Guacamelee! Review

Being a long-time fan of old-school 2D brawler beat-em-ups, I was excited to hear about the release of Guacamalee! But it remained exclusive to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita for a while after its release with hints of a PC release later.  PC being my preferred platform, I patiently waited and in time it did come to PC so I dove in to it with my regular gaming co-op buddy Eugene.

Pretty much every game is better with co-op

The entire game is Mexican themed and you start off as a lowly farmer who’s love is stolen you by an undead villain.  Said villain wastes no time in killing you after the kidnapping, but while wandering around in the land of the dead, you come across a powerful spirit that bestows upon you a magical lucha libre mask turning you into a powerful luchador wrestler and returning you to the land of the living so you can go save the girl.

Carlos and his goons are a perpetual thorn in your side.

The first striking thing about this game is the art style which is very angular and cartoonesque.  It works well with the humour of the game which is extremely well written often making references to popular memes and cultural icons and many quirky characters that talk a lot of sass to you.

Very meme

The basic game-play is quite normal side-scrolling brawler action for the most part.  You unlock new moves over time, but there is not much shockingly new or innovative here.  Despite having said that, it is still very tightly put together and satisfying combat with the controls being sharp and fast rarely leaving you in the lurch or feeling like they’re letting you down which they often can in this genre.

Combat is sharp and satisfying

The main highlights are the boss fights which vary from enormous enemies who must have specialised tactics deployed against them to even larger enemies who cannot be defeated by conventional means, but become elaborate chase scenes where you must defeat them with the environment.  There are also a number of auto-scrolling platforming sections where you must use your special abilities to manoeuvre your way through and/or evade death.  There were some of the most annoying sections and I would happily have done with less of these and more combat.

The platforming sections are some of the games weakest

While playing through this on PC in co-op, we did find it a lot more difficult than we expected it to be.  The platform sections in particular where precise timing was required to not die were especially difficult.  Nevertheless, we persevered about 80% of the way through the game until we arrived at a boss that we just could not defeat.  He was too fast for us.  So we went to the internet to see if this irrational speed and difficulty was intentional and if there was a way to adjust it.  Lo and behold, we discovered there was a bug in the PC version where if VSync was disabled, the game would run at nearly 3 times its usual speed.  We re-enabled VSync and the game returned to normal speed which now seemed ludicrously easy in comparison to the earlier speed so we sailed through the rest of the game with ease.

But the boss sections are some of the best

Guacamelee! Review Summary

Guacamelee! provides lots of reliable 2D side-scrolling beat-em-up action so if you are a fan of this genre and old classics like Streets Of Rage or Golden Axe, you really can’t go far wrong with Guacamalee!  Team up with a co-op buddy for even more fun and enjoy the hilarious pollo filled ride.  But if you play the PC version, be sure to turn VSync on!

Final Score: 3/5

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Editorial: The Tipping Point

It happens sometimes, you hit a certain point in a game and suddenly your whole aim in that game is drastically changed. It might be the moment you decide “screw it, I’m never gonna get 1000/1000 on this game” when you notice one irritatingly difficult/time consuming achievement. Or it might be the moment you’ve been stuck on the same puzzle in Zelda for 2 hours and decide the time has come for a quick trip to Gamefaqs.

Whatever it is, whenever it happens your self imposed rules are torn up. Once you succumb to a game guide for one puzzle, you’ll be quicker to do it again when you hit another brick wall. Once you’ve given up on getting all the achievements, those daft little pointless collectables you’ve been hunting out so painstakingly for the last 8 hours suddenly don’t matter at all (think Alan Wake and his Coffee Flasks)

I most recently experienced this while blasting through Trials Evolution, right around the time I started onto the “Extreme” tracks. My aim up to then had been getting a Gold medal on each track, and I’d been doing pretty well with only a handful of tracks so far still sitting on Silver medal status. The fact that some of those Golds took me an hour of effort to get didn’t bother me at all, I enjoyed the challenge. It took about five minutes of the first Extreme track for that to change though. I knew I had absolutely no mission of ever getting Golds on all the 8 Extreme tracks. Suddenly the goal I had been striving for was seemingly unattainable, and in the blink of an eye my goal was now just to finish all the tracks and forget the Gold medals. And I was fine with that.

So, yeah, I pussied out and gave up on my challenge. I was a quitter. So why don’t I care? Because in my opinion I’m not admitting defeat. I probably *could* get all the golds if I spent enough time, I just don’t want to any more. It’s reached that point where it just wouldn’t be fun to me – it would be more of a chore. Above all else, gaming is meant to be fun. It’s a hobby, it’s something that you pay money to do in your spare time and it shouldn’t feel like a chore. If it ever does, maybe you should remind yourself of that and change the rules, or change the game completely.

The completionist in me makes me want to beat every game I start, but there’s so many amazing games out there nowadays that if I’ve completely lost enjoyment in a game I’m not gonna keep playing for the sake of it. Towards the end of Disc 2 of L.A. Noire I grew tired of the seemingly random nature of the interrogations and the old Rockstar trademark of dragging out a story with too much filler so I haven’t played it in about a year. The beauty of it is you can go back to it any time you want should you fancy another crack at the challenge. In my case I’ve spent long enough away from the fantastic atmosphere and change of pace gameplay of L.A. Noire that when I go back to finish it off in the next few months I’ll enjoy it a lot more than I would have if I had just ploughed through it back when I started it.

Every game comes with its own set of rules and gameplay constructs, but don’t forget who’s really in charge of your gaming experience.

Hint: It isn’t Bill Gates and his achievement points.

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D4 Dark Dreams Don’t Die Review

After playing Deadly Premonition last year and loving it ,despite the PC version being probably the single worst PC port I have ever seen, I was very excited to hear that the next game from designer Swery was being ported from XBox One to PC.  I was a little apprehensive at first because on it’s original XBox One platform, D4 was a very Kinect heavy game so was unsure how well this would transfer to a mouse or controller alone.  Read on to find out how well pleased I was with the entire package in my D4 Dark Dreams Don’t Die Review!

Things start off weird and only get weirder

The best way to describe this game is simply as total and utter madness all the time.  Everything and everybody is ridiculously over the top, quirky and wacky to the extreme.  And while some may this this would make it tiresome, it really does not.  It just makes the different characters, locations and events stand out when they are all very memorable and original with their own mannerisms and quirks so you are unlikely to forget anyone or have difficulty differentiating between people.

You’re unlikely to forget or mix up any of these larger than life characters

Most of the gameplay consists of walking around areas and interacting with objects and people to extract and piece together information in your hunt for the infamous D who you have vowed to hunt down on someone else’s behalf.  The sheer amount of interactivity is staggering and almost every object and person you come across can be interacted with in some way.  You can use your “vision” (kind of like a sixth sense) to easily figure out what the key objects and people you need to interact with are but pretty much everything has some beneficial outcome for you examining it and half the fun is to just explore and investigate everything so you can find more comedy gold and weirdness.  Almost all objects and people can be interacted with and many of them will give you side-quests to perform to rewards you with items or boosts to your health and other statistics.  As expected, these quests are also ridiculous and can range from racing around checking creaky doors or answering air-plane trivia.

Examine every little thing. You never know what benefits you may reap.

The other part of the gameplay which is much less frequent is a series of quick-time events which usually take the form of extremely over the top fight scenes where everyone involved pulls off nigh on impossible acts of co-ordination, gymnastics and grace.  Again, these are totally ridiculous and will have you in stitches as you struggle to make sense of the telemetry of it all.

The fight scenes don’t happen to often but when they do, they’re great

There are many dialogue options ranging from purely provocatory to straight-laced straight man and you are given extra rewards to “stay in character” as a serious cop.  But this can be quite hard to do at times as it’s not always clear what kind of tone you should be taking as it switches regularly between flippant and serious.

What would you say to this guy if you were a Boston detective?

Your main goal throughout the game is to find important objects filled with memories called “Mementos” and use these to dive into the past to search for clues to help you find the mysterious “D”.  Doing this, you spend a lot of the game in the past searching for clues and the parts that take place in the present day are centred around finding more of these mementos to investigate the past more.

Find mementos in the present and dive into the past to investigate!

One minor complaint is that the controls can be a little awkward with the right stick being used to both look around and move forwards and backwards which is done in an “on rails” fashion only allowing you to move between designated spots rather than totally free roaming.  This is most likely done to have more artistic control over the set pieces and how you get to see them.

Movement is not free and is guided along set waypoints on paths

You never get to stop completely because even during cut-scenes there are small quick-time events that will give you more bonus points and money for examining things during cut-scenes so if you want to get as much as possible, you have to stay on the ball at all times!

Apparently cats operate shops on airplanes in the past

D4 Dark Dreams Don’t Die Review Summary

Dark Dreams Don’t Die is a total riot and is enormously entertaining start to finish with little to no let up at all.  The only problem is that this is going to be an episodic series and only season 1 is available so far.  It is also not a terribly long season at maybe 3-4 hours going quickly and about 10 if you want to do and see absolutely everything so you will be left begging for more by the time you have finished it!  Can’t recommend this one enough.

Final Score: 5/5

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E3 After Thoughts

Having seen everything on offer, here are my E3 after thoughts on the games that interested me.  I think overall, I got about half of the things on my wish list as well as a few more nice surprises. Not bad at all!

Bethesda: a mixed bag warm up

• Doom 4!  Loved all of the Doom games especially Doom 3 and it’s expansion so looking forward to more of this.
  

  The classic Doom Revenant. Now with more death.

• I will play Fallout 4 but I’m not gushing for it like a lot of people are. Fallout 3 was decent enough but New Vegas was fairly boring to me.
• I don’t care at all about Dishonored 2. I didn’t think much of the original.  It was decent enough but again, nothing special.  It took me about 4 hours to finish running through shooting and stabbing everyone I could see.

Microsoft: lots of unexpected and varied news

• I like the new XBox One controller, that will finally be compatible with Windows and has lots of customisations.  Sadly unless it comes down in price a lot, it will be too much money at $150, probably over £100 by the time it gets here.
• The Gears 1 remake looks nice.  It has the extra missing chapters that Gears 1 had on PC that XBox never got and is coming to PC.  (it’s picked up some colour in the remaster).  Gears 4 also looks good with a darker more sinister air to it.  Gears is always fun for co-op and I’ll be getting these for sure.
• The Rare compilation of classic games is a very awesome idea but I don’t think I’ll get it myself as I would likely never be able to finish the half of them.
• Halo 5 will be the game that finally sells me an XBox One.  Buck vs The Chief! Oh no!
  

  Buck from ODST. Then and now.

• Ashen looks to be an interesting little indie title.
• Backwards compatibility with XBox 360 is great! Maybe I can finally retire my 360.  I Just hope they expand it out and keep going with it.  It requires users to re-download an emulated version of the game to hard disc rather than just using the disc.
• Phantom Pain.  Oh my god.  Oh my god.  This will be one of my biggest games of the year.
• Recore might be good.  Solid developers behind it like the Metroid Prime team.
• Rise Of The Tomb Raider is coming along nicely. If I have an XBox One at the time I might as well get it on that.  If not, I’ll wait for a PC version.
• I tried Dark Souls a while back. Didn’t like it so not too fussed about Dark Souls 3.

EA: more from all your favourite franchises

• Need For Speed shows promise.  Despite going back to the underground street racing scene.
• Mass Effect Andromeda is very exciting. A whole new galaxy! Had to be really after the ending of Mass Effect 3….  But this whole new galaxy seems to have a lot of common elements from out one.
• Unravel is a platform game that has a lot of charm but I predict much sadness.  and EA needs more stuff like this.
  

  Unravel has a small studio indie vibe to it.

• Fucking Mirror’s Edge 2! Now called Catalyst.  Finally with a release date. It will be open world but probably not really I’d suspect.  I’m guessing it will be like a modern Far Cry where it’s open world between missions but the missions will be channelled into smaller linear areas.

Ubisoft: all online, all the time

• I still haven’t played The Crew and now I kind of don’t want to.
• More DLC for Trials Fusion! Yay?
• The Division and Rainbow Six Seige look good but I just don’t care about multi-player.  I wish they’d stayed single player or at least included a good single player campaign.
• Ghost Recon Wildlands does look great though. I thought it was Far Cry 5 at first.  It should also good for co-op.
  

  Ghost Recon goes open world. Just like every other game recently.

• I’m going to play Assassin’s Creed Syndicate either way. I just hope its more like Assassin’s Creed Rogue and less like Assassin’s Creed Unity.

Sony: 3 Enormous pieces of earth-shattering news

• Oh my fucking god.  Final Fantasy VII remake.  It’s finally happening.
• The Last Guardian has come back to us. I knew it would. I never lost hope.  But it’s moved to PS4 now, so one more reason to get it.
  

  I never stopped believing The Last Guardian would come back to us.

• Shockingly, I have never played either Shenmue game but I know the love people have for it so I might try it now…
• Uncharted 4 looks great as expected and will most likely be the game that sells me a PS4.
• Firwatch looks like a playable Pixar film. Should be cool.
• Horizon Zero Dawn is the next big thing from makers of Killzone which I have been a long time fan of. There are hints of Enslaved Odyssey To The West in it.
• Tacoma is another indie title from the makers of Gone Home. But will it be a game?

Nintendo: kind of phoned it in

• A new Mario RPG game with Paper Mario mixed in? Could be fun, but not quite the Mario game we wanted.
• The 3 player co-operative Zelda, Tri-Force Heroes, looks like the earlier co-op Zelda, 4 swords, only with 3 players not 4.
• Yet another Animal Crossing game?  I haven’t played this series since the Gamecube original.
• Starfox Zero just looks amazing.  Glad I don’t have too long to wait for it.
  

  Hard to say no to a new Starfox game.

• Mario Maker is probably great for the creative type but that I am not so it may not be of much use to me.
• I so badly want Yoshi’s Wooly World with an amiibo.  I don’t know why.  I don’t know why I want amiibos so bad.

Square Enix

Adam is back (from the dead somehow) with religious symbolisim abound.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided has a lot to follow up from Human Revolution.  But so far, it looks like it’s well set to do so.

Miscellaneous

• Call of Duty Black Ops 3 has a co-op campaign.  Finally.  Love me some co-op shooting action.
• A new Hitman?  Cool I guess although the last one wasn’t great
• Transformers: Devastation.  Oh yes.  Everything Transformers is gold.  Everything.  And Platinum games is making it who also make solid gold.  A winning combination.
  

  Hard to go wrong with Transformers. G1 Transformers, that is. Michael Bay got it pretty wrong….

PC

Gears Of War Ultimate Edition will come to PC the same day as XBox One

It’s very good to see things like the Gears remake, No Man’s Sky and Killer Instinct coming to pc.  Most things are launched on the same day now instead of months or years later.  PC is finally getting the attention it deserves.  Probably in part due to PS4 and XBox One being the same architecture as PCs now.

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Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days Review

Probably not the nicest area of Shanghai

I played Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days originally not long after it came out in co-operative split-screen mode and decided to replay it again recently.  Co-operatively again, only this time online on PC so without split-screen so this could be considered a re-review if there is such a thing.

Good luck shooting guys.

This game got truly slated in most reviews.  Every reviewer said that they didn’t like it and that it was bad and ugly and nauseating to play and many other derogatory comments.  But I found this to be very unfair as this is a game that is very very easy to misunderstand.  The problem was that most people just didn’t seem to get what the developers were going for with it.  Their design idea being the aesthetics of the game was to make it “authentic and genuine” like a documentary.  To this end, the game is intentionally designed to be disgusting and does it extremely well.  Everyone in it is an ugly asshole.  The majority of the game is set in the slums of Shanghai so the streets are littered with dirt and rubbish.  The “background music” is rarely more than a buzzing white noise.  Every light is abrasive and neon and causes strobing and lens flare obscuring your vision.  The whole thing is shot in a “found footage” motif with your point of view being from a camera man who is following the unlucky pair of Kane and Lynch.  He does a good job keeping up with you most of the time but it’s this point of view that causes your view to wobble around constantly especially while running and to be obscured constantly by blood splatter, dirt and even more lens flare leaving you unable to see most of what is going on for a lot of the time which just adds to all of the chaos and confusion.

Can’t see anything? Get used to it.

Despite being primarily a cover-based shooter, the shooting is loose and has no feedback. You can’t easily tell if you are hitting your target or not until they fall down dead, which is probably what real shooting is like without all the electronic aids. Aiming is rarely any more accurate than running and shooting from the hip.  You regularly get knocked down flat on your arse when you get winged with minor damage causing you to scrabble to get to your feet again in an undignified mess.

You’ll get knocked down. A lot.

The 2 main characters are completely unlike-able terrible people who start off in a dicey situation doing an illegal deal and keep getting into progressively more and more awful situations only making them worse every time they try to solve them.  But at least they’re honest about being bastards.  They don’t spend the game-play murdering everyone they lay eyes on and then play the role of reluctant hero in cut-scenes like some protagonists do.  They’re just bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling 100% of the time.  They also usually rarely have any clue what they’re currently doing or are going to do next and just fumble through areas screaming incoherently at each other (and sometimes themselves) further adding to the feeling that you never ever for one single second have any kind of semblance of control on the situation and that everything is just on a continuing downward spiral towards even worse things.  It’s a hell of a wild ride trying to escape the city as all kinds of shit hits the fan.

Some of the nastier injuries will be pixellated out

It’s a video game nasty.  It’s a straight to DVD film release.  I just wish they would make one final entry in this series.  Without spoiling anything, I can only say once you see the ending, you will know why.

Hey, remember DVDs?

Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days Review Summary

In every single conceivable and quantifiable way, it is absolutely terrible.  But somehow, it all comes together.  It all works.  It’s a beautifully honest, brutal, unashamed disgusting chaotic, haphazard nausea-inducing mess and I love it.  And if you give it a try, you just might find that you love it too.  Or not.  Not everyone will get it.  Those of you who get motion sickness easily may want to turn on the “steadycam” option which steadies the camera in the hands of the film-maker a bit more.  I probably haven’t explained it very well just how good this is.  But trust me on this one.  It’s a work of genius and it makes me sad that it never got the recognition that it deserved.  That’s why I will keep spreading the good word.

Final Score: 5/5

Kane and Lynch are not nice men.

 

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Review: The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt

A word of preface before starting: this review was written from the point of view from someone who has played the 2 previous Witcher games just over a year ago, so while I am familiar with them, it was quite a while ago and my memory of them may no longer be crystal clear.

Just starting out

I got a massive feeling of Deja Vu when playing The Witcher 3.  Much like Mass Effect 3 was almost mechanically identical to Mass Effect 2 but with a different story, The Witcher 3 is almost mechanically identical to The Witcher 2 but with a different story.  With only small game-play adjustments, much of The Witcher 3 will feel very similar to anyone who has played The Witcher 2.  There is also an enormous amount of lore which is not often explained or recapped, so those who do not remember much of the plot-lines or characters from before hand may often be left wondering “What the hell is going on?”

First of all, “The Good”:

The most satisfying part is once again the combat which despite some difficulties with clunky controls works very well and makes you feel like a bad-ass monster killing Witcher especially when you start to unlock some of the later very fancy skills.

The Witcher 3 is the new Crysis

There is a truly staggeringly huge amount of content in this game and will give tremendous re-playability and extra content to go through.  It took me 30 hours for a fairly swift play-through of  mostly just the main plot quests with a small amount of secondary quests. CD Projekt Red were probably not exaggerating when they claimed it would take 100 hours to completely do everything in the game.

It is also a stunningly beautiful game.  I mean my god.  You can just get lost just walking around and gawking at all the sights.  The dynamic weather is also a  fantastic addition allowing storms and blizzards and such to descend at any time.  One particularly excellent example of this is in swampy areas when large wind and rainstorms appear and you can hear the wind howling and the trees swaying and creaking and the rain lashing down.  It’s quite a sight to behold.  It also made my GPU weep tears of pain as I desperately tried to push a stable 30-40 FPS out of it.  With an overclocked Intel i7 3700K and overclocked GTX 670 I could only comfortably manage medium presets.  But I mean just look at it.

Forests are the best

Next up, “The Bad”:

Equipment degradation is one of the worst ideas in the history of gaming but sadly it was put into this game.  So your weapons and armour will regularly reduce in effectiveness or break entirely so it is necessary to keep going back and forth and spending money (which is quite scarce in early stages) to get them repaired or else you will be totally neutered in fights.  Yes, it’s more “realistic”, but it’s a terrible idea for a game and should die forever.

Because the world of The Witcher 3 is a huge open world, you need ways to get around it quickly.  One of these ways is your horse, Roach.  While this means of conveyance is faster than walking in theory, a lot of the times it is not.  The horse can theoretically autopilot along marked roads but it rarely succeeds at this and will often just fly off the road into obstacles and get stuck.  It also seemingly gets stuck on every twig and pebble even when manually controlled so quite often unless I had to travel a truly huge distance and had no other option, I would tend to favour just legging places on foot.

Boats are another means of conveyance

The game’s fast travel system is also almost total trash.  You can only fast travel to map signs when you are standing beside another map sign.  But the problem there is that quite often when a quest ends, you are left stranded in the middle of nowhere with none of these signs around for miles.  One occasion I was left on a remote isolated island on one side of a mountain with the nearest sign being on the other side of the mountain so the only options were to either scale the mountain or go around it just to get back to civilization.

The controls also seem a lot clunkier than they were in the previous games somehow often causing various problems such as getting stuck on scenery, drowning and getting stuck on your horse while being cut to bits by an angry mob.  I tried it both on keyboard + mouse and controller and controller seemed to be the more comfortable but still not without it’s difficulties.  Swimming controls are especially difficult with trying to control things while diving underwater being damn near impossible.

An open meadow where you’re less likely to trip up on things

And “The Other”:

The depth that the quests can sometimes get to is both simultaneously great and tiresome.  While it’s good that the story has great depth to it, it can get a bit annoying after the seventh or eighth link in quest chain when you start out wanting to do something simple, but to do that, someone wants something else and to get that, you need help from someone else and to get help from that person you need another thing and on and on and on.  It can feel like it takes an eternity to get even the simplest of things accomplished.  This made the game feel incredibly slow at times and lacking in momentum.

I came across many less bosses in this game than I did in the previous two games.  Which did tone down the epicness of the tale a little when there were not that many huge hulking obstacles in my way.

Just taking in the sights. I did this a lot.

There were also many less difficult choices where it’s hard to make any kind of decision.  In The Witcher 1 and 2 there were many many choices you had to make where it was very hard to tell what you should do and how this would have consequences down the line.  Most choices seemed fairly cut and dry and easy to tell what would happen when you picked various options.  That may have been due to the fact that this is the end of Geralt’s story and there were limited ways things could pan out, but it took away a bit of the bewilderment the previous games had.  I made a concious effort to be a jerk throughout most of the game so I got what definitely felt to be “The bad ending”.  From what I have read, there are at least 3 different main endings and minor variances within them depending on the choices you made.

Summary

The Witcher 3 overall feels like more of the same of The Witcher 2 with some of the rough game-play edges smoothed out and a few new rough ones exposed.  There is less linearity than there was in previous games and shedloads more quests and activities to partake in.  But sadly, a lot of the greyness and ambiguity in the world that made the previous games so interesting and tricky to completely figure out seems to have left too making it a bit more black and white and simplified.

It’s a no brainer if you played and enjoyed previous games.  You just might find that it’s a little different this time round as the trilogy comes to a close.

And it’s also a no brainer if you haven’t played the previous games.  It’s still an excellent action RPG.  Just a little slow paced at times….

What’s next for Geralt?

Final score: 4/5

Watch video footage of my play-through right here:

Review: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD

The already timeless visuals look even more beautiful now in crisp sharp HD

An almost unbelievable 11 years after the original release, I return to this new HD remake of one of my favourite Zeldas, The Wind Waker.  Promised many enhancements and game-play tweaks as well as new HD graphical upgrade, this remake provided a way for the Zelda team to cut their teeth with familiar material on the new and unfamiliar Wii U hardware before making an entirely new Zelda adventure which is to come in 2015.  The visuals have held up superbly well being quite simple and clean to begin with.  The enhancement of HD only serves to make them look even better.

Tingle is now officially obsolete.

The Wii U gamepad enhancements allow you to swap items super quick on the fly without having to pause the game.  It can also act as a dungeon map, sea chart (including treasure maps) and interface for messages in a bottle, called Tingle Bottles which replace the Tingle Tuner.  Only the few that did connect a GBA to their GameCube in the original game will remember the Tingle Tuner, but it was in essence a second screen assistant that could provide local maps, an on demand shop and allow a second player to assist in minor ways.  Since the Wii U gamepad performs the most important of these functions now, it only makes sense to retire the Tingle Tuner and this is a much appreciated addition to the game greatly speeding up menu navigation which has always broken up the action in Zelda games.  Almost everything that was needlessly slow and tedious in the original game has been tweaked and sped up in this remake.  Some notable examples include:

• Much faster extraction of treasure from the sea bed.


• A swift sail which doubles sailing speed and auto-redirects wind to your back can be won at the auction house


• The Triforce chart pieces quest has been significantly shortened


• Pictographs are immediately rated upon taking them and you can carry 12 at a time


• Pictographs from Miiverse can be submitted for statue quest


• Grapple hook can change direction while in motion

Sailing across the beautiful Hylian sea is now easier and faster than ever thanks to the new Fast Sail

And many many more smaller less noticeable changes which will still be of benefit.  Needless to say in remastering this game, the developers took a lot of feedback and listened to it because almost every flaw with the original has either been removed or reduced to have less of a negative impact.  The most notable of these being the double speed sailing (take note, you should acquire this Swift Sail from the auction house as soon as you can) which greatly reduces the tedium of navigating the oceans and greatly cutting down the length of the Triforce quest in the game’s closing chapters.

A “mandatory side-quest” to collect Triforce pieces

While I do certainly approve of cutting down the Triforce quest, which always like it should have been a side quest rather than a main one to me, I am less enthused by the cutting down of sailing time.  Yes, sailing can definitely get tedious at times especially coming to the game’s close or if you choose to do more of the optional side quests, but I always felt that the sailing was an integral part of the game and added to the experience.  It was there to convey the vast empty openness of the ocean that you were travelling.  You could sail for quite a while without ever seeing anything other than the occasional rocky outcrop or enemy post if you were unlucky or just searching for something you did not know the location of yet.  But that was the point.  The ocean is big.  You are meant to get lost and you are meant to spend time out there.  It’s often been said that this game was the closest Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto has ever come to his original vision of The Legend of Zelda which that was a child entering a dangerous cave all alone and overcoming the dangers therein.  For that, and many other reasons, it remains one of my favourites in the series and is definitely worth a re-purchase and replay in this stunning new HD version.

The Wii U gamepad additions are extremely helpful particularly for mapping and item management

Summary

The Wind Waker HD is a beautifully executed remake that sets the bar to a new high for HD remakes that will appeal to both experienced veterans who have played it before and also to Wind Waker virgins who can now experience the game with a lot of the annoyances removed and extra bonuses added on.  Bravo Nintendo.  Expert job.

Final Score: 5/5

Review: Ryse: Son of Rome

To say this is a pretty game is quite an understatement

I got this just out of morbid curiosity more than anything else after hearing not great things about the XBox One version saying that it was just all quick time events.  But after recent big award winner disappointments like Destiny and Shadow of Mordor, I thought I’d give an underdog a chance and I’ve always been a fan of the developer, Crytek.  Turned out I had a lot more fun with this than either of those combined.  First off, the most obvious point that smacks you across the chops immediately is that Ryse looks gorgeous.  Like, properly gorgeous.  So much so you may well find yourself stopping regularly just to gawk at the beautiful scenery.  Likewise, all the actors in the story are amazingly well represented and the voice acting is actually surprisingly good too.  The plot-line follows a re-telling of the well-known Roman legend of Damocles who is wronged by his commanders but returns from the dead to seek revenge on them.

“‘the Sword of Damocles’, an allusion to imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power.”

Although not the most original of stories, it also plays out nicely and at a good pace with build up to major plot points being tense and atmospheric.  And so, we come to the part that most complaints are centred around:  the game-play.  Yes, it can get quite repetitive.  Yes, there are only a handful of basic enemy types and skins and you will see them repeated very frequently.  Yes, a large part of it is quick time events.  But despite all this, I still had a lot of fun with it.  It is quite satisfying to cut and bash and chop your enemies apart in increasingly gruesome manners.  You gain experience and build this up to unlock more numerous and hideous executions as well as better gain abilities.  The gain abilities are used to recover health, gain extra EXP, focus or combat bonus after performing a successful execution.  Executions can be performed after softening a target up sufficiently and then triggering a time slow down followed by a series of button colour coded quick time events which perform fantastic limb chops, shield smashes and all kinds of other unpleasant things.

It is also a very messy and brutal game

That is the core elements of the combat.  There are other moves available such as dodges, blocks, taunts and such to help deal with the massive hordes of enemies you will face as well as your focus ability.  Once you have chained sufficient combos and filled your focus bar (with blood) you can slow down time again and become an almost unstoppable killing machine rapidly chopping and slashing through most defences instantly.  This becomes especially handy in later levels when the tougher enemies become much more numerous.  I think the PC version of this game became available to me at a good time after being frustrated and disappointed by numerous big release season games that tried to over-complicate what should have been simple things.  Ryse on the other hand, is very simple but what it does, it does very well.

“A modern take on a classic 2D brawler”

The best way I can describe it is that it’s a modern day version of an old school brawler like Streets of Rage or Golden Axe dressed up in super super HD visuals.  Yes, they were simple and could get repetitive, but they were also immense fun to play and were usually short enough that the repetitiveness never had time to become a huge issue.  The same can be said of Ryse with it taking me little over 5 hours to complete, but this felt like a good duration for this type of game to me.  Any longer and the repetitiveness may have become a bigger problem.  I think that the problem it faced at the time of the XBox One’s launch was that due to its gorgeous visuals, people were expecting an immensely deep game underneath that wasn’t there.  But to me, that doesn’t seem like Crytek’s thing usually.  Their way of doing things seems to be to make an immensely pretty game that is simple to play, but a lot of fun.  Much like the Crysis games.

And when I say brutal, I mean brutal.

Summary

It’s probably not going to win any game of the year awards and it’s no thinking man’s game, but Ryse is a short and guilty pleasure that provides a lot of bloody fun while it lasts.  However, if you’re someone who always craves depth and huge epics even in a combat game, you may be better looking to something along the lines of the Batman Arkham games.

Final Score: 3.5/5

Check out my Let’s Play footage below for a complete play-through

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh2oETQSyOwQqCDvIAxc8XBAtIEJbJIbX

Review: Middle Earth - Shdaow of Mordor

Many reviewers are touting this as a potential game of the year candidate.  Sadly, I was not quite as impressed with it as they were.  Read on to find out why.

Shadow of Mordor is an extremely impressive game in the visual department also needing 6GB of VRAM for maxed out settings on PC.

The combat is excellent being quite similar to the Batman Arkham games combo, counter, dodge, take-down system.  It’s a good system but you are quite unequipped for larger and prolonged battles in that you are not able to take much damage before going down.  High priority targets such as Warchiefs also often come surrounded by dozens of lower and middle tier enemies making actually getting to them quite tricky and trying to combat them specifically in a huge crowd even trickier.

“You know how to fight six men. I can teach you how to engage six hundred.”

There are not a lot of main missions but quite annoyingly, they are regularly padded out by other objectives which at first seem optional but then later become mandatory for you to complete before you can move on to the next main mission.  There are also a huge number of systems to get used to such as at multiple different ways to unlock abilities, upgrades, equippable weapon skills, focus (bullet time), context sensitive actions, etc.  These are all introduced at a blindingly fast pace with little explanation or time to get used to using them so many may go unnoticed making your life harder.

“One does not simply walk into Mordor”

The much lauded Nemesis system where the power hierarchy of the Orcs is interesting, but  doesn’t really add a lot to the game unless you want to get heavily invested in it which I didn’t want to really.  The Orc Warchief, Bodyguards and Captains can be killed off making some more vulnerable or allowing some to be usurped but they can never all be killed permanently as they just endlessly replace each other.  Kill one and another takes his place.  It also breaks the flow of combat every time you get meet a noteworthy foe in combat for him to say his piece and tell you his name.  While novel the first few times, this gets old quick as it even does it in the middle of combat totally breaking the flow.  Also should you die and go back to fight the same Orc again, you are reintroduced in the same manner each and every time which can get very very tiresome.

The Nemesis system is a novel idea but in reality adds little to the game-play unless you go very far out of your way to get mileage out of it.

It feels like this game is trying to aspire to be a true next-gen open-world game by adding in so many extra systems and concepts and optional side-quests.  But all these optional events turn out to not be optional at all and if you try to do the main missions without buffing yourself up through “optional” side-quests first, you’re going to have a bad time.  And seeing as the whole point of an open-world game is that it should allow you to play it your own way, I think it has failed quite badly in this aspect because it forces you down one path and to play it “the proper way” or else face an insurmountable difficulty wall.

 “Mandatory side-quests”

I didn’t end up finishing Shadow of Mordor because about 9 hours in, quite close to the end when I was reaching the end of the SECOND optional-but-not-optional Warchief culling, it ate my save and put me back to the start.  I decided to call it there and never touch it again as it had already irritated me quite enough.

Interrupting an intense battle to introduce an Orc with some smarmy lines. Cool the first few times. Tiresome after the twentieth.

Summary

Shadow of Mordor provides some excellent combat, stealth and free-running mechanics which work very well when they do.  But sadly, they are buried behind myriads of side quests that you are forced to do to be equipped to survive through the main campaign.  This is a major let down for me as I just wanted to play through the story of the campaign and not 100% all side-quests.  If you are the type of player who loves doing absolutely every last thing in a game, this will probably work better for you.   But if you prefer just to do main missions, you will have a hard time.  Due to me falling into the latter camp, I cannot personally recommend this one.

Overall Score: 2/5

Mini Review: Watch Dogs Bad Blood DLC

T-Bone is a much more easy-going character to spend your game time with

This first major piece of Watch Dogs DLC take place after the main campaign is finished, which seems to be quite standard for most DLC now, and stars hacker/crafter T-Bone who was your associate in the main campaign instead of Aiden Pearce.  T-Bone is a much more likeable character being very fun and jovial rather than Mr Sad Face, Aiden Pearce who may have had a hernia trying to crack a smile.  T-Bone's move set and unlockable skills are largely similar to Aiden's only you begin the DLC campaign with a good portion of them unlocked for you already and you gain unlock points quicker allowing you to quite easily max out an entire branch of your choosing during the main story missions.  These main story missions, of which there are 10, will take you roughly 4 hours to go through if you are doing them at a brisk enough pace and just like the main game, there are many other side missions and collectables to find.  Some of the new side quests like cracking Blume Corporation's tracking of Aiden Pearce or side jobs given to you by cop friends are interesting twists on what we have seen before in Watch Dogs and add variety.

Your remote control car, Eugene, gets you out of many sticky situations

As with most DLCs, this one assumes you have already finished the main campaign and sets the difficulty bar a little higher because of this with most missions featuring large numbers of tough enemies that will readily flank you from all sides.  Personally I preferred this though as I much prefer the unsubtle approach of going in with a large machine gun and simply shooting everyone between me and my objective so it was good to have some challenging targets for a change.  One well-advertised new gameplay element in Bad Blood is T-Bone's remote controlled car, Eugene who gives you the ability to sneak into tiny tunnels, remote hack, stun, explode and much more.  Because T-Bone is not only a master hacker, but also a master engineer, as demonstrated in his crazy booby trapped car lot when you met him in the main game, he is able to craft quickly and easily including any replacement Eugenes should he get destroyed.  This remote control car adds an interesting twist to a lot of missions because its defences are limited but can go a lot of places T-Bone can't so you must work together with Eugene to get into previously inaccessible locations.  Sadly, most of the same graphical glitches that I witnessed during the main game are still present in the game engine such as wall colours flickering and lighting not behaving as it should.  I was hoping they would use the opportunity of updates to fix some of these rather unsightly problems, but it does not appear to have happened.

Large shoot outs with many enemies are commonplace. But I never choose the escape option

Summary

Bad Blood offers mostly more of the same Watch Dogs game-play but adds a much more likeable main character and some genuinely interesting new twists in to the mix.  It seems to be becoming a common trend for Ubisoft to play a main game safe and then try different more interesting things in following DLC.  It's a trend I like and I'd say if you weren't too fussed on Watch Dogs' main campaign, this may help sway you the other direction.

Overall Score: 4/5

The end of the backlog

Well, it's finally happened. After almost 5 years of concentrated effort, my backlog is finally finished.

Many less appealling games had to be culled from the list as well as games that I had just got for no reason or for other people to play but I never ignored any of the games I truly wanted to play and over the last few years, I have worked my way through hundreds of games to get to this goal. And at the same time, I managed to keep ahead of the new releases and never felt behind in the gaming world.

So where to go from here? Well, there is still a wishlist of 45 or so games that I keep. About half have yet to be released and half of them I have just never got around to getting. So I'll delve into these over time and as the unreleased ones appear. 2 of these are due to come out tomottor: Wolfenstein the New Order and Transistor so these will keep me busy for a little while and then, the much touted (and future successful franchise) Watch Dogs appears next week so you can rest assured I will have plenty to say on all of these.

There are also a number of franchises that I have never delved into at all or very briefly:

• Kirby
• Castlevania
• Phoenix Wright
• Secret of Monkey Island
• Professor Layton
• Ratchet and Clank
• Jak and Daxter
• Fable

I feel I have missed out on so these will be more avenues to research. Along with plenty of favourites that I want to replay, huge games I want to play more of and piles of DLC that I have saved up, there will still be plenty of Life on the Grid to come yet.

It feels like a great achievement to have finally finished my backlog and I hope that everybody else still battling with theirs sees that it can be defeated and is not an impossible goal.

Here's to the next phase of gaming.

The backlog is finished

The backlog is finished.