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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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 Outer Worlds

It is easy to tell a Japanese RPG from a Western one. JRPG’s focus on cool visuals, heavily inspired from anime and manga with at times cheesy dialog and story lines and combat that features summoning monsters and comically over sized swords. Western RPG’s, generally speaking, focus on the dialog and story, presenting worlds that seem to brim with possibilities. Obsidian Entertainments The Outer Worlds is very much the second of these, and in some ways is an excellent example, but not so much in others. 

You play as the sole revived occupant of ‘The Hope’, a colony ship left on the edge of  the Halcyon colony, light years from earth. The man that revived you says he can save the thousands of other colonists on the ship if you help him, and of course you do, setting you forth on an adventure across space stations and worlds to encounter a cast of crazy characters, strange planets and vicious monsters. So far, so RPG. 

To solidify this, there are stats, upgradable weapons, companions and quests. Everything you would want from an RPG, except for one important thing: Stakes. The stakes here never feel world ending, there isn’t some ‘big bad’ coming to destroy you, it is a smaller tale than that, which is a deliberate design choice but one that makes everything feel a little bit muted and understated. 

There is a sense of humor to The Outer Worlds that a lot of RPG’s lack, and this comes through in the excellent writing and story lines. The tale of corporations running everything and the rivalry between each one that leads employees to not even take medicine if it isn’t made by the one they work for is something genuinely different and fun, with people you encounter saying the company marketing line at the end of every sentence. It can get a little tedious, but that is kind of the point, corporate policy infringing on everything in your life is just that. 

You start out a loner, but soon come upon your first companion, Pravati, an engineer naive in the way of the colony. This is where the game really comes into its own, showcasing the excellent, nuanced writing that is truly the hallmark of The Outer Worlds. Each companion is a very unique character you help shape over the course of the story, and the both satisfying and disappointing ending wrap up scenes serve as a nice conclusion to each arc, though that does depend on how much of each character's quest line you complete. 

The game is a bit Mass Effect 2 in that regard, with each character coming with a ‘loyalty mission’ style quest line that gives back story and develops each one into those unique characters. The best part is that they aren’t ‘go to this place, fight a bunch of creatures/bad guys and win’. A couple are, but most are helping these characters find closure on an aspect of their lives or giving advice in times or need. 

Of course, you do have the option to be a massive dick. This being a story and character heavy RPG you get the option to be good, bad or somewhere in between, and characters do change to reflect that. Being the person I am, good was my path through the game and I saw plenty to give me a satisfying conclusion. It’s all this that will make or break the game for you in the end, if you find the dialog grating or cheesy, and hate the voice acting, cause everyone is then this won’t be the game for you. It’s not, but that's just my opinion, the voice acting is pretty great throughout, though most people have a southern american accent that isn’t for everyone. The writing as previously stated is excellent and these feel like real people, it's truly impressive. 

What's not impressive however, is the combat. It’s in there, it works, but it's just all so lackluster. The guns have little weight to them and on most encounters are so very easy they are a bump in the road rather than an obstacle to overcome. To put into perspective about how easy these encounters are, each companion comes with a unique combat ability, as well as things that boost your stats in certain ways but the fights being as easy as they were I didn’t have to use these abilities. In fact I actively forgot about them until about two hours from the end of the game. 

The ability to assign different states to your companions doesn’t help with this either, since setting them to aggressive and giving them decent weapons and armour means they will just wade in and wreck anything they see, though this does normally result in at least one dying. On the plus side, as soon as all the enemies have been dealt with they instantly revive, so it's no big deal. 

All that was required was the guns to feel that little bit more weighty, like actual armaments, and the enemies to be harder to kill, just by a little bit and that would have given a better performance out of the combat. As it stands, if it wasn’t there at all you wouldn’t lose that much when playing, which is a shame because effort has been made here, with a variety of weapons both ranged and melee that give you plenty of options, it just all feels kind of pointless. 

Travelling about the halcyon colony grants you areas that include a space station, cities and small towns on a few different planets. It's a bummer that there isn’t more of this as the stellar map has several planets you can’t seem to go to, though to be fair I didn’t find all the companions during my play through so that could have changed, as well as the fact I played as a good guy so the options could have changed. The environments I traveled to were pretty varied and very nice looking, so monotony didn’t set in until the back travelling kicked in towards the end of the game. 

The Outer Worlds is a great RPG that just needs better combat. The writing, characters, environments and tone provide a unique setting that is entertaining to explore. There are ideas around what characters in a game of this type could be and prove successful and satisfying, and despite the ending scroll being disappointing for its lack of animation it gives you closure to a character set you come to love, especially for your player character.

 If you are itching for a RPG that doesn’t have all the over top weapons and summons of a JRPG then this is the game for you, and it isn’t over a hundred hours to play, so it doesn’t out stay its welcome. As western RPG’s go, this is a great one.

Review: Creature in the Well

Picture this: A lone robot wakes up in a windswept desert. Nothing but sand as far as its optics can see. How it got there? Unknown. Why a desert? Unknown. A short walk and it finds a small town, with no one around, a well at one end and an opening in a mountain at the other. 

This is the premise of Creature In the Well, and it is a very effective one. The game combines atmospheric story telling, a quality art style and some interesting gameplay into a game ultimately let down by level design and imprecision. 

The scene I set out above is the opening of the game, and you soon discover that the residents of the town have taken refuge from ‘The Creature’ a malevolent being living in the mountain. Your character goes inside to discover various parts of a machine and if they are all reactivated then the sandstorm cutting off the town outside will cease. The wrinkle is the titualur creature, for it doesn’t want you to turn the machine back on. 

What proceeds is what would be a fairly standard hack and slash game except for two things: There are no enemies other than the creature, and pinball. Now, the pinball you might be thinking of isn’t quite what the game delivers. This being a hack and slash, your character picks up two sets of weapons, charge tools and strike tools. These range from drain pipes to swords and spiked whips and you use the charge tools to grab the energy balls floating around the environment or that are shot at you and the strike tools to blast them outwards. 

Doing these actions solve environmental puzzles and gets you through the strange boss encounters, but you don’t actually attack enemies since there isn’t any. What you have to strike are pinball table bumpers that get charged up and eventually disappear, clear the room you’re in and a new path will open up. This could be a secret path or the way you need to go to move the game along. A secondary effect of charging these balls is you are provided with ‘power’ the in game currency. 

This currency is used to open sealed doors as well as upgrade your character and activate nodes to teleport you closer to the boss encounters when you die. I say ‘die’ but you don’t really, you run out of health and the creature then rears up out of the shadows, snatches you and tosses your barely functional body out of the well. It’s a good way to handle it, and adds to the dark cartoon feel you get from the visuals and sound design. 

Unfortunately, it's the pinball mechanics that ultimately let the game down. Starting out as an interesting and fun twist on the standard mechanics of the genre, especially when multiple energy balls are bouncing off lots of bumpers with a brilliantly satisfying sound effect, it quickly becomes an exercise in frustration. This is down to the inherently imprecise nature of pinball as well as what some of the rooms in levels ask you to do. 

On more than one occasion, I would walk into a room and it seemed fairly obvious what to do, get the balls to hit two bumpers on the left and right. However, once I did this and they disappeared, five more smaller bumpers appear with a five second count down above them. I have to get the balls to power all five in under five seconds to progress. So I start slashing to catch and charge the one ball in the centre of the room plus the others randomly bouncing around the room, to a maximum of three. This can take way longer than the count down, especially as the balls will bounce in all directions when they hit the bumper, meaning you have to reset and try to capture and charge again and hit all five in the time limit. 

The balls bouncing can help but not always, and all too often I felt it was more luck than any kind of skill that I got through a room as the balls flying about happened to hit the bumpers at the right time. It’s a level of required precision that that game cannot deliver on, and is compounded by extra obstacle in certain rooms, especially explosive towers. 

These towers pop up in certain rooms and are either static or moving. When a charged ball hits them they explode with a large radius, damaging your character. Now you do have a dash move and can move around if you aren’t actively charging a set of balls, but this can prove very tricky to pull off, not to mention that the amount of on screen information can become difficult to keep track of, so you just don’t see when the towers are about to fire. 

All that just occurs in the standard sections, things get even more hectic when you reach the boss rooms. Each level has one of these, and it involves a square platform in the middle of the room and various bumpers and hazards around the edge, clearing all the bumpers moves you onto the next stage of the fight, simple right? No, not as simple as you might think as the creature’s arms will rear up out of the darkness and launch damaging blasts at you. These are slow moving and can be destroyed by firing charged balls at them, but it is one extra thing to keep track of in a room that will combine every element you have encountered so far: explosive towers, timed bumpers, launchers and bumpers that fire beams of damaging energy. All that plus parts might be spinning or moving, blocked off or some other such wrinkle. 

Now, it's not like these are impossible to complete, and they are certainly a challenge, but my previous comments about the imprecision just lead to anger inducing moments that detract from the overall quality of the game, because this isn’t one of those situations where you never feel like it’s your fault. For me, it was always the games fault because the ‘combat’ such as it is simply isn’t tight enough to make what you need to accomplish fun. 

I do still recommend Creature in the Well though, because the attempt is what is important here. The developers took a tried and tested concept and put their own spin on it, attempting something that has rarely been tried before. Depending on your opinion, that attempt might have ultimately failed, but they took the chance, and everything else about the game is top notch. Gaming won’t change without those chances being taken, so support this game for what it gets right and wrong, because that is how things move forward, and if you have a game pass subscription, its free, so what have you got to lose?

Review: Blair Witch

Games are very different to movies. It’s an obvious statement, but it’s worth mentioning again, because it is this difference that is at the heart of the issues with Blair Witch, the new game from Bloober Team. It is a competently made game, but the deft touch required to transfer the themes of The Blair Witch movies to a video game setting simply isn’t there and it lets the overall game down. 

As I said though, it is a competently made game. You play as Ellis Lynch, former cop and army veteran, as he travels to the Black Hills Forest to search for a missing boy some two years after the events of the very first Blair Witch movie. Ellis brings with him his pet dog Bullet, and off the two go to attempt to find this small boy. What happens next ranges from the genuinely creepy to the downright obvious, but tries to play on the idea of the titular witch in the woods. 

To be fair, the writing isn’t half bad with Ellis feeling like a fully fleshed out character who is desperately trying to get his life back on track. The characters around him and certain events that transpire add to this feeling, with flashbacks to his time in the army showing a man suffering from deep emotional distress. The good news is that this isn’t done in a ham fisted way, as you can never be quite sure if its the evil presence in the woods or Ellis’ issues that cause the incidents. 

This is all helped along by the best thing that the game has: Bullet. The dog follows you around, pointing out dangers or foraging for clues as well as helping direct you into the seemingly directionless forest. Petting Bullet or giving him a treat helps ground Ellis back in reality, again showing the character as something more than just a blank slate FPS protagonist. 

Despite all of this, the game is let down by its name and the cinematic history that comes with it. Should you compare a game and the movie it's based on? That particular debate is still open and yes, as I said at the start of this review they are very different mediums, however games can convey the themes and core tenants of their license while still being their own thing. Blair Witch doesn’t do this. 

The movies are all famous for being ‘found footage’, i.e. the movie you see is actually camcorder footage shot by the protagonists and found at a later date. The game doesn’t do this. It does have a camcorder that allows you to watch tapes you found throughout the world. If you find one with a blue sticker it's just footage you can watch, find one with a red sticker though and you can pause it when something changes and that change is reflected back out in the real world. Its neat, but found footage it is not, and it's also about the closest thing, apart from setting and the strange stick figures you come across, to the Blair Witch license you are going to get. 

Therein lies the problem. The Blair Witch Project and it’s sequels are more about what you don’t see rather than what you do. There isn’t any combat to speak of, and it's more about sinister goings on around the protagonists that mess with their perception of reality rather than anything you overtly see. The game puts the viewpoint in first person and shows enemies you have to fight off with the aid of Bullet and a flashlight, others you have to avoid, making it just not creepy enough to work with the license for me. 

I remember going to the cinema to watch the original film when I was younger and coming out with a distinctive ‘meh’ attitude towards it. I then attempted to go to sleep and that was when the films brilliance dawned on me and I had trouble sleeping for a few nights after. You don’t get that with the game, there are some messed up moments and sequences where images and sound coalesce into something that bamboozles the senses but as soon as you come out of it you are back to a standard FPS thriller, one that could have its own unique and original IP and still be just as effective, the developers wouldn’t even need to change that much about the story and in game assets. 

To be fair, I came around on the game by the time I got to the end, with the story and overall writing enough to provide a satisfying conclusion and the atmosphere doing just enough to make it work. I did not believe, and still do not, that it requires the Blair Witch license and honestly I think it would be better without it as it would have room to just be its own thing without the added pressure of living up to the source material. 

Given that the game is on Game pass, there are certainly worse ways to kill a few hours, but put the notion of this being a licensed game out of your mind, it is a unique horror experience that for some reason was given a name unfitting of its nature. 

Review: Crackdown 3

I remember, back in the day, playing the very first Crackdown. It had its problems, but it was so fun to power up to point where you can leap tall buildings in a single bound, blast generic bad guys in the face and have a good time. It was an original IP for the Xbox 360 and a brilliantly fun, turn off your brain time. 

Fast forward twelve years and we have Crackdown 3, released for Xbox and PC earlier this year. Unfortunately, while the same basic formula applies, and this time features loveable tough man Terry Crews, the magic hasn’t translated because games have evolved over the last few years leaving the third game feeling stuck in the past. 

That’s not to say it doesn’t do what it says on the tin: Crackdown 3 is very much a Crackdown game, but that is kind of the problem. Rather than evolving the formula in any significant way, a few half baked ideas from other games have been added, then the same method of progression has been kept in while a lock on mechanic makes the shooting a little too easy and formulaic. This results in a competent game, but one that isn’t overly exciting and can quickly devolve into boredom. 

In it’s defence, Crackdown 3 fails to fall into the trap a lot of open world games do - over filling the map. There is plenty to do, but not so much that it becomes a slog to get through and the overall game becomes nothing more than a checklist. The developers at Sumo Digital managed to get the balance just right, with enough things to do to keep you playing but not so much that its overwhelming. It’s just a shame that this is the best thing the game does. 

Shooting enemies becomes rote quickly, and despite there being the ability to target individual body parts when getting close to bad guys, you rarely need to do it, plus how this is implemented is strange. I played on PC, so to target an enemy is a click of the right mouse button, fire the left, but when I got closer I could do a quick little movement of the mouse to target the head or arms. It was a weird way to do it because it feels counter intuitive to move the mouse in such a way. More than that though, I didn’t need to do it, I could kill the guy only slightly quicker with headshots than I could just targeting them normally. 

Once I gave up on trying to do headshots, the combat got better but so easy that the only times I died were down to poor positioning on my part. The variety of weapons, I must admit, were pretty cool, nothing spectacular apart from a couple of the bigger rocket launchers, but I always had the right tool for the job. Getting better over time with them helped a lot too, but again this added to the ‘this is a crackdown ass crackdown game’ feel. 

As for the other main part of the gameplay - running around the city, that again does the job but I wouldn’t call it Mario levels of precision, far from it. The jumping is just a little too floaty for the number of platforming puzzles available to you, and while this is compensated for as you level up your agility skill by grabbing glowing agility orbs dotted around the world, the over reliance on platforming challenges in the form of towers you have to climb to get rid of the bad guys propaganda leads to frustration as its all too easy to jump over the platform. 

What is that propaganda replaced with? Terry Crews. The setup for the story is that the agency (the ‘good guys’) sent a team to the city of New Providence as the source of a global power outage had been traced there. The opening cut-scene sees the transport shot down, and thus the only agent left is you (unless playing co-op). There are several agent models to pick from, but let's be honest, play as Terry Crews, he is the biggest draw here. Unfortunately he is also massively underused. 

Cutscenes don’t feature any lines from him, apart from the opening one, and while jumping around the world and getting into fights gives you little quips it's not enough. The biggest thing is that when you complete a tower, the giant red hologram of the games big bad is replaced with a giant blue hologram of Mr Crews, spouting lines about how the bad guys are bad. Which you don’t really hear unless stood directly underneath a tower. 

It’s a shame because he is a funny guy and has a singular brand of angry, so any previous experience of his work makes his use here disappointing at best and outright terrible at worst. The marketing all surrounded him, but don’t be fooled, you can play as any other character and get just as good results, but still, play as Terry Crews cause you might as well. 

The term ‘It’s a shame’ pretty much sums up the whole experience. Keeping the essence of Crackdown is possible while still evolving the game, but that didn’t happen here. Even the more modern aspects are a let down. There is a very lite version of the Nemesis system from the Shadow of Mordor games here, but it's just not what you want from such a thing. Where in that game if you took out a nemesis they are replaced by an upcoming orc, here you are given basically the same screen but when you take one out, that's it, they are done and you move onto the next. Once they kill them all you get to take on the head of the organisation they work for. 

Speaking of that big bad, while I appreciate that I put the game on easy, that final boss battle was one of the easiest battles I have ever played. I honestly had more trouble with the lower level bosses than I did the last one. In part this was because I was at a much higher level, part because I had probably the best explosive weapon in the game, but mainly it really is just that easy and it left me feeling unsatisfied with the end game. 

I did try the Wrecking Zone multiplayer mode, which was actually kinda cool. Jumping all over the map blowing it up as you hunt down the other team was cool, but there was so little skill involved it became boring quick. The same lock on system is here, so it's not a challenge to take someone down, and the environmental destruction, while cool adds little to the experience. So few people were playing I got into three matches with the same set of people then the last one took longer than five minutes to match make so I gave up. 

Again, it’s a shame, a bit more thought and wrecking zone could have been really ace but at present it feels like a tacked on afterthought that has had half the resources thrown at it that it really needs. This is especially bad considering that when the game was first announced a huge deal was made of this mode and how it used the cloud to power its destructive environments. It might still do that, but the cloud isn’t a substitute for good game design and ultimately this is where the mode falls down. 

Overall,  Crackdown 3 is a game of missed potential, a game who's core essence could have been kept while taking on more modern elements that would have given it a fresh feel. It could have used its celebrity protagonist in so many better ways that it feels like the money spent should have been used on improving the game and had it followed through on its promise of cloud powered multiplayer become one of the best games of the year. 

Unfortunately, my reaction by the end of my time with it was a definitive ‘meh’. It is a half decent way to while away a few hours but nothing that will stick with you and a game that is easily outshined by more modern takes on open world games. It's on Xbox Game Pass, so to be fair if you have that then it is worth a play, but don’t be fooled, even then it is outclassed by other games on the same service. It’s a shame.

Review: Tetris 99

For a certain generation, Tetris is the quintessential video game. It is a game that has contributed to not only hours upon hours of precious time lost with its ‘just one more go’ mentality, but also the resounding success of gaming hardware. It is the most successful single video game of all time and rightly so, its depth hidden behind its relative simplicity.

There have been two attempts to update this all time classic for the modern age in the last few months. Both are twists on the formula, with Tetris Effect blending music, VR and classic gameplay into one stunning whole and the other giving an altogether different experience.

Over the last two years, what has been the major trending in gaming? Yep, battle royale, and that is exactly what Tetris 99 is. No, I didn’t mistype. This is a online vs Tetris game where 100 players compete to be the last...tetromino standing? I think that's the way to put it. It’s free, it was a surprise on launch straight after a Nintendo Direct, and it is bloody good to boot.

On the surface, it is a straight game of Tetris like you have always known. Different shaped blocks drop from the top of your screen and you must place them at the bottom to complete lines which then disappear. However, surrounding your play space are 99 other, tiny play spaces. These are the other players in the match, and you must defeat them in order to win.

How do you do that? Well, play Tetris, obviously. You can use either the touch screen in portable mode or the right thumbstick in docked mode to target other players, and when on the attack, any lines that you clear from your space sends rubbish to theirs and vicea versa. Get your opponents play space to fill up and they are knocked out, simple.

Except its not, good Tetris play is key and if you aren’t playing well you will quickly be overwhelmed and out of the match. Add to this the fact that the game speeds up at certain milestones and it means that you have to be on your toes at all times, tracking more than you would in a single player version of the game.

It’s really neat. It gets the blood pumping at the higher levels and rewards good play, though problems inherent to online competitive games are present here as well. It is certainly possible to be knocked out very quickly in the early stages of the game, especially if being targeted by multiple opponents. It can be mitigated by completing lines as the rubbish that accumulates is then cleared to give you breathing room, but it is the equivalent of spawning then getting killed in Call of Duty.

Teaming seems to be a thing as well, though that might just be how the targeting system pans out when using the right stick as it doesn’t target individuals, but a set of people such as ‘attackers’ or ‘random’. It works but isn’t fully explained, which is fine as good play is the meat of the thing, so long as you do that and have the corner of your eye on the other stuff you can get quite far, if not win.

The music is fantastic, though not as integral as something like Tetris Effect. There is little to no lag when playing online, and everything's bright and colourful. It's a great playing game that brings Tetris into the online space surprisingly well and to top it all off is free with no microtransactions.

Is it a battle royale game that will keep you coming back though? To be honest, no. Its great but long term there isn’t anything to keep people engaged like a battle pass, and just seems to be a make good from Nintendo to its players. To be honest, I am fine with that, it doesn’t need to be constantly updated, it did exactly what it was supposed: make its players happy.

For the price of free, if you have a Switch then you should absolutely download and play this, even if you have never played a battle royale game before. It is the perfect introduction and a great version of the this classic game. What more could you ask for?