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This has been in early access for ages, but it finally came out at the end of last week. It's a modern take on Streets of Rage, I'd include Final Fight in there too but it really does focus on Sega's game. It's 3d with 2d layering, I think, it's not quite as snappy as an old 2d fighter, you can get locked in combos a bit, but it's better than a straight 3d fighter for that sort of stuff. It has special moves like SOR2, forward A, A with no direction, these damage you slightly when you use them. There's a super move, like the first Streets of Rage game that kind of acts as a screen clearing attack, and a rage meter where when triggered you do double damage, seem to have increased speed, and automatically block incoming attacks. There's a combo system that helps makes thing a bit less rote. You have punch and kick attacks, alternating between them means you can continue your combo beyond the point it should have ended. You have the same grab attacks as Streets of Rage 2, including the ability to leap over the enemy to do a more powerful reverse throw. There's a forward forward punch (or kick) move too, but these are a lot less useful than the ground upper. The levels are fairly lengthy, with multiple stages making up a set of levels. There's a few different enemy types but you start to get very familiar with them very quickly. They do mix up the levels, so far I've seen a Streets of Rage 3 style digger level, and a in to the screen shoot em up style stage. There's currently no online multiplayer that I can see, but there's local multiplayer, I'm not sure if it's just 2 player or not. It plays fairly well, it's easy to get surrounded and ganged up on. That's where the few frames of locked animation become a problem, you can't cancel out and do your area special attack, nor can you do enough damage to knock back enemies by shifting direction. You don't have a specified reverse attack, and if you did it would be the button combination to trigger your rage. Which is a problem itself, mashing out combos can lead to you accidentally triggering your rage and burning it when you didn't need to. Aside from that it just feels a little mushy or laggy. The button layout on a Duel Shock isn't great either, finding jump or special feels harder than it should be considering there's only 4 buttons. It's decent though, better than a lot of similar brawlers. Oh, one final gripe, the story, dialogue and acting are pretty horrendous. Plus the character model of the Blaze stand in is a bit tasteless. It actually wouldn't be so bad if it was just in game, but seeing her sexualised shape in a half open ultra tight leather catsuit gives it a tone I don't think they were going for, but then the problem with the story is that it has a nasty try-hard edge to it, so it's either the same problem or deliberate

I've just been playing Grid Autosport. For some reason, my Steam copy unlocked early, but who am I to complain? Anyway, I'll write a better write-up later, but I can say right now, GRID IS BACK!!!!! Gone are the shoddy driving physics of Grid 2 (It doesn't matter what you drive in what event, it'll drive like Ridge Racer). This thing drives just great. I've only done a small season of Touring, and a few Street races so far, but I'm hooked. There are five styles of driving on offer here. They are Touring, Endurance, Open Cockpit, Custom, and Street. Touring is (of course) Touring cars. Endurance is the longer races where tyres, and pit strategy matter a lot. Open Cockpit is the single seat race cars, sort of like Formula 3. Custom is the loud brash street car events, such as Drift. And Street is racing on city streets in everything from Hot Hatches, to Super Cars. The game is much more simulation orientated, although not full sim, and it can be toned down for more novice players. It has a level up system which can be accelerated by turning off driver aids, and flashbacks. Driving with full damage turned on can leave you struggling to control a car after a nasty bump. In the Touring races, it has an interesting penalty system if you cut the corners, whether it's on purpose, or if you're shoved over by another car. The game cuts power to your car for a second or so, with a longer pause it you're taking the piss. I thought it cool.

yeah so this is insanely good. i mean it's always looked ace from the videos of the pc version which i was well jelly of. but now it's out on psvr so i've been playing it the last few nights, only stopping because my arms/legs need a break. so imagine you're darth vader or some other dude with light sabers, and you're listening to some banging tunes, and there are blocks flying towards you. obviously you smash the blocks with your light sabers - and that's the game. it's a rhythm action game so the blocks come at you in time with the music. you slice the blocks up in the direction indicated by the arrow, and with the hand indicated by the colour of the block/light saber. the scoring is based mainly on how big/exaggerated your swing is, and a little bit on how well you hit the block in the centre. doing big swings goes out of the window pretty quick as the difficulty ramps up. the music is mostly, i don't know how to describe it (techno?/industrial?/dubstep? i'm rubish at categorising music), it's a bit like the music in aaero, and works really well with the game but it's not the sort of thing i'd listen to outside of a game. there's a campaign mode (exclusive to psvr for now iirc) with loads of different challenges/modifiers on the songs, beat a score, the song is faster, move your arms over a certain distance - which is really hard work. i was a bit worried about the moves not being as good as the pc equivalent but it's no problem, they work great. i'm still jellous of the pc version though as that can have custom/imported songs. it's VR only, but if you have a way of playing it i'd recommend giving it a go.

Couldn’t find a thread for these so I made a new one. I played a little over an hour of the first game, just as far as exploring Dobuita a little. Of course this is Japan in the 80s, so thirty years before the Japan I’ve experienced, but still so little has changed. Visually from the streets, the houses, the parks...this is what Japan is like. And the young children in the game that meet Ryo speak exactly like Japanese children do now. The scene with the girl and the kitten next to the shrine was very touching. So far so good! Playing the game on PC by the way, connected to my tv and using a wired controller. Resolution is 1920x1080 or something along those lines.

I was lucky enough to get into the Need for Speed closed beta on Friday, and after downloading it for what seemed like eternity the entirety of Friday I finally managed to get on and give it a go yesterday, so here are some of my impressions. Before I begun the beta I actually hadn't seen too much of the new NFS, I'd seen a gameplay walkthrough from E3 that looked a lot like Underground and Carbon, and personally didn't look that interesting, but some of the recent trailers stirred my interest and I was considering a purchase even before I begun the beta. So I played roughly 3 hours of the Beta yesterday afternoon, the first thing you notice is the graphics, they are just truly astounding, the game looks exactly like the footage EA have put out pre-release and it runs at a buttery smooth 30fps, obviously 60 would be better, but it seemed like a smooth 30fps with no dips at all, pretty sure it was running in 1080 as well, on PS4 at least, no idea about the Xbone. The visual style and pretty much everything about the game screams NFS:Underground, I know they didn't call it NFS: Underground 3 for whatever reason, but it might as well be, the neon lights, the drum-n-bass, dub-step, trance, hip-hop, rock, electro inspired soundtrack coupled with the glitzy neon streets, deep car customisation and the perpetual night all screams Underground to me and it is pretty much NFS:U3 whatever EA want you to believe, which is no bad thing, the visual style is amazing, it almost feels like you're in a Fast & Furious film at times, screaming around the LA streets at night in some Japanese drift-machine, Ghost games have done a very good job with the Frostbite engine in recreating the 'NFS:Underground' style and vibe in the game. The car customisation is extremely deep and varied, it's pretty much Forza-level customisation, you can seemingly change every panel on your car for visual customisations from spoilers to body kits, side skirts, new rims, splitters, you name it you can tweak it pretty much, and this is coupled with the extensive performance customisations which means you can upgrade your cars performance in a ridiculous amount of ways from upgrading the ECU, Spark Plugs, Exhaust system, Nitrous, Fuel Injectors, Tyres, Suspension, pretty much anything you can think of, it's extremely extensive and it is very intuitive, I spent quite a while just messing around upgrading my car with new bits and pieces, putting on new decals and colouring my Rims differently, it is pretty addictive and I'm sure when this comes out a lot of gamers will spend a lot of time creating fantastic paint jobs akin to those found in the Forza series. The game looks amazing, that's in no doubt, and it'll probably be even more polished than it already is when it's released later this month, but apart from that I didn't really have a wholly positive experience with the game, the live-action cutscenes can get in the way a lot of time, not sure if you could skip them or not, but they seemed to go on far longer than they should've and ruined the flow of the game somewhat for me at times, although the acting wasn't as bad as I expected, I mean it's bad, sure, but it's not quite Diana bad. The other things that grated with me are how empty the city felt, 'Ventura Bay' just didn't really feel alive at all, there's no pedestrians knocking about, and there's just not that many AI and Human cars around either, not sure what the size server size is but it felt like you'd only be on the same map with 3/4 other Human drivers tops, not incredibly impressive really, although I did like the ability to press R1 and start a race with a random other human racer whenever you wanted to, although this is nothing new to be honest. Mission variety also seems a bit of a failure really, admittedly I'm still very early in on what I'd imagine will be a 20-40 hour game, but all the missions so far have been: Sprint Races, Circuit Races, Drift Challenges, Drift Circuits and Drift Sprints, that is literally it, I have a feeling you'll be able to compete in Gymkhana events later on (as Ken Block's in the game) but at the moment the variety is pretty woeful and I was already getting a bit bored of the lack of variety in the missions. The biggest issue though is the car handling, you can adjust the car handling between 'drift' and 'grip' in the car customisation options, the default setting was right in the middle of the two extremes, and until you get used to it, the car just jerks all over the place, you seem to slow down far too quickly, and you seem to be able to throw the car around quicker than you'd imagine, there just isn't much weight to the handling, it feels overly sensitive and jerky. I did get used to it towards the end of my 3 hours with the game, and was able to pull of some nice drifts and stuff but there is quite a learning curve it seems to me, maybe adjusting the grip would make things better, but I didn't try that so I'm not sure. In conclusion, NFS has definitely got bags of potential, it feels like the most polished and accomplished NFS game I've played it a long time, and I hope it delivers on that potential. I just hope that the mission variety is there to keep people wanting to play and Ghost manage to tweak the handling a little, because, without it, I feel many will give up at around the 10 hour mark. Definitely one to look out for, but at the moment I'm still going to wait for reviews rather than pre-ordering.

This is a little known indie RPG from a couple of years ago that has a 16bit JRPG style. On the surface it pulls a lot of inspiration from Chrono Trigger with regards to its battle system, but instead it has a sci-fi setting where you play as a team of future spies. It has been good so far. Well, the story I'm a bit unsure about. Maybe it just needs some time to pick up but currently it has a dodgy mix of some regular sci-fi and a Saturday Morning Cartoon, but in a way that isn't quite working for me. I just want them to pick one so far. But I've been very impressed with the battle system and that's the star of the show here. You have basic moves, moves that can be used once until you've gone in a turn consuming defensive stance, the moves have a lot of different kinds of properties even early on. Every fight with basic enemies feels meaningful. JRPGs are often more of a marathon than a sprint, where you have to get from one place to the next, doing lots of simple fights and making sure you're prepared enough for it. Here, all of your health and abilities are restored after a fight so they're very self contained, puzzle-y things and don't shy away from making regular encounters feel like boss fights in another game like this. It's cool. It's very cheap on Switch as of now and if you want something to challenge your decision making in a JRPG style I think it's truly worth looking at.

I've been playing a bit of void Bastards. I really like it but it feels a bit strange and I don't feel like the game is going to be showing me anything new after only an hour or two. It sits in this weird spot between early access and full release, which I suppose is why they decided to go with gamepass since a full purchase is a big ask. The aesthetic is great, the world is fun, especially the northern Juves that run around swearing at you. Its just a very sparse idea for a game and hopefully they can expand on it and it's not just a quick cash grab since roguelikes are where the indie money is at the moment.

I thought there was a thread, there should be, Ape Out got a lot of coverage for a few days at release. It's a simple premise and a simple game. You're a captive ape and have to escape. Your captors are gun toting guards or various types, and you bound through the level smashing guards, grabbing them to use as shields, or flinging them into other people or walls. You can take 3 hits, every few sections you start a new level and get your health back. Killing the guards doesn't really do anything for you other than clear the way, there's nothing to stop you from just gunning it, which is what I tend to do and it probably does rob the game of something The thing that makes Ape Out stand out is the jazz soundtrack which is tied to what's going on in the game, and the old European cartoon look. It's a cool game. The problem is that there's not a huge amount to it. I like it but you're getting as much from it on disc 1 as you are on disc 3. You get new enemies and the challenge they throw at you changes, but it still amounts to you grabbing and splatting. For example, the game introduces enemies who smash through windows wearing body armour, they're more dangerous and more useful as weapons, but they still die from being twatted about by a gorilla

Ok. So, this game is awful. Sorry, but it is. I’ve loved the Contra series for a long time, ever since I started with the awesome Super Probotector (aka Contra 3) on the SNES. This is absolutely one of the worst entries to the series. Graphically it’s nothing special. I’ve seen worse, sure. But considering we’re at the end of this generation, it’s nothing to write home about. The effect where an enemy gets thrown into the screen, Turtles in Time style, is pretty laughable. The overheat mechanic is terrible. Your main weapon overheats in a matter of seconds, unless you hold off from keeping the fire button held down. Your secondary weapon is usually more powerful, but that overheats even faster. There’s quite often a ton of enemies on screen. So your natural reaction is to try to shoot them all. Except you can’t, because your bloody weapon overheats. Leaving you frantically rolling around, waiting a good 8 seconds before you can fight back. Within a few levels, content gets recycled. Hope you like seeing the same bosses and mini-bosses, over and over again. There is a store where you can buy upgrades, but it’s absolutely baffling. Huge amounts of stuff to buy, with not much indication of what it actually does. All of which cost an obscene level of cash to buy anyway. Oh, and if you die in a mission, none of the cash you earned gets kept. So that’s fun. You can’t pause a mission. At all. Even on your own. So you’d better not need a piss, or anything better to do for a good 30-40 minutes. To top it all off, it’s just bloody boring. The whole appeal of Contra is running and gunning your way through waves of enemies. Here, the overheat mechanic completely and utterly ruins the flow of the game. Reviews are tearing this game a new arsehole because of it. And they are absolutely right to do so. It adds nothing to the gameplay, instead it restricts you. Oh, and the spread gun? One of the most iconic weapons in the series. Here, it’s a temporary power up that you get to use for about 5 seconds. If you even find it at all in a level. Utter shite.

So. Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force. Brought to you by the geniuses behind the Mega/HyperDimension Neptunia series, it's a medieval JRPG for the ages. Ok. It's not. It's a bit of a pervy game wrapped in a lovely little Dark Ages anime art style. @Sly Reflex was asking me about it last night, and the only answer I really had was that it's inoffensive. Which I then immediately clarified by saying the GAMEPLAY is inoffensive. The story itself just seems to be an excuse to get questionably aged female characters into questionable states of undress. One character in particular, Harley (who thankfully, looks of age), has a particular comfort with herself, so gets herself into situations like this... Anyway, I've just discovered this game is a remake of a 2013 PS3 game. It uses a modified version of the Neptunia battle system, so it's a turn-based JRPG. You have a circular battle arena and your characters make their moves, then the enemy makes theirs (obviously depending on speed levels). When it's your turn, each character gets an area they can cover, where they have to get close enough to an enemy to make an attack. Or far enough away if you're defending/healing. It's easy enough to get to grips with, and as you progress they introduce more and more twists on the formula. You level up as per RPG rules, then also gain a kind of ability points that allows you to increase your attack, defence, movement and attack range, as well as the amount of physical attacks you can do in a combo. It's a nice idea and lets you personalise each fighter to your play style. The story involves finding swords - known as Furies - and using them to release the Goddess. Well, in my story that's what's happening. You can also release this other dude - he's a bad guy - or there's a third option. I'm not sure if you can release both or what. I assume so. A few other systems are in place, but that's the main gist of the important stuff. After about 10 hours of gameplay I'm around level 10-12 and have 4 characters in my party - Fang (the main character), Tiara, Harley and Galdo. All 4 have three hits in their combo, I've unlocked a few extra moves for all of them, and they all have a Fairy giving them benefits/bonuses. It's good. Not great. But there's enough there - besides the perviness - that's keeping me playing, so i'll carry on at some point this weekend.

Steamworld Heist is a game that’s out on everything. It was initially released on 3DS in 2015, and I’ve played it for a couple of hours on Switch. It’s a fun turn-based space faring rpg with an eye-catching visual style. Battles take place inside ships and the ship layouts are randomised. Missions are selected from a node-based map. I’ve been playing on the default “Experienced” difficulty and it seems like a reasonable challenge. I’ve had a couple of characters die during missions. When a character dies they don’t receive experience for that mission but they are resurrected when the mission is over. The game has all the features that you would expect from the genre - special abilities, equipment, loot, new characters to recruit - but it’s the visual style and the ricocheting of bullets (as you can see in the picture) that makes it unique and fun.

Had a bit of a play on Torchlight II. It's really nice, although playing with a mouse feels well oldskool. Reminds me of the Diablo days where I'd wear mice out by clicking them over and over picking up the lewts. I went with the punchy guy, although I might just start toons with all the characters and play the game through. It depends how long the legs are on the game, I got fed up after about 100 floors down in the random generated floors of the original on 360.

Dunno how many of you are waiting for this one but hey ho. It plays like those old western RPGs I never played. Get job, go to place, kill baddie tell job giver. Or maybe collect plants and take them back to some dude. Fighting is done in the style of a FPS, its not like Fallout 3 though, this does actually feel like one, all the stat stuff behind the scenes is there but you don't notice or consider it mid battle like you may on Fallout 3. The AI is bollocks compared to what we have come acustomed to, missions and dialogue are given out in soulless text like it is in Marrowind and despite the great artwork it still feels far too brown. So why couldn't I put it down for hours? I'm not sure yet, I think its the looting aspect and the weapon collecting, because of the randomly generated weapons I'd keep exploring the area to find something rare and useful that I could show off when I do end up online. It is a stupid thing to be driven by but I'm loving all these juicy stats. Haven't tride the co-op yet, will do that around its general release.

Was the thread for this deleted? I feel like there was one... Anyway I played a good chunk of this before I went home last Christmas. I booted it up today and continued where I left off, which led to me restoring the colour yellow to the world. And then I played on a bit more after that. According to my Switch profile I’ve played it for “more than three hours” so I’m probably near the end. The selling point of the game is the beautiful art and music but I’d forgotten how enjoyable the game’s gentle puzzles are to solve. You could describe the game as being style over substance, which it probably is, but I feel like the gameplay foundations of the game are pretty solid.

Bit of a strange one, it seems a little like Wolfenstein's gameplay in a service game. It's not quite as punchy, the guns, particularly the shotgun, feel weaker. Enemies have levels, so far they've been low enough that the fodder have been easy to kill, but there's also some that have armour, and the boss took ages I really like the two girls, they're funny, we'll see where it goes but I'd be up for giving them another game.

Just played the PC demo and its fucking intense to say the least but it's also very nice looking and the guns feel about right. I know this was beta tested on the 360 did anyone play it? is the XBL demo out yet to try?

Preloaded this yesterday evening on Steam and it unlocked last night but only got round to playing it this evening for 3 hours. Before I get into some impressions I just want to note how poorly optimised it is, there's hundreds of reports on GAF, Reddit etc. of people with Titan X's and 980 Ti's struggling to run the game. Now, considering this is only slightly better looking than XCOM:EU, and is no Star Citizen in looks, it's a huge surprise that these Monster rigs can't achieve 1080/60 on it with Ultra settings. I couldn't achieve 1080/60 either on my rig (970, i7) at Ultra, and had to drop it down to the High preset. This still wasn't enough and I had to put the AA on FXAA, DOF to Simple, Medium Shadow Quality, Tile AO, static Decals to get it to the 1080/60 sweetspot, and even then in Cut scenes it drops to 30FPS. Technical details out the way, the game is bloody impressive so far I must say, I've already had a far better time with it that XCOM:EU and many other Strategy games I've tried to get into in the past. It felt to me like you were thrown in at the deep end with EU and you were just expected to work out the systems for yourself and the way the game works after the brief tutorial, but this is far FAR better at getting new players introduced to the game. Won't spoil it, but the opening mission is central and key to setting up the story, it has a really cool Guerilla, backs-against-the-wall, Resistance/terrorist cell angle to it and gets you right into the thick of the action and the story right away. Just from that first mission you feel under pressure to succeed and in a desperate situation and the game builds off this and expands on this theme from what I've experienced thus far. Once you've got acclimatised to the mission mechanics the game methodically introduces you to all the bits and pieces you can do at your base by highlighting certain things you should be doing and locking off other things that are best left til latter, it means you're not bamboozled by all the choice on offer as a Newbie and aren't afraid you've made the wrong decision already somewhere down the line. Its much more cinematic than I thought it would be as well, I've encountered a lot of cinematic cut scenes already and I'm only 3 hours in. The missions have been great so far, barely out of the tutorial stuff really but the first 'proper' mission I did I managed to successfully set up an ambush on the Aliens using the new Concealment mechanic and Overwatch, it felt fucking awesome. The next Mission I did pretty well as well, but lost 1 soldier, then came the arse-kicking mission... Had to escort a VIP to the EVAC point and extract them nbuut right at the start of the mission a Sectoid appeared, mind controlled my most advanced Soldier and I just couldn't really deal with it at all, they proceeded to wipe out the entirety of the rest of my team, reloaded and tried again to no avail so I reloaded back to before the mission begun and it loaded up a different mission. I was much more wary and careful of this new mission as I'd been owned the previous one. Made good progress on this one though, got the VIP from his cell, escorted him through the level to the evac point, just staying alive by the skin of many teeth. Then I realised I'd left one guy behind, and the evac point was surrounded by Aliens. Took a huge risk and just moved him along into the open, then on the second move I moved him to the evac point, it moved to the cinematic camera, one of the Aliens shot him using Overwatch which took his health down to 3, then another one too and I thought he was going to die, but the Alien missed and I managed to Evac everybody, when the mission ended it was so fucking satisfying, just absolute elation, and this is just on Easy! Thank fuck I didn't try it on a higher difficulty! So yeah, extremely positive first 3 hour impressions, hopefully get round to playing some more tomorrow.

Gato Roboto is a kind of miniature monochrome Metroidvania where you play as a cat who can hop in and out of a robot (and other machines). The cat itself is powerless and defenseless but can get to places where the robot can’t. Movement is very fast and compared to other games of the genre you’ll explore large areas of the map very quickly. I’m at 15% completion after one hour. So far it’s exactly what it looks like, plays very well and seems like excellent value for money.

Got my copy through the post today from Simply Games, after I finished installing it I dived straight into the Multiplayer, pretty good, incredibly addictive as always, and extremely similar to the beta a few months back, I'm nowhere near as good as I was in AW unfortunately, and have only had a handful of games where I've got a positive K/D ratio but I'm still enjoying it, was mostly playing Ground War (alternating between Safeguard, TDM and Domination). As I've got limited time for this before F4 on Tuesday I don't really know what to do in it, I was hoping to Prestige it by Tuesday but there's seemingly no 2XP so that'll be quite a difficult task, I've only levelled up to Level 10 in 3 hours so it'll take me another 20 hours at least to get anywhere near Level 55, so I may just pack it in and make a start on the campaign or try out a bit of Zombies. I briefly tried to start the campaign today, just as an experiment to see what happens on the matchmaking side, pleasingly it does have matchmaking in co-op which means I can play with randoms if needs be if/when I eventually get round to playing it.

Played 90 minutes or so myself and I've enjoyed it so far, already I can tell this is a really well made game that has had a lot of love and attention gone into it. The puzzles are pretty basic in nature, essentially a 2016 Snake-Light puzzle but with different elements that make them harder and harder such as having to pick up little squares on your way to the goal and having to control two snakes at the same time. They have grown quite challenging already and I've got stuck a couple of times already but persevered and eventually found a solution. The island itself, the atmosphere and the art style is where the game really shines, there's absolutely no tutorials, no hand-holding whatsoever and you're left to explore wherever you like and solve whatever puzzles you like. The game looks truly beautiful, like a 3D painting come to life. The Island feels purposefully bewildering, haunting, eery and mysterious and just ripe to explore, it definitely has that Skyrim sense of wonder to it, seeing something in the distance and thinking to yourself 'Ooh, I wonder what's up there' and then sauntering up to see what you find. Found a couple of the voice recordings too and they were both high brow philosophical quotes from famous scholars, scientists, philosophers from a bygone age. My only worry so far is the repetitious nature of the puzzles, but I've read they go more in depth the further you get into it so its not a major worry. Going to put another 90 minutes into it later tonight.

Diablo 3 had an open beta last weekend, a stress test for the servers, but there's was a decent amount of game to play through It's Diablo, point where you want to walk to, click on enemies to attack them, hit your hot keys when your specials are charged, pick up loot. I'm not sure why these games work, and I'm not sure why Diablo and Torchlight work better than Dungeon Siege. I only played as the barbarian, with these kind of games I tend to find I get swamped, so playing as the character best suited to close combat suits me, but he does seem a lot less interesting than some of the other characters. I will say, and I know it's very early in the game to make any sort of judgement (you play the first act), that it hasn't grabbed me as much as Torchlight did, but it's still enjoyable and hugely compulsive. It's quite easy too, apparently that's just how Diablo plays, and I certainly wouldn't want it to be too hard, but it was only on the boss fight that I had to use a health potion. The problems though, the game has to be connected to the net at all times. It doesn't matter if you're playing single player with no intention of ever taking it online, it needs to be connected to the net. And not just connected in a casual way, checking in every now and then, it seems to be virtually running the game from a server. What this means is that if the server is busy you get lag. Click on an enemy to attack and either you wont perform the action or you will and the enemy wont react for a second or so. You also get put back a few steps from time to time, like you've unsynched with the server and lose the last couple of seconds of play. There's also the obvious issue of this meaning you cant play the game if your net, or Blizzard's servers, go down. I think this is due to the auction house for loot that allows real world money purchases. I get that being offline runs the risk of people hacking the game and selling created weapons when they get online, but I'd happily take the option of never being allowed to sell stuff in exchange for being able to play offline. All this could change as it was a beta, and the lag might never be a problem again. Although I suspect the launch weekend could be a nightmare. Shame because the game itself is very good

Surprised I couldn't find a thread for this... It's been out a while and i'd eyed it up on other platforms but ever pulled the trigger, but finally bought it on the Switch and it's superb. It's a rogue-like where you keep pushing further through a dungeon, unlocking new equipment that makes your life easier for the next run with the big twist being that all movement has to be timed to music and monsters also have their own movement pattern to the beat. The soundtrack's superb as well. It has that 'one more go' factor, and it never feels unfair. I'm still pretty shit at it, and have only made it to the third area so far but it's still throwing numerous surprises at me even in the first few stages, and I can feel myself improving the more I play. It seems the perfect fit for the Switch - a game you can pick up and play for five minutes or a good long session.

Game is out now so it’s time for a new thread! Who is playing this/interested in playing this? I just downloaded it and will be getting started soon.

I'm amazed this isn't already on other platforms as it's been on pc for a bit and looks ideal for the Switch market. It's a Sonic inspired 2d platformer, Mega Drive style graphics and all. It plays quite a lot like the Sonic Mania Encore dlc, in that you play as Spark the Electric Jester (himself), then pick up power ups that change his moveset, with you being able to switch between a couple of them that you have in stock. Different outfits have different moves, Wind lets you double jump, float a bit, roll like Sonic, but the trade off is that the attacks are weaker and have no range. There's an archer outfit that can't double jump but has range and can attack in different directions If you played Freedom Planet it has the same feel as that, it's floaty in a way the Sonic games weren't, a bit loose to control, and enemies don't feel solid. It's not a huge criticism, but it doesn't feel as tight as classic Sonic which it's aping. I'm enjoying it though, I've been chipping away at it over the past 6 months, and I've put a bit more time in to it over the weekend to get it done. It's fun, not amazing, but deserves to have had a bit more attention that it's had

I was watching Review Roulette on Rock/Paper/Shotgun and this came up. It's a fairly simple game, and it's really short, but it's pretty funny and really well done. You're a skeleton of a pirate and have to escape from your cell, then from some other pirates, then track down some treasure. It's fairly basic stuff, lots of QTEs, some sneaking, nothing especially complicated and nothing you can't work out how to do pretty quick. The reason it's worth playing is that it's pretty funny, lots of sight gags like people giving a cool wave goodbye then tripping over something It's good, but it's really short. It's currently in the Steam sale, but the usual price of £5 is, not expensive, but only because it's well put together, I doubt there's an hour of game there. Either way it's cool, glad I played it, and I suspect it will come to other platforms eventually