Whiskey_chaser

Started playing this last night whilst chatting to a mate on PSN. Had a couple of awful runs, dying to really stupid stuff, wasting a rare resuscitation artefact, that sort of thing. Then had an absolute stonker of a run. Finally beat the second boss after getting really close a few times and had a good load out of artefacts including one that gave me 5% health per adrenalin level on killing an enemy (adrenalin is a random perk you get for killing three enemies which stacks up to level five and is reset in taking a hit). Tentatively went into the third biome, after hearing some friends were struggling to make any headway into it. Got to the boss and beat it first try. And what a boss design it was, any other game this would have been the final boss, it had a Bayonetta vibe to it. Only issue was i then cleared through Biome four only for the game to glitch, with no boss appearing then hard crash for the first time (first crash in 20 hours). Luckily i'd unlocked the shortcut so I don't have to do it all over from scratch. I think this could already be my game of the year.

For what it's worth, I bought the LGCX at the start of the year and burn in was a worry for me as well, but the consensus is that it's only if you do the same thing for a ridiculous amount of time (think pub tv only showing sky sports). As mfnick says, they have various systems in place like pixel refresher and the general rule is to leave the TV on standby instead of turning it off at the wall which apparently sets it into some sort of pixel optimisation cycle. The only minor complaint I have is that 4oD isn't on the LG ecosysytem. Other than that my only regret is going 55inch and not 65inch. Whatever you go for i doubt you'll be disappointed for the money.

Bit of an update on this as i've managed to put a little more time in over the weekend (not as much as a few friends though who are now hitting the 20 - 30 hour mark). Firstly, it's good. Really good. If third person action games are your thing, this is one of the tightest controlling third person action games out there. I don't count myself as being particularly good at games but i'm doing ok with this. Before you know it you'll be jumping and dashing through the air whilst dodging swarms of projectiles like some kind of hyper neon ballet. Yes it's tough, but the moment you clear a challenge room without taking a single hit feels awesome. One criticism i've seen is that the runs are too long, which is fair, but unlike Hades you don't have to play through them all each time. There are ways of unlocking shorter paths through the biomes and there's also a light metroidvania element going on, beat a boss, get an item that helps. So each run becomes a balance of how much you want to explore/buff up for the next area and how quickly you want to push through. The lack of a save function is still a bit wanky though. Hopefully they'll patch in something soon. I still haven't managed to patch this. Apparently the solution is to wipe the SSD and start fresh, but i'm not going to do that. The game runs fine without and I can live with a lack of online functionality. But that's an issue that's more to do with the PS5 than the game itself. So yeah, really loving this. I'm going to say it, because it's a game that it draws a lot of comparison to, but I prefer this to Hades (a game which I played a lot of).

My youngest kid asked for this for his birthday yesterday so I got this and an extra dualsense so we could play through it together. Have to say we're both loving it. It does the Nintendo thing where it throws a game mechanic at you for a brief period and doesn't go back to it which has led to some really nice puzzles (non of which have been too tricky) and third person shooting elements with a nice co-op twist. We've just played through from the start up until the fourth boss and have loved every minute of it so far.

Played a shit load more of this last night and managed to beat the first boss and get all the way to the end of the second biome on my fifth run. The second boss was nuts. Nearly had it but the third attack cycle is insane. It Almost felt like third person Ikaragua. My only grumble so far, and this is more the PS5s fault and not the game, is that I can't download any updates for this (there's a 15gig file stuck in the queue). I've tried all the suggested steps, cleared cache, database rebuild, delete and reinstall and nothing.

So, after a bit of a nightmare getting this to work (I can't download the day one patch for some reason) i've managed to get a good couple of hours in on this. First impressions, it looks, sounds and controls amazingly. It's a dark game but the colours really pop and there seems to be a barrage of particle effects on the go at all times. It uses the dualsense well, with rain causing gentle vibrations on the haptic feedback and the L2 trigger having two states, half way for normal fire, all the way for alt fire. Weapons seem pretty varied as well with plenty of stats to boost. The game's pretty ambiguous in telling you what things do so i've picked up various perks with no real idea how they affect the gameplay, though there's a lot to take in on the first run so hopefully this will become clearer. Fought (and died) against the first boss who seemed a bit of a bastard. Got his/her/it's health down to zero only to be met by the dreaded second health bar and a new range of attacks. Knocked that down and got rewarded with another health bar to deal with. Guessing that this will be a little more forgiving when I've worked out the nuances of the perks/upgrades. In terms of the game world, the atmosphere is great. Think H.R Giger designing a metroid level and you're pretty much there. So yeah, early days but it's fun and the story seems intriguing. Looking forward to playing some more.

I've just cracked an ordered it, I was waiting for the reviews. Yeah, it's a lot for a game, but I seem to be in the minority here for liking rogue-likes. I'm also seeing a lot of mentions of Alien, Metroid and Hades in impressions/reviews which has pretty much turned it into a no-brainer. I seem to remember Tekken 2 costing around £70 at launch?

I'm now up to 70 hours on this. Can't remember the last time a game grabbed me so much. I've started watching people stream it and check the reddit daily. Nothing else comes close to the atmosphere in this game. Every gunfight is so tense and each match is rife with 'Battlefield' moments. I could play (and have played) this all day. Had a bad few games yesterday then had three back to back games where we obliterated everyone/thing. Such a buzz when you wipe out all the teams on a map, steal a few bounties, kill a boss and then have free roam of the map to unload on any enemies in your way. Also - fuck the dogs in this game.

This is one of those series which I really wish I liked, but I gave the game a good couple of hours and just didn't enjoy it. It still felt like I was playing a PSone game, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

Yeah - the difficulty is all over the shop. You can melt through people in one section and then get absolutely screwed over on the next. Are you playing co-op? It's a heck f a lot easier, the difficulty doesn't seem to ramp up by much with other players, and the revive you get is invaluable.

Not sure if this has been posted before, but i'm loving the in-game music for Moving Out - reminds me of the Krypton Factor theme:

I much prefer first person over third (something about 3rd person that throws my aim off). First person games, Halo, Half-Life, Bioshock, and more recently, purely because it's possibly the best multiplayer FPS games i've ever played, The Hunt: Showdown (i'm becoming obsessed with this game). Third Person, Gears 1 & 2, Outriders (loving the craziness of it) and as @Sly Reflex EDF.

I've now hit around 50 hours on this and think me and my team are actually pretty competent. We still get our arses handed to us on a plate but can handle our own in a fight now. Bosses are a second thought now. We now spend our time creeping around the map listening for any sound of other players and the moment we hear a gunshot we go hell for leather at them. Also found this review that summarises my thoughts on the game perfectly: He nails it with this comment - this game is about managing sound. Once you know what you're doing, every action you take is about working out how much noise you'll make. Good community behind it as well. My teammate had a message congratulating him on an epic gunfight after one game (they spent a good ten minutes duking it out, tense as hell to watch).

A mate of mine plays this at a half-decent level, has proper coaching and everything. High level play seems intense.

I really want to enjoy this, but login issues and random dropouts have increased since the latest patch and i've barely been able to play it for more than half an hour at a time. It's a shame as it's great fun three player.

I picked this up, heard good things about the controller and it was cheap (£17 on PSN). Not my type of game normally but i'm enjoying it (i'm not really into sports but Rally driving is one of the few i'll stop and watch on TV if it's on). I was nicely surprised by the career mode. It's really nicely presented and seems to have a nice bit of meat to it with some light RPG elements thrown in. I'm just trying to find my difficulty level now though. Dropped it to 90 and was finishing with a 14 second lead. Back up to 100 and i'm 14 seconds behind everyone. Fair play to anyone that's legitimately good at these games though, the level of focus you need is immense.

I think this might be one of my favourite online multiplayers in a long time. It's just so dramatic. Had a couple of amazing games last night. There's a new boss tied to an ongoing event and he's a bastard to kill. Me and a mate were playing double's only matches so we found the clues, made our way over to the boss where my mate got sniped. After creeping around for 10 minutes trying to find the sniper (again, the audio is so good, you can pinpoint a sparrows fart in this from 50 meters away so suddenly dropping and going quiet to stalk someone really get's the heart going), I managed to revive him, where we took out the two men that were about three shots away from killing the boss. Easy boss bounty, we bunkered up and sat in silence, only to hear the squelching of feet outside the barn we were in. Spying someone through the crack in the woodwork, I opened fire, killing one of them through a wall and my mate head shotted the other. Easy extraction. On a second game, another joined us. Again, we found the boss but I stayed back and up high as another team had just killed it and I watched my team mates try and breach. Traps had been set and they both died on entry. I stayed still and watched. Another squad showed up and all hell broke loose. I sniped three players and managed to revive my squad, almost getting fucked over by a wasp zombie in the process. We then had a manic chase across the map as the sole survivor of the boss fight tried to extract with their bounty. We encountered the last squad on the way where we took them out in a crazy firefight that attracted half of the undead on the map, then got to extraction to see the bounty carrier we were chasing get mauled by dogs ten meters from the boat. This game. This fucking game. I absolutely love it. Wins feel like something you really have to fight for, and the learning curve is balls hard (doesn't help being noobs in a three year old game) but there's a real 'fuck yeah, we actually did it' feeling to it when you do, and the losses are normally so dramatic that you don't mind anyway.

It's not something I immediately picked up on, but yeah, now you mention it there's a lot of care put into all the weapons. The melee in this game feels great, swinging a sledgehammer has some real weight and heft to it, and it feels brutal when you make contact. Yeah, you essentially look for clues (glowing blue glass like craters on the ground - uncracked if you're the first to discover it, but the glass cover missing if someone's been there before), kill the boss and then get to an extraction point where your character survives for another round and get's trait points, which you can use to buy certain mods such as 'Gator Legs' which let you move quicker through water (one of my favourites because the water devils in this game can ruin your day). The PVP in this is just spectacular though, it's like a really tense Western standoff.

Couldn't find a thread in here, but played this via PS+ and had a pretty damned enjoyable time with it, to the extent I bought both DLC's (one is a decent sized addition to the 'story' and the other is a tough as nails rogue like, think Risk of Rain with Dark Souls difficulty bosses). It's a weird one. It's like they took every game idea they liked from the last few years and threw them at a wall to see what stuck. It's essentially soulslike but with guns. It works as each enemy has a very deliberate attack which gives you time to react. The story is all over the place, it starts you off in the worst area in the whole game which is a really odd decision, as the rest are really varied and quite cool (the first area is like a drab, generic, post apocalyptic 360 era shooter). Enemy design is cool though, and there are some great bosses (you're essentially battling a foe called 'The Root', tree like demon people). Played through the whole thing co-op, and beat the game and the DLC and it took a good chunk of time. Despite how bat shit weird and obtuse it can be at times, it had a charm to it. Definitely worth a bash with one or two others for the current asking price.

Me and a few friends picked this up in a psn sale, one of them had heard good things, and my god, it's amazing. Quite possibly one of the best online multiplayer experiences i've played in a loooooong time. So the premise is, it's a bit like a Battle Royale, in that three to four teams are dumped on one of two big maps. Instead of areas getting smaller, you have to use 'dark vision' (world goes dark, sparky bits are highlighted in the distance) to find three clues that point you to a boss fight. You then have to kill the boss and extract. The kick is you're all trying to get the same final objective, and if you do kill the boss, you have to banish it, a defending process that takes a couple of minutes, then you pick up two bounties which light you up on the map like a Christmas tree. What also makes this standout is that the map is littered with loads of zombie enemies that each throw a new way into how you approach areas. This is a game where you have to be stealthy, because the audio is absolutely fantastic. Approach a dying horse? Better put that bastard down quick because its going to start neighing like a motherfucker. Flocks of bird fly away from you, giving your position away. Stealthily planning out an approach to a hunkered down group of enemy players, only to have a flamer charge at you and explode can make things go south fast. The setting is great as well, think Resident Evil 7 meets Red Dead. It's hard as nails, and there's perma-death on your characters which adds to the tension, but the whole thing has given us some of the biggest laughs i've had in a game in ages. It's not going to be for everyone, didn't think it'd be my bag to be honest, but I absolutely love it.

Good progress on this at the weekend. Area's two and three are now completely cleared. Fuck all those that cheese the old monk invasion. I had five OP invaders hide behind a door and one hit me the moment I got through the gate. I ended up making myself the invader a few times and just sitting there to give some people an easy win as it seems a bit of an unfair fight. I also cleared the first part of the last area and killed the boss without taking a single hit, and am most of the way through the last section of the first area, just got to figure out how to tackle that bastard blue dragon.

I tried the trickster class earlier. I normally avoid the rogue type characters in games like this but it was ridiculously fun. The trickster's power is time manipulation, so you can create a big slow-mo dome that slows everything that comes into it (including projectiles).

So, the demo is out and me and a few friends played through the entire thing last night, including replaying a few missions on a higher world tier. Initially there were a few hiccups with connection, but after half an hour we all managed to get in. Character creation is a basic as it gets but the random name generator threw up a few good ones, I went for Everard, as he looked like an England thug. It's kind of janky looking, like early PS4 game graphics scrubbed up to 4k, but it ran smoothly enough. The story is proper sci-fi trash. It's like a 14 year old played the latest Kojima game and decided to write sci-fi. That being said, it was enjoyable trash though most of the time we were laughing at it, rather than with it. Gameplay wise, the gunplay was light and didn't have much punch to it and the cover system has a few issues it needs to address, but the fun came with the abilities. I went for pyro class, so the main stick for me was that anything I hit with a special attack got marked, and if I killed a marked enemy I got health back. Each other characters has a different take on this - the tank got health if he did damage close up. It was stilly early loot game but towards the end we already had a couple of bits of blue gear (seems to follow the standard loot colour system) that switched things up. I had a gun that let me trigger my L1 ability twice before cool down instead of once and another that increased my explosion sizes 25%. With the aggressive play style they force you into, combat was frantic and great fun. It felt more Diablo than Destiny, with a lot of enemies on screen at once. Another nice twist on difficulty is that a higher world tier (difficulty) gives enemies different attacks. So yeah, it's not going to set the world on fire, and hopefully they can squash a few bugs before launch, but we all played it for five hours last night and would have happily kept going if the game would have let us.

My take on it last night: Crash Bandicoot can fuck right off. I'll probably end up buying it though as my youngest loves it. Returnal looked cool. Not £70 day one purchase cool but certainly something i'd pick up in the sales. Old Boy - the game – can't remember it's name, Suri? Sushi? STFU?, looked pretty intriguing. Some shitty looking dodgeball game that made me want to go and play Splatoon instead. The new Abe game. Doubt I would have bought this but it's free so I'll give it a whirl. Solar Ash continues to look amazing. Kena continues to look incredible. Five Nights at Freddy's about as much fun as self catheterization. Deathloop is ticking all the right boxes for me. Free FF7 Remake upgrade is nice, never finished it on PS4 and was looking to go back to it.

Rumours are that... ...will be next months PS+ offering (spoilered) in case it ruins anyone's surprise.