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Credit to Genesis Noir for having an unusual story. Before time and existence a good give physical form to his experiences to make sense of the world, falls for a beautiful jazz singer (also a god), her ex gets jealous (also a god), and kills her. The explosion from his gun is the big bang that starts the universe as we understand it, and you travel through time to find a way to make the bullet miss her, something you can do because you don't experience time as we do. All of this is jazz themed, but you'll bounce through various times, from cavemen to feudal japan and so on As a game, its not really anything special. I've played it on pc and did everything with the mouse, it's almost always a case of clicking on something or spinning something, it's rare the puzzle itself is especially difficult. What can be difficult is knowing what's expected of you. I got stuck really early on because I didn't realise I could click on something, and that was all I had to do to move on. I've had it be temperamental too with what you're clicking on which has again led me to being stuck on very simple puzzles. The only but I had was on a clock puzzle later in the game. I needed to set a particular time, but I couldn't back out from the clock view to see the time again. I think something similar may have happened earlier in the game too looking at the clue board. It's not great but there's some cool things to look at, it's original and I could see some people really clicking with it, it didn't really do it for me though

For some reason I got it in to my head that this has more direct control in it, but it's more Oregan Trail, resource management. Not my sort of game really so I sort of regret buying it, but I'm going to stick with it a bit The problem is its difficult all the time. I was expecting it to ease me in, but within an hour I'm having to go without stuff to try to stockpile coal because I can see a cold snap coming. To do that I need to prioritise technology that makes coal use more efficient, makes heating more effective. Problem is my population want things like medical tents and food. In terms of resources, you need coal for your generator, wood and steel for buildings, I had a decent amount of steel so I've stopped collecting that in favour of wood and coal, then I got loads of wood from an expedition so have moved my people off that too to try to stockpile coal. Your civilians are a resource too, a resource that gets sick all the time and moans about everything. You can't have all of them collecting coal and wood, you'll need some to hunt at night for raw food, to work in the cook house to make meals for everyone, and to man the medical tents While your doing this you also have to manage happiness and discontent, people being cold and hungry isn't good, and they'll set you tasks such as heating the tents, do that discontent decreases, miss it by 5 minutes like I did and there's a huge spike. I also lost a day to not understanding how the scouts worked, but they've brought back workers, food and wood so they're pulling their weight so far

I played and completed this in one sitting, it's about 3 and a half hours or so maybe. I'm pretty slow at games like this so it might actually be less. Essentially it's a 'PT-like', I didn't know that going in as I only knew about the controversial aspect that there's apparently a Pooh bear reference in the game (I didn't find it, guess it's very obscure). It's a welcome change from something like The Medium which was tepid in just about every category, here you've got some fairly effective scares (albeit a bit cliche) and some really effective atmosphere. It's a walking sim basically, puzzles are simple observation puzzles. You go through the same environments over and over and put the square narrative puzzle piece in the square shaped narrative hole. Like P.T. tho it makes good use of repeated environments and unlike P.T. this is a fully realized thing with a self-contained story and not a drip feed teaser of something much bigger So yeah you can make a good horror walking sim as long as you remember to make the environment do a good job at telling a story. Obviously at this point the mystique of this title has sort of overcome all discussion about it. It's really quite good I'd say but it's still a indie type horror game that will have you thinking while you're playing it but not necessarily after you're done with it

Just to let you know what you're in for, Sea of Solitude starts with this screen: It's a beautiful game in places, similar in visual style to Rime. The introduction sees you in a boat in the titular Sea of Solitude. Playing as a young girl who's quite literally overtaken by darkness (seriously, she just has facial features, the rest of her form is just black and a little undefined), you're given a guiding light in this sea of darkness, and that provides the only source of light around you. It's a platformer in nature, so from time to time you have to leave the safety of your boat and walk around the flooded city its set in. When you do climb out of the boat the world around you becomes dark and stormy, and there's a creature that stalks you in the depths of the water. Basically, everything feels like a very heavy-handed discussion on depression. As you work through your problems and face your difficulties, you eventually bring light to the world around you. This is where the visual beauty kicks in, because it becomes bold, vibrant and just stunning to look at in a very stylised way. One touch I adore - you have to remove corruption from the world (this is what makes the world brighter again), but your character's backpack gets more and more full as the game progresses. Again, a very obvious metaphor, but one that's done in a subtle way. It was only near the end of my session last night I actually noticed it. This isn't a game that's ever going to set the world on fire - the controls sometimes feel a little loose, the story has less than zero subtlety, and the graphic design is an acquired taste (but exactly the kind of thing I love). But given that it's a very stark look at the different aspects of depression, it also feels quite brave in a way. I also don't want to give spoilers away, which is why I haven't discussed any of the main story beats, just given a little overview. It feels relatively short, I reckon I'm about half way through it - but I'm really enjoying it at the moment. As much as you can 'enjoy' a story about a young girl's crippling depression.

Don't think this ever migrated into the Games thread, but I started playing it today. It's pretty clunky, but already has a few interesting ideas in terms of making you work things out whilst investigating/researching and linking events together when using the psychic flashbacks. The Lovecraft vibe is quite obvious, and combat best avoided at times rather than head on. Promising few hours, so I'll be seeing this through.

This is a bit of an odd one, it really should have been called something else - it gets a lot of hate from project cars 1/2 fans (understandable really) as it's a departure - it's not a sim any more, and drops stuff like pitstops. this isn't really a problem for me, while there was some good stuff in 1/2 i was never a big fan, and i think there's a gap in the market for what 3 is trying to be. the handling is more inbetween sim and arcade now - like pgr/driveclub. so it's a similar game to grid and shift now i guess - but while both of those were decent imo there was something not quite right about the handling, this seems better in that regard, although probably not as good as pgr/driveclub. it's much better on a pad too than pcars1/2, i didn't play those with a pad but apparently there were problems - this one i've only played with a pad so far, and it's been good. one thing it still has from previous games is a great selection of tracks - saying great maybe understating how good the selection of tracks is, it's pretty amazing really i think there's ~40 real tracks (lots of these have multiple layouts too), and 10 made up ones. it has some from old toca games that aren't in games often like knockhill and oulton park, etc. so it's sort of close to a pgr style handling game with lots of real life tracks - which to me sounds like it could be the best thing ever - it's not the best thing ever. although i am enjoying it. then we have the problems - there are many problems with the games structure imo - the timetrials - just let me keep going - don't like having to restart every lap. - the 3 lap average time events need to be more lenient on voiding laps imo. - generally it's really harsh on voiding lap times - which i think is fine for online leaderboards but should be relaxed for the career mode stuff. - getting money to buy new cars is really slow going - which compounds into other problems - can't buy cars needed to do events to get more stars to unlock more events. games like forza and GT throw loads of cars at you - this should be the same. - lots of xp points wasted (you need these to get money) restarting instead of finishing events - although i now think i've solved this one - always finish an event and see your xp go up then restart at the last opportunity to avoid more loading but still get the xp. - oddly long loading times from an ssd - although ~30 to 40 seconds is still faster than some games from hdd. - the difficulty is all over the place, and unlocking stuff is tied into the difficulty - for me there should be difficult events with gold/silver/bronze medals etc, but getting bronze should be easy and fine for unlocking everything - here you need the 3 stars/gold etc as much as possible to help unlock stuff. i might have been making things harder for myself by buying the deal of the day cars sometimes from the store thinking they will come in handy, but they are for much later in the game. i've played ~12 hours and think i have 5 cars. also oddly you can pay money (in game money) to unlock events instead of properly unlocking them with stars - this is odd but a very good feature because of how hard it is to unlock stuff normally - but seems like they realised the unlocking system was crap and this was a quick fix for it or something. the graphics are not supposed to be any good, but i think it looks alright, and it runs really smooth, at 4k, with like 32 cars on track sometimes, this is on pc anyway. oh except when it rains, that's less smooth - i should mess with the settings to sort that out. despite the problems though i keep coming back to it, i am enjoying it. the handling is good, the selection of cars seems good if i could buy them, and the selection of tracks is really impressive. i hope they get chance to make a new one of these, with a different name, and with the career/structure stuff improved, i think it could be brilliant, and i'd like to say i think it could be a big hit but i'm not sure this kind of thing sells very well these days so who knows.

Can you spoiler tag your latest post above please @Nag? Only glimpsed the first line, but saw things I didn't want to. Anyhoo...played the first 100 minutes or so earlier. I'm very impressed with it, I really wish I hadn't of played the Beginning Hour demo though as that pretty much ruined the surprise of the first hour of the game for me after you reach the house (guess the clue was in the name but I stupidly listened to some Journo's say it's not related at all to the game...), few different bits and pieces though and I liked the continuation of certain elements like finding the bolt cutters and fuse I wasn't able to find in the demo made things feel a bit different. Absolutely adore the atmosphere already, it's just dripping with dread, what I wasn't expecting though is just how Resi it would feel, you walk along a corridor, see the flashing of lightning streaming in and rain pouring down the windows and you can't help but think of the Spencer Mansion from the original, even the animations when you pick up and examine an object remind me of that so much, I like the little touches like the wrist watch and the items too, all very Resi. The gameplay itself is cool, I'm getting a definite Outlast/Alien:Isolation kind of vibe with it, but it still manages to feel distinct enough and Resi enough for me personally to differentiate from those titles, it definitely isn't scary though, I just don't feel threatened at all by the Bakers really, you get a brief 'Ahh, gotta run' when they get in close but if they catch me I just jankily leg it away from them, no idea if I'm meant to be shooting or running most of the time either. The graphics and lighting effects are incredible too (although the character models are a tad ropey at times), it can be a gorgeous game when you're walking through a dimly lit corridor or something, evokes the Train from RE0 a bit and of course the Spencer Mansion in the original (I know I've mentioned this a lot). Someone from the development team definitely saw the first season of True Detective as well, there's even a shot in the beginning cutscene which is pretty much ripped straight from that, love the whole deep South swamp vibe to it. So yeah, I'm impressed, probably more impressed than I thought I'd be and can't wait to play more, hopefully put some more time in at the weekend. A few pics:

Managed to pick this up for £13 yesterday and played through up to the fourth Hospital. It's Theme Hospital in all but name. It's been ages since i've played anything like this - used to love playing Theme Park and its ilk back in the day, and 2PH ticks all the right boxes, giving a nice rush of nostalgia but at the same time not feeling dated. If you've never played Theme Hospital, the premise is pretty simple, you're put in charge of various hospitals with you trying to increase the hospitals reputation and cashflow. You get a steady influx of patients with various illnesses, all of which are quite silly (my favourite so far is the patients that are deluded into thinking they're rock stars - the hospital is soon over run by people dressed as Freddie Mercury). The game is also pretty funny, it's actually made me chuckle a few times.

I've seen so much praise for this, review scores and whatnot, i was sort of sceptical but got it anyway. was sort of underwhelmed in the areas of graphics and emotion, it does look really nice and the story is alright i guess but too much hype. anyway onto the important bit - it plays flipping brilliantly, the enemies sometimes seem a bit pointless, especially at the start, then you unlock something really cool that makes them more interesting/not-pointless. it's a platform puzzler metroidvania sort of thing - with only a small amount of puzzling so far, more like complicated and satisfying platforming like super meat boy/guacamelee, it's tough but not super difficult yet anyway, and i'm not that good at platformers. some sections are so much fun i didn't mind dying and retrying if i messed them up. controls great too which is pretty important when things get tricky. so yeah double thumbs up so far. edit - oh yeah there's an interesting save system too, not many proper checkpoints but you can save/checkpoint pretty much anywhere you want, but it uses energy so you can't do it all the time, and that energy can unlock doors so do you save or keep the energy in case you need it? not sure what i think to this yet but it's not been a massive help/hindrance either way. and there's a sort of rgp lite levelling up thing where you unlock perks and stuff. edit 2 - mini bosses so far have been a bit disappointing. not sure if i've fought a proper boss yet.

Having played the opening scene of this game I'm going to cautiously give it a "highest recommendation". In fact the opening scene was pretty much perfect so I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. Two of the games planned five acts have been released so far. The official website gives a pretty good description: So far the game has a Cormac McCarthy feel to it which I really like.

Way back in January 2013 this game raised £1.5 million on kickstarter, was released in 2015, followed by a Horizons "season pass" which looks like it is receiving its final major update this year. I bought the base game at some stage during the last two years and have finally gotten around to playing it. I've played it for over four hours so far. The game has a number of tutorial missions (and videos) which explain some of the fundamentals of the game, piloting and landing your ship, combat, travelling between planets. There's certainly a learning curve but I think I have the basic piloting, landing and navigation parts down now. I can't really speak for combat, I completed the basic combat tutorial but I haven't yet encountered any combat in the main "open" game, which I've played around 90 minutes of. You start off with a ship, 1000 credits and a mission to deliver data to another port. I completed that mission and you are then told which places to visit if you wish to learn about various aspects of the game. Each port has a mission board where you can take on a variety of missions, but you can't take on missions of a higher rank than your current rank. I'm still at the starting rank "Penniless". So far I've completed one extra mission, to supply copper. I haven't even scratched the surface of the surface of the game but just playing this most basic part of the game has been fun so far. I've been playing on PC, with a controller. Aesthetically, the game looks and sounds beautiful. The hyper space jumps or whatever they are called are amazingly eerie.

Horace is a narrative platform adventure about a robot butler that's absolutely full of charm and wit. It's very British in character with tonnes of jokes and references to old computer games and 80's and 90's pop culture. The story is told through cutscenes in a pixel art style narrated in the robotic voice of Horace, and really goes places. Just when you think it's going to be a tale of robotic domestic bliss, everything changes. The game itself has some pretty fiendish platforming with metroidvania style uprgades and is really fun to play. The levels and and what you need to do in them show a lot of imagination and variation. Death comes regularly, but infinite lives and and instant respawns help alleviate frustrations. My only criticism is that it's maybe a little long, but I had a blast with it.

Aviary Attorney was kickstarted back in January 2015 and released just before Christmas the same year, pretty good going by kickstarter standards (although probably not the best time to release a game on Steam). Actually, i've just realised that it's a British game, developed in Coventry. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/384630/ss_92cad3d06e54d0058103a0db5ae13458d4eacd34.600x338.jpg?t=1452042223 http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/384630/ss_53bbbedb6973ec88412db36b28845950a21ef3ff.600x338.jpg?t=1452042223 I've played the first chapter and Aviary Attorney is pretty much exactly what it looks like. The game has a gorgeous art style and all the characters are animals (so far). The two main characters are the defense lawyers Falcon and his assistant Sparrowson. The story is set in 19th century Paris...and the dialogue is full of puns. It's a funny game. The first chapter/case was about the murder of a frog at a dinner party. It was a pretty snappy intro to the game and the highlight was the trial at the end.

I think Murder By Numbers was pitched to me as Picross meets Phoenix Wright, and initially that seems to be a big grand, it's just picross with a murder mystery plot. A reasonably well told plot, it's got quite a sharp script, big characters, it's kind of funny at points, especially with how they use their still art assets to animate a scene, it's well done. The gameplay though is just scrolling around an area to find a hidden object, when your cursor glows red to say you're on it you trigger a Picross puzzle. If you don't know what picross is, it's like sudoku mixed with a crossword. You have numbers on the side and top of a grid, e.g. 3, 4. That means of that row a run of 3 blocks will be coloured, then a run of 4, its your job to completely fill in the grid. The solution here always ends up being a clue (near enough), something relevant to the mystery. where it does start to remind me of Phoenix wright more is that you can talk to the other characters. Mostly this is simple, you run down a list of questions. However, you can start to present them with the items you've found, which can trigger them to offer up more information, and move the plot on I'm enjoying it. I'm hoping it gets a bit more meaty. I was going to say gritty, but I don't think it needs to, it's tame really, but equally it hasn't really reached something like Danganronpa, which is silly, but compelling and adult

Picked this up as something bright and colourful to counteract how dark and oppressive Outer Wilds is. You play as Stella, accompanied by her pet dog Daffodil, who has taken over from Charon as the “spiritfarer” - in other words, it’s a death management sim, but it’s not gloomy at all. The game looks and sounds absolutely stunning. I’ve literally only played 30 minutes but I loved it. Seems like the game will be a mix of exploration with gentle management elements.

One of my longest running New Years Resolutions is to get into a MOBA. For the last 5-6 years this has always been my sole resolution but I've never quite managed it. I had DotA 2 installed on Steam for a really long time, likewise with Heroes of the Storm - Blizzard's MOBA - just after it released on Battle.net, but I'd just never got round to trying them. I'm not really sure why but every time I'd think about playing them I just couldn't motivate myself enough to actually invest the time to learning a whole new game genre and all its intricate mind-bending mechanics. Last year I ended up uninstalling both DotA 2 and HotS, I just didn't think I'd ever realistically get time for them so I deleted them to save on HDD space. Fast forward to last week and I saw one of iJustine's videos where she goes to a local LoL tournament to support her sisters boyfriend, couple this with an ad somewhere that I stumbled across for LoL and an old Eurogamer video where Chris Bratt visits Riot Games' HQ in LA and I found myself sitting at the LoL website. Fuck it I thought and began the download. I'd heard from lots of folks across the net that it's quite a toxic place to play and I need to be at least a bit clued up on the game so I don't piss others off and let them down when I'm playing, so I searched YT and found the two videos below - which were incredibly helpful - and then took to the in-game tutorials. The in-game tutorials take you through a basic match, step by step, holding your hand the whole way and making sure you know what everything does. There's 3 game modes: Summoner's Rift, ARAM and Twisted Treeline. Summoner's Rift is the default 3-lane 5 v 5 setup, Twisted Treeline is 3 v 3 on a smaller map with more a more confusing lane layout and ARAM is a 5v5 straight up team deathmatch/battle scenario without any lanes, towers etc. to worry about. I'll stick to Summoner's Rift for now. You start out at your base in the left corner of the map, here you'll find a CS type map where you buy starting equipment like Swords, boots, potions etc. that improve your character, next you pick a lane - top, mid or bottom - and go about protecting/patrolling it like a hawk. Dotted along these lanes are sets of turrets, when an enemy gets close it will shoot them and protect you, so both your and the oppositions first goal is to take these turrets out to weaken the opposition. To confuse matters even more there are these folks called 'Junglers' which roam in between lanes in the jungle areas. These folks level up and strengthen their character all in the Jungle then pop out of the darkness to surprise unsuspecting players in lanes at the right moment and do some damage. As you play your in-game rank goes up (not related to your account rank) when farming minions (AKA cannon fodder) which makes your character stronger and earns you lots more gold. When farming these minions if you encounter an enemy team member you take them on, and if low on health you retreat to the safety of your turret and either heal or 'recall' - heading back to your base to heal. So as the game progresses your team and the opposition will gradually get stronger and stronger, the ultimate goal is to eventually reach the oppositions base and take out all their inhibitors, therefore winning the game. Another point of confusion is the 'Champions' - there's over 100 to choose from with 10 on a weekly free rotation. It definitely helps not being asked to choose between the entire roster but just these 10. Ashe is apparently a really good starter so initially I tried her, then Morgana, before eventually finding my 'main' - Miss Fortune (pictured below). She's this bad ass red-headed Pirate lady with dual pistols. Whichever Champion you choose you'll have Q, W, E and R attack ability with B being used to recall, D and F being reserved for spells and 1, 2 being used for potions and beacons, all these have cooldown timers. The Left mouse button is used to aim ability cones and the right to attack enemies and generally move about the map. I'm not sure what else to add but the game is free, you pay to unlock Champions, skins, loot boxes etc. in the store but some are also available to purchase with the in-game currency you accrue when you level up. There's also a LoL mobile variant called 'Arena of Valor' made by LoL's parent company - so it's very similar - available on the App Store. It runs on a Potato as well, so if anyone fancies trying it give me a shout.

It's everything I'd hoped. More of the same but in co-op it's just so cool. Quite a few hours into co-op, not started single yet. The comedy is still present and the levels start lovely and begin to look run down and something is not quite right with GLaDOS again

Bought this back in the Summer sale but only just got round to playing it. Been wanting to play it for ages because I love L4D and this seemed like almost a carbon copy of that game swapping Zombies for Rats. It's pretty much as I expected really, the template is so incredibly close to L4D its unbelievable really, if it weren't for the medieval looking maps it could honestly be a rat-people mod for L4D/L4D2, even the outlines for allies when they're slightly off-screen are the same green and red as Valve's masterpieces. Despite being rats some of the enemies behave in incredibly similar ways too, there's one that pilots a gatling gun (a ratling gun...), one that throws poisonous gas at the group, one that sneaks up on you and pins you to the ground and one that whips you away, even saw one that looked like an L4D tank, there's a few armoured rats too. The maps themselves don't feature safe-houses, but constant rolling objectives to fulfil, choke points with hordes of enemies and bosses/mini-bosses to slay, all the maps seem to have a medieval aesthetic so far but I've only played 2 missions so I can't be sure, can't say they're as interesting as L4D's maps though. Where it differs from L4D is in the protagonists and Loot system, there's 2 melee characters and 2 ranged/magic characters to choose from which offers more variation to L4D's line-up, and there's a loot system where the game will virtually roll a dice after you successfully complete a mission and give you a rare or common bit of loot on a sliding scale determined by the RND. So yeah, it's quite a lot of fun and for anyone that likes L4D I think they'll like this, enemies aren't quite as satisfying to beat up and the weapons aren't quite as nice to shoot/swing but still worth a go if you're looking to scratch that L4D itch that Valve has left unfulfilled. Only on PC at the moment but believe it's coming to console in the very near future.

I took a chance on this game because I liked the trailer, it released on my birthday and it has been in development for many years. The gameplay and tone is similar to Mother, although I expect Omori is much darker as it starts with a content warning. The graphical style and music have been lovely and I’m enjoying it so far.

People are asking me about this offsite, so I decided to do a write up instead of saying stuff over and over again. I don't think many people will be bothered by this, but it might pique some interest somewhere. I don't know. This is my second Creeper Worlds game, the first being Creeper World 3. Now I really liked CW3. I liked it a hell of a lot.It was a RTS where all the boxes I like are ticked. It's all about building towers and digging your heels in, turtling and taking the map back from the enemy. As a game it wasn't too pressing, you could set up and once you're tooled up you could slowly add to you weave of nodes while leisurely watching tv. It wasn't complicated in management either, just don't overspend your energy requirement and make sure you keep topped up on anticreeper, if you have anti creeper guns. Once you were set up it was a case of using a creeping barrage and claiming your win. CW4 feels like the developer looked at CW3, saw how people played it and went "Nah, fuck this, I don't want them playing like this" and completely upended the basic management. You don't just generate energy now from placing a grid down, now you can build on specific parts of the map to mine energy as well. Before energy powered all the guns apart from anticreeper sprayers, which was the only resource that had to be mined. Now you have Blueite, Redite and Liftic. It might be called Greenite, I forget. All this shit goes into a factory you have to build, which you have to manage. So far each colour makes a specific thing, but I think it's going to come to a point where I need to add them together to make something else I need. These manufactured or processed things go to powering different weapons and things on the playing field. Other changes are that since the game is now in 3D, some units have altered how they work. The AA for example works like a missile dome, and since the creeper can fire over it you need to have ample coverage. Before you'd just build a wall of AA and move them forward with your creeping barrage and nothing would get through. This is now not advisable, since you can get sucker punched and lose framework in the backlines if you're not careful enough. I like it, it means having SAM sites around the most important parts of your network is something you need to consider. Nullifiers have also changed, instead of blowing up emitters an pods that spawned enemies in, now they just prevent them, meaning that instead of getting near, blowing them up and then making a retreat is no longer and option. You have to get up there, get on top of them and keep pressing. I'm unsure if I like this. Since your frame can only handle so many packets shooting around it, if you over step your energy consumption the ammo used to supress an emitter could potentially go down. Sometimes huge pushes can cost you a lot of energy and I can see this biting me in the arse at some point, I'll be concentrating on the frontlines and part of what I'd conquered will manage to break free. The Creeper itself remains largely in tact. The goo has a certain viscosity and predictability to it that it's easy to plan ahead, cut it off and generally keep in check. The new 3D aspect of it and proper fluid dynamics are amazing, especially when the harder corrupted goo comes into play. This is kind of hard to describe, but imagine you have a rice pudding with a dollop of jam in it, and you keep scooping the edge of the rice pudding, then the jam slowly spreads in the direction you're scooping from. The corrupted creeper moves in a similar way, it doesn't really flow on its own like the standard creeper will, but it will dynamically fill in where any creeper has been shot out, which means it ends up on the frontlines unless you change tact. I really like this. I talked about the air units, or spores as they're called in the game. These have had a serious buff as well, as predictable as the creeper is as it lurches forwards and fills in the terrain, the spores have caught me off guard a few times. Sometimes it's placed a shot in the middle of nowhere on it's own turf, but then the ripple in the liquid it's caused has washed over my defences in ways I would not have expected, either through pushing through someone where that's poorly defenced, or over a ridge you thought you'd taken care of. It might only be a bit of liquid that pours over, but if it hits a turret and that goes down, or it hits the framework of your system and starts altering the packet travel, then it can cause issues that you weren't prepared for. Overall I'm liking the game. I am about half way through the campaign now, but there's loads of stuff I've not seen yet that was in the previous game, for instance there's a unit called a TERP that allows you to alter the level of the landscape, meaning you can control the flow of the creeper, or make yourself high ground top attack from safely. Having seen the design philosophy behind that tactic though, I bet there's something implemented in to prevent you from cheesing like that. I don't know, I guess we'll see.

Well, this was surprising. Coming from the people that brought us the god-awful Rambo game, and having pretty much zero hype, I wasn’t expecting much. But this was actually alright. Certainly the best Terminator game in years, though that’s not saying much. Combat wise it’s pretty decent, though it’s a bit annoying that Terminators more or less insta-kill you, and your weapons do absolutely no damage to them. Thankfully the next level gives you a plasma rifle, so it’s payback time. There are Telltale style conversation choices, that affect the ending. Though not dramatically so. Still, the writing is decent, and the voice acting is good. It’s not massively long, I played most of it last night, and finished it this afternoon. But I had fun while doing so. It was certainly worth a rental.

This is glorious. I'm playing at 60fps for the first time in a Horizon game and it is spectacular. It still looks wonderful in performance mode, and the boost in framerate has made this series feel even better. I've done a couple of the showcase events which have been awesome, a barn find and some of each event. I'm currently playing in Spring and I am loving the differences between seasons. I joined the Giant Bomb club and am seeing other people from the club in my game which is cool. This is game of the year material for me, and could well end up being my favourite driving game of all time. It has everything.

Singleplayer first mission done and will admit its just as much fun as before, I love a bit of gears and thi has cheered me up! Graphically its better but not sure how much better tbh, can't play too much as other half wants to play it. Am i right in thinking all the other gears games will work off the xb1 as well now?

I’ve been keeping an eye on this as I’ve loved the look of it. Anything with an anthropomorphic duck is already a winner. It’s basically a free-flowing X-Com. You move about the land finding loot and you can either sneak past enemies or engage in them using the X-Com battle system. It’s based off a table top game but this is the first I’ve heard of it. The setting is post apocalypse but all the humans are long since dead and referred to as “the ancients” and you play as mutants. I’m only early in so there’s two in my squad but I know you get at least 3 of you roaming around the battlefield at some point. It’s good so far but meant to be very hard so I went for the easiest setting as I’ll probably never finish it regardless. The GB quick look sold it to me, but I got it via GamePass either way.

The campaign is satisfying. It has you in nice big areas with lots of stuff to jump around, and you just feel urged on to test it out in the fights and see what you can actually get away with. I've been kinda impressed with the platforming in the campaign generally. There was a point in a sewer area / factory place that even seemed to dial back the sign posting quite a bit and climbing the area felt like you weren't meant to be there, but you were. That surprised me, and in a way puts it above the original Mirror's Edge in a way. The production values in the campaign are higher than I was expecting as well; there have been some really cool set pieces. There is a bit in an assembly line that assembles sections of town. It's big and stupid and amazing. I did play a little multiplayer too and I'm liking it a lot. There is so much nuance to how you can play. I'm at the point where I could be doing well but not really knowing why it's going well until I play the next game where I can't seem to do anything right; so I'm still figuring out what I'm doing, but I'm mostly having fun. A good way to vent frustration is just to grapple something and see how fast you can get back into the action. It's great, anyway. I'm using the Tome mech online as it seems to be the one for people who can shoot.