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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.

It doesn't get more retro than a card game...right? Anyway, this is Blizzard's new big thing. It's a free collectible card game, with a Warcraft theme, currently in open beta. I've played the first three battles of the tutorial and I love it so far. It's not a trading card game, the only way you earn them is by winning battles. I'm going to play through the single-player and then head online, I can see this being addictive as hell.

I played through ADR1FT over the weekend. I've been meaning to play it for ages, it always looked really interesting, certainly very pretty. You're an astronaut in a destroyed space station trying to survive in your damaged space suit, it's surprisingly not a horror game despite it being a nice looking game set in space. Let me say first, it's a VR game too and I suspect its 10 times the experience in VR. Or it will make you really sick as you spin around in 0g. I think it'd be a cool experience to try though, the first person view with stuff floating past you would be pretty immersive. As it is I had a few problems with it. The way the story is presented, through audio logs and emails, comments through your helmet speakers, none of it went in when I was playing. Almost certainly I think VR would have gone some way to solve this, if only because of the earphones. I picked up on the state of the station being someone else's fault, guy was a real jerk, but beyond that nothing else landed. The gameplay is you floating around trying to keep your oxygen topped up (not difficult), while following the breadcrumb trail to the next objective. There's very little else to it, no puzzles. Still though, I managed to lose where my next objective was a couple of times, found it easier to just turn the game off and start back from a checkpoint the next day It's not all I hoped it would be, maybe on another day, or even with headphones, I'd have clicked with it, and I do think it'd be a better game in VR

So it’s a rally game, it’s very much like the first dirt rally, it’s pretty difficult, mainly because of the narrow roads. Was as thinking maybe it’s a bit easier than the first game, then did a stage in a rear wheel drive car, in the rain at night. It’s still really hard. the handling seems really good, bit better than the first one maybe, but I’ve only played with the slow cars and a rear wheel drive car, which I didn’t use much in the first game so hard to tell yet. Initial impressions of the pace notes are pretty good. the force feedback is alright, not great, the fun rumbling effects are missing it seems, but the important grip/handling info is there, if a bit weak. Hopefully this will be improved. Not played either game much with a pad but the first seemed really difficult, this seemed much better. Graphics are are pretty good, even on my old pc, nice foliage, nice weather effects. On one hand I’m not too keen on the 2.0 thing, but on the other hand it’s a nod to one of the best games ever so I’ll let it pass. theres also Rallycross, I sort of don’t care about this so will only try it when I’ve run out of rallying to do. so yeah it’s really good, if you like sort of realistic rally games with narrow tracks that are really difficult, this is the game for you! oh yeah it’s out Tuesday unless you buy the fancy version, I sort of don’t like it when they do that, and wasn’t really bothered about getting it early, but wanted the souped up dirt 1 dlc tracksthat come with it, and the price for the pc version was not so bad.

Played 2 hours of this so far. You play as a 20 year old girl (well, a cat, all the characters in the game are animals) who has dropped out of college and come back to her home town. The developers of Night in the Woods made a couple of short supplementary games called Longest Night and Lost Constellation. I played both of them before playing this, neither of them is particularly good (especially the slightly longer game, Lost Constellation) but they're probably just about worth playing. Essentially, Night in the Woods is a conversation 'em up (I guess they call them narrative adventures). It's not a game about choices though (not from what I've played). You walk around Possum Springs and talk to the people who live there, they always have something new to say every day. But as you may have seen from the trailers, you don't just walk around on street level, you can also jump up on rooftops and telephone wires and explore the higher up areas on each street. Exploration is side-scrolling, a little bit like South Park: The Stick of Truth. The game also reminds me of Life is Strange. As is par for the course, the game looks and sounds beautiful. The game really does look great though. The environment is full of little details, and I love the characters faces. Like the way Mae's eyes move when she jumps. And as well as music, the game has lots of really good sound effects like the twang when you jump on a telephone wire or the clatter if you jump on a rubbish bin. One thing I read about this game is that Mae is a 20 year old who talks like a 12 year old and I agree so far. She and her friends all talk like children, in that kind of American deadpan way. I wouldn't say I can relate to the way she talks. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying the game, and enjoying the story.

I've dropped the 'Episode 1' from the title because by the looks of things, because the game has done so well, development has been restarted, and rather than come out as 3 episodes it's all being done as one longer (still short) game. It's still in Early Access, and what's there is really short (about an hour), but it's an impressive little game and I can see why there was so much hype around it. It's an fps with powers, you can grapple to enemies, fire a pulse that launches enemies in to the air, then use your laser sword thing to do huge amounts of damage to the prone enemies. There's more moves to unlock, and to improve what's there, including time freezing, and the ability to stay in the air while you're doing damage. This is important because all this is set to a Devil May Cry style scoring system, chain moves and mix things up and you'll get more rewards. It was supposedly made by one person, more or less, and given that it's remarkable, it looks good, runs well, and has good ideas. I have had to redo a checkpoint because the scripting broke, I think an enemy didn't spawn, either way I couldn't progress. I bought it months back when it was on sale, I might say at this point you might as well wait for the real game to come out. Granted that could be years, and if you're getting the full game for the price of this one then why not, but it might be worth waiting to see what this turns in to

I finally got around to playing the copy someone bought me. Initial impressions are it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it's not particularly great either. It is early access, so things might change. So what is Phasmophobia? It's a 4 player co-op game where you go ghost hunting. You get given equipment to gather evidence about the ghost you're looking for, with each bit of info narrowing down the possible suspects. If you manage to claim three bits of evidence, you've narrowed it down to one suspect. Each bit of equipment allows you to open up the possible discoveries of what type of ghost you're looking for. For instance the black light can show fingerprints. The thermometer can show freezing temperatures. The book can show ghost writing. The idea is you go and set up all the stuff, figure out where the ghost is and then use the process of elimination to decipher which type of spook you're dealing with before leaving the level. You can gain extra level up XP and cash by providing extra evidence such as photos of the ghost or any of its doings. On top of this you have a mental level that degrades as you spend time investigating. As this lowers you're more likely to be targeted by the ghost. Once you reach a certain point the ghost will start attacking you, at which point you have to hide to avoid being killed. The good points. The chat is really well done. You have two keys that allow you to chat with the party. One is a proximity chat and the other is the radio chat. Proxy chat cannot be interfered with, but radios can. When a ghost has had enough of your shit, your torch, the buildings electric and your coms go down or spike in and out, when you're trapped in with a ghost and you're trying to tell your friends to get the fuck out, this is pretty intense. There was one moment where I was being stalked and the others had left the building in time, but each time they tried to contact me all I received was radio static, and listening to them try to give advice by shouting through the walls while everything kicked off was really excellent. In a time where everything is party chat and discord, this game makes you want to play with the games lobby VoIP, just because it's proper grand. The build up is genuinely spooky. Pinning down where the apparition is goes from being quite boring to getting quite tense. They nailed this. The bad points. Man, where do I start here? There's so many. The sound. Although the proximity voice stuff is really nice, the sound mixing in this game is atrocious. It's clear that the people involved in making this game have no idea how sound works, as soon as you walk into the premises it's like wearing a bucket over your head. The sound is laid on so thick it feels like I'm swimming underwater. It's really hard to decipher where sounds are coming from when you have tracked down a ghost, you can hear footsteps or knocks but the direction of which they originate is just impossible to pin down. I have no idea if this is a purposeful choice, but it's really bad. It does instill panic when a ghost hisses or shouts at you and you don't know which way to run since you could be running to or from it without really knowing where to go. It's just crap. Needs improvement across the board. The looks. Usually I'm not into ripping on games for looks, as long as they offer something interesting, but this very much looks like one of those asset flip games Jim Sterling likes to wank off to. The player characters aren't great, but the way they move is super fucked. They walk like they're holding in an explosive bout of diarrhea. It really takes away from it when you're investigating this house and it's knocking and bumping, then a player limbos and hip thrusts across the screen. It's a real immersion breaker. The ghost themselves are terrifying when you only see them for a split second, but when they go on the hunt to kill people they look so shite. They're ghosts ffs, make them do scary stuff. Make them twist and contort, make them walk up the walls, make them glitch about and make the house go mad by slamming the doors over and over and flicking the lights on and off. Making them strut around the house menacingly and maybe strangle someone isn't enough. I laughed at the first one I saw and subsequently at everyone I saw hunt after this. Talking to the ghost feels like a huge gimmick. There's only so many times you can say "Is anybody there?" and "Can you show me a sign?", it feels like a huge waste of time. This could potentially be a great feature, but it's just so hit and miss right now. GUI and controls. Wow are these terrible. Truly. GUI is quite possibly the bare minimum they could have done. It sort of reminds me of those times where you are in a community centre or a hospital and there's those rip off big name drawings of Mickey Mouse or Fireman Sam done by out of touch adults with little to no art skills. It's awful. This shit cherry on the festering shitcake are the controls. Everything can be remapped, but the default keys are crazy. You have all these keys around WASD and you want me to press V and B for things that I need to be doing continuously? GTFO of here. All the things in the game are fiddly as fuck. Take your pick of interacting with stuff. It could be LMB, RMB, E, F or G. A lot of this could be sorted out by sitting down and just deciding to strip it right back, since there's really no need for this many keys. It's also so convoluted. If you pick up the torch, you can click to use it, but you can also press T to use the torch. But if you swap off a torch you need to press T again to put it back on, since the item you have in your hands overrides it. It feels like they've purposely gone out of their way to make it as janky as fuck. I know it's in early access, but this stuff really needs the rough edges filing off. Take all the unnecessary bits out and make the QoL things just standard. It also has that horrible hold the LMB to open doors thing going on, because that's never been annoying or cumbersome at all. I think the biggest thing gameplay wise is usually it all feels so anticlimactic. When you have got the evidence and you've narrowed it down to the specific type of ghost, you just leave. I do not feel like I resolved anything. I walked about a house, did a bit of hunting, found the room, set up, got the evidence, maybe ran away from the ghost and then left. There's no subduing the ghost or exorcising it, you just leave. As a premise it has room to grow into itself. Each ghost needs a personality it follows, each area should have things that can happen. Some ghosts need to be friendly, some ghosts need to be evasive, some ghosts need to be aggressive, some ghosts need to posture. As far as I can see none of this is in the game. There's no poltergeist that flings all the kitchen cupboard doors open and throws items about the house. There's no ghosts that bangs the tv on to give you a scare. From what I've seen there's no ghosts fighting against each other for domination of an abode. All this should be here. I want to see changes to a room when I leave it and come back. Imagine you're in the kids room and you leave it, then when you go back the ghost has built out of spelling blocks "help" or "mommy?"? As it is now I've seen a handful of different ghosts and they've all reacted exactly the same. Just over 1h played and I feel I've seen everything. Make the aggressive ghosts break your video feeds. They need to fuck about with you more without relying on the hunting phase. Sometimes the scariest thing is the thing that never comes. Like when your dad went out for cigarettes and never returned, or that time when you told your significant other you loved her and she changed the subject. With any luck, the dev's pile up the cash they've earned from this and reinvest it into a game we can truly point to and say "This is the best spooky game we've gotten in years", but as it is now it's nothing but a mildly diverting hollow promise.

Started this last night, I went in almost completely blind only knowing that it was set on a ship and was a puzzle game made by Papers Please creator, Lucas Pope. The first thing you notice is the visuals, it has an old school Macintosh look about it, you can change it to LCD, Commodore and other old school looking visual designs in the settings but I stuck with the original and it is incredibly cool. Quite migraine inducing though and a bit weird, definitely takes some getting used to but it gives the game such a unique vibe and style to it that I've never really experienced before. I am absolutely useless at Puzzle games so I knew I was going to get stuck a lot. I didn't know I was so useless at them that I'd spend the first twenty minutes aimlessly walking around the ship not knowing I'd had some equipment to pick up on the lifeboat before I could do anything though Once I got a book from the lifeboat things clicked into place. You have to study the whole book (the game pops up with a notification telling you so) to find out various bits of information like a sketch of the entire crew, a glossary of nautical terms, a crew manifest, a map of the ship and a load of blank chapters that have yet to be filled. Your job is to find out what happened to everyone aboard. After getting the book you get a compass with a skull symbol on the top. The book itself has a very dense, slow, real feel to it much like the various papers/passports/stamps you handle in Papers Please. Things are explained to you in a brief tutorial and information section in the book but it doesn't hold your hand at all and just lets you get on with it once you know that you're trying to find out the fate of everyone aboard the Obra Dinn and roughly know the ways that you go about that task. So essentially it's a murder mystery game. You walk up to a skeleton on the floor of the ship, hold your compass over it and a 'memory' will play out where you'll go back in time and see how that person died, with time completely frozen in the memory. Once in the memory you study details like weapons certain people are holding and faces to try to determine who they are and who they've killed, eventually marking in the book their fate once you've come to a conclusion. One scenario leads to another so you may find a skeleton which leads inside to another skeleton which unlocks another memory and so on until you've navigated through a stream of consciousness to fly through a whole scene and hopefully come up with a solution. One scene leads straight into another too so it's got a fantastic flow about it. It's a little bit obtuse though, similar to Papers Please. It can feel frustrating to not really know at all whether you got a guess right or not and just have to assume your deductions are correct despite it possibly affecting the next scene and the suspects/victims that may come out of that. All you know is whether you got a person's fate correct (at the moment I just have one person ticked off I believe) but don't know if you've got their identity, murder weapon etc. correct so it can interfere with others in a particular scene. The game starts from the end as well and goes back in time, so the first chapter is literally 'The End' and then you go back and find out how the fuck that all ended up happening. Early days but so far it's intriguing, obtuse, mysterious and incredibly compelling all at the same time. I do wish I wasn't so confused by everything as it does feel like I'm just being swept along without fully understanding everything but fingers crossed everything clicks into place after awhile. Definitely one of the most unique and innovative games I've played in a long time.

The follow up to the previous Ben and Dan games: 'Ben There, Dan That!' and 'Time Gentlemen, Please!' which as well being great for having punctuation in their titles, are also really good and very funny tributes to/pastiches of Lucasarts era point & click adventure games. This game is pretty different. It sets its sights on indie games in general, drawing from a wider range of influences. Ben is stubbornly sticking to his 90s point & click roots, and is all about looking at things and solving puzzles by combining items from his inventory (which is DEFINITELY not crafting!). Meanwhile, Dan wants to get with the times and be an indie platformer because that's what's cool these days. The result is a hybrid point & click/puzzle platformer, that surprisingly works very well. The game starts with the pair in Peru looking for a rare flower with the power to cure cancer, because, according to Ben, games about cancer automatically get respect no matter the quality. This is basically the tutorial, they get the flower and return to London to find something has caused the Apoclalypses (multiple apocalypses, not just one), trying to stop it is the main plot of the game. The writing and humour is by turns clever, silly, perceptive or biting as required, and works well for me as a fan of the previous games.

I've had a quick 10 minutes on this, so my thoughts will be brief. The game setting is quite unlike anything I've ever played. It's a 4 player co-op game where you are tasked in casing a job and carrying out a heist. However it doesn't play sneaky like you would expect it to. You basically set up covering as many angles as you can, and then when you are ready you pull your gun and begin being a nasty little shit. The game reminds me a lot of Left 4 Dead for some reason. Your team of people start out with 2 weapons but you can level up and rejig what you take with you. This includes ammo bags and medic stuff among other things. The events work similar to the events in Left 4 Dead but have more persistence. Instead of one event that you complete and pass, you are put into a play area where several events knock on to each other. While these events get deeper and deeper to the objective, the authorities will start to try and stop you from getting to them. Again, this reminds me of Left 4 Dead, security guards are hopeless and easily dealt with, police are harder and then swat and other stuff starts to show up, with each unit having a special niche similar to the Left 4 Dead special infected. A typical section will have you race to an objective, and then defend it against waves of swat before it being completed and moving onto the next part of the heist. It's not too hard to follow. The bad news for some is that I could find no controller support in game. I did a quick scan and found THIS, but I'm not sure how you configure it in. If you cannot get it to work it looks like you're stuck with KB+M controls. It's not so bad though, I'm no whiz and I did fine, there's a lot of leeway that should get you used to playing with those tools instead of a controller. I'm looking forward to playing it in a group, I bet it's a right laugh.

This hasn't reviewed amazingly, and while I loved Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon, I couldn't muster to energy to do the same stuff again in far Cry 4 and 5. In fact I booted up Far Cry 4 towards the end of last year because I wanted a nonsense fps to play, and I still couldn't. I ended up doing the pacifist ending, then booted it back up and ran about it bit, then realised I just couldn't be arsed For whatever reason the more I've seen of Far Cry New Dawn the more I've been interested in it. I think knowing that it's shorter is a big part of it, like I said I loved 3 but the amount of time I spent with it, doing the same routine over and over did start to drag by the final island, although at the time I put that down to me doing everything before moving the story on. New Dawn looks amazing, maybe a bit too amazing. I'm playing it on high settings (it can go to ultra) on a GTX 1080 at 1080p, and I still get framerate drops to 50 every now and then. It's less when there's lots of combat, more when I'm in dense woodland with lots of mist and fog. Which I mention because it is ridiculously dense, so dense I've been bitten by snakes I couldn't see, and have to rely on watching when and where my A.I. teammate starts screaming and where she's shooting at. I'm impressed with how it looks though, I had this pegged as a bit half-arsed, and granted it could be I didn't play 5, but the colour and the environments look great Gameplay wise it's kind of just Far Cry. It's not as reliant on taking back encampments as the old games, although there are still some, and there's no radio towers. You're still randomly getting attacked by animals, and there's still a skill tree, you're still playing good guys vs bad guys. Enemies take more damage before they go down than I remember, with some enemies having a 2nd health bar, possibly a 3rd but I've not seen that yet. You're kind of dumped out in to the open world pretty early, you have a story mission but it's far enough across the map that you can't help but do other things along the way. A lot of the side stuff involves you stopping trucks, be it for all important ethanol or less important humans, chasing them down isn't fun, being in the right place to stand in the road and shotgun the driver in the face is fun, that said I've not managed to get an ethanol truck yet. Beyond that, I've just been rescuing people by killing bad guys I'm really enjoying it though, played for hours tonight and I've still not got halfway to the first proper story mission. Before I go there I've got some treasure to find, an ally to recruit, then a bunch of buildings to kill everyone in, then I'll do the thing I've been asked to do

I've been playing this most of the day, to the point i had no idea it was so late! and a quick go when it came out friday night on steam. it's totally awesome to the max it's a 2D bullet hell shooter, it started out as a Japanese indie game, then made its way to arcades, and this steam version seems to be a port of the arcade version with some new features. the general idea is to shoot stuff and dodge stuff as usual, and the basic scoring system involves shooting stuff at close range (any shooting will build it up but just slower) to build up a boost meter, which has 2 levels, when the meter gets above a certain point you can use it as a bomb, and if the first level is maxed out you can go into boost mode where you have more firepower and get more points - there's also a second boost mode you can enter if you fill up the meter again (or filled up both levels in the first place), which i believe gets you more points still. i'm still not totally up on the scoring so there is more to it than that - there's also a lock shot button which can be used at the same time as normal shot, think this is supposed to be used for killing big enemies for scoring. going into boost is crazy, stars all over the screen to collect, mass destruction and bullets everywhere, and double boost mode is equally crazy, with more stars but less bullets as you'll be killing everything faster, but it doesn't last long. there's a boost mode which seems slightly easier, where you go into boost mode automatically and stay there till you bomb or die. there's loads of modes: novice - boost novice - original arcade - boost arcade - original arcade - unlimited? - can't remember exactly what its called but its a really really hard version of the game - like futari ultra or something. arcade - time attack - this is a new 3 mins stage - unlimited lives - get as many points as you can. i've tried all the modes now - managed to 1cc novice boost after 3 or 4 tries so it's maybe a bit too easy but that's the idea of the novice modes - it was still great fun. novice original - had a few goes and got near the end - will keep trying for the 1cc. the arcade modes are quite a lot harder, i struggle with the 2nd level boss - it might be a bit of a difficulty spike as stage 3 is alright imo. hopefully the hidden ship will help with arcade mode - there are 4 ships - i've still not unlocked the last one - apparently its overpowered so i look forward to giving it a try in the arcade modes. i am really enjoying it at the moment but i guess it might end up a bit like SDOJ where the novice modes fun but too easy to stick with long term but the main modes are too hard for me - too early to call this mind. the graphics and sound are generally great but the sprites are sometimes a bit blocky and dodgy looking - the explosions/bullets/gold stars/player shot in boost mode all look amazing, it's like a symphony of madness, colours and stuff everywhere. it's got online leaderboards and replay saving. i have had some problems getting it to run in the desired aspect ratio/screen size on my screen in full screen mode - easy way to avoid this is to play in windowed mode and stretch the window as desired. also it's currently under £5 on steam - i think this is an amazing bargain - probably a goty contender for me. http://store.steampowered.com/app/285440/?snr=1_7_15__13 anyone else playing this?/might pick it up? (you should ) also here is someone destroying the first stage making it look much easier than it actually is (maybe i should find a more standard player for a video demonstration but most videos are the old version at the moment), although the first stage is quite easy:

Anyone play this? I did it today with some ffxiv people. Basically you're a crew on a ship doing maintenance tasks and one/two/three of you are evil fuckers trying to kill the others either directly or through sabotage. The maintenance tasks being things like shooting rubbish out of the ship and taking care of disconnected wires, the sabotage being setting the reactor off or turning off the lights so other players can't easily detect suspicious fuckery. At any point a crew member can call together the crew and chat amongst each other who they suspect is the baddie. Then you shoot them out of the airlock Ripley style I am absolutely terrible at games like this due to having as much social grace as a donkey so trying to convince others I'm not an evil fucker is very difficult so my best strat is to just try to skillfully ninja as many dudes and kite them around the ship with sabotages cause as soon as we get on voice I'm basically already defeated lol. Apparently this is one of the biggest games in the world for some strange reason, think it's only PC and phones right now but you can play it on any old shit laptop. Maybe iPad works too I dunno. For context here is Limmy playing it I'm going to watch this to learn to git gud

I'm pretty sure this was free on Switch. There's a publisher on there that gives things free if you've bought their other games, so a couple of people on here might have this. I've got to say, it's worth paying for, it's a great little game. You play as a circle missing a slice who sets off on a journey to make themselves whole. The gameplay is simple, roll and jump. You eventually meet a stick who has never explored or experienced much who joins you, now you can stick to things. Eventually it becomes apparent that stick just wants to lay down roots and you're pushing them in to things they aren't wanting to do. So you break up, then you meet Moss who has no interest in a relationship and just wants comfort. Now you can only cling to things, you can't jump anymore. The game goes on like this, new people, new types of relationships, and new gameplay. It gets relatively heavy and does a good job of tieing its themes in to gameplay. It's way longer than I expected too, a good few hours. Genuinely one of the best things I've played on Switch this year

So it's star wars, and you fly around in various star was vehicles such as xwings and tie fighters, and you shoot bad guys (or good guys i guess). I'm a big fan of the old school tie fighter game (and xwing etc.) and this takes a lot of things from that - like the engine/lasers/shield power balancing thing, which i like, it adds a sort of mini management thing, you can divert power to any of these 3, choose engines to help evade missiles and charge a boost meter. lasers charges your lasers, and overcharges them added benefits which i'm not totally sure about (either you get to fire for longer or the laser is more powerful, not sure?). switching to shields charges your shields and can overcharge them. it sounds quite simple but i think it really adds to the game as you have to constantly switch between them depending on what's going on - i'm still getting used to it and the controls. there's more settings you can adjust shield power forwards/backwards and other stuff - that's too advanced for me at the moment. i've done 5 missions so far, 2 prologue ones and 3 missions, i'm still getting bits of tutorial, and still getting used to the controls and what all the lights and stuff on the dashboard mean. Ienjoying it so far but I'm not sure if i'm enjoying it because it's good, or because flying around in a xwing/tie fighter in VR is really cool, or maybe it's a bit of both. have only played in VR so far, there are some problems with it, maybe due to my old vr headset, but the graphics aren't great, except for the cockpit which looks great, but stuff like the other ships look pretty blocky and a bit blury. but it is super cool being there, being able to look around for other ships and flying through explosions (which also don't look great) and stuff. The targeting seems to work well too, and there are a lot of options i haven't got the hang of yet like targeting ships that are attacking you. but the default of cycling through current objectives works well - i played a bit of ace combat and had problems with the targeting, it seems to work much better here. you can also issue simple commands to team mates and stuff. multiplayer seems to be a big part of it but i'm not sure i'll play that mode or not. So yeah seems like it's pretty good so far, and even more recommended for VR.

Got this from boomerang, only played the first mission so far. Will see how it goes from here. Escaping the police when I fucked up was a right bastard. Can't even be arsed with Uplay anymore. Didn't load once on ACIV for me.

Deep Rock Galactic is a co-op game with classes in it. Nobody had all the tools to do everything, so being spread out over classes is preferable. There's a single player mode where you have a bot, but if you're buying this game to play solo, then you're not really getting the best out of it. I'd go as far as saying don't bother in that case, since you're getting a skimmed experience. What is the aim of the game? You play a space dwarf in a team of 4 that is tasked with dropping into procedurally generated levels armed with a shopping list of things to do, a primary objective and secondary objectives which result in a stacked payout. This is an over simplification, but it's as brief as I can keep it before it gets more complicated. Each class has its strengths ands weaknesses. I have been playing as the Gunner. The gunner has a minigun, a revolver, a gun for shooting ziplines, a shield generator and a sticky grenade. Really his job is to protect the other 3 with heavy firepower, not that the others can't defend themselves, it's that they have mining to do. The two people I have been playing with have been playing the Engineer and the Scout. The Engineer has a shotgun and a grenade launcher, as well as a turret that can be built for some automated defence. He also has a hologram which can be tossed to get the attention of enemies. The star of his arsenal is the platform gun, which shoots out a big looking pancake you can stand out. Think of Prey's gluegun and you're more or less right on with what this cane do. The Scout has an assault rifle, a shotty, a grappling hook, a powerful flare and a grenade that disrupts enemies. There's a nice synergy between the Engineer and Scout, since the Engineer can put a platform near ore that's out of reach, the Scout can then grapple up to this and then mine from the platform. There's a lot of stuff like this, any inadequacy one class has, and others can pick up the slack, but the symbiotic relationship has to have some balance to it. Finally we have the Driller. None of us have played this, but we have a 4th inbound that will end up filling this spot. I would like to give it a try as well, but it should be noticed that you can have more than 1 class of each if you want. You're not forced into playing anything you don't want, but having those nice synergies with the people classes in the lobby will make things go a bit smoother. This guy is equipped with a flamethrower, a pistol and throwing axes in place of grenades. He is also equipped with drills. Why drills? This is why. Everything in the game can be dug up. When I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING. We're talking levels built out of what the first Red Faction game was built on. Each player is equipped with regenerating flares (you are underground after all) and a pickaxe that you can use to terraform the maps and dig your way to victory, but pretty much everything in the game can cause the map to be blown up and pockmarked. Why would the maps be getting blown up and generally messed up? You think that it'd be as easy as going down there and taking what you want without any challenge? Nope, there are enemies that you must fend off, puzzles that you must work out to get the hard to reach ores and caverns that must be dug through to if you want to uncover all the spoils. While all this seems simple in practice, it can get rough. Sure the Scout might be able to get up the ledge, but the rest of the crew have to carve their way up, stalling progression. Digging through the dirt into the cavern you know is near you can be done by everyone, but it'd be much easier if the Driller just plows through it. Incoming enemies? Set up a defence and try not to get in the way of the Gunner as he cuts through enemies. It's one of those games where no matter what class you chose to pick, you feel needed, and you're always grateful for the classes there that can do the things you cannot. It also gets to a point where after a bit of playing you know what everyone is doing, even though all the levels are procedurally generated there's that groove of people just knowing how to react at specific times, grouping up in big fights and helping out with general mission stuff off those more pressing times. Speaking of missions, there's a lot of variation here. I mentioned elsewhere in the forum about Vermintide's puzzles where they are the same solution each time you play through them, which means repeated play through just force you through the same old motions. Not so here. There's one mission where you're tasked with going and retrieving a failed missions stuff. This means you go down and find the drop pod the previous mining expedition used, but you have to find their hopper, which is sort of a spider bucket that follows you around and is called a "M.U.L.E". We had to find them, sometimes they were buried, sometimes they were broken and needed repairing. We had to sort all that stuff out, then refuel their drop pod and defend it before escaping. Each refuel is different. It feels like a more refined attempted at the gauntlet stuff from Left 4 Dead or the puzzles from Vermintide, the next step in the evolution from those mechanics. It's dynamic and exciting, especially when the help they send down ends up in a place you were not expecting and you have to reshuffle to take advantage of it. Talking about the M.U.L.E.. You only get one per game, the idea being you mine or harvest the stuff you need, and when you get a spare moment or are full and cannot carry anymore, you call the M.U.L.E. (they call it all sorts of stuff in game, like pet nicknames for it), dump your load and carry on mining. Once the primary goal has been achieved, a button on the M.U.L.E. becomes operational and you can hammer it and make an escape. The bucket walks back to extraction leaving arrows on the ground for you to follow. You have 5 minutes to get back to the escape, at which point if you do not make it, you fail the mission. If someone makes it back, but some people don't, the people that failed to return get deducted rewards. It's kind of mad, because this escape can go so fucking wrong if you're not prepared for it. It's so easy to drop down a ledge that's impossible to get up quickly on the return leg, so having a quick plan in place for these situations is needed. The worst thing is getting to a room with a hole in the roof and the M.U.L.E. fucking off up the chimney and leaving you to quickly work out a plan before you're overwhelmed by enemies, or miss the countdown and get abandoned. It's exhilarating stuff as you rig together a stupid plan to get around it and come out smelling of roses. So what do you do with all the stuff you mine? You use it to level up your gear. There's a lot going on here, but you have an overall level, a class level for the four classes and the perks points for doing assignments. I'm not really understanding how half of these work since it's not really explained that well. There's different builds and stuff, for example would you rather have a minigun that spins up faster, or one that gets more accurate the faster it gets? There's also currency for a load of cosmetic stuff, so you can make your guy look just how you'd like if you're into that. There is one ore in game that acts as a currency out in the field. When you hit a certain amount you can call in a resupply, which is needed since you don't really get that much ammo. It's really easy to run dry if you're careless. Aside from that, all the other ores go to either making you money or upgrading your stuff. Overall it's really impressed me as a package. I don't think I've played a game that's quite like it 1:1, it seems to have borrowed from a load of places, but it still feels like a cohesive experience and I've jonesing to get back at it when my co-op buddies get back online. Also looking forwards to playing the other classes and seeing how they work from my own perspective. I am sure I've missed a load of stuff out while writing this up and I'll probably come back and top off in those areas. As it stands, I couldn't really recommend it enough as long as you have people to play with. From the handful of hours I've played I've enjoyed every minute of it, I think it's been ace. I hope it ends up coming out on consoles so it can grab a bit more recognition from the wider gaming community. It's a game that deserves it.