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.