citadel. That game came out in 2007. Are we honestly saying that with all the supposed power of the modern systems we still need to do this in 2023? It’s ridiculous, we should be past that at this point, especially with all the cash chucked at a project such as this. 

Finally Cal’s face. Now, do not get me wrong, this isn’t a dig at Cameron Monaghan, he is a fine looking guy and honestly I can’t wait for him to play Cal in either a Star Wars movie or TV show (seriously, make that happen Disney!), but because some of the collectible cosmetics are his hair and his beard, for some reason Cal’s face permanently looks out of focus and pixelated. This is true even cut scenes and it can really pull you out of the action to think, “What is going on here exactly?”.

I know that having changeable hair and beards isn’t an easy thing to do in games, especially at this level, but it just looks weird. Every other character's face looks fine, but Cal’s stands out a mile for no reason at all. Does it stop the game being one of the best character action games of recent years? Does it mean it’s not the bed Jedi action game ever made? Not all all, but it looks weird and I played on PS5. 

Despite all of this, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a fantastic action game and makes you feel like a powerful jedi. It’s excellent story twists and turns and setups a, at least for me, much anticipated sequel that I hope can fix the few issues present here to make it truly the best Star Wars game ever made, and if it can beat Tie Fighter in that, I for one will be extremely happy. 

Review: Forspoken

New IP’s are tough to pull off these days. People say they want the new stuff, some new world to explore and story to be immersed in but unless the gameplay is absolutely perfect from the off and the hype train is storming along then people simply won’t buy that new IP, causing developers and publishers to fall back on tried and tested franchises. 

Enter Forspoken, Luminous Productions and Square Enix’s latest action RPG. It fell into this exact trap, but it is my belief that the game hasn’t been given it’s due credit as, while I admit it's not all perfect, once you get a few hours into the game and get the flow of things you will be treated to a cool world to explore with some interesting story/lore concepts and a battle system that provides some of the best attack animations outside of a Final Fantasy game. 

Forspoken begins in modern day New York, our protagonist, Alfre ‘Frey’ Holland is trying to look after herself and her cat while dodging local gang’s and the police. We find that Frey has a mysterious past having been orphaned as a baby and abandoned. After an encounter with said gang results in her home being burnt down, Frey goes on the run and eventually finds a magical amulet called Cuff and is thrown into a portal to appear in a world called Athia. 

It turns out that Cuff is sentient and talks to Frey via a psychic connection they share. Cuff is also very useful, granting her magical powers, both for battle and for traversing the world of Athia. That open world is massive and contains a lot of stuff to discover. Regular readers will know my disdain for open world games with too many icons on the map and while Forspoken does fall into this trap, it marks those icons with the rewards you get for completing them, be that mana, new gear or one of the various other collectibles.  

So I am a little torn on this subject, as on one hand Forspoken does fall into the checklist trap, but it never felt like a chore. A major reason for this is something that other open world games should implement, which is being able to add more than one way point to the map. You can have up to five going at any given time, as well as the one for your main story objective. It allows you to plan a path towards that objective while also picking up major upgrades along the way. It’s a genius idea that, at least for me, stopped the icons becoming a chore you have to do. 

It promotes exploration and, since the items you need to increase your magical abilities and upgrade your gear are just strewn about the world, you can get plenty for upgrades without having to grind out battles over and over again. Those items include glowing orbs of Mana, which is an interesting way to handle that age old mechanic and I really like it as currency rather than a meter that drops down to power your abilities and most powerful attacks. To be clear, you still have a meter to govern that, but it's stamina. It’s a little twist on the same formula, but keeps things that little bit fresher. 

As you travel around you discover that there is only one city left on Athia, Cipal, and everything else has been destroyed by ‘The Break’ as Frey dubs it. This is a miasma that corrupts creatures caught in it, causing them to become grotesque and powerful monsters with exposed bones and, for some reason, gold covering sections of their bodies. This fate awaits creatures ranging from bears to deer to crocodiles, and of course, the humans unfortunate enough to escape. 

The humans are just zombie mobs that prove, especially with the later powers, trivial to defeat, but some of the bigger creatures are no joke and can come at you with large groups. Each creature also has a weakness to a specific type of magic that Frey can use based on four elements: Earth, Fire, Water and Lightning. Switching between each magic type is easy and paying attention to what weakness a given enemy has is crucial to success. This can easily be found by performing a ‘Cuff Scan’ which reveals more information about the creature in question, as well as revealing collectibles and resources. 

The cuff scan becomes vital as some of the upgrade resources are really hard to see, because they don’t glow or anything like that. As you get close you do get a little, and I mean a little, icon on them to say where they are, but when using her magical parkour abilities Frey travels so fast that it can be difficult to spot them. This is especially as a lot of them are flowers that just blend into grassy areas. It adds to the overall look, but can be maddening when trying to farm for upgrades. 

The aforementioned magical parkour is a true gem of the game. While it can be a little hard to control in spots and you can easily overshoot things you are aiming for, the sense of speed is immense and charging across the landscape, flipping and bouncing over obstacles is an absolute blast. It again means that finding all those icons isn’t as much of a chore as it would be in other games and is a stand out mechanic. 

I mentioned previously that Frey has access to four types of magic. While one of those, and the first one  you get, is all Frey’s, the others are acquired by defeating the god like Tanta’s, beings of power that used to benevolently rule Athia, but now are part of its downfall. This concept is super cool and one of my favorite story aspects of the game, though the remaining tale falls pretty epically into “I can see where this is going a mile away” territory not long after you reach the magical land. It’s a shame that overall the story is pretty generic as there are some really cool concepts and lore dotted over the world, but I guess we can’t have it all and frankly, the game play’s so well you can easily ignore the story, though it does take quite a turn at one point that makes it worth it. 

Some of the magic attacks available to Frey are some of the coolest animations of any game in recent years. For example, one water based attack engulfs an enemy in a ball of swirling water and when you attack it, the ball explodes and damages everything around it. It looks awesome, and gives fights a spectacle only matched by using the summons in Final Fantasy. The basic magical attacks are just that, but with three levels and multiple options allow you to play around in combat. The biggest attacks are secondary magic, but even bigger than that is the surge magic, screen filling powers that at their fullest power destroy everything in their path in one hit, though I admit that does depend on exactly what you are fighting at the time. 

Charging up a barrier of molten rock to raise from the ground to hit anything Frey is facing is deeply satisfying and while not all of the abilities are particularly useful, and trust me, there are so many that there are more of those than you would really want, battles are fast and exciting. Fluidly dodging attacks while switching to attack magic before unleashing a powerful secondary attack before finishing a group of enemies off with a surge attack just feels great, and rarely gets old. 

Ultimately the biggest problem with Forspoken is the writing. As I said previously the story is as predictable as they come, which is disappointing but not the real problem. The worst sin is that when Frey is talking, while a fine performance from the actor, the dialog is just dire. I don’t mind swearing in games, or any medium save for content made for kids, but the way Frey talks borders on the unbelievable. I have seen things floating about the internet saying that if this is how the developers think New Yorkers talk they are very much mistaken. 

It can get grating when you play a game for forty odd hours, and this is compounded by the fact that certain actions have exactly one set of dialog. I get that the more sound you record with an actor makes the costs of a game go up, but hearing the exact same thing every time you interact with a certain object, and there being multiple objects of the same type around the world, gets very annoying very quickly. I almost would have preferred it to say the thing once, then never have a voice line again after that first one. To be fair, that does happen to some stuff, just not everything. 

Honestly though, go into Forspoken for the gameplay and you will be greatly rewarded with a fast paced beautiful game with satisfying combat and enough abilities to really play around in fights. You will probably take or leave the story, but don’t give in to the rumors, it’s actually a pretty great game, you just have to give it a chance. 

Review: Marvel's Midnight Suns

Putting a new spin on things, depending on what they are, is questionable at best. Do a good job and you will be lorded, do the opposite and you will be persecuted. So, with that in mind, what would a new spin on a superhero game be? Normally the realm of third person action, what could you do to differentiate? Well, the answer, in the case of Firaxis’ Marvel's Midnight Suns, is to turn it into a hybrid of tactics, CCG and visual novel. 

The big question is this: Does it work? As a concept, surprisingly, yes but with a few caveats. On a technical level, no, sometimes Midnight Suns barely works at all. When it does however, you are treated to a visual spectacle that matches some character action games, with a card system that has just enough depth to be engaging without being over demanding on your time. I really enjoyed my time with the game, but technical problems marred the experience to the point where I really hope they get a sequel. 

The premise of the game is that Lillith, the mother of demons, has been resurrected by perpetual Marvel bad guys Hydra, which foreshadows the coming of the midnight sun. Which is bad, very very bad. Like, summoning evil Elder God bad. Into the fray steps the mystical hero team of The Midnight Suns, led by immortal witch Caretaker. They also get the help of the Avengers and thus the battle for the planet begins. 

The two teams then perform a resurrection of their own, bringing back The Hunter, a mystically powered hero who defeated Lillith once before. This is the customizable character you take charge of through the adventure. The Hunter has a decent character creator so you can make a fairly unique looking hero, and there are lots of outfits to unlock for both in and out of combat, though the out of combat outfits don’t seem to have taken into account that you can make a feminine leaning character and sometimes don’t seem particularly fitting. Then again, you can have various swimsuits, including bikinis, so maybe it offsets that. 

Fulfilling certain requirements, which we will get to in a minute, will unlock various combat outfits for The Hunter, some of which are cool, some not so much, but there are plenty to pick from. These can be further customized with ‘palettes’, different color schemes for each outfit. Then there are the various paintings and room upgrades for The Hunter’s bedroom, upgrades for facilities within the Abby where the inbetween mission sections happen and a host of other things which all mean that there is plenty to unlock throughout the game. 

The main thrust of the game comes in two parts. The first is the character interactions, and while I said it was a visual novel at the start, that's actually a reductive way to think about it. The interactions for the most part are all fully voiced and clicking on a character rarely results in the same thing over and over again, and the characters animate and emote while talking. These generate friendship points which increase your overall standing with the characters and grant special bonuses in combat. 

Get their friendship level high enough with the hunter, and you will unlock the midnight suns challenges for a given Hero, once you are far enough in, which is a unique challenge and unlocks a legendary ability and the characters Midnight Suns outfit, which I personally found were the coolest looking combat outfits in the game. There are 12 characters to interact with in all: Blade, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Dr Strange, Iron Man, Ghost Rider, Hulk, Magik, Nico Minoru, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man and Wolverine. There is also Caretaker and others, but they don’t count to the friendship mechanic. 

They do a good job of giving each character an actual personality, from Ghost Rider not being sure he can live up to the name to the head strong and bullish Nico. Some of the names on the list are of lesser known heroes but they all fit the story and setting and while some are more useful in combat than others, taking any into battle does result in some fun encounters. 

The biggest problem with these interactions is that there is just a little too much of it. It’s cool to develop the relationship with the characters but it does take up far more of the game than the actual combat missions and can prove to be a bit of a chore by the end of the game. Though if you do it with the aim of getting their midnight sun's abilities then it provides more of a goal and is well worth it as those abilities are legendary level and some of the coolest moves in the game. 

It’s a shame with these that isn’t an option to romance any of the hero’s, but I am not sure that would help with the whole ‘too much talking’ thing. Then again some area’s of this could be removed altogether to make room for it. For example, you can join ‘hang outs’ after some mission, picking one hero from a set to go and literally just hang out with for a time. Different characters will prefer different activities and you can give them gifts which again they will like or hate to various degrees depending on what you give to who. 

This boosts your friendship with the character by quite a lot so in gameplay terms are worth doing, but again, one of these interactions can take ten real world minutes which is a lot when all you are doing is listening to two people talk. It works, but you really have to be into the game to not get bored. I can easily see why people would fall off of it due to this aspect of the game. 

Around these interactions is Abby exploration, where you can run around in third person and explore the interior and ground of Caretaker’s mystical home. This does prove very useful, as chests, resource items and various secrets can found and these will provide different types of cards for use in combat. The Abby as a location is a pretty large and the secrets it holds are fun to find, but again it adds to the feeling that the battles aren’t the focus of the game, merely a fun addition, which frankly, is the wrong way round. However, if you are into what the game is putting down, then there is a lot of fun to be had. 

The second portion of the game is handled by allowing you to perform one mission per day, during the day time. The social interactions handled either before you start a one or after completing one, depending on what you talking about. First off let me say that more than one mission should be allowed in a given in game day, it just feels like a really artificial way to extend the game time and frankly it doesn’t need it. I can get behind only having one story mission a day, but there are constantly freshing general missions that add nothing to the story and are just a way to gather currency or resources so should not count towards this. 

When you do get into a mission, you are given a set of cards. These cards will cover at least two of the three hero’s you take into a mission, but are replenished as you end a turn. Each turn you get three card plays, so you can actually use three cards. Though that vary’s depending on a couple of things. Certain cards, for example, are free, which means that they do not cost a card play to use. Normally these are support cards that would do something like give the attack cards in your hand critical hits for two turns, but that can mean the difference between victory and defeat. 

The other thing that will govern if you can play a card is heroism. This is key, as a given card will either cost or generate heroism. If a card generates, you will gain one or more points of Heroism and naturally it costs this will be taken away. Building up Heroism gives you the ability to play your most powerful cards and plays into your overal strategy as you fight through enemies. It’s a cool system and when you get it down you can unleash devastating attacks that clear out most, if not all, of the enemies on screen. 

The battle options don’t end with the cards in your hand. You have combat items, cards that grant extra bonuses such as going into next turn with four card plays instead of three or giving a particular hero’s cards bleed for a set amount of time. Not only that, but each level will have a series of environmental objects that can be used to attack enemies for extra damage. These can do cost Heroism, but there are ways around that. 

Finally, after a certain upgrade, your hero’s have access to a shoulder barge that will slam enemies back. This can be done into team mates, other enemies or the environment for various amounts of extra damage. Unfortunately you only get one of these, I would have liked to see an upgrade that grants one per move, as you only get two move’s without any extra help from a card. It’s a small thing and probably done for game balance, but some of the missions can be twenty minutes and up, so this extra option would have sped things up. 

You have to make use of all of these options to succeed, though remembering all the options at your disposal can be difficult as you have so much to keep track of. When you do though, and absolutely shred through the bad guys, its the best feeling. Unleashing those massive, spectacular attacks that send them flying all over the screen with a burst of K.O’s is awesome and gives you goosebumps each and every time. 

Unfortunately, all this comes at a cost. Not a monatery one, but a performance and technical one. Well, to be fair, there is DLC, but thats another matter. The simple of fact of that matter that from booting the game the frame rate dips and sounds and animations lag. At first I had no idea why, coming to the conclusion that because I was streaming at the time, that was causing issues. It wasn’t. It was the fact that even though I was launching it from steam, the 2K launcher was running. Which, to be frank, is crap. Setting steam to bypass this instantly sorted the majority of the issues I was having, though unfortunately not all. 

The game still had dips in framerate, a couple of crashes to desktop, long load times and animation and sound desync’s. It was frustrating, but nothing more so than the almost unplayable final mission that was so low in frames that all the majestic spectacle on display was lost. It’s a shame because as epic finalies go, this one is pretty epic. 

I really enjoyed by time with Midnight Suns, when it worked. I can, however, easily see how people will fall off it. There is simply too much talking. Normally in RPG games this isn’t a bad thing, but when all you want to do its play another mission because the action is as good as it is this gets frustrating quick. I hope they make a sequel, a version of this that fixes some of these issues and refines the technical aspects so that the game actually runs perfectly. If they do that, then it will go from a decent game to an awesome one. 

Review: High on Life

Sometimes games come along where your enjoyment of them will be highly dependent on if you like another form of media. This goes beyond just, “I like Game of Thrones, so I like fantasy games”, this is enjoying one specific thing because you enjoy a different specific thing. 

It’s this exact scenario that High on Life exists in. Enjoyment of it will stem, in a very significant way, from if you like the animated comedy Rick and Morty. This is because that show's co-creator, Justin Roiland, was heavily involved in the development of it, including coming up with the original concept and writing a lot of the script, as well as playing a major character. 

The concept is that aliens have invaded earth because humans, as it turns out, can be turned into psychedelic drugs for them. So a cartel called the G3 corner this lucrative market and it's up to you to save the day. From there you and your sister are teleported to an alien city, you pick up a talking alien gun and set off on your mission to save the world. 

You set off on this planet hopping adventure as a bounty hunter with the help of Gene, a foul mouthed former bounty hunter who acts as mission giver and lore dump and takes over your house. Gene is an arsehole, he really is, but has a nice little character arc overall. Him being such a dick is indicative of the type of characters and humor you will encounter throughout the entire game, so you will probably decide if it's for you within the first thirty or so minutes of the game. 

This will be compounded by the fact that the first gun you pick up, a Gatlian named Kenny, is literally just Morty from Rick and Morty, voice and all. For me, this wasn’t a bad thing, I like the show so having him as my first gun was kinda cool and the very fact that your guns are sentient beings is a cool concept. 

I cannot stress enough though the smartest two things the game does. First, it gives you the option in the settings to turn down the amount of talking the guns do and second, it gives you more than one. If progress meant a new attachment for Kenny to change how he fired, but you still ended up with the same voice for the entire game, that would end up very annoying by the end, especially with the little vocal prompts about the secondary fire modes. 

As such, you encounter more Gatlians with different voices, and while they are the standard FPS arsenal - shotgun, SMG, etc, due to those voices it provides some much needed audio variety, though it was still just on the edge of annoying by the time I got to the end of campaign. Your mileage on that may vary, as it's probably gonna be the most subjective thing about the entire game. 

The actual gameplay is pretty solid, with the Gatlians having a decent punch behind them and each having an alternate fire mode that provides additional combat options, such as Kenny’s Glob shot that fires a large ball of slime that has AOE effect and allows you to juggle enemies who have been launched, which is a lot of fun but not actually necessary for the majority of encounters. These alt fire modes also open up new routes for getting around the levels and find the strange box like creatures that form the majority of the collectibles.

The encounters themselves throw a lot of enemies at you that require different strategies. It’s all very Halo to be honest, with the smaller enemies running up and requiring one well placed headshot to finish off, while the next one up will use cover and try to flank you. Larger enemies barrel in and try to melee you, taking more shots to take down. No one enemy feels like a bullet sponge, and taking the ‘combat puzzle’ approach will result in swift victory. 

Boss battles are entertaining, requiring you to use all of your unlocked equipment and skills at that point to take them down, and when they hit back they hit hard. The penultimate boss is probably my favorite and a real highlight of the game overall, with some cool effects that make it stick in your mind. 

Unfortunately, the game does have problems. I encountered audio bugs a lot when in combat encounters, with the sound suddenly changing like the speaker had been submerged in water. I had to uninstall and reinstall the game from game pass after my first play as it just wouldn’t launch for no reason at all. The frame can dip quite a lot, surprisingly not too bad during fights but more just running around the world, it's not insane but is noticeable. 

The character models for Gene and your sister, and her especially, when talking to you back at the house often don’t seem to be looking at you when talking to you. Now, this might be that your sister just did an epic amount of coke before everything kicked off and is supposed to be looking off into space, but it's just weird. Gene has three eyes, one of which doesn’t work, but still sometimes isn’t looking in your direction when talking right at you. It's a weird little thing that breaks immersion a bit, it's not a deal breaker by any stretch, just very distracting. 

Honestly the biggest problem, and this goes back to your enjoyment of Rick and Morty, is how much you can stomach the voice acting. It is an extremely voice heavy game, even by most FPS standards, and by extension of the fact it is a comedy action game that doesn't always hit and can get repetitive in spots. As I stated previously, it was just on the verge of getting annoying by the time I completed the game and while you can go back after the campaign to search for any collectibles you missed, you might not want to and then have the voice acting go over that edge. 

If you are looking for a solid FPS with a cool premise and some genuinely funny moments then you would be hard pushed to beat High on Life. If you hate Rick and Morty, this won’t change your mind, and could potentially increase it, but if you turn the voice acting down and take it as a decent but not spectacular FPS you might well have a good time for the around ten hours it will take to finish it. Considering it is free on gamepass, there is no reason not to give it a try.

Review: Scorn

Bigger is not always better. Sometimes a minimalistic approach, done with skill can provide interesting, if not fantastic results. Such as it is with Scorn, the debut game from small Siberian based developer Ebb Software. It’s scope is small, its approach minimal, and it works - for the most part. 

To say that Scorn lets you discover things on your own is an understatement. When you start the game you are treated to a cutscene, then left to your own devices, having to figure everything out as you go. Seriously, it's so minimal that if you hadn’t played a single first person game before you wouldn’t even get how to move around. This is both an asset and the game's major problem, which I will get to in a bit. 

That opening cutscene sets up the look and feel of Scorn and it makes quite an impression. If you have ever looked up the art work of one H.R.Giger, yes that H.R. Giger, then everything will at once seem familiar but so vastly alien at the same time. There is no voice acting, no diaries to pick up, the entire game is metaphor layered on metaphor with that biomechanical art running through every inch of its world. 

The biomechanical feel is really nailed, though it never makes the game world feel oppressive, just alien if that makes any sense at all. Operating switches and doors involves slotting your fingers into what can only be described as orifices and pulling down on muscle fibres. Any upgrades involve large needles being stabbed into your characters arms followed by squeals of pain. The look and feel they are going for is nailed at every turn, even in the weapons. 

Those weapons are given to you after a surprisingly long time and an encounter with a very disgusting looking creature. Seriously, if you are very susceptible to nightmare fuel, maybe leave this one. Once you have it you get variations, though they are basically shotgun and really big shotgun and this is where the game truly falls from any grace it might have built up. 

That minimalistic nature works in the context of Scorn being a puzzle game. Unfortunately, Scorn is not a full puzzle game and the combat is just dire. The lack of UI means that you have no idea how to heal yourself, that you have to reload the weapons, even that you have picked up any ammo for said weapons. Literally I ran around for forty five minutes trying to find ammo for the first weapon upgrade only to realize, by going into the settings menu for something else, that there was a reload button and a machine I had encountered ages ago is actually an ammo vendor. 

This was the same for healing, the game never tells you can heal and the thing that shows you how much healing you have doesn’t even look properly like a heart due to the nature of the art style. I spent ages getting one shotted by enemies I couldn’t win against because the game simply never explained there was a healing mechanic and again, going into the settings out of frustration showing a heal button. Players shouldn’t have to go into the settings to figure out how to play your game on such a basic level. 

It’s a shame because it brings down a genuinely interesting and arresting game from being one of the most unique in years to an annoying slog with combat rules that sometimes just don’t seem to make sense. The only saving grace is the actually pretty excellent final ‘boss’ encounter. I put boss in inverted commas because it's the best way to describe the fight, in a longer game it would simply be an escalation of the enemies. It does rule though, making good use of the space and things in the environment and requiring patience above all else. 

Scorn is a very cool looking game that absolutely nails the look and feel it is going for. Unfortunately the combat just doesn’t work well enough and a minimalistic approach to UI really does nothing to help. Just a couple of tool tips and that would solve a lot of the problem, but alas they are nowhere to be found. If you want something unique to look at, then give it a go, just make sure you look at the setting menu first. 

Review: Horizon Forbidden West

How do you know you are playing a good video game? For me, it was the fact I put nearly one hundred hours into Horizon Forbidden West without even realizing it. I thought I was on about sixty max, so the extra hours meant I was just enjoying the game. It doesn’t all hit the mark, but it's still a fantastic game. 

Forbidden West takes place a few months after the events of Zero Dawn and has you once again take on the role of the Nora Warrior and Clone of a thousand year old scientist, Aloy. It opens with Aloy trying to save the planet all by herself, believing it is her burden alone and not wanting to risk anyone else in the fight against the machines. Obviously this doesn’t last long, and soon you are sent out into the titular Forbidden West to try and find the games initial big bad, Sylens, the smarmy archaeologist and researcher from Zero Dawn. He is planning something big, and Aloy is out to stop him. 

At this point, the game becomes…an Horizon game. If you played the first one and loved it, there is much to enjoy in its sequel. The story is great though this is mainly due to a lot of excellent side quests rather than the actual main story, the combat is as good as it ever was with some fantastic new machines to slowly rip apart with an assortment of weapons and the RPG aspects have been expanded along with the map and some new gameplay options. 

All these things add up to a fantastic sequel to an already fantastic game. Unfortunately it is bogged down again by some graphic issues and real frustrations with climbing, which in a game where you spend a good amount of time climbing cliffs and buildings searching for loot and collectibles, gets tiring very quickly. We will cover the bad points later. For now, let's look at what's changed. 

Some of the changes are quality of life changes that are really good, sensible additions to the game, such as the ability to change the time of day at any of the numerous shelters dotted around the map. The climbing has been expanded too over Zero Dawn, so it's much easier to do, but that comes with its own problems, again, to be covered later. Your focus, when scanning machines, has been changed so that tapping left or right on the D-Pad will allow you to see the various breakable parts and weak points and hitting R2 allows you to highlight it. It makes it way easier to highlight parts during the heat of battle, and lets you learn what each weak point is so you eventually can do it by eye without the scanning. 

The best change, though, and one more games need to implement, is the stash. Horizon games are a collectible-a-thon, in terms of missions to do, weapons to gain and most importantly, resources to gather. Those resources could be machine parts, medicinal berries, animal parts for your pouches or a hundred other things. Normally you can only carry a set amount and once your pouch for a particular thing is full you cannot carry anymore until you use some or all of it up. Now, if you pick up more it is automatically sent to your stash which has an unlimited capacity and you can refill from that from any town or shelter with the handy ‘refill all resources’ button. 

It’s a brilliant addition and while some people might enjoy the need to keep collecting the same part over and over again, most will be happy that it just happens for you. Another change from the previous game is that you can now change the time of day at any shelter, meaning that the machines that come out at night can now be accessed much more easily, making the expanded grind that bit more manageable, and the grind is significantly increased. 

Gameplay changes come thick and fast. The skill tree system has now expanded from four to six and now includes a new addition: Valor Surges. There are two per skill tree, and range from upgrading the power and range of your traps, to making it easier to rip parts from machines. They are a great addition though to be honest there are far too many. One per tree would have been more than enough, especially since there are three upgrades per surge. 

When you remember to use them they expand Aloy’s abilities quite a lot, especially in tougher fights, but again, remembering they are there can be tough. I didn’t start using them properly until many hours in just because I kept forgetting it was a possibility. The combat options are pretty expansive, though to be honest it's more than likely you will just start shooting arrows until stuff starts flying off machines. 

Melee combat has been expanded too, now including more combos that are unlocked via skill tree and a kinda cool new addition, the resonator blast. Your spear builds up a charge as you attack, once it turns blue, hitting the power attack button will smack down your opponent and leave a blue mark on it. Firing an arrow into that mark will set off a massive blast for huge damage, and is one of the most satisfying things in the game. Especially when you pull off the combo that allows you to jump back off enemies and slow down time. 

Aloy has two major out of combat additions: The ability to swim and the pullcaster. Swimming is a cool addition that really adds to the size of the map and gives some new side quests to mess around with. It stops you from being able to fight, but the number of enemies in the water is minimal so it's not too bad. The pullcaster allows you to move things around and open new areas for climbing and exploration. It’s another cool addition, though can’t be used everywhere. That's where the Shield Wing comes in. 

The Shield Wing is all very Breath of the Wild, and yes, that does mean it allows you to glide down from things. When I tell you jumping off a mountain and slowly gliding down, just panning the camera around really does bring home how amazing this game looks. It is breathtaking, especially at night and is truly one of the best things in the game. Just the simple joy of taking in the view. While there is a photo mode, there is something special about seeing it as Aloy would. 

The roster of machines to fight has been greatly expanded, with many taking the form of dinosaurs rather than regular creatures. Another area Horizon really shines, the designs of the machines are something to behold. Remember that first reveal of Zero Dawn? When the Thunderjaw trundles into view and you went ‘WOW’? That is like every new encounter. Add to this the addition of ‘apex’ variants, that are black armored and way more powerful and the combat can be some seriously fun challenge. 

The story is good too, not as good as the first one, but still good. Aloy’s journey through the Forbidden West is cool with the main story, but it's the side quest where things really shine. These aren’t, for the most part, just a way to get you to go collecting things in the wilds. Some of them are unique story elements, and include some of the best representation in any game I have encountered in some time, let alone a massive AAA RPG such as this. It’s brilliant to see, it really is, but that representation is entirely relegated to the skippable side missions and that is where it sucks. A little more confidence that such things could be part of the main story would have had way more impact. It’s a real shame and spoils what should have been one of the highlights of the tale. 

That tale takes you through various biomes, standard stuff like snow and desert, and has you interact with various new tribes that occupy the Forbidden West. These range from the Tenakth, who worship ‘the Ten’, to the Utaru who are the farmers of the land. The main human enemies hail from these and other tribes from the first game, and form a part of a rebel band who can override machines and aim to take over everything, not just the forbidden west. 

I won’t go into further detail on the story, so I don’t spoil anything, but it takes some twists and turns and sets up a third game. All these changes are great but the game isn’t without its problems. The climbing is simply dire, no two ways about it. I was able to find multiple spots where I could cheese my way up a mountain by simply spamming jump because there were no climbing areas nearby. The climbing areas are indicated by yellow lines on rock faces when pinging your focus, though I highly recommend going into the settings and turning on the setting that allows you to see them at all times, it just makes it easier. 

This problem is compounded by the fact that you can look at the rock face you are climbing, see what should clearly be a grabbable/climbable section and be completely unable to use it simply because it wasn’t marked as such. It’s really frustrating and for a game that relies so much on climbing for exploration, isn’t really forgivable. I would say that making it ‘go anywhere’ but gated by an upgradable stamina meter would solve it, but that can be annoying as well and probably isn’t quite as easy to implement in a game this good looking and this massive as it was in Breath of the Wild. 

There are some issues in combat as well, especially against human enemies as it can be really hard to filter between multiple foes. Spamming attack helps, but doesn’t always mean you are hitting the biggest threat, and you constantly have to juggle the camera to make Aloy attack who you want. It’s a smaller issue than the climbing, but still provides frustration, especially in some of the side missions which teach you how to use unlocked combos. 

Switching between ammo types for attacking weak points on machines at first glance is easy, but the heat of battle changes things and it can become confusing as to which type you actually have selected, and this goes the same for weapons as well. The weapon wheel is brought up easy enough, but the game doesn’t pause, just slows, so you can still be attacked while you are picking. Quick decisions can mean you overcompensate on the stick and instead of choosing frost ammo pick , say, electric ammo which the machine is strong against. Like I say, annoying, but it's something you get used to and I honestly don’t believe is really a better solution. 

There are some graphical issues as well, not many but enough to notice. The main one being Aloy’s hair, which is some of the most annoying things I have ever seen. Serious, they can take the same assets, add it to a model of Medusa and be done, it would take five minutes and the hair would move like you would expect. On Aloy, it just doesn’t stop moving and its insane, it can really mess with your mind and gets very annoying very quickly.

Add to this the fact that the hair and a lot of the main models clip through the environment and each other at times and you can see why it gets distracting. These are the only main graphical issues, other than a bit of expected texture pop in, so its a case of taking these small niggles for all the other beauty.

The final thing I want to talk about is the accessibility options. While you get a lot of standard things to help players, you can also set some interesting things, like the health of enemies. The easiest of these is ‘story’ and means two or three well placed shots, even on the apex machines, takes them down quickly. Combine this with the ‘easy loot’ setting and the grind for upgrade resources or those collect x number of these missions becomes a breeze. I highly recommend turning at least ‘easy loot’ on, as well as the setting for always on climbing holds, as it doesn’t affect the difficulty but does lessen the impact of the RPG grind. 

Horizon Forbidden West is a fantastic sequel to the splendid first game, and while it doesn’t have the same impact, and the main thrust of exploration is the shockingly bad climbing, as I said at the start of this review you can tell you when you played a great game when you don’t even realize you have put nearly a hundred hours into it. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about exploring the Forbidden West, I don’t know what will. 

Review: As Dusk Falls

To say that FMV (Full Motion Video) games have been around for some time is a bit of understatement, with the genre appearing first nearly forty years ago in arcades. Of all the gaming genres out there, though, it has always been the one to never really return to the public consciousness, instead relegated to peoples nostalgia for old, half forgotten consoles. 

In the last few years though, games like Her Story have rode that nostalgia wave while also creating compelling narratives to push the games along, embracing the limits and opportunities of the genre in equal measure. There have also been games best described as FMV-Like, and this is where As Dusk Falls comes in. 

The first game from Interior/Night, a studio made of former Quantic Dream and Sony veterans, As Dusk Falls is best described as a thriller - think of those old movies where the bad guys end up in a standoff with the cops and you kinda know how it's gonna go, cause that's the way it always goes. 

Thing is, you don't know this time. As Dusk Falls’ choose your own adventure style means your decisions in certain situations matter, with the story adapting to those decisions and crafting your own version of the story. I like games like this, where your run is your run, and might not be the same as the next person. Of course, you can go back and see everything, but that is self-defeating in my book and games like this are best played once and you take the unwritten rule that the story you get is your version of it. 

If you do this, there will be a lot of content you missed. The end of each chapter shows you a timeline of events, but only fills in the path you took, so you can see the other branches if you had taken the other option, but no specifics, just lines leading to blank boxes. It’s amazing to see just how much you have actually missed out, but also brilliant because it reinforces that feeling of ‘this is my version of this story’. 

There isn’t really a singular main character, as the game spreads out over a cast that each feel fleshed out and real. You might have seen the archetypes in a hundred movies over the years, but that still means they are better written than many in other games. There is the devoted dad, the violence loving member of the gang of ‘bad guys’, the mother who cares for her sons no matter what they do and more. This cast is the game's main strength, and chances are you will resonate with at least one or two. For me it was the Dad, Vince, for obvious reasons, but also a young man named Jay who is caught in his older brother's wake. 

As the story progresses there are some genuinely emotional moments, and you can get really invested in it, feeling for some characters while hating others and it is really cool to see, marking the game as a definite highlight of this genre and a future cult classic. I have definitely been thinking about it long after completing it, always having to force myself to remember that I had my run and that’s ok. It’s so good though, the temptation is high to go back and choose the other paths. 

I said at the start of this review that it is a ‘FMV-Like’ game, and what I mean by that is that the art style has actual, real life actors, but isn't full motion. It's more like moving through comic book frames but without the frame while being rendered to look like paintings. It’s striking, evocative and genuinely different to the point where I couldn’t tell you another game that looks quite like this. The downside is that it's a style that could instantly put some people off, and honestly, if you told me this makes you feel motion sick I can see that being a thing too, so be warned that your mileage might vary here. 

At around six hours long, assuming you only do one run, the game is the perfect length, feeling more like one of those limited run prestige TV shows you get through streaming services and it works perfectly for what the developers are going for. If you go back and see everything you can easily double that length, probably get even more out of it. You shouldn’t, but that's on you. 

As Dusk falls will leave you wanting to see every aspect of its story due to the strength of its characters and writing while also thinking about it for some time after you have stepped away from its events. Resist. Take the version of events at the Dessert Dream Motel as cannon and enjoy your time with it.

Review: Stray

Do you like the following things: Indie games, robots, the post apocalypse and cats? If you said yes to one or more of those things, especially the one about cats, then you should play Stray, the latest game from developer BlueTwelve Studios. 

In Stray, you play a stray cat. You can run, jump, meow - everything a cat can do short of your licking yourself inappropriately. The game opens on the cat and its litter, where you can run around a small platform and play with your friends in an adorably cute and cuddly fashion, before exploring further a field and eventually stumbling into the games main story. The cats, from the off, are excellently rendered and if you have had or been around felines for any period of time feel right in the way they move, which is incredibly impressive and lets be frank here, if they messed that up the whole game would fail before it even began. 

Fortunately they nailed it, and as you explore more as the cat you stumble into the world of the robots, sentient automatons with CRT monitors for heads and each one having its own personality, emotions and motivations. Some are main characters, some are side and some simply add a bit of lived in flavor to the world around you. The city you explore feels lived in and, without getting spoilery, in more ways than one. 

Not long after you arrive in the city you find a small hovering drone called B-12, who interprets the robots language for you and communicates with them, gives clues and stores useful items for the adventure ahead. He is how the game splits the difference between roleplaying as a cat and giving you an actual adventure to carry out and it works really well. Also, if you think that loveable ginger cat is cute, wait until you see B-12!

The art of the world of Stray is really cool, the robots have a striking design that I personally really dug, with the story giving context for how they dress and differentiate themselves from one another. This differentiation also reflects a slight meta commentary on social class systems in the real world. It’s not the deepest thing ever produced, but, again, it adds to the environmental storytelling in the beginning of the game. 

The large levels are built with the cat's abilities in mind. These aren’t some supernatural thing, the cat is literally just a cat with a drone on its back, but each level is built so that if you think a real world cat could make a particular jump then the one in game definitely can. It gives a sense of just knowing how to play because you have almost definitely seen a cat jump before and it just makes sense.

The game doesn’t out stay its welcome, being a relatively short experience at around six hours of play time and that is a good thing, if the developers had attempted to pad things out with lots of side quests it would have gotten boring very quickly because while there is a version of combat for a very, very, small amount of time, it's not like the cat is a tiny four legged tank, it really is just a cat. 

By the end of the game your heart will be warmed and you will still be left with a few questions you might want answered, but you will be left satisfied with the conclusion. It’s one of those stories where not everything is wrapped up neatly with a bow, and that is a good thing because it leaves you thinking about the game way after you have put it down and coming up with your own potential answers. It sounds weird to say but I kinda hope they don’t make a sequel and just leave Stray to be the unique, satisfying experience it is.

Review: Tunic

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and if that is true then Tunic is the most sincere game ever created. But what happens when that imitation becomes so good it almost betters its inspiration? 

That is the thing about Tunic, its designer Andrew Shouldice wanted to create a game a lot like classic Legend of Zelda but in so doing has produced a game that in some regards out classes its inspiration. Tunic is played from an isometric perspective as you control a fox looking for…something. As you play, the true nature of things unravels and you discover just what you are adventuring towards. 

You start out with no weapons or equipment and no real instructions, you just figure it out as you go. Now, understandably this might seem like a bad thing, but it draws on years of institutional knowledge of video games that people these days just…have. You already know how to control the Fox, you already know that you can go up to that sign and it will give you some information. What you don’t know is that you can’t understand that information, because Tunic has its own language. 

Some things are given to you in your regular language of choice, but everything else isn’t and you have to piece information and directions together from what little you do have, exploration and one of the coolest design choices in the game, the instruction manual. That manual is part instructions, part story and part map. However, at the beginning of the game, you don’t have access to it. Exploring will grant you pages but the game also annotates those pages with hand written notes that add tiny tidbits of information about secrets or such as you travel around the world. 

It’s a cool effect, and as you play you realize that Tunic is a game about secrets, not combat (which we will get to), not adventuring, but secrets. Because everything starts out as a secret and only by doing everything else do you start to reveal them and discover more and more about the world around you. It creates not only a compelling world that begs you explore, but a narrative that fuels that exploration.

It's the hidden locations that aren’t on the map, little hidey holes behind waterfalls or subtly hidden in plain sight as you look at the screen that really make running around the world of Tunic feel awesome. There is always something to find, some new bit of the manual or an upgrade to find and it's here, along with the combat, that the inspirations for the game become apparent and its true genius is revealed. 

When it comes to combat it is not what you expect. The rest of the game is a cross between Zelda and metroidvania style games, and at first you think that each battle will play out in a similar fashion to that but you should actually be thinking more along the lines of Soulsborne, where everything can kill you if you don’t respect it. 

Taking your time is the key to fighting and it actually takes more getting used to than you would first think, or at least it did for me. This isn’t a fault of the game, but rather a deliberate and excellent design choice that gives it a unique feel because anyone who has been gaming for years has played a lot of what you initially think this style of game is, but by forcing you to respect even the lowest of enemies it pulls the rug out from under you and breathes fresh life into what would have ultimately been a ‘meh’ aspect of the game.

I won’t lie, I still got overwhelmed even late into the game, but it forced me to figure out the combat and respect the enemies. The dodge roll and later some upgrades, became my best friends but again just like the Soulsborne games sometimes you get hit and wonder just how big the hit box on the Fox actually is.

The music is equally as great as the rest of the game, adding to the otherworldly feeling of the world. It is calm and serene where required, and swelling for boss fights,  almost indescribable in the way it just adds to the game. It’s fantastic, and would be a great background soundtrack to your working day. 

The only real downside to the game is that it can be easy to get lost and not know which way to go, and spend an age spinning your heels trying to figure how to get that obvious upgrade so you can get that manual page or chest that is in plain sight but can’t get to. There are a couple of enemies that are on the top end of annoying, but otherwise I have very little negative to say about Tunic. Go, play, you will not be disappointed.

Review: The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe

First all, a disclaimer: I never played the original version of The Stanley Parable. I wanted to, but life got in the way, as well as a deluge of other cool games in its original release, so it just never materialized. As such, Ultra Deluxe is my first play of the game at all, so be aware that no nostalgia is present here. 

The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe is an updated version of the original game from 2013. It is classified by developers Crows Crows Crows and Galactic Cafe say it is a remake and pseudo sequel to the original game. Honestly, I feel that is stretching things a bit, but what makes me feel that way is also kinda of the point. 

You play as Stanley, an office worker who likes to sit at his desk and push buttons. Loves nothing better in fact. There is a narrator who explains what Stanley is doing, and gives hints as to what to do next. You can walk and look around and, shockingly, push some buttons. That's about it. Now, do not let this lack of interaction fool you, the game is intensely clever and well written with genuinely funny laugh out loud moments throughout, but mechanics heavy it aint. 

The genius is the way the game reacts to what you are doing. Follow the Narrator’s instructions and things happen one way, but change just one thing on that path, and new possibilities open up, and the game and, more specifically the Narrator, reacts to that change. He can try to get you back on track, or just roll with what you are doing and the levels change to reflect your actions too, at least in some cases. 

The point of the game is to find all the different ‘endings’. I put that in inverted commas cause it feels more like a reset than an ending, you don’t see credits for example, but in each case you reach some kind of conclusion to Stanley’s story, and some are fairly mundane, while others are pretty wild and surreal. If you think you have a bead on what  the actual story is about, I can assure you, you don’t. 

The game is more like a meta-narrative on game design and interaction than anything more traditional and it excels in that, with knowing prods at tropes and design ideas any gamer has experienced a hundred times over, with some laugh out loud comments from the narrator who does a fantastic job at conveying everything. 

Ultra Deluxe’s only real downside is that, as per the developers, it is a pseudo-sequel. What this means in broad terms is that at some point you walk past a door marked ‘new content’ which has, as you might infer, the new content in it. Some other bits have changed in the main game, but without being hyper familiar with the original release you probably won’t even notice. Honestly though, it feels more like it could be a patch rather than any kind of meaningful sequel, though given how meta the game is overall, feels exactly in line with what The Stanley Parable is about. 

I really enjoyed my time with the game and if you haven’t played the original definitely give this a go, it is super fun, has some knowing winks and nods for those who know and is genuinely funny to boot. The voice acting is fantastic and will provide more than enough entertainment to justify the cost. A great, different game all round.

Review: Halo Infinite

The crushing weight of continuing a big franchise, be it in TV, film or games sits heavy on the shoulders of the people building it. Time and again we see that weight be too much, and continuations of a popular work simply not being able to live up to the immense hype of such expectations - looking at you The Matrix Revolutions!

Sometimes, however, the end product meets and maybe even exceeds those expectations, and this is the case with 343 Industries and Microsoft Game Studios latest entry into the storied Halo franchise, Halo Infinite. It contains everything you have come to expect from the series, while modernizing and expanding where it needs it to give Halo its most impressive makeover since 343 took over the franchise from Bungie. 

The campaign kicks off with new character Echo 216 finding that quintessential action hero Master Chief floating in space. He picks him up, reactivates his armor and Chief is ready to kick ass and chew bubble gum but as is normally the case, he is all out of gum. You are launched into the first and most deceptive mission of the game from there, and everything is immediately familiar to Halo veterans. 

The weapons are right, the level looks like a Halo level but with more polish, the enemies are what we have come to expect, with grunts, elites, jackals and brutes all present and correct and even the sounds and quips of those enemies hitting you right in the nostalgic feels. If you take Halo Infinite based solely on this opening level, then you would be forgiven for being a little disappointed. The hype told you to expect an open world, which this definitely is not. 

You get tidbits of the changes made, such as ammo stations that refill all your ammo of a given type, such as kinetic or plasma. You get your first taste of the grapple hook, probably the single most important change to the series yet, but it isn’t until you get past this first level and head down into the atmosphere of Zeta Halo itself that you see what Halo has truly become. 

Here you find that the Banished, former Covenant soldiers that formed their own army after ‘The Great Schism’ from the original Bungie games,  have won and they have taken over the ring and any UNSC/human outposts that were created. Humanity's most badass ship, The Infinity, has been destroyed and it is up to Master Chief, Echo 216 and a new AI companion to stop them. 

The temptation with open world games is to fill the map with collectibles and icons and make sure the player always has something to do. Infinite does do this, but it doesn’t fall into the trap something like the later Assassins Creed games do and has so much stuff it just becomes a boring checklist. There is just enough on the map to keep you moving forward and, more importantly, make you feel like you are having an effect in the overall battle for Zeta Halo. 

This is down to the Forward Operating Bases, or FOB’s can you liberate from banished control. These will then unlock things to find on the map, but also provide a stock of human NPC’s you can jump in a warthog with and joyride around the map taking out random patrols and liberating other personnel or more FOB’s. It makes the world feel like you are having an effect on it and changing as you play. Does it fundamentally change the game as you progress? No, not really but its a neat addition none the less. 

The FOB’s also provide access to various vehicles dropped onto them by Echo 216, quite where he gets these from no one knows but they are useful for getting around. Not quite as useful, however, as the two best additions to a Halo game: the spring button and the grappling hook. Running around the map at a pace that befits the genetically enhanced and armor augmented Master Chief gives the game a speed that no previous Halo has managed, and couple that with the ability to fire your grappling hook to almost any surface and make your way up mountains without having to take the scenic route returns that sense of the ‘combat puzzle’ that made the original Combat Evolved so magical. 

When you do get into fights, and you will, often, Halo Infinite excels. It feels exactly how a Halo game should feel when it comes to gun play, and returning players will instantly be at home with its combination of firearms and grenades but also can find ways to integrate the new abilities such as the grappling hook, drop wall, thrusters and threat sensors. Breaking an elite's shields using your gun, watching them roll out of the way of a grenade only to take a hit to the face as you stick them with your grapple and reel yourself in will never get old. 

I played on Heroic, and while a lot of encounters were a breeze, some of the bigger bases and bosses were no joke and took more than a few attempts to get through. I felt this was the right level to play at, with the best combination of ease and difficulty spikes, though legendary still exists for those who want even more of a challenge. What I played on was definitely the best for me though. 

Without getting spoilery, the story isn’t the best Halo tale ever told, but it works and has one or two twists that were genuinely surprising, though earlier games do far surpass Infinite in this regard. The writing is well done for the most part, but the absolute worst part of the story is Echo 216. Did you find Hudson from Aliens annoying as hell the second the shit hit the fan? Well Echo 216 is worse. To be fair, he does have some legitimate reasons for this, and I have to admit the voice actor had to be very special to be that annoying, but it did get grating after a while. What's weird is that if you order a vehicle through him, he just appears with it and is all professional, there are no fun lines about it and it is a missed opportunity. 

The heart of the story is once again about Master Chief’s relationship with Cortana, though Infinite adds a wrinkle to this with new AI The Weapon. Supremely naff name aside, Weapon replaces Cortana as Chief’s companion and despite him being basically a face plate, you can see he struggles with that sometimes. Weapon is also extremely annoying sometimes, but that's more due to a childlike naivety than anything else, though one section of the game did make me laugh out loud a couple of times with her. 

The game does introduce a new, never before seen enemy in the Skimmers, and a new potential ‘big bad’ in The Harbinger. The skimmers are basically flying grunts, similar to the bug enemies of earlier games but able to use more advanced weapons. The Harbinger is introduced, she does a couple of things that are only vaguely alluded to, then you have a boss fight and that's that. Her arc sets up the future of the series, but it's not exactly something I am chomping at the bit for. 

So the campaign is generally excellent with a few annoying bits, what about multiplayer? The multiplayer is actually separate to the campaign and can be played entirely free. It has all the modern trappings of a free to play game, with a store and a battle pass, plus events that happen on a fairly regular basis. It plays great, the modes are fantastic and even if you have no interest in the campaign, play the multiplayer, it's smooth, fast and feels fantastic. 

It’s the simple things that make it such a joy, like the big red ‘X’ that appears when you kill a spartan and the sound effect that accompanies it. It’s just so satisfying, especially if you get that no scope headshot with new weapon, the skewer, probably my favorite weapon that has ever been in any Halo. 

Modes like Slayer, Team Slayer, Capture the flag and Arena return among others and each retain that classic Halo feel. The maps are generally well designed, allowing for close range fights and the use of snipers at the same time. My favorite mode is Fiesta, new to Infinite, that has no weapon pickups but each respawn you are given a random set of weapons and abilities. Getting a rocket launcher and the skewer as your spawn weapons makes for some fun times and those no scopes and double kills come thick and fast. 

Some of the voice lines that are spouted as you rack up kills, like “You’re a surgeon with that scope” and “There’s nothing more satisfying than a three round burst” just feel good to hear, and add to the fun of any given match. 

Unfortunately it's not all great, I experienced quite a lot of frame rate hitches (not helped by the fact I was streaming while playing it) and I had a couple of hard crashes to the desktop, both during the campaign and multiplayer. Sometimes the matchmaking can take an absolute age as well, and you have to be careful because trying to look at the current set of multiplayer challenges while waiting for it can result in the search being stopped for, as far as I can tell, no reason at all. 

No amount of messing with the setting fixed the frame either, though just before I finished the campaign an update was applied that seemed to stabilize it quite a lot. The worst thing about multiplayer is the cosmetic system. You can’t create a truly original Spartan, at least so far and that's a shame. You have armor cores that you can then change things like the helmet, chest piece and gloves on, but you get only certain additions that apply to that armor core, not a set that will apply to all. 

For example, I had some credits left over after getting the battle pass and so headed into the store and purchased a very cool looking black and turquoise spartan skin. The color scheme looked ace, but once I had purchased it that was that, I couldn’t change any part of the armor, nor could I apply the color scheme to any other armor cores. It was for that core and that core alone. It’s a shame cause it's a real missed opportunity and adherence to something so rigid under the already kinda of ridiculous multiplayer mode just seems off. I do appreciate that making games, and especially 3D models with the level of detail that Infinite’s does is hard, and that is probably why this decision was taken, but seeing something that would look really cool on another armor core only to not be allowed to apply it is just frustrating. 

Halo Infinite is a fantastic game, even if you only play the free to play multiplayer. The campaign, while not the best story in the series, is fantastic to play through and modernizes the Halo formula while keeping its classic feel. The Multiplayer is just satisfying to play through and has modes galore, getting hectic in all the right places and just being plain fun. The fact that Halo Infinite is on Game Pass makes it a must have if you subscribe, but even if you don’t want a great shooter, definitely check this out. 

Review: Twelve Minutes

2021 is definitely the year of the time loop. Lots of games, a few films and TV shows all showcase the mechanic this year and one of the ones that I was personally looking forward to was Twelve Minutes, the new game from developer Luis Antonio and publisher AnnaPurna Interactive. I then, unfortunately, played the game. 

Twelve Minutes is a game with a striking look, with a top down perspective set in the smallest apartment known to man and features just three characters, the Protagonist, his wife and a mysterious cop. What starts out as the, quote “best night ever” quickly deteriorates as the cop bursts in, accuses the wife of murder and eventually kills you. 

The loop resets, and its time to figure out why he shows up, why he accuses your wife of murder and exactly what he is wanting. In terms of mechanics, it is a fairly standard point and click style game with objects that can be interacted with and combined with various others and the three characters to create differing results and hopefully get to the truth of the matter. The problem is that there are enough things to interact with and logic to follow that the possibility space becomes way, way larger than what the game actually wants you to do. 

Que many hours of frustration as you constantly bump up against what you think you can do, and what you can actually do. Your brain will say that, logically, doing this with that will result in this, but what actually happens is you just receive the same bit of dialog again over and over until you finally fumble into the right interaction and move the story forward. This game is supposed to be about six hours long, but because of this problem with possibility, it took me ten. 

Some of this is down the UI, that can make it difficult to realise you need to do something else with an object or click a dialog option more times to get different results. I finally beat the game once I realised I had to click on an object I just picked up to trigger some dialog that will grant me a different path of conversation when talking to the wife and it says a lot that at that point I was looking up guides that said just pick up the object, not pick it up and click on it, almost like even they didn’t realise you had to do that. 

Twelve Minutes suffers from something that just about all time loop games suffer from: repeat dialog. Now, it might seem harsh to criticize a game with such a system for having to get the same dialog to the player over and over but with the other issues it out stays its welcome long before you can complete the game. 

It’s not all bad however. The all star cast does a stellar job with a script that isn’t exactly stunning and I honestly, without being told it was, couldn’t tell that the protagonist is played by James McAvoy and his wife by Daisy Ridley. I can tell the cop is Willam Dafoe, cause it's Willam Defoe, hiding that iconic voice is almost impossible! 

The script just doesn’t make sense at times, with reactions and dialog which can instantly throw you out of the game because frankly, people just don’t interact like that. It’s partially the nature of getting dialog recorded in different sessions, sometimes thousands of miles apart, to work together properly, but also the script just does a bad job of those interactions. It does go some places in terms of the plot though, and some are pretty wild, eliciting an out loud “WTF?” from me personally, but it definitely has its problems. 

Twelve Minutes unfortunately isn’t as good a game as its premise might suggest. The issues with the possibility space and a script that could have been so much better bring down what was an arresting idea, one that could have stuck with people for more than just the bad areas. As it stands, if you do remember this game, it will be mainly because of the extreme levels of frustration it provided. Fans of the genre will get the most of it, the rest of us beware. 

Review: Backbone

It’s very easy for games to fall foul of ‘style over substance’. The medium inherently sets developers up for this trap, as so many components make up any given game that leaning too much on one or two aspects sacrifices the substance to enhance the style, and it is a balancing act that all too often fails and leaves the game worse than it could be. 

Backbone, the new game from developers Eggnutt is, unfortunately, a Style over Substance game. It looks great with a cool jazz tinged noir theme that runs throughout, but gives way to a hard pivot into a twist that comes out of the blue with little setup and makes no sense given the world that has been created up to that point. 

You play as Howard Lotor, a private detective in a Dystopian version of Vancouver. He is also a raccoon, as this version of Vancouver is populated by anthropomorphic animals, ruled over by the apes, who are the higher class. The story sets up an interesting world of class and social issues, gangsters, drugs and all the same rubbish stuff that we humans have to deal with - just with talking animals. 

It starts off with Howard getting a fairly normal P.I case, as such post-noir stories do, with a wife wanting to know if her husband is cheating. From there, it becomes a fairly standard point and click adventure, with a heavy emphasis on talking. The dialog is the game's main thrust, and at first it seems that paying attention to what is happening really does help. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn’t last long, and you soon begin to question if you are actually affecting any conversations as while you might be able to be an arse or be nice and understanding, if at first it does seem like you have messed up it will always loop around and get the result you need. 

This is disappointing, because it makes the conversations you have feel kinda pointless, and you can just button mash through without paying attention as the game will always feed you the right thing. Once you find out there are no multiple endings, it makes it all the worse, as that would allow multiple playthroughs and make the conversations feel meaningful. As it stands, when you complete you game you feel like your time was wasted a little. 

That feeling is compounded by the fact that there is very minimal sound in the game. I appreciate that Eggnutt is a small developer, and that voice acting is expensive and beyond many studios, but Backbone is a game that could have really done with it. The minimalist sound design makes the game more than a little boring, and voice acting could have really helped with it. This is a nit pick that isn’t really the developers fault, but the other issues with the dialog just adds to the idea the game wasn’t respecting your time. 

I will say that the graphics look fantastic, with great animation for the characters when moving around and background art that really invokes the dystopian city feel. It is enough to propel you through the story, though again, those other issues do make the game's completion feel wasted.

The story itself, without getting to spoiler heavy, is weird. As I say it starts off with a standard ‘cheating husband’ case, and spirals out into a deep, conspiracy heavy and potentially world changing mission from there. The problem is that the game invoked in my head one story which would have been really cool to see play out, but that twists into a story that makes absolutely no sense, has no real resolution and the motives in the final act for some of the characters seem completely at odds with the overarching narrative on display. The game would have been so much better had it leaned into it’s early politically motivated ideas and had real, grounded characters that made sense in the world, but that twist just sends it off on an completely unneeded tangent that spoils the rest of the game. 

Had this happened, some of the genre splicing the story does would still work, it would just make a hell of a lot more sense and give a much more satisfying conclusion. It's a shame that it doesn’t because it would have made for a very cool detective story, an in-over-his-head tale in the best traditions of the thriller genre, just with a talking racoon as a protagonist. 

If you plan to pick up Backbone, do so on Xbox Game pass. It makes the sting of how it all ends and lack of multiple endings less painful. It will provide a game that looks great, but is ultimately disappointing and makes little sense. Be warned.

Review: Curse of The Dead Gods

Playing enough games, and understanding certain aspects of how they are built, is a double edged sword. On one hand, it allows you to get into the mindset of the developers and see what they were aiming for, on the other it allows you to see the mistakes and call bullshit on some aspects of fundamental game design. 

Curse of the Dead Gods, from developers PassTech Games is probably the optimony of this philosophy and it both elevates and pulls it down. This, coupled with the fact that it came after a game that radically altered how the rogue-like genre is perceived, means the critique of the game became just as fun, if not more so, than the act of playing it. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean COTDG (as it shall henceforth be known) is a particularly bad game, and comparing to the aforementioned other game (Hades) is something that is more than little unfair because on a fundamental level they may be the same genre, but are doing different things. Where Hades focuses on story, COTDG has little to none. Hades gives you a gentle difficulty curve, COTDG is hard as sin from the off. Still, it was hard while playing not to compare, which is, as I say, unfair. 

COTDG puts you in the shoes of an unnamed explorer tasked with finding a way out of the three temples of the titualar dead gods, There is the temple of the Jaguar, the temple of the Eagle and the Temple of the Serpent. Each one has its own unique enemies, traps and bosses along with a central theme. So the Jaguar temple is based around fire, while the Eagle temple is lightning and the Serpent temple poison. Coincidentally, these are also the three elemental damage types you can wield. 

The game is a rogue-like, so the main loop is the same as all these types of games: run the same level over and over again until you beat it and can move on. This involves picking a set of weapons from an altar at the start, picking which temple you want to run and then playing until you either die or beat the final boss. Each room will give a specific reward, either a new weapon, weapon upgrade, gold or improved attributes. More types are added as you get further in, but these are the main four. 

Unfortunately, design problems start to crop up almost from the start of the game. It’s tutorial sections throw so much at you straight away that it's very difficult to take everything in and I got to the point where I just buttoned through with the reasoning that I will figure it out on my own. All this needed was a little spacing, not ‘here are eight things you need to know right this second’ even though you won’t actually use at least three of them for a few minutes into the first level. It was a terrible intro, and didn’t set the best first impression. 

Some strange wording choices in the help tip texts didn’t help and proved confusing, though I will admit that it was my own issue with them calling everything an ‘action’ when it didn’t make any sense. These little things do however set up the game's major flaws, of which there are a few.

A lot of games give you the power fantasy, where you become this all powerful badass over their run. COTDG is not that, you are no bad ass, and the enemies are no joke. It's less Devil May Cry and more Demon Souls. The game is actively out to hurt you and make your life harder and harder, and it’s systems lean into this. Unfortunately it doesn’t go all the way, and it ends up having a combat system that doesn’t marry up with this idea. What it wants you to do is wait for your opportunity, dive in and deal a bit of damage, then back out and regain stamina a la Demon Souls. The problem is that mashing the attack button is a fast and fluid affair, with an off hand combo attack that swaps to your secondary weapon for extra damage. This means that most enemies are destroyed without having to worry about parrying or dodging, and if you do parry, the weakened effect lasts long enough that your remaining stamina is more than enough to take out a couple of enemies at least before having to back off. 

This is compounded by the fact that one of the best weapon types in the game, the claws, just straight slices and and dices enemies, meaning your character swaps back to Devil May Cry. It’s a weird combination and the game would have been better had the developers picked one side of the coin and stuck to it, rather than trying to walk the line between the two. This leads into the game's most major issue: All the systems have one too many things on them. 

What I mean by this is that, for example, the stamina bar has your attack, your dodge and your parry on it. Meaning if you are concentrating too much on attacking, which is extremely easy to do, you cannot then dodge or parry, leading to an annoying series of hits from enemies you should be able to easily deal with. Then there is the corruption system, which has attacks from enemies, passing through a door, curses, traps and upgrades all associated with it. Once you get corrupted enough (five rooms) you gain a curse, some of which are incredibly annoying and some give you a boon with slight downside - Dodging now makes you intangible but a perfect dodge won’t regain stamina for example. 

It’s a lot to deal with, and it doesn’t help the game. Just taking the attack off the stamina bar would make for a more fluid combat experience, while making the choice for upgrades between gold or health gives it a more risk reward vibe that would fit into the game better in my opinion. To be fair on that last one, there is a curse that makes it so you can pay for upgrades and attributes with health rather than adding to your corruption meter, but it's not something you can rely on because of that. 

All that said, COTDG is still a good game, it just takes a long time to get used to how the systems work, what weapons are best, the parry timing (especially the parry timing!) and everything else it throws at you. I enjoyed my time playing the game once I got used to it, but getting used to it took me a good ten hours, and even then I had to turn on the assist mode to be able to beat it. 

The assist mode is really good to be fair, with lots of different settings that allows you to just make things a tiny bit easier or make it very easy to play. Honestly if I had turned this on at the start, it would have made the game much better, as it forces the game to lean into one side of the aforementioned coin on its combat and stopping it walking a line it just isn’t doing. 

Overall, COTDG is a great game and a great rogue-like. It’s just trying to straddle a line with it’s combat that doesn’t work and has no story to counter that and propel you through. Put the effort in to learn how everything works and you will be rewarded, but, to be frank, turning on the assist mode even a little will remove that line and make your time with the game that much better. You just won’t get achievements, but honestly, who cares about them in 2021?

Review: The Medium

Marianne is a Medium. Not the kind that reads Tarot cards and scams tourists, a legit one that can see dead people and help them cross to the other side. She must use her powers to uncover the truth about not just the case she is investigating, but herself as well. This is the setup for Bloober Teams The Medium, and despite technical issues that prevent it from becoming a classic, it's one of the best horror thriller games of the last few years. 

The game’s world is dark, the main character working at her adoptive fathers funeral home and her first act is to get him ready for burial. It’s an effective tutorial of how the game works, which is to say as a modern adventure game, so it's a case of running around rooms and environments to find interactive elements and find what is required to solve a given puzzle. In terms of gameplay, the majority is fairly standard stuff that fans of the genre will have seen a hundred times before. 

It does have some twists however, and various points in the game Marianne shifts so she inhibits the real world and ‘the other side’ at the same time. This literally splits the screen in two, either top and bottom or side by side depending on how that sequence is set to play out. This gives way to the games' take on puzzle solving, as Mariannes medium powers, for the most part, can only be used on the other side. This allows her a defensive ability, an offensive ability and to have an out of body experience which shifts her onto the otherside to move independently of the real world, though this only lasts a finite amount of time. 

This is how you get past the various obstacles that lie in your path to solve puzzles and move forward, though to be honest the game does a bad job of reminding you this abilities are at your disposal, and I got stuck on a least a couple of levels because I forgot about the out of body experience ability and the game does not make it obvious that is what you need to do to continue. I am not complaining about a hint system here, this is a case of there being an in world hint to what to do, but it’s so vague that it is easy to overlook. 

It’s frustrating, though once you get used to what to look for it's better than it was, you just shouldn’t have so much trial and error to get there. The puzzles themselves are not especially difficult to figure out, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t satisfying to complete. One in particular stands out, and has you switching between the real world and the other side in order to figure out the solution. It's very clever, and is one of the game's strongest sequences. 

The split mechanic when it kicks in I have to admit is very clever and really cool. If you think of the remasters of Halo CE and Halo 2, where you can hit a button to switch to the old graphics from the new ones, it's kind of like that but both are happening at the same time. When this is a cutscene, it's quite freaky because the real world section plays out exactly the same as the otherside, but without the other character Marianne is talking to. She literally talks to, and interacts with, herself. 

Speaking of freaky, the developers' rendition of the other side is one of the freakiest things I have seen in some time. It’s all rotten and decaying versions of the spaces you occupy in the real world, with things like a collapsed wall replaced with burnt corpse’ looking down at the ground or revealing the fate of long dead characters. Walls look like they are made out of bone underneath and doors of stretched skin block your path. It's a great environmental look, but it's the characters you meant that send it all home. These will have relatively normal things like missing arms, and when I say normal here I mean in terms of what your brain understands, but also the outskin on other limbs will be twisted with holes missing to reveal nothing in the middle. Ribcages will be exposed but look grey and brittle, while this strange, almost fungal display spreads out from various parts of the body. 

It is one of the games best looking aspects and marks the talent of the art team at Bloober, though as someone who has had nightmares of freaky skin stuff since watching an old sci-fi movie as a kid, this distracted me a few times as it made my skin crawl. Which I guess is exactly the effect they were going for, and the game is all the better for it. 

At the start the game is slow, not least because someone somewhere confused ‘running’ with ‘fast walk’ which even at the end of the game feels like a brazen attempt to extend the life of the game and it is no less frustrating then than it is at the start. Literally no one on earth would move that slowly. This isn’t helped by the game's biggest design decision, one that is at this point very much out of date: Fixed camera angles. I get that the team was going for an old school adventure game feel, but those games have moved on, and the problems that come with this decision, such as directions being changed because the angle moved are all present and correct, and just as frustrating as ever. 

That said, once the story started to pick up, I was engaged more than I was initially expecting and it helped to set up a universe that I really hope the developers explore more in a sequel, as the lore starts to be developed in some very cool ways. I won’t say more than that to avoid spoilers, but the game does stick its landing excellently, its ending excellently acted and written and leaving you wanting more. 

The last thing to mention are the technical issues. I played on PC, and it recommends a gamepad to play with, and I cannot stress that enough if you intend to play. The keyboard and mouse controls are poor beyond belief, to the point using an item to cut through a skin door on the other side actually hurt my arm it took so long with the mouse. Then there are the frame rate issues. It just dropped to single digit frames for no reason I can tell several times during my play through and I have no idea why. 

I had one issue with my gamepad that wasn’t the game's fault, but when I got it fixed for some reason the look controls became inverted for no reason at all, I certainly hadn’t done it. These little things, and the frustrations around the movement speed and fixed camera angles keep The Medium from becoming a classic, but I do recommend it for fans of both horror thriller games and excellent art direction. 

It is one of the best horror thriller games I have ever played, it just takes a few hours to get there, but I cannot deny the art direction is top notch and makes the game well worth a look on its own. The fact the story gets as good as it does is just the icing on the cake, and I really hope a sequel comes soon. 

Review: Carrion

 As gamers we spend so much time going on a power fantasy where we save the helpless, mow down hundreds of lesser enemies and ultimately defeat the big bad at the end to save the world/planet/galaxy/universe that it can become somewhat rote. It’s rare that a game lets you be that big bad and rarer still where there isn’t some reconciliation at the end. Enter Carrion, where the developers decided to let you play as that big bad. 

Carrion puts you in control of a blood drenched tentacle monster with a taste for human flesh, and sets you lose in a facility full of said walking food. It is a joy to play up to a point and doesn’t out stay its welcome with a relatively short run time, but I have never encountered a game that screams for one of the most used video game mechanics in history and never gets it. 

Simply moving the monster around the map is an absolute joy, it just feels amazing to get around and the only times you can’t get to a particular spot is because you haven’t found the required upgrade yet. Yes, this is a metroidvania style game so upgrades come at a decent pace and allow you to get around easier or survive combat encounters better. 

Speaking of, the combat is slightly weird. The majority of the NPC’s are fodder, literally, and are used to replenish biomass which serves as your health. There is a morbid satisfaction to entering a room full of unarmed scientists and ripping them all apart, sometimes rolling over the scene and covering it in blood. It harks of those horror movie scenes where the monster annihilates an supposedly ‘elite’ squad of soldiers and provides some of the games coolest moments. 

As you progress, however, those NPC’s get guns. This starts with some obviously overly ambitious security guards and office workers grabbing weapons and thinking they are brave and they don’t pose too much of a threat, but eventually you get the actual soldiers and without considered use of the environment and a deft hand on the controller can prove a problem due to the forward shields they carry. These guys upgrade to flame throwing wielding annoyances and the ultimate enemy, the mech. Again though, through ability use, knowledge of the room/level and agile thumbs they don’t pose a huge problem. 

It means the game is, for the most part, a breeze to play through. As I said at the beginning it is a joy to control and it’s at its best when it goes all in on the overpowered monster loose in an underground facility trope that is the games main selling point. Unfortunately, it isn’t without its problems which is a shame because with just a bit of tweaking Carrion could be one of the year's best games. 

I said it’s great to control which is true, however, as the creature gets bigger it can get in its own way and make it difficult to move vertically. I am not exactly sure how this can be rectified, and it is a relatively small issue but it can be frustrating. Same goes for moving around in water as it can be hard to track which bit is the ‘front’ so you can end up moving in circles to get through a section. 

This size issue can cause problems with a certain type of defense system the facility has as well. This is a mine, i guess, that sticks to the biomass and is an instant kill when it goes off after a couple of seconds. They appear at set locations and while there is an upgrade that stops them killing you, it is possible to accidentally drift into their reaction zone and get killed when you don’t have the energy needed to stop it. Again, like all but one issue in Carrion, it's an annoyance more than anything. 

The main issue, and one that I don’t think any long time gamer would be able to understand why it isn’t included, is that this game needs a map. Desperately. It is ridiculous that it isn’t included given the lack of any other on screen direction other than your ability and health indicators, and given that the game is a metroidvania style game which inherently means a lot of backtracking and returning to old areas for upgrades, it is a glaring omission.

It is insane that one of the most used, and some would argue, basic video game mechanics is completely not in the game. Moreover, this was a deliberate design decision by the developers and speaks to an age old problem of “Well I can finish it without one so so can they.” I mean, to be fair you can, but not without an immense amount of moving through areas multiple times for no reason whatsoever. 

The lack of a map is Carrion’s most frustrating and disappointing aspects and I hope the developers learn from this mistake and have more respect for their audience's time in the future as the despite that one massive issue and a few niggles, it is a great playing and fun game that genuinely offers something different to the usual power fantasy. I do recommend Carrion, just be aware that it will hugely frustrate you by the end.

Review: Call of Duty Warzone

Let me be clear from the off: The act of playing Warzone (as it will henceforth be referred to) is fantastic. The game feels amazing to control, taking down enemies is satisfying and the production values are second to none. In that regard it really is a great game, which makes it that much more unfortunately that everything around the act of playing varies from confusing to outright terrible. 

Apart from the obvious non-comic or sci-fi setting, Warzone differentiates itself from other Battle Royale games by having 150 players on the massive map at once, be that in the quads, trios, duos or Solo modes. Some of these modes are cycled in and out, but to be fair that makes little difference unless you can only scrounge up one friend to play. I mainly played Solo’s because I have few friends to play with and it was a good time up to a point. 

The big innovation, and it is one of the coolest things Warzone does, is The Gulag. When you are killed for the first time in a given match, it isn't a game over straight away. Rather, you are sent to The Gulag, which is basically the shower room scene from The Rock in game form. There you wait your turn until you are put into the centre against one other opponent You get a gun and some other kit and in true battle royale style, the last person standing wins. If you win, you’re immediately dumped back into the map to continue playing, sans weapons and equipment. 

You get one round of Gulag, then when you die you’re gone for good. At least, that's in Solo’s, in the other modes if your team have enough cash they can buy you back into the game ala the reboot system from other games. The Gulag is a very cool addition and distills the game down to that final battle and that first win in that is such a great feeling that dying can make you pumped to continue the match. 

Another difference is the sheer amount of weapons available to you. Whereas Apex Legends or Fortnite give you a relatively small loot pool with a set of clearly defined more powerful weapons - the gold level gear in both, Warzone gives out lots of different guns and equipment. These are organised into assault rifles, smgs, shotguns, LMGS, marksman rifles and sniper rifles for the primary weapons. There is a melee category too but that consists of the Riot Shield and seems a bit pointless as a primary weapon. 

You can also carry a secondary weapon which consists of either pistols, launchers or another Melee category, this time just holding the combat knife. On top of these, you have three equipable perks that grant things like more sprinting time or the ability to use two primary weapons. That last one is probably the most useful in the game, or at least it was for me, as it meant I could carry an assault rifle and a sniper rifle at the same time. 

The last set of weapons are the Lethal and Tactical equipment. Lethal are basically various forms of grenades, while Tactical are things like smoke grenades or the heartbeat sensor for detecting close by enemies. There is a lot of kit in Warzone, and that's before you even get to all the attachments for the weapons which improve accuracy or reload times or a number of other stats, and these are individual to each gun and unlocked by using said gun while playing. 

I have written three paragraphs about what kit is available to you in Warzone, and needless to say it can be overwhelming. That is before you add in ‘blueprints’ which are developer designed weapon combos with different names. So for example, there is the ‘Black Asp’ assault rife, which is a weapon I have found from chests but had no idea what the difference was from any other gun apart from a name change and fact it was blue coloured. Turns out this is a standard Oden rifle with a bunch of attachments and renamed, though I had to figure that out by picking one up and swapping the between it and a normal oden to look at the pictures in the bottom right of the hud. 

I have had to google multiple times to work out the best load out to take into the game, but then the load out options all feel a bit dumb in the context of Warzone. Most BR games have you get loot from chests, in game drops or just the ground, and while all of these are present here, you can only get the loadout you created outside of a match by either buying a loadout marker from a buy station or hoping beyond hope that no one is camping one of the randomly spawned free loadout drops. 

It replaces, in a manner of speaking, the luck of the draw aspect of the chests as by opening enough chests and grabbing enough ground loot you can buy the best guns in the game after a few minutes. It’s an interesting take on the concept, but it simply isn’t as good, as it removes the  feeling of besting a better equipped opponent. Plus it adds in an extra thing for annoying players to camp near for free, cheap kills and this being COD, of course they do that. 

To be fair to Warzone, it is trying to do BR a different way so all these weapon options fit in with that as do the loadout drops, and it does some genuinely interesting things to stand out, for example if someone is aiming a sniper rifle at you, you can see the light reflecting in the scope so you know its a sniper shot coming  your way. It might not seem like much but it's a cool little addition. 

Another is the cash drops that pop out of chests and are strewn over the ground. Grabbing these means that when you find one of the buy stations scattered around the map you are purchasing kill streaks, armour plates (warzones shield equivalent), loadout drops and in the team based versions a killed squad member. Again though, the buy stations are just another thing for players to camp on and get free kills, so it's not exactly worked. 

It's not this stuff that brings Warzone down though, it's everything around the act of playing it. The download is 100GB for just Warzone. 100GB. The problem here is it isn’t just Warzone you get, you actually get the whole of Modern Warfare as part of the install, it's just the main game is hidden behind a £50 pay wall to unlock it. Which would be fine, if you weren’t limited to just two operators (character skins) if you don’t make that purchase. 

It's a shady thing to do in what is supposed to be a ‘free’ product. This is compounded by the fact that all of the options and settings available to players of the full game are available here, which again, would be fine if it doesn’t cause stupid issues. For example, there is the option to turn off crossplay, so you only play with players on the same platform as you (in my case PC), except Warzone requires that it be turned on, so you can’t play with it off. If that was the case, what is the point in the option even being in the client? 

Then  you have the killstreak screen that lets you pick which killstreaks you will receive depending on how many kills you get. Except this is pointless because you don’t earn killstreaks like that in Warzone, just the main games multiplayer, so again, why is this in the game client if you can’t use it?

The UX in Warzone is also terrible. There are so many menus for different things, and icons denoting you have something to look at, that it can be hard to figure out where to go. But then those little icons don’t show up in logical places, adding to the confusion. For example, using a particular gun and getting kills with it will increase your level with that weapon and unlock attachments and gun skins or charms. When this happens and you are dumped back to the main menu, the weapons tab will have a little green icon to say you have unlocked something for a gun. However, clicking on the tab means that icon disappears, it won’t show up on a particular weapon type. 

Clicking on a weapon type and scrolling down the list will also not show you which weapon has something unlocked. Only by clicking on a specific weapon will you get the ‘gunsmith’ option to customize it, and at that point, two menus down, do you see the icon to say something has been unlocked. Would it really be that hard to put the same icon on the weapon type tab and the actual weapon icon? 

Now I do appreciate that this might be something that only annoys me, but this is Call of Duty, the budget would suggest that some of the best developers in the industry are working on it and yet no one seems to have figured out this relatively easy fix? It’s a dumb thing that just annoys and brings the game down. 

This is all assuming that the icons even work properly because I have had a  couple of instances where I have looked at everything and the icon remains for no reason. Another little bug is that when the match is starting and your character is walking to the back of the plane ready to drop, your character skin will change for no reason whatsoever. I normally play as an asian woman operator but several times I have swapped genders and outfits just at this screen for no reason at all. 

In Solos, it will randomly add a teammate into screen while the game loads, confusing you as to whether you clicked Duo’s or not. All these are little things but they add up and take away from what should be a seamless experience. 

Actually dropping in and playing the game, though, is fun to a point. When you are killed you can get the same feeling you would get playing standard COD multiplayer, like you have been decimated before you could react, or even see the person firing on you. This isn’t helped by the real world setting and clothing on the character skins - they don’t exactly jump out at times so it can be easy for players to hide and get the jump on you. I suppose that is just part of the game, but it can be frustrating when you can’t see them cause they are hiding in the corner of a building, covered in shadow while in all black clothing. 

Getting a few kills in a row is a great feeling, especially since characters are very squishy and can be ripped apart in stand off if one is a slightly better aim than you. I played on PC and it was slightly weird to have this happen so much because I was mainly playing against Xbox and Playstation players due to cross play, so in theory I should have the advantage but I really didn’t and I could never figure out why. I suspect it was my own skill more than anything, but there was this sense that they always seemed more powerful. 

Of course, they could have had better guns so that’s why, and I do freely admit my skill at COD is lacking after years away due to frustrations with how the standard multiplayer always pans out, so this might just be a case of getting used to how the game plays, as it is very different to other BR games. 

I want to be clear on one point though: Warzone exists as a way to get you to buy Modern Warfare. It is NOT the benevolent freebie the marketing would have you believe, and everything is geared to getting you to spend money on either the main game or the battle pass and skins. I wouldn’t have an issue with the battle pass if this was a proper stand alone game, and might even invest in it because the moment to moment gameplay is good enough. It’s just unfortunate that the shady practices that surround this put me off rewarding the developers, despite knowing that it was a business decision above their heads. 

It’s also rubbish that Warzone’s lifespan is probably exactly one year, and a new version of Call of Duty Battle Royale will most likely appear with this year's game. That is cynical, I admit, but perfectly justified given the annualised history of the series. It will be, however, very successful, because there is a very large subset of people who don’t want sci-fi - making Apex Legends a dead end, who want an antithesis to the ‘kids game’ that is Fornite and who want a free Call of Duty. 

Cynically it is very shrewd to release Warzone given these parameters, but it is clear business has trumped giving the users a decent experience, and that is very sad, because as a small, stand alone experience that sells a battle pass and some skins Warzone is a very good Battle Royale game for the most part.