22 years later, we finally get a direct sequel A Link to the past

Many hardcore Zelda enthusiasts will maintain that the 2D top down Zeldas, specifically the original A Link to the Past, are the best Zelda games. Personally, I'd have to say that A Link to the Past is my 2nd favourite but is just narrowly edged out by Ocarina of Time which is damn near as close to a perfect game that I think I've ever played.

So imagine my excitement when I heard that Nintendo were planning on making a direct sequel to my 2nd favourite Zelda game and still probably one of the best games ever made! I did initially think it was a little odd to put it on the 3DS limiting it to both a small screen and only people owning that handheld. But I knew that the 3D capability is excellent when put to good use so I still had high hopes for this game.

And I'm quite happy to say that those hopes were well placed because this is a fantastic Zelda game harking back to the days of old when you were just left to your own devices and to find your own way through things rather than constant tutorials and interruptions from "helpful" assistants. Being a Zelda veteran almost since day 1 (first one I got was Link's Adventure not long after it came out) I do not need tutorials and prefer to be left to my own devices and to seek out help if and when I need it. Thankfully, this game caters to that very well in 2 different ways.

First of all, just like the original Zelda games, you do not get your hand held the whole way and the tutorial is a dungeon that you can get to in probably under a minute. Second of all, the items work a lot different than before. Apart from a couple of key items you get from dungeons, you rent or buy the vast majority of the items for the game. So with a bit of money farming at the start, you can have a good 90% of the items from the get go. This also changes up the dungeon sequence obviously, so instead of being pointed to one dungeon and then the next, you are just told "Here are a bunch of places bad shit is happening. Do with them what you will.". Which I thought was a very nice change of pace. The one drawback of the rental system is that if you fall in battle you lose the items and must rent them again. This can be fixed later in the game when you are given them option to outright buy them instead (for quite large amounts) and then you are also given the ability to upgrade them. I was not searching especially hard for money, but I was still able to rent out all the items right away and then buy them all quite early on.

The other well touted change is Link's new ability to merge with the wall and move along it. I thought it would take me a while to get used to using this mechanic but it didn't. You very quickly get used to thinking with this mechanic in mind and it is well used all the way right up to the end of the game for both normal puzzles, battles and finding secrets.

The game plays almost exactly like A Link to the Past we all know and love, except now looks much much prettier and is rendered in very effective 3D giving areas and and enemies and multi level locations great depth and feel.

I would only have two negative things to say about this game. And one of them is not really even entirely a bad thing.

1: Being a direct sequel to A Link to the Past it is set in the same version of Hyrule as that one. And because it takes places not a huge amount of time afterwards, the world is practically identical. Both the light world and the dark world (now referred to as Lorule for some reason) are 95% identical for what I could see. And while this provides a lot of great nostalgia, it means that you will not be seeing a huge amount of new material or locations. The only things that are majorly different are the interiors of the dungeons. But even these have a lot of the same exterior locations, names and sometimes bosses. The same goes for the music and I can scarcely remember hearing a new tune throughout the entirety of the game but I'm sure there must be a few. Overall it feels like there was an awful lot of copy-paste done to put this game together.

2: This game is very easy. Like really easy. I'm not sure if this was a side-effect of the open ended structure causing the difficulty levels of the dungeons to needing some evening out so none of them are ever impossible but I blew through this game hardly ever getting stuck on a puzzle and the only thing that even came close to knocking me down was the end boss. Some may say this is not entirely a bad thing either as it allows you to focus on having fun rather than dying all the time but it was a little bit of a disappointment to me as I remember getting stuck in the Link to the Past dungeons a lot.

But those are tiny little niggles and definitely do not do very much to detract from the sheer enjoyment to be had from playing this game. It brings you back to your childhood and the amazing Zelda games of old all in glorious 3D. And right in the palm of your hand!

A little known portable 4th wall breaking game from the mind of Suda51

This one has been on the backlog for a fair amount of time. It was put on for the sole reason that it was made by the much insane Suda51 of who I am a big fan of. I knew very little about it going in apart from that it had many 4th wall breaking moments. Because of this, I was considering cutting it from the backlog. Now having played it, I think I could have done that quite safely without missing much.

Mechanically, it's a fairly normal action RPG in the vein of Secret of Mana or Vagrant Story etc where there is no separation between the overworld you move around on and the battles. You just move close to enemies and engage battle mode and your character attacks automatically when it is his turn. There are still hard numbers and levels and values so it's not as simple of a battle mode as the likes of a Zelda game and you can easily be out-classed and quickly pummeled if you try to fight an enemies too many levels ahead of you. There are also magic techniques which are referred to as Techs in this game. One unique feature to it is the addition of decals. Which are one of the aforementioned 4th wall breaking elements. You collect decals which can then be stuck onto the screen over the real world for a variety of effects such as attacking enemies or warping back to base and such.

The story is one of 3 main characters. A professor guy who seems to be an alien of some kind. His ship has been shot down and crashed on earth. The power cells are missing and it's your job to get them back. A small child who the professor ropes into doing this helping (the character you control). And you. The person controlling this small child. Yes, you are often spoken to directly by the professor as he is aware of your presence and will talk to you as if behind the main characters back. It's a little strange at times but seems to work pretty well. In the process of hunting down these power cells you come across another group who wants them for less pleasant reasons and conspiracies appear and so it all unfolds.

Overall, this was a fairly enjoyable little action RPG, but I don't think I would have missed out on a lot had I removed it from my list. It's 4th wall breaking antics added little to it and it lacked the usual signature brand of madness that Suda51 normally adds to games that give them such appeal to me. A dissapointingly average affair overall sadly.

Returning to the dark and difficult world of The Walking Dead

Long term readers of this blog may recall that I was a little unsure about The Walking Dead after playing the first episode and was unsure if I should carry on playing the rest of the series. It's a good thing I did....

After some quite common technical difficulties getting my saves from Episode 1 working again (although I don't think my 400 days decisions were recovered) I was ready to dive into season 2 but I made sure to brace myself before I did because I heard it was quite a rough start.

The game play itself follows the same kind of point and click pattern as the first season in that you go through a fairly linear path making dialogue choices along the way. You also get into encounters with "walkers" and sometimes other people. These usually play out as quick time events. But the appeal of the game lies in the great writing and dialogue in the characters and how even the smallest of choice that you make can have unforeseen consequences further down the road. You control Clementine, your young sidekick from the first season, although now she is a little older, a little wiser, a little stronger and much more capable at dealing with threats than she was before. Which is good because you will come across many of these.

It's difficult to say much in a review of this because the best part of it really is the story and the way the events unfold, but saying too much will just result in spoilers. All I can feel comfortable saying is that in the games introduction, you are still wandering with some of the characters from season one, but very quickly things go to shit and you found yourself split up from them and falling in with a new group trying to find your old one again. But needless to say, a lot happens in and around those events. And most of it is unpleasant. One over-arching theme of The Walking Dead is that most of the choices you are forced to make have no real right or wrong. They're all wrong. Just to varying degrees. So you really are trying to make the best of bad situations for the majority of the game and not trying to get anyone else killed.

This first episode is a good bit shorter than I expected taking me little over 90 minutes to finish and ended quite abruptly so I'm hoping they can keep a quick and consistent release schedule for the following episodes. I am also very excited to see how my choices come to play in the long run. Bring on Episode 2!

An action based Final Fantasy game in all but name from the original Fantasy Fantasy creators

Fans of the Final Fantasy series may have noticed the games declining in quality over the years. I have yet to play any of the newer ones beyond Final Fantasy X (what I regard to be the last true Final Fantasy) but everyone other that games reviewers, who we know cannot be trusted, have said almost nothing but bad things about the newer Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV are simply an MMORPGs with Final Fantasy branding slapped onto them. I started Final Fantasy XII when it first came out but played it one time for 3 hours and had no desire to return to it because it was so boring. I will have to someday though.... And from what I've heard of Final Fantasy XIII, it's simply a 30 hour tutorial where you walk from A to B through linear corridors.

Most of this downfall in quality in the newer games is due to the vast majority of the teams that made the older Final Fantasy games leaving the studio and the new ones are now being made by entirely new people and just can't put out the same quality games the original team did. But thankfully, most of this old team are still making games and still together in the form of Mistwalker Games. And some of the games that they put out, mostly this one and the incredible Lost Odyssey) can genuinely be considered to be the true new Final Fantasy games in all but name because they have a lot more in common with the legacy than the new pretenders to the throne do.

All that being said, I can indeed confirm that this feels like a true Final Fantasy game through and through. The battle system is quite different to the usual fixed standing battles and instead adopts a free roaming system where you move close to an enemy to hit them. You can also command other characters to attack or use magic and distract enemies or enhance ally spells once they have been cast. Despite seeming simple at first, there is a lot to the battle system that I gradually realised as I went through it hacking things to bits.

It adopts a system similar to Final Fantasy IV in that new spells and skills are unlocked just by levelling up so you do not have to hunt down new spells or equipment to get them. There is also the usual armour and weapon systems like Final Fantasy games but in this one, like a few others, you can upgrade both weapons and armour with the use of cash and/or specialist items breathing new life into old equipment. I did a fairly straight run through the game only doing a few optional side quests, but even doing this, I was almost always flush with cash and good equipment so this aspect of it seemed fairly easy except for the difficulty ramp at the end of the game.

One minor deviation from Final Fantasies of old that this game takes is that you are not trying to save the entire world. Just your own island, Lazarus Island, from a reptilian species called the Gurak that you are war with. You play a character who is in a band of mercenaries with his friends who has ambitions to become a knight of the empire. You start off doing small times jobs, but as usual, you get embedded in larger and larger jobs with more widespread effects and end up battling for the fate of the island itself.

The characters in your gang are all very notable and different and well fleshed out through both the main story and some side missions. All but one character who just seems to be there to tick a box and is quite irrelevant in the big picture.... The NPC characters are also very well fleshed out and you do feel strongly about helping/stopping them all. Basically what I'm trying to say here is that the characters and story are very expertly done and do a great job of drawing you in to the world.

This is also one of the most visually impressive Wii games that I have ever seen and it seems Mistwalker did a great job of squeezing every last ounce of performance out of the machine's limited spec to make every character and location look as detailed and wonderful as they could. It even feels like they push it too far a couple of times because there is hints of slowdown in very busy areas and battles where it is asking just a little too much and the Wii struggles to keep up.

I was a little hesitant to play this before hand because I had heard mixed reviews on it from many sources. I had considered striking it from the backlog due to lack of interest but now that I have been through it, I am very glad I did not because it was a truly wonderful JRPG that continues the legacy of the classic Final Fantasy games in the best way possible. Once again, it seems more and more that reviews can not be trusted.

Even the name "The Last Story" is quite similar to "Final Fantasy" when you think about it....

Sidenote: barring any games that I add after the backlog is finished or anything done in co-op, this is the last game on the list for the Nintendo Wii. The backlog is finally coming to a close....

Shotgunning two Gran Turismos in a row = car orgasam

Almost immediately after finishing Gran Turismo 5, I dove straight into Gran Turismo 6 to keep the racing simulation momentum going. Lots of racing being done lately….
This release was oddly quiet and snuck up on a lot of people which would explain it’s poor sales compared to it’s predecessor. Many would have expected this game to go to PlayStation 4 rather than PlayStation 3 because of it’s release so close to the arrival of the next-gen consoles. But the developers of the series maintained that so far, they have done 2 main Gran Turismo games on each console and so wanted to stick to that formula. Meaning that sometime in the next 3-5 years we should get Gran Turismo 7 on PlayStation 4.
Because I played this and Gran Turismo 5 so close together, there felt like there was a great deal of overlap and similarity. And there was. But there were also some large noticeable differences. Some good and some bad.

The enormous load times from the game before it seemed to be even worse than before. While the menus had been improved and sped up greatly, the loading of the actual races seemed to suffer and sometimes it could take upwards of two minutes to load a race. Thankfully though, the stupid level system of the previous game had gone and you had more freedom in picking your way through events. But still not as much as you did in previous games because events were still divided up into license classes and you had to get to and complete the final event in each class before moving on to the next.

One other negative thing that was very noticeable was the very low number of prize cars given compared to previous games. With this game, I again decided just to hit the end credits and call it a win as I did with Gran Turismo 5. But in doing that in the previous game, inhad at least a dozen cars in my garage. Only a couple of them having been bought and most being awarded. This time I had 3 cars in my garage. 2 of which I had bought myself. As a result of this, I had to stretch the first good car I won (a Renault Clio this time) even further. Pitting it against proper performance cars and scraping wins by the skin of my teeth. And instead of winning a car capable of winning the last few events, I had to save up and buy a monstrous racing Nissan Skyline. This felt a bit disconcerting because it's Gran Turismo tradition to win most of the cars you need and usually only to have to buy cars for specific model events. After finishing it and consulting some prize car lists it seems that most of the prize cars came from getting all golds or all available points in a division. Quite a departure from the procedures of the previous games again resulting in reduced freedom to move through the career. I think more prize cars will be given out over time for free in the Gran Turismo showcase and Vision Gran Turismo events, but I was playing this too soon to avail of those sadly.

Left: The Renault Clio Sport that got way too big for it's britches taking me through the majority of the career

Right: The Nissan GT-R touring car that took me to the finale

There are a number of very interesting side missions to do while you make your way through the career like visiting the Goodwood Festival of Speed, doing driving missions where you have to knock down cones, one make races and even lunar missions where you get to drive the actual lunar rover around the same routes the Apollo 11 team took. Those missions are an interesting novelty, but not terribly exciting seeing as the rover tops out at 15 Mph and topples over if you hit a pebble the wrong way.

But these are all minor quibbles and few things can take away from the pure joy that is Gran Turismo driving. Making your way through the career and gawping at cars that you want on the way and then eventually unlocking or buying them and loving every minute of it. Like Gran Turismo 5, this is another game I will return to at a later date to play more of because I very very much enjoyed what I did to get to the finale.

I just wish they had given me some more prize cars along the way....

A long delayed but much enjoyed return to the legendary Gran Turismo series

I have been a very long running fan of the Gran Turismo series.  I can quite clearly remember getting the first one upon release on PSX back in 1998.  Which recent advertising for Gran Turismo’s 15^th anniversary has reminded me that it was released 15 years ago and made me feel quite old.  I have got and played every instalment since then including most of the weird single make demos and Prologues and such.  But for some reason, I didn’t get into this one very much when I first got it.  Most likely because I was swamped under by many other games at the time and I knew it would be a huge undertaking.

But with the impending release of Gran Turismo 6, I decided that it was finally time to get this one done.  But decided to just “Beat” it for now (i.e. get to the credits roll) rather than 100% it which I had done with all the previous entries in the series.  This would at least allow me to go into Gran Turismo 6 having experienced the majority of 5 beforehand.

The most obvious upgrade in this newest instalment in the series is the enhanced visuals thanks to the power of the PlayStation 3.  But due to there still being some technical limitations, some cars do look nicer than others.  Certain important or expensive cars are classed as “Premium” and will be rendered in exquisite detail with full lighting and shadowing and such.  Whereas all the other cars will simply be rendered normally and while these still look better than PlayStation 2 cars, there is a very noticeable divide in their visual representations.  There is now also car damage both visual and mechanical which was forbidden by Honda for a long time but they have finally allowed now.  As well as a lot of manufacturers not previously available such as Ferrari and Lamborghini. 

One new addition that I did not approve of is enormous loading times.  Everywhere.  Both in menus and getting ready to race, you seem to spend more time watching loading screens than you do playing.  Despite it installing the game to the hard disk gradually as you go to reduce loading times, they never really seemed to get any better.  One other new addition I did not like is the introduction of an RPG-like level system.  You gain experience by doing events and level up, but the levels are only really there to provide entry barriers to later events stopping you from moving through the career at a pace faster than the developers wanted you to. 

A-Spec and B-Spec are now also separate careers altogether.  Rather than having one set of races that you can complete in A-Spec mode, B-Spec mode or both, now there are 2 entirely separate careers with separate sets of races and separate drivers with separate levels meaning you have to do a lot of things twice over.  I did not particularly care for this change either and preferred the old system of being able to choose which mode I wanted.

The racing itself is the usual excellent simulation handling that we have all come to expect from Gran Turismo.  There were many tweaks put into the engine this time around to make it even more realistic and you can notice them over time and trying out a number of cars.

This is the first game in the series to have an online mode, but I did not touch that for obvious reasons.

Most of my time was spent racing through various events (when I had reached high enough levels), winning cars, doing license tests (when I had reached high enough levels).  I did the usual Gran Turismo thing of using one of the better cars that I won earlier on (A Toyota Scion FR-s) and continuously tuning it up to its limit so that it was in races against cars that far outclassed it but still won.  I did this for as long as possible, then did some single make races and was lucky enough to win a Mazda Concept Le Mans car that I could use in the World Championship.

Left: The Toyoya FR-S that took me most of the way to victory. 

Right: The Mazda Furai Concept that won me the world championship.

As mentioned before, I only went as far in this game as to hit the end credits and consider it a win, but I did have a lot of fun with it and it is another game that I want to return to after the backlog is defeated and do more of because it brought back a lot of good racing memories.  That were only slightly hampered by some annoying new features.

On to Gran Turismo 6!

An enjoyable RTS set in a crazy alternate timeline

Strange as it may sounds, I have never played a Command and Conquer game before. This is my first. And the only reason I did was on the recommendation of my regular co-op buddy. I have played my fair share of real time strategy games before such as the amazing Homeworld series, the Dawn of War series, Halo Wars and others but it’s usually not a genre that I swarm to like a moth to a flame. I was promised this one was a lot of crazy mad cap fun though so I went in optimistic.

And it was a lot of mad-cap fun. But apart from that, it was a fairly standard RTS affair with a few exceptions:

• A huge all star cast with the likes of Tim Curry, Jonathan Pryce, George Takei, J.K Simmons, Jenny McCarthy and more.
• The action takes place over land, sea and air meaning you have to watch all 3 fronts at once.

The plot picks off after Red Alert 2 (which I had not played) where the Soviet Union was about to be done in. But conveniently, they have invented a time machine and travel back in time to kill Albert Einstein and change history making them and the Japanese Empire both global powers again along with the Allies so all 3 are at war again. But due to the lack of Nuclear weapons, some new super weapons have been invented such as satellites than can pull units from space, huge mechs, and vacuum bombs. All very fun stuff and makes each side have it’s own drawbacks and benefits.

There are 3 campaigns, one for each side, each with it’s own story and while none of the campaigns are terribly long in number of missions, they do still take quite a long time because the difficulty ramps up quite quickly and considerably meaning most of the later missions will take you many many attempts. We only did the Soviet campaign and even it took a good 10 hours.

It was also an incredibly demanding game for the year it was released (2008). I was playing it on a machine built to a good spec in the same year and even it was struggling. But because of this, it does look very nice indeed.

Apart from that, there’s not a huge amount else I feel I have to say about it. It was a normal RTS kind of encounter and one you will enjoy if you are an RTS fan but fairly unremarkable otherwise apart from the hilarious cast and scripting. A solid effort.

Another fantastic entry in the Need For Speed series by the practically infallible Criterion

And yet another game in yet another yearly franchise presents itself. And just like Assassin's Creed IV, this is another "next-gen" launch title that must also be able to run on current gen hardware. But fortunately,  this is another game that uses the mighty Frostbite 3 engine so it will look impressive on everything.  But more so on newer hardware.  And more so again on a high end PC which is what I played it on.

This is now the 3rd entry in the Need for Speed series made by Criterion. Yes, technically this was made by Ghost Games

but after some re-arrangements at EA, most of it was made by Criterion and therefore it will be awesome.

And it was awesome. A short way of describing it would be that it is Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2. A very similar but much visually enhanced follow up with an open world structure and different and varied task lists acting as levels of progression instead of just linear progression.

Again, you can play as both a cop or a racer. The cops must bust the racers and the racers must avoid the cops. The events are again similar to Hot Pursuit: time trials, races, interceptors and hot pursuits. Time trials and races are self explanitory. Interceptors are cop events where you must chase down and bust a single racer and Hot Pursuits are different depending on which side you are on. As a racer, in a hot pursuit, you must simultaneously avoid the cops and beat the other racers to the finish line. As a cop, you must bust as many of the racers as possible before they reach the finish line.

You progress through the game by completing lists of tasks (called assignments as cops and speedlists as racers) where you must perform a certain number of tasks such as win X number of races, take down Y number of racers, score Z number of points etc etc. These start off as short and easy lists of tasks but soon get to be extensive and difficult as you progress. progressing also unlocks more events, cars and pursuit tech. Ah yes, the pursuit tech. Think of these like your items in Mario Kart. Each car can have 2 and you can pick from a variety of offensive and defensive weapons. Some are limited to cops, some to racers and some available to all. For example, only cops can call in helicopters and set up road blocks, only racers can use super turbos and shock pulses but everyone can use EMPs and electrostatic fields. These weapons mix things up and give you a wider set of tactical options while trying to bust or avoid being busted.

As mentioned before, the game runs on the Frostbite 3 engine so it looks absolutely stunning even on current gen consoles and low end hardware. But this also allows for a lot more flexibility in the environment. In racers of old, you were limited to drive only on the road and there would be barriers all around the roads (either visible or invisible) to stop you going off the road. However the Frostbite 3 engine allows for a huge amount of destructibility and complexity in the environments so you can now go tearing off road, through fields, fences even buildings. It creates a much better feeling of action and immersion to be able to slide wide on a corner, tear through a field full of fences and come out on the other side realising you had just accidently taken a shortcut. And did I mention it looked gorgeous? Just look at the shots for yourself above.

It's not all good though. There are some minor complaints I did have with it. Truly huge load times going in and out of the open world to change cars, bank points etc. No way to pause the game (this is due to it being aimed at primarily online multiplayer which I did not partake in). The cops are truly out to totally murder you when you are a racer. And I mean they absolutely will not stop until you are 6 ft under. And a large difficulty imbalance between the racer and cop careers. Racer task lists are generally much harder to do and racers must buy new cars whereas cops are simply given them. There is then also the fact that a racer is targets of other racers and cops so everyone is out to kill you but cops have allies in the other cops and a racer will rarely be aggressive towards a cop and simply try to outrun him. Also due to the extreme high speeds that you are usually travelling at, you regularly crash into things before you have the chance to avoid or sometimes even see them. But this has always been the way with Criterion's racing games so it's to be expected.

These are all fairly small niggles though and none of them stopped me having an enormous amount of fun with this game just as I did with Hot Pursuit and I would give this a very very strong recommendation to any fan of racing games. But if you're new to Burnout or the newer Need for Speed games, you may be unprepared for the initial learning curve and get frustrated with it but stick with it, crash through it and speed your way to victory and awesomeness at 225mph.

Long live Criterion (and now Ghost Games). They can do very little wrong in my book.

A return to form for Creed series. Even if it doesn't have a lot to do with Assassins....

Here we have yet another entry in another annual franchise this release season. After the quite mediocre and poorly received Assassin's Creed III of last year, everyone was hoping this would lift the series back up to it's previous success. And it does. Kind of....

The base mechanics of the game remain pretty much the same as all the Creed games before it. Despite Ubisoft constantly saying they're redoing the engine from the ground up, your Assassin always seems to move and climb and run and stab in exactly the same way as all the others did. Maybe it's in the genes.... As usual there are some small improvements and tweaks and new things such as more gun-play, more weapons, using people as human shields and such. And thankfully, there is quite a lot of killing and planning assassinations and carrying out assassinations in this title much like the older ones. This felt sorely lacking in the 3rd game which felt like it was going to every possible extent imaginable to stop you actually doing any assassinating.

Many people (including myself) reacted quite strongly to the initial trailers for this game which focused heavily on the naval warfare aspects by assuming that they had taken the under-whelming naval warfare from Assassin's Creed III and made it into a full game. Thankfully, that was not the case. The naval warfare is a much bigger part of the game now but thankfully, it is a lot more fun and fulfilling than it was in the previous game. Your ship is your primary method of conveyance around the world, other than your feet which sadly cannot traverse large bodies of water, so you rely on it heavily to get you from one place to the next. And because this is Assassin's Creed, you also rely on it to kill others. So because you use your boat(s) a lot more now, you are more focused on upgrading their defensive and offensive abilities as naval battles are quite common-place now. You can install and upgrade a slew of weapons to blast opponents out of the water and their use it quite cleverly dependant on where your viewpoint is. I.e. if you are looking straight on, you will fire chain cannons, if you are looking to the side, you will fire larger broadside cannons, if you are looking through a telescope in the distance you will fire long range mortars, etc, etc. There is also a vast array of enemy ships to combat from small cargo ships to gigantic heavily armed Man'O'Wars which will blow you to pieces if you are unprepared. Once a ship is damaged enough, you either sink it totally and gather a small amount of resources from it or board it, kill the crew and get a much larger reward. This makes for many Hollywood-esque swashbuckling scenes of swinging onto deck guns blazing and swords swinging which are pretty awesome. I did enjoy the naval aspect much more this time round, but it does get quite hairy quite quickly before you really have the money required to upgrade your ship enough so you are either forced to grind for cash or go into battles sometimes massively outclassed.

I usually went in outclassed and eventually won through mostly by sheer hard-headedness, but if you don't mind a bit of grinding there are an enormous number of side quests to get cash from ranging from plundering ships to diving for treasure to taking on Assassination jobs given to you by the Assassin's Guild. And it is the fact that they are side jobs that brings me to my next point which was a bit of a gripe for me personally: In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, you are not actually an assassin. You are a pirate who within the first few minutes of the game kills an Assassin (albeit seemingly not a very good one), takes his clothes and wears them for the duration of the game while he goes about his merry way trying to make a better life for himself through general pirate-like antics. The Assassins and Templars do become a bit more involved in the story down the line but for the most part, they feel like things that are going on in the background and not really a huge concern of yours generally but just something you are doing to eventually achieve your own goals. To me, it felt like a pirate game that Ubisoft had inserted the Assassin's Creed game mechanics and a small part of the plot into. And this still makes it a very fun game. But...not...really an Assassin's Creed game.

Not wanting to dish out any huge spoilers, but the real world side of the story that takes place outside the Animus is now also reaching quite lofty levels of absurdity but you can find all that out for yourself.

Visually, the game is the prettiest of the series so far especially if you play a "next-gen" version as one would expect. The island scenery and vast oceans do look very colourful and vibrant and inviting and every area seems to have it's own unique charm. I played the PC version which is also very easy on the eyes. However, seeing as this is one of the very first games of the next console generation, and also had to be designed for current generation hardware, it is not a huge leap forward visually yet from what we have seen in previous games as it must cater to both old and new hardware. Think of early XBox 360 games that were not terribly graphically impressive because they also had previous gen versions such as Just Cause or Far Cry Instincts and you will get what I am referring to.

None of this detracts from the fun of the game though and it is still definitely worth playing if you are a fan of Assassins or Pirates or the Assassin's Creed series. Just expect quite a few WTF moments along the way.

Also, it had a few too many boring "Tail this guy" missions for my liking.

The second chronological but last played entry in the epic Wipeout series

Yet another title that I got many years ago but has been left by the way side until now.  I had put this entry in the Wipeout series off in apprehension of it's high difficulty level.  But after actually playing it,  it didn't seem terribly difficult after all.

It did however seem very short.  The campaign as it were only consisted of 9 races across 3 difficulty levels. There were other modes too like head to head and time trials but I was not interested in those and only wanted to do the main races.

The game play is the same as every other game in the series.  Namely high speed anti gravity racing that gets more and more high speed as you progress. It's been said that the handling in this game is the best in the entire series but having played them all now,  I would still say that Wip3out had the best handling of all the games in the series.  And is still my favourite by far.  But the handling in this one definitely comes a close second and Wip3out just refined it a little more.

Although this was only the second game in the series, this was the first game to pioneer the absorption of unwanted items allowing you to regain shield power without having to wait to get to the pits at the end of each lap.  It also introduced many of the now staple weapons such as the quake and energy drain. It also featured a huge amount of advertising for Red Bull for some reason.

An excellent Wipeout game all in all even if it was a bit short but it set the precedent of the better handling and more feasible tracks making it much more approachable than the bone shatteringly difficult first game.

It's also a tearful goodbye for me to Wipeout because I have now played every game in the series and with the closing of Studio Liverpool, there will never be any more made.

Quite sad. Goodbye Wipeout. Thanks for the wild ride.

A very different kind of game from Rockstar set in the seedy underbelly of 1940s Los Angeles

I had originally intended to play this when it first came out in 2011 but then I decided to wait for the game of the year version because a lot of DLC came out for it and I ended up purchasing it in a Steam sale and as was the style at the time, it was pushed back in favour of other games. But now finally comes it's turn.

This game had very mixed reviews when it came out some saying it was awesome and some saying it gave them a weird uncanny valley feeling because the faces were very real but the rest of the bodies were usual stiff game characters. Then there was the reported controversy over the working conditions for Team Bondi during the development of the game and then their eventual lay-offs casting doubt over whether or not they will ever get to make any more games.

Despite all this, they did manage to make one very interesting and different game that is unlike anything I've played for quite a while. The basic premise of the story is that you play as Cole Phelps. A recent recruit into the L.A.P.D. who starts to make a name for himself by being a great detective and being able to crack cases that no one else can. You start off as a beat cop but soon get promoted to a traffic detective and work through a number of different desks including arson, vice and homicide. Each case you work involves searching crime scenes for clues, questioning people and trying to tell if they're lying to your or not. You can do this by just bluffing them or catching them out in a lie with evidence that proves them wrong. This is where the detailed faces come into play as you are meant to be able to tell when a person is lying to you just by their facial expressions. I found this a little hit and miss however but it might just be that I'm bad at reading people like this. There are also a number of action sequences in some cases that can involve chasing down criminals and either tackling, shooting or threatening to shoot them, vehicle chases where you must disable the suspects vehicle and shoot outs where you move around cover and shoot dudes. These action sequences don't seem too important to the plot and this is emphasised in the fact that you can skip them if you fail a few times. Although this rarely happened to me as I quite enjoyed the action parts as a good change of pace. Progression through cases can be different depending on how you do in questioning people, I.e. some things may not be revealed if you do not succeed with some questions so some people or areas of investigation may never be unveiled. At the end of each case, you are given a rating depending on how thoroughly you investigated everything, how you did in questioning and how many clues you found, but apart from achievements, these ratings do not seem to do much.

While it was fun working through the cases at first, coming into the middle of the game, a lot of them seemed to get very very samey and it felt like it was starting to drag. With the exceptions of the end missions in each desk which were usually different and almost like a 'boss level' in some ways. Fortunately, towards the end, the cases did start to have a bit more variety to them so that by the time things wrapped up, it had a good sense of momentum going. It's just a shame that the middle dragged so much as I feel that could have easily put a lot of people off or made them get bored and stop. I also learned that there were 2 other additional desks planned to be putting in making the game even longer, and it was already quite long taking me nearly 22 hours to get through. Rockstar axed these 2 additional desks saying the game was "long enough already" and I'd have to agree with them there.

I found this to be a very different and unique game. It did have it's shortcomings in the aforementioned dragging in the middle of the game, but all in all it's definitely something everyone should try because for now, it's as close as we're likely to get to a game being crossed with a film (maybe with an exception or 2) in a properly believable way. It also does a great job of capturing the era of the 40s in every way from the cars to the people, to the language and even attitudes of people involved. Plus it feels super-cool to be a detective in the 40s.

Bravo, Team Bondi. I hope you can pull yourselves together and make that follow-up.

2 years later, I finally tackle "the best game ever"

After being severely under-whelmed by Oblivion, I was giving serious consideration to skipping this sequel to it. Fortunately, I was convinced otherwise by a friend because this one was a very very large step up in every way from it's predecessor.

To start with, I played it with the very nice PC exclusive HD texture pack which made it look a lot prettier than it's console counterparts. The PC version also allowed the use of the console which was necessary to get around a few game breaking bugs. This is quite a buggy game....and as I read more of the Skyrim Wiki through my progression, I became more and more aware of how many holes there are in the engine and quest scripting and just how many ways the game can be broken and how much harder it is to fix on console versions.

Asides from the obvious graphical upgrades (both stock and HD addition) which provide both much nicer looking locations as well as a great deal more variety and detail in said locations. This makes all the walking that you do (of which there is again, a lot) at least interesting to take in all the scenery around you. The voice acting is also greatly improved, although does not have quite the star-studded cast of Oblivion. The keyboard short-cuts and interface are enormously improved allowing for much speedier navigation of everything taking full advantage of the keyboard and mouse which is greatly appreciated.

I also enjoyed the story much more in this game over Oblivion. Instead of just being some dude who just stumbled into a quest, this time you are a "Dragonborn". A descendant of a member of the Royal family from Oblivion who have the ability to use their voice as a weapon by learning magic words or "Thums". You come into this knowledge at quite an opportune time in that Dragons are just starting to return to the world and the Dragonborn is the only one who can truly kill a dragon by absorbing their soul and their "Thum" along with it. This gives the story a much greater sense of an epic and a great sense of accomplishment when you complete your mission and even the smaller goals along the way.

The game-play itself remains mostly unchanged from before in that it has action RPG level progression and you pick the kind of traits you want to develop. Again, I went with a skull-cracking bruiser who cuts dragons into very small pieces.

The only drawbacks that come to mind are the aforementioned enormous amount of walking. And while the nice scenery does help to alleviate the boredom of walking, even this wears off eventually. And some of the areas that you have to get to are in very inaccessible places either around or on the other side of or on top of enormous mountains that you have to find a way around or up and this can also wear a bit thin over time and starts to feel just like padding the way with pointless obstacles.

I only did the main quest in this run but will definitely return to it to do all the DLC at a later date. With many more mods attached to it to make it look even prettier. The screenshots here will be something to aim for. And while I did thoroughly enjoy it and would easily recommend it to anyone I still don't think it lived up to the enormous amount of hype surrounding it or all the "best game ever" claims. It's good, but not that good. Looking forward to going back to it though and pushing it and my PC hardware to the limit.

The latest yearly entry in Activision's famous franchise. 'Next gen' is here. On PC.

Much like gaming journalism's Jim Sterling, I am actually quite a fan of the Call of Duty games. But not for the usual reasons. I do not touch the multi-player because with a few rare exceptions, I do not care for multi-player and especially not for competitive multi-player. But I do enjoy the Call of Duty campaigns. As simple and cheesy as they are, they do provide a lot of action packed experiences and some great set pieces and big budget Hollywood-like thrills. I'll usually only play through them once but it's a good thrill ride while it lasts. The stories in these games is usually fairly thin on the ground and just an excuse to kill lots of dudes (with the exception of the Black Ops sub-series which I felt had a bit more to it) but that doesn't really matter because I'm just usually in it for the dude shooting and big explosions.

The "plot" this time takes on a sort of Red Dawn motif where America has been invaded and mostly destroyed by the newly founded South American Federation and it all fires off with them attacking and setting off an American space defence system called Odin. You soon become part of one of the few remaining elite American military groups called "The Ghosts" and must solve this problem. With guns.

The game-play is the usual standard FPS kind of thing. But there are a few new things to mix it up. One of main ones that was widely touted upon the games announcement is the now famous Call of Duty Dog, Riley:

Not wanting to issue spoilers here, but Riley does not play as huge a role in the game as you'd think only being present for a few levels out of the 18 total.  But he is very awesome when he is there being able to be commanded to kill any enemy you can see with the press of a button or remote controlled at some times using him to stalk through sections and eat people.

There are also a few interesting types of different level like completely underwater scuba levels and even levels in SPACE where you float around shooting dudes which is fun.  Apart from these ones, most are fairly normal ones on the ground mostly on foot, but some sweet vehicle levels too including tanks and such but are all very action filled and tense providing plenty of thrills.

Despite this being one of the big next-gen games, I played this on PC with maxed out settings and in Directx 11 and it did look very nice but not an enormous step up from last year's Black Ops II.  But still nicer that it does in XBone or PS4 due to much more powerful hardware.  "Next gen" graphics and abilities have been around for quite a while on PC so I'm not terribly excited about any of the next gen consoles myself or any of their social media or TV features.  I already have a PC that can do it all better.

Again, not wanting to do spoilers, but the ending does seem like a major set up for a sequel but despite this, the sequel has not been confirmed yet.

An enjoyable game all in all if you're a Call of Duty fan or a fan of big budget shooters or dogs.  If not, you can probably skip this one but I had fun with it while it lasted.

A long put off sequel to a classic Star Wars RPG of the past

I have very fond memories of playing the first game in this series, the original Knights of the Old Republic back in my first year of Queen's University almost....10 years ago now. Man, I'm old.

It was a fantastic action RPG set in the Star Wars universe roughly 4000 years before the original films. But not much changed in those 4000 years because most things are by and large the same. You controlled a character who the force was with, so to speak and would go through the game accumulating experience, levelling up and choosing new force powers to develop or strengthen as well as new abilities traits. So you can do the usual multi-varied approach to most situations like talking (which is this time aided by force persuasion), stealthing or shooting (and lightsabreing). Except for the later games in the Jedi Knight series it offered what I feel to be one of the most authentic and immersive Star Wars universe experiences that you could possibly imagine. Every detail and line of dialogue and piece of grime on old rust bucket ship just feels like genuine old school Star Wars and it's great to be able to run around in that world chopping shit up with a lightsabre. Naturally, you meet a lot of characters along the way and some of them come with you for the ride. This gives you an opportunity to develop other types of characters such as gunslingers or support characters and also gives you people to talk to about stuff and many opportunities for the phrase "I have a bad feeling about this." to pop up.

I often thought this was a precursor to the Mass Effect series because before I had played those games, everything that was described about them to me sounded like a direct copy or further development of the systems in place in Knights of the Old Republic and now having played all of those that initial suspicion was confirmed. The dialogue systems in particular share a great deal in common and KOTOR's dialogue trees seemed to pave the way for Mass Effect's dialogue wheels.

It may seem odd at this point that all I have done is explain what the original game is like, but the reason for that is simply this: barring plot, locations and characters, the sequel is almost identical. The engine is the same, licensed out to Obsidian by Bioware to make this game. The weapons are the same, the levelling system is the same, the dialogue system is the same. Pretty much everything is the same and that's not all the surprising seeing as this came out barely a year after the original in what seems like was probably just an attempt to cash in on the critical acclaim of the original. And while that may sound bad initially, when it's a rehashing of a game that good, it's not a bad thing at all. Immediately after I started playing it, old memories came flooding back to me and I was soon greatly enjoying being back in the swing of being a Jedi in training.

The only one minor complaint I'd have about this one is that the story is less epic than the original and by the end, I was having a bit of trouble following it to be honest. But you can't have it all. It's still a fantastic game and a very worthy sequel to another awesome game. Some reviews were not so kind to it, but I could not find any reason for this at all because the only minus point it has compared to the original is the aforementioned rehashing. And that due to it's rushed release schedule, a lot of content had to be cut and quite a few bugs were left in it. But it developed such a following that a fan made mod was developed to fix these bugs and add back in the majority of the cut content. Check it out here.. And go play this game while you're at it. And the original too. Because they're both great.

The much anticipated sequel to the 2011's surprise platformer hit

I'm sure by now, we've all seen the stories about how this sequel to the awesome Rayman Origins started life out as a Wii U exclusive much to the pleasure of Wii U fans and owners. But then, quite close to the launch date, Ubisoft in their infinite wisdom decided that the Wii U had far too small of an install base to justify an exclusive and would never make their money back if they did so, so they decided to delay release for another 6 months and bring it to almost every other platform too.

While I'm sure this was an irritant to said Wii U fans and owners, I myself am quite glad they made that decision because I do not yet own a Wii U and may not get one for quite some time so I was happy it came to a platform that I could play it on. Namely, PC.

I'll get the bad things out of the way first and to start with, there is the problem that they did not take out the very Wii U centric features that were designed to make heavy use of the special touch pad Wii U controller like the character Muffy who can be controlled by a 2nd person using the touch pad to move platforms into place for player 1 and take out enemies. In non Wii U versions, this guy is simply controlled by pressing a button and he instantly does the action the other person would have done. While this is probably simpler and quicker, he still feels a bit redundant being there and the levels that featured him were quite annoying sometimes because you would often forget to use him. There are also a lot of scratchcard mini games that were clearly designed for touch pad left in there that you now just waggle a thumb over with the stick. Yeah okay, but seems a bit pointless. There are also annoying progress walls where you need to collect X number of arbitrary things before you can do Y level. Which I do not recall Origins having and you could progress freely without having to go back and re-do levels to collect more things. Speaking of re-doing levels, there is also a "Back to Origins" section in this game where you can unlock a number of levels from the predecessor game. And while this is a nice extra for those who did not play it, our playthrough of it found it necessary to play these levels also to get the required number of items to progress so this felt like more re-treading and padding. The game also felt considerably shorter that Origins though, despite this. It was also quite a lot easier and the final levels came about as a bit of an easy and sudden surprise after the face melting difficulty of Origin's final levels.

But those are all minor quibbles. I mean just look at the screenshots sliding past above here. The game is achingly gorgeous and joyous to play. Every level is filled with beautiful scenery, epic music that keeps pushing you on. It's just so happy and so much fun. Even when it's kicking your ass, you can't help but have a smile on your face. Yes, actual gameplay wise, it's pretty much just more of the same as Rayman Origins with a few new features, but it was amazing, so why would that be a problem?  The plot of the game is....well, who are we kidding?  There basically is no plot, just like Origins.  You just run through levels kicking ass and collecting things.

The huge bosses are back again and this time will transition between multiple 3D planes mixing the battles up more. Each one is different and frantic and yet more ass kicking fun. And at the end of each world, there is a fantastic running level done to the theme and rhythm of awesome tunes. These are undoubtedly some of the best levels in the game. Fantastic game from start to end. If you liked the first one at all, play this immediately. If you didn't, play this immediately. Even if you didn't play Origins, play this immediately. The one caveat I would give is that if you are a Wii U owner, go with that original intended platform so all the features intended for Wii U will not look so out of place.  Oh yeah, and those awesome music levels? Here's a taste:

Finally, I take my first steps into the world of the Elder Scrolls

Another very famous game here that I have long had, but never got to. Many people claim it to be one of their favourite games ever (or at least until Skyrim came out) so there was quite a lot of hype to live up to. Sadly, I do not think it succeeded here. Not for me anyway.

Being made by Bethesda the same as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, it once again runs on the long serving Gamebryo engine. Albeit a cruder and earlier version than what was used in Fallout due to this being developed a few years earlier. As a result of this, there was little to no gamepad support for the PC version and few keyboard shortcuts either meaning pretty much everything had to be done with mouse pointer which was quite cumbersome and time consuming. This engine while extremely powerful and flexible is also incredibly buggy and crash-prone. So I did run into a few technical difficulties that forced me to reload earlier saves to redo events and frequent crashes would also cancel out progress at times.


The plot is your fairly standard issue Medievil-timey kind of thing where you are a lowly nobody who is suddenly thrust into a destiny quest and have to save the world from some real bad dudes.

But not these ones

But overall, it had a very Lord-of-the-Rings kind of feel to it. The reasons to this are three-fold:

• The medievil setting
• The gateways to the plane of Oblivion (where the bad dudes live) look just like the eye of Sauron
• You spend an inordinate amount of time walking places

Some of my favourite parts of the game were the featured voices of the likes of Sean Bean, Patrick Stewart and Terence Stamp as main characters and the clearly enormous amount of time sunk into the art design of the world. It really is a stunning place to behold full of beauty and detail. Which is a good thing because of the afore-mentioned large amount of time spent walking so at least you have nice things to gawk at while you're walking. And the dungeon caves that you have to trawl through to find things in are also lavishly detailed and full of fantastic architecture and atmosphere making you feel like you are really treading on ancient ground where no-one has been for centuries.

Some of your travelling buddies

Also, much like Fallout, you pick a class for your character and as you level up you can choose what to pour your experience points into. If you want to wield magic or huge swords for instance. I went for huge swords naturally. But the level progression in this seemed very very slow and I don't think I was even past level 6 or so by the time I had finished the game. And while I am aware there is an enormous amount of things to do outside of the main campaign, not much of it interested me so I opted just to stick to the main quest. However, I may go back at a later date to do some of the extra DLC missions which were later added on.

In summary, I would say this was a decent enough open world adventure where I did have fun cutting shit up in dark caves but after all the hype from numerous sources, I was really expecting more. The hype was so huge and it fell so short of it that I was briefly considering not bothering with the sequel, Skyrim, at all. But I was convinced to change my mind on that one and that review will come soon.

A cheap rehash of it's very successful predecessor that is but a shadow of what came before it

Another game bought in a Steam sale just because it was cheap. I hmmed and ahhed about this one for a while when it was on sale because it has a bit of a less solid reputation than the much lauded Fallout 3 that came before it. Some people said they enjoyed it more but a lot more said it was not as good. But then I eventually did buy it in that sale and I can say with certainty now that was a mistake.

This was made using the exact same engine so it looks and feels and behaves pretty much the exact same Fallout 3 did and also uses the same mechanics, menu systems, character building system, inventories, etc. It's all the same. The only differences are:

• Types of weapons (pretty much all small ballistic firearms and no energy weapons)
• The location (desert of Nevada as opposed to Washington D.C.)
• The story (you play a courier who narrowly survives an attempt on your life seeking revenge)

I don't know what it was about this game that rubbed me the wrong way because mechanically, it is identical to the awesome game that came before it but I just did not enjoy it at all. I did not care at all about this nameless courier or the fate of New Vegas. And it just felt like a chore going through all these events that I was uninterested in after enjoying Fallout 3 and all of it's missions so much. It may have been a bit of an uncanny valley situation where it was so similar to something that I liked a lot, but it was not that and one of the main aspects of what made the previous game great (the story) seemed so pointless and inconsequential in this one, it just turned me off.

If you enjoyed Fallout 3, by all means try this one but beware because it seems to be a bit of a Marmite game.

Another long neglected big name game that I finally got around to

This is a now 5 year old game that I wanted to play when it first came out, but as usual, it was sidetracked by other things. But I get to them all eventually and now it's the turn of Fallout.

There was a lot of hype surrounding this one having been told by many who had played it how awesome it is as well as knowing that it had won many game of the year awards from multiple sources as well as plenty of other awards so expectations were fairly high. Also, Liam Neeson is in it and that's always a good thing.

As many know, it's your basic kind of action RPG deal where you pick a class and some skills and then level up by killing lots of things and pour your experience points into the areas you want to specialise in. So you can be a murderer or a smooth talker or a hacker or a stealthy assassin. I poured all mine into assault rifles and health so I could take beatings and shoot things in the face. Theres also a cool targeting system where you can freeze time and pick an enemy and a piece of their body to hit which makes the combat easier to control.

The basic story is that you live in a underground vault because the world was destroyed in a nuclear war and everyone now lives in vaults and never leaves because the outside world is destroyed and irradiated. For some reason, all the in-vault propaganda and equipment and such has a very 1950' vibe to it, so right up until I started the game I was under the impression that it took place in an alternative 1950s timeline but apparently not. It is set in the future.... So people are born in the vault, live in the vault and die in the vault. But this turns out to not entirely true because your dad, Liam Neeson, leaves the vault suddenly and without explanation and it's up to you to chase him and find out what's going down.

Naturally you visit many places along the way and meet many people and there are multiple outcomes and methods to accomplish almost any goal depending on what kind of skills you have. You can talk your way into or out of situations, you can pick locks, you can kill people in your way, you can pay them and on and on. I tended to lean towards trying to talk my way into places because it can save a lot of ammo and supplies. But when that didn't work, I would go with all out murder. It's another game that it seems like you could play a dozen times and do it differently every time and I do enjoy having that kind of freedom and choice. But even with all the options, it feels like you rarely get stuck in a no win situation where you simply don't have the means to proceed and have to retreat. I feel this did happen a lot in earlier games like this such as the first 2 Deus Ex games and the first Hitman.

There is an enormous amount of equipment and weapons and items in the game and you will regularly get newer and better stuff so you'll have to be constantly checking inventory to see if you're using the best you have. Equipment and weapons also wear down and eventually break, but can be repaired with spare duplicates. But remarkably none of this feels like busy work and it was enjoyable to keep my inventory clean.

I also greatly enjoyed the story because it felt very personal at first, but then it does pan out revealing greater consequences and more parties but because it was all started by your dad (still the awesome Liam Neeson) it still feels personal and you want to carry on his work. And the endgame is totally epic.

I'm sure pretty much everyone has already played this, but I would strongly recommend it to anyone who has yet to do so because it's just lots of fun from start to finish wandering the irradiated wastelands in search of Liam Neeson dealing with waste-landers and shooting mutant jerks in the face. Unfortunately, I have been told from sources, that I missed out on finding a dog companion called "Dogmeat". He sounds like he would have been cool.

I did enjoy this a lot and I got the game of the year edition on Steam so I will be going back to play the DLC (of which there seems to be a lot) at a later date for sure. My only minor complaints are that there is a huge amount of walking before you can do much fast travel so it would have been nice to have a vehicle or if your dude could move a bit quicker.... Also, Liam Neeson kind of sounded like he was phoning in his part. But he's still cool. Also, you make what seems like should be a game long nemesis right at the start who I was expecting to be the end boss, but no. After the first 10 minutes you never see him again. Missed opportunity.

Benchmarking the system with some beautiful scenery rendered by the new Frostbite 3 engine

Here we have the latest long anticipated entry in the Battlefield series. Touting the latest and greatest Frostbite 3 engine developed by the awesome DICE. Although I'm sure the anticipation for most people was for the multiplayer. However, I do not give two shits about multiplayer but after hearing that this one had an actual campaign this time, I was keen to give it a go and see how it would run on my rig as it is touted to be a very visually impressive engine with beautiful vistas, great detail everywhere, super realistic character models and the series' signature feature, destructible environments including whole skyscrapers.

As you can see from the screenshot roll above, it is undoubtedly a very very pretty game. And it features a very realistically modelled Chalky White from Boardwalk Empire starring as the aptly named "Irish".

However, once you are beyond the eye candy, the game itself is a fairly standard FPS affair. The only differences from the usual formula are modifying loadouts of 2 normal weapons (pistols, rifles, etc) and 2 gadgets (mines, bombs, grenade launchers, RPGS, etc). You can also use a tactical scanner to mark and tag enemies and then send your team-mates after them. I haven't played a lot of the Battlefield games, but the do seem to err on the side of realism in the way that there is excessive weapons wobble and recoil and it is quite hard to actually get shots to land most of the time. You'd probably get used to this over time if you did a lot of the multiplayer, but just going through the campaign it took a bit of adjusting to.

The campaign itself revolves around an escalating war in the east between 'Murica, the Russians and the Chinese. You start off trying to escape with intel and VIPs, but it soon escalates into all out war and you have to ensure the survival of one of the last US ships in the region.

I don't plan to touch the multiplayer but the campaign was a fun, if fairly safe and run of the mill soldier romp. It did however create a real feeling of being in war with the chaos and cover being shot or blown to bits and not being able to see or hit shit most of the time. Give it a go if you're a fan of FPS or gorgeous visuals but if not, don't bother. But I still had fun going thorugh it.

Lots and lots of choice in this cult hit espionage RPG

Bought this game quite a few years ago on the recomendation of a friend who had played it. But it kind of got pushed to the back burner due to an almost complete lack of knowledge of it. But now that the backlog is finally starting to shrink and choices are getting a bit more limited, I decided to give this one a go.

You play Michael Thorton who has just been initiated into the titular secret Alpha Protocol outfit. Who are there to carry out clandestine government operations which can then be denied and the outfit itself can be dissolved and remade if needs be. You start out being sent on a fairly routine operation, but then naturally everything starts to go wrong and conspiracies start to happen and you end up having to save the world as usual.

The pro-dominant feeling I got when I was playing that it was that it was some kind of present day love-child of Deus Ex and Mass Effect. It's all about the character you build up and what you put your stat points into to make him a killing machine or tech expert or silent killer. And making dialogue choices which were touted as being the 3 "J.Bs". That being James Bond, (suave, charming and flirty), Jason Bourne (straight to the point and professional) and Jack Bauer (in your face and very aggressive). Different characters respond positively or negatively to these dialogue choices. So business like people will respect the professional approach whereas mercenaries and soldiers will prefer the direct and aggressive approach so you have to figure out what works best with each type of person. While this is interesting initially, it quickly becomes very easy to read and predict what people will like what so this fairly quickly becomes redundant.

The 3 sets of footsteps that you can choose to follow in

But you are also given a lot of choice in the routes you can take in missions. You can talk your way into places or sneak your way in or hack your way in or shoot your way in (my preferred approach). This most reminded me of Deus Ex in that there were a lot of different approaches to every situation. But like in both Deus Ex and Mass Effect, there were many many choices of outcomes so there were so many different ways that things could work out and it felt like they were all actually significantly different unlike some other different ways things work out....

There were some minor complaints here and there like general low texture quality, quite lifeless voice-acting and some events do not quite occur like they should. In one case I had an end of mission report stating how the mission events affected a character that I had shot in the head a few hours earlier. So that was odd. But these are pretty small niggles in an otherwise very well put together game that you could play dozens of times easily and have a different outcome each time.

In conclusion, I'd say this is decent enough but I could never shake the feeling that I was playing the lesser cousin of Mass Effect or Deus Ex and just kind of wanted to be playing one of them instead. So give this a go if you've exhausted all those kind of games already and would like to try something a little different, slightly more campy and down to earth (as in not sci-fi). But I always preferred sci-fi settings myself.

An "Origin story" which doesn't seem too far back in time but still involves Batman beating the living snot out of many dudes

I played both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City earlier last year and found them both to be a lot of fun. And although the basic gameplay was very similar (and fun) which involved a smooth as silk combo criminal beating system where you could fly between guys kicking and punching their faces in building up combos and performing various special moves to take out specialist enemies. Once you earned the skills, you could also employ gadgets mid combo like throwing Batarangs to stun and such. Arkham Origins carries over the same combat system but this time throws in some new moves and new gadgets into the mix.

Although all the Arkham games had the same basic combat, gadget, skill and levelling systems, the first was very linear being set inside an Asylum. Apart from a few large open areas in the asylum, you were pretty much on a rail in the first game. However, city was different and had a much touted "open-world" where you could freely move around Arkham City using your gadgets and go after side quests and such having more freedom before. Origins adopts a very similar system. So much similar of a system that it almost feels like a redoing of Arkham City with with a different plot, some different environments, weapons and gadgets. It reminds me of the large feeling of similarity between Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed 2.

As the name implies, this is a prequel and according to the in-game dialogue, this takes place in Batman's second year of being the bat and about 6 years before the original Arkham Asylum. So this sets you up to be meeting a lot of the main villans for the first time. And although this is interesting to see how things begin, it also means that a lot of the Batman villans are re-used. There are some that haven't been in the games before, but there's a fair few that we have seen before. The game also takes place between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day (although I don't actually recall ever seeing daylight at any stage) and apart from a few Christmassy set pieces and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it does not feel terribly Christmassy. Which is a bit sad because I would have liked Christmas to come into it more.

The gameplay itself as mentioned, remains the same as the previous games and is a tremendous amount of fun. You have the usual out and out gang fights, and the predator sections where you must take out rooms undetected and a selection of very varied boss fights each needing unique tactics and thinking to take out. One thing I did notice in this is that Batman has a lot of inner dialogue telling you what he has to do next. This is clearly meant as an aid to help show you how to progress next but I don't remember him helping out this much in previous games and it felt a bit too hand-holding at points. But then at times when you really were stuck on how to proceed he would be very quiet. Which was a tad annoying. He does have some cool and new interesting gadgets this time round like glue bombs which can be used to stick goons, remote wire shooters that can make ziplines and an EMP like disruptor which can shut down electronic devices from afar. These and some new combos and moves are some of the few new elements that mix the system up and add new things into it.

Despite being almost a complete redo of the previous game, I would still recommend this to anyone who has played or enjoyed either Arkham games, or anyone who likes Batman, or anyone who likes beating up lots of dudes. It is a lot of fun, but the developers seem to have realised what big hits the previous two games were and have taken a "if it's not broke, don't fix it" attitude. So just don't expect anything shockingly different to what came before it.