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Just by typing the title I realised they could just have dropped the "2" from it, nobody played the first one anyway unfortunately and it would look nicer visually. Anyway - I've finally started playing this over the weekend. Due to certain circumstances I didn't get as much time with it as I had hoped (see here), but I did manage to finish the prologue of sorts which takes about 5 hours. Lots of good things here with few negative stuff, but overall so far it's pretty much exactly what I would have wanted from a sequel. Fundamentally it's still Monster Hunter x Pokémon, meaning you gotta breed them all by collecting and hatching monsters from eggs. Those monsters will then accompany you on your travels and both help for traversal on the map due to their faster running speed or other special skills (jumping, cimbing, swimming etc.) and during combat. During combat you only have limited control over them, but each has its own tendencies, so switching between them depending on the enemy is the way to go. The basics of combat being rock-paper-scissors haven't changed, so you still use this feature to build up the Kinship Gauge, which is basically a mana pool that allows you to use skills and command your monster more directly by letting it use special moves as well. New to Wings of Ruin are weapon classes. In the first game your weapon only influenced the skills you could use as your character was more of a support for your monster, but this time you play a more virtal role and can target weaknesses with a weapon type that is particularly effective. An early example is smashing the rock a monster uses for a weapon with the hammer, or cutting its tail with a greatsword. Outside of combat it's a classic JRPG experience with semi-big HUB areas, quests, treasure chests and such. One thing I have mixed feelings about is the NPC partner that's with you most of the time during these initial 5 hours. I don't have anything against the character and she's certainly easy on the eyes, but it takes away from the feeling of it being a solitary adventure, with only you and your Monsters à la Pokémon. Now it could be that she goes her own way at some point but the fact that she levels up after combat and that some enemies have rather huge HP pools I get the feeling that it's designed to have a party of two (or four, technically) most of the time. There's been a lot of talk online about the technical side of the game. In context with the hardware it's running on, it's certainly less impressive that the original. Where MHS1 was basically a triple-A game on 3DS, this feels more of a budget mid-tier game that suffers from a low-ish framerate and some horrible pop-in. It's not without its charms though, as it has a very vibrant and nice style, the character models are great and during combat it really shines with impressive animations and effects. And the sound effect that plays when you land a critical hit on a downed monster might just be one of the most satisfying I've ever heard in the game.

Probably anther topic doomed to die in solitude, but this is such a unique concept that I wanted to put it out there. I also didn't see much of it in the media space, except for a preview in some magazine a while ago. I usually preface an explanation by saying "this game is a bit like X and has elements of Y" but I really can't do that here because I have never played something similar. It's kind of a dungeon crawler with the setup that people get sucked in some game world where they transform into dice. After that you have to go through multiple floors per level with your character, fight baddies, get to the exist and hopefully collect all the loot in between. 90% of it is combat and here's how I'm going to fail at painting a clear picture of how it plays. Your character has a bunch of actions and a number of dice per turn he/she can use. The dice are rolled and therefore random by nature and actions usually either require or are influenced by the number of the dice. For a strong attack you might need to stack multiple values until you reach the total it needs or if you have an attack that does [ ] damage, the value corresponds to the dice you use to activate it. But that's really just the snowflake on the tip of the iceberg. Some actions require even or odd numbers, or have a minimum or maximum you need to use. Then there are the player characters: the first one is super basic and easy to understand but it can get really complex later on. The robot for example doesn't draw dice, but calculates them on a 11-digit scale. For every time you create one, you're getting closer to the limit and if you exceed it, your turn is basically wasted, so that's a nice risk-reward feature. The witch needs certain values to brew attacks in her cauldron while the tinkerer has a special skill he can freely use, but has to switch it out for a new one after every battle, meaning you can't rely on those powerful moves forever. As borderline impossible it is to explain with words, it actually does an excellent job of teaching you when you play it so there's that at least. So far I quite like it. I don't love it, but it's a unique concept and it's the perfect handheld game, something the Switch unfortunately doesn't offer too often anymore. One run through a dungeon is a 10-15 minute affair, there's barely any loading times, battery usage is minimal due to every just being 2D pictures etc. It's currently on sale and I got it for free through star points but I wouldn't have regretted paying for it.

First things first, I'm really enjoying this. It's very Japanese, the story has just gone full anime, and it reminds me a lot of Astral Chain, only more engaging. The combat is probably the star of the show without it being as complicated as it appears. You have some very basic attacks with your weapon, this will charge a meter that lets you use your psychokinetic abilities, so you can fling items at enemies. Do that too often and the meter drains so you can't any more, but get in close to an enemy and land some weapon attacks and you'll be fine. Once enemies have taken enough damage, assuming you haven't already killed them, you'll be able to perform a kind of finisher/super move, against weaker enemies this is a one hit kill, against bosses it can be a difference maker. Both while you're exploring the world (although this hasn't been an option yet in the way it was in the demo), and in combat, if you have teammates you can borrow their powers, ranging from your attacks doing fire damage, you becoming invulnerable, or even invisible for stealth attacks, amongst others. These work on a cool down, and are more or less required at points, but they aren't unavailable for long. There's also a meter that fills where you'll become super powered for a bit, I get the feeling once you've levelled up a bit this will be a huge deal, at the minute it's more annoying that you can't trigger it yourself and save it for when you need it There's an rpg element. You level up, although it's not presented what that really means (presumably stats and HP), you can equip items, buy better weapons, healing is done on a slight cooldown which can be a bit of a pain. There's also a skill tree, it takes BP points to buy new perks, but these come pretty quickly, to the point that I feel like I might well max it out before the end of the game unless there's hidden branches to it. You can also increase your bonds with your teammates, this is done in your down time with gifts and bonding missions, and it gets you new layers to their abilities. It seems to be pretty similar to how Persona handles it tbh The only real criticism I have is that it's all presented in a bit of a confusing way. Lots of different, but pretty similar people bouncing around, odd terms, lots of menus. It can feel like it's slow doling things out too, not that it's paced badly or feels like a slog, and maybe this is a consequence of having played the demo, but knowing that at some point I'll have 4 teammates at once, be able to explore certain areas, the way it gates this feels like it's holding you back, even 10+ hours in to the game

You know the first thing about this that made me smile? It comes with a manual! I can't really recall the last game I had that came with a real one? Anyway, this game (at time of writing, I'm not upto the second boss yet) warrants being remade. The original game was made in 1986. Gaming has changed a bit in 35 years and a straight up port isn't really going to garner any positive attention. Which, looking at some reviews and scores, this really has. Which, so far, I can only agree it deserves. Oh and two things. 1) I never played this Alex Kidd game, so there's nothing rose tinted there. 2) I definitely won't be playing this with the infinite lives cheat on. With how extremely generous auto-saving is in this remake, it isn't really necessary.

I don't know how to give impressions on this without getting in the weeds. In terms of features it's an old fashioned 2D fighting game. You have an arcade mode (which is kinda interesting in that the better you do the harder the end boss gets) and there is a story that is literally an anime that you just watch, which is what the last game did too but it's still wild to me. There's also a pretty intense Mission Mode that does it's best to teach you the deeper mechanics of the game which if you're the studious type could work pretty well. I could do with spending more time in it myself but getting wrecked by someone using my character then trying to rip them off in the next match is more fun for me. It's the good netcode that saves it though. Well, the matchmaking is pretty rough at the mo but it plays really well in game. It just means there's always people to play with. This came online at midnight and I was ready to play it so I went to the east coast of USA since it was a more sensible time there and while it was a little choppy visually my inputs were barely delayed, if at all. I really hope they put this in a DBFZ2, in fact it would be shocking if they didn't. I've not saved many fights yet since I think I'm still pretty scrubby but my Gio is coming along a little. And this fight with Zato was fun when I wasn't put in the corner with all his nonsense:

Took a punt on this after seeing it in the Summer Games Fest. The first one has always appealed and at £35 it didn't seem to pricey. And so glad I did as this is one of those games that has me beaming from ear to ear when I play it. Its main game mode is a 64 player medieval skirmish, two teams hacking the hell out of each other in either all out warfare or some objective based gameplay (storm the castle/free prisoners that sort of thing). There's just a wonderful charm to it all, with a great sense of humour running through it. The combat is surprisingly deep (though it all goes to shit when theres 20 of you bashing the shit out of each other) with three main attacks, a swing, a stab and an overhead attack. Each attack can be dragged meaning you pull the right thumb stick in the direction of your swing to give it more range and heft. You also have a special and a kick as well as your standard block/reposte/evades. I've only had three or four games on top of the tutorial but it's great fun so far, and i'm resisting the urge to ditch work today and play it.

i've played persona games before but no smt games, i guess so far it seems pretty similar but without the daily routine/social link stuff, and the demons/personas are in your party rather than being sort of summoned. you have to talk to the demons to try and recruit them, although this is often bollocks as they ask for loads of stuff and then just run away, i still like it though, they say weird things and it can be pretty funny. the demons mostly look familiar too as they're pretty much the same from the persona games. i'm playing the super easy mode (which is free dlc), and it's really easy, i could have coped with some more difficulty, maybe a mode inbetween the normal one and the super easy one. but it's supposed to be quite long so the super easy mode should help with that. it's probably a good job i'm on the easy mode too as my main heal spell changed into something useless, and i've probably given most of my good healing items to demons while trying to recruit them. so i don't have many ways of healing at the moment but it hasn't made much difference. minor spoiler for stuff near the start of the game this is a ps2 game i think, i'm not sure if any graphics have been upgraded, it doesn't really look like it, it just looks like a ps2 game in much higher resolution. so far it's alright, i'm quite enjoying it but it's not been amazing or anything. i'm going to keep playing anyway.

Started this last week, putting about 12 hours into it and it’s safe to say it’s been a bit of a mixed bag so far. At the very beginning of the game you’re free to create your character as you so choose, there’s about 7 different classes (one of which is locked away behind a pre-order bonus for some reason) - like a Psychic specialist, ranged weapon specialist, all rounder and melee specialist - about 8 different animal-like races you can pick which have various strengths and weaknesses. Along with a way of picking various elements - like Heat, Cold, Radioactivity and Biohazard - you’re strong or weak to and the degree in which you’re resistant or vulnerable to said elements. The classes you pick, resistances you choose and breed of animal you pick seem more like starting points than a set class as you can put as many points into any stats you want to, deviating from your starting point drastically, sticking rigidly to it or ending up somewhere in between if you so wish. You’re then introduced to your mysterious protagonist, who has seemingly come back to town for the first time in awhile but doesn’t remember too much about who he/she is and what happened to the place he/she grew up in. Along with your Protagonist you’re also introduced to the Narrator, his dulcet tones permeate through an awful lot of the game, particularly in the early going. He is reminiscent of Stephen Fry’s performance in Little Big Planet, explaining a lot of the games various systems to you along with acting like a translator to the many weird and wonderful anthropomorphic characters you’ll meet along your journey. It starts off super slow in lots of boring industrial, factory type areas that attempt to introduce you to some of the basic elements in its eclectic crazy mix of various systems. It ends up holding your hand too much though to an annoying degree where you’re stopping to watch a cutscene or some kind of dialogue after every fight or action, not letting you off the lead so to speak until you’re about 2-3 hours in and even then the game still wants to explain a lot of stuff to you. Once you’re out of the early factory area and let loose into the open world things get much better. The moment you step out of the dull factory and gaze upon this luscious, striking world filled with greenery and bathed in sunlight it is a real wow moment that immediately put a smile on my face, it is reminiscent of coming out of the Vault in Fallout 3. I don’t know how they’ve done it with a team of 20 people but the world is an absolute sight to behold, it quite frankly looks ridiculously good and with the added photo mode you can't help but stop and take a snapshot every few minutes. There is a clear Eastern influence running throughout the game with the music, ‘Wung Fu’ combat and design of the characters and world, from the Buddhist shrine-like Tribe outposts to certain enemies wearing Samurai-like armour. The good/bad scale (represented by two light and dark sprites) is a clear nod to the Asian concept of Yin and Yang as well. Even once you’re outside the factory the game still loosely holds onto the reigns for awhile pushing you towards making your first big choice in the game, aligning yourself with a Tribe. On the face of it the choice is a clear cut good vs evil but there’s shades of grey in there with good parts of the seemingly ‘evil’ choice and bad parts to the seemingly ‘good’ choice. I really like this as the whole Renegade/Paramore good/bad swinging scale stuff has been done so many times before and rarely gives you pause for thought, some of the events so far feel a bit like New Vegas where you’re damned to some degree no matter what you choose. The world itself is absolutely massive, as said above I’ve put 12 hours in and have barely made it out of the opening Southern zones you first get to as you get out of the factory. At the centre of the world is the Tree of Life with the different biomes located around it much like a Clock, I haven’t explored much of the world yet but it’s clear there is a lot of variety in its design from the mountainous greenery of the first area to the flooded plains of the next, with the latter being explorable by a makeshift jet ski. There are some biomes that are locked off due to being too hot, cold or radioactive which requires you to get a special suit to be able to venture there safely. The game throws so much stuff at you that it is hard not to be bewildered by it all. There’s about 4 different types of upgrade points you can put into things (character stat upgrades, Psi-points, Bio Points and combat move upgrade points), a loot system where you can find and equip better equipment depending on its rarity, a crafting system where you can make pretty much anything providing you have the right materials, numerous strange animals you can recruit as mounts, numerous machines you can pilot to make your job easier and a multitude of other bits and pieces. The combat is perhaps the most interesting part of the game as it is extremely customisable and it’s possible to play the game however you want once you master or unlock the right elements. On the surface of it, it’s a bit DMC mixed with Max Payne, you have a ranged weapon and a melee weapon (or two) you can use in combination with each other. It’s super fun to just mess about with an experiment, but can feel a little loose and imprecise at times, with hits not quite registering with the required oomph to make them truly satisfying and a somewhat delayed response to your button presses. The world design is possibly the least interesting part of the game. It is very much like a Ubisoft game of 4-5 years ago or perhaps a better comparison would be the Mad Max game of 2015 or Just Cause (as this is made by ex-Avalanche devs), filled with lots of meaningless shite you can do, pickup, explore and engage with. Me being me, I can’t leave these symbols sitting on the map untouched so go around looking for 6 billboards out in the world when my time would be better spent doing a story mission or some of the more interesting side quests. It is a truly fascinating, beguiling and bewildering game that has plenty of promise to it in these somewhat early stages but I’m not sure if all that promise will add up to something in the end or not. I will say again though how astounding it is a game this large was built by 20 developers, it is crazy how big this world is and how much detail, dialogue and character development it has going on in it. The story is genuinely intriguing too which I didn’t expect and I can’t wait to see where things go next.

So the full game is out, I've spent the morning playing it... bear in mind I didn't play any of the demo's so the opening is all new to me. I think everyone by now everyone should be able to gather what happens in the beginning, Chris being all dark and barrel chested, anyhow you soon wake up at night, in the snow... looking for Ethans baby. To me the game looks really pretty, the lighting is really good and so far (using RT) the performance seems to be holding up nicely. I never overly liked the shooting in 7 and this seems very close, I've recently picked up an add on to my pistol and that's definitely helped... I feel much happier in these third person Resi games with a shotgun in my hands though. The start of the game is almost a bit too much, there were times I wasn't sure if I should be trying to kill all these things or running away... that's also happened a couple of times in the castle where I'm up to now. Things have calmed a bit since getting in there though and it's a gorgeous place to explore. I do wish the movement speed was a bit quicker though. So far so good then, looking forward to finding out a bit more on these freaks who are making life a tad rough for old Ethan.

Started this off earlier and put just under 4 hours into it. This has set the record of making me cry the fastest in a video game, just felt overcome with the music in the tutorial ? also the fountain in the middle of the village at the beginning of the game is just amazing, I must’ve walked around that fountain about 30 times just listening to the lovely music (cried again here), amazing. As soon as I got free reign to explore the village I explored every corner of it, there’s not much to it but it creates such a strong sense of place and unique vibe, it’s already memorable and familiar even in my short time there. Combat feels like a more simplistic version of Automata’s. It looks flashy and feels good but is bit more shallow than Automata’s. If I had to compare it, it feels a bit like FFXV’s (without all the warp-strikes) or one of the earlier KIngdom Hearts games. You start off without any ranged abilities with just your sword to rely on, but pretty quickly you pick up a ranged weapon which has added to the variety on offer and cool abilities you can pull off. Story-wise not much has happened so far, I’ve just been given a few meaningless tasks to do by Popola, been to my first dungeon and met a certain literary figure. I’ve done a few of the side quests too just to see how bad they are for myself, and yeah, they’re not great but I don’t mind them so far, they’re inoffensive, a damn boar kept fucking me up in one of them.

Started this last week and put about 12ish hours into so far. I've been looking forward to this a long time as a fan of the series, with the semi-recent remake of the first game (Abe's Oddysee) New N' Tasty reinvigorating my love for it. It started off as a one-to-one remake of the second game (Abe's Exoddus) but over time - believe it has been in development around 6 to 7 years - it grew into something more than that, a complete reimaging of the second game and a rejuvenation for the series too with added abilities, new action segments, a huge expanded story based on AE and tons of new levels that weren't in the first game. After the excellent New N Tasty I didn't expect this to get such middling reviews, which made me a little hesitant to start it. Thankfully I had nothing to worry about and have found the review scores a tad baffling based on what I've played so far. It is fair to say it is a departure from the classic Oddworld games of old, they have added a double jump, you can no longer use the D-Pad to control Abe, there's modern elements like a crafting system, the ability to tie up Sligs instead of killing them, medals that get awarded for carrying out a certain number of actions or collecting a certain amount of collectibles in a level. On top of this some levels have an action focus to them now where you'll have to run to escape being killed by Sligs and Glukkons in air ships whilst the platforms around you are crumbling into flames, later on there is also a section on a train which ends in a boss fight. So this is a quite a different beast compared to the original titles and even New N Tasty it's fair to say, some folks won't like that, others - like myself - will embrace the changes more. Thankfully though, despite all the changes mentioned above the way the game plays remains largely in tact. You still possess Sligs and can make them explode, you still recruit Mudokens and lead them to safety through butterfly gates, there's still tricky sections where you can't use possession and have to use stealth to avoid enemies, just scraping through to the other side. Thanks to the new additions coupled with those core Oddworld systems there is much greater variety to the game, you'll go through an action-based level where you're getting chased by a Glukkon Blimp, then encounter a level where you're possessing sligs to clear a path through, levels where you can't use possession and have to rely on stealth and timing to make it through, others where more metroidvania elements come into play and you'll be heading into dark caves to find a power source to move on. The levels themselves are obviously much more impressive than the original games but perhaps more surprising is how they're much more impressive than even New N Tasty. You are still on that 2D plain controlling Abe, but the camera does pan around certain paths through the environment and there is much more going on in the background with Blimps, Snipers, mine trains wizzing past, as well as a greater number of Mudokens to save at times (sometimes in the 100s). One level - that is technically the most impressive - is on a train that is whizzing at high speed through the desert, culminating in a boss fight against a Slig in a giant mech. I will say though that one level so far frustrated the fuck out of me. It was the longest chapter so far and its key mechanic is using smoke to hide yourself from enemies, the issue is that in some parts of the level there aren't any smoke valves to hide in, you have to create your own smoke grenades to hide yourself and any Mudokens that are following you. The aiming is really finicky to perfect and on top of this the game is a little janky when it comes to detecting you and your squad in the smoke, a lot of the time I was fully covered but one or two Mudokens could be seen at the end and a Slig would just fly on by, another time they'd get shot up and I'd have to restart from the checkpoint and try again. At the start the difficulty was considerably more forgiving that the older games thanks largely to the double jump and an abundance of checkpoints but since then the difficulty has thankfully ramped up considerably to something akin to the games of old. The checkpoints are still a bit of a crutch and the double jump still helps you out of a few tight spots but some sections like the boss fight mentioned above have been pretty brutal to get through. Graphically, the game is very much a mixed bag. There's something about the art style that just feels a little bit washed out compared to the older games and New N Tasty, on top of this the game uses a very subdued colour palette, lots of browns, greys and muted greens throughout which doesn't help. On top of this the texture quality of rocks and other natural elements all look pretty shoddy with only the industrial areas looking ok. The game does shine with the background details though and the train level mentioned above did impress me quite a lot, but for a PS5 game it is still not really up to scratch. It is obviously an indie title so allowances for that have to be made. As for flaws, the game can be a little buggy at times. I think on about 5-10 occasions I've had an issue where Abe will get stuck mid-jump and no controller input from me will get him moving again, resulting in a checkpoint restart being needed. The controls are also a little finicky and imprecise, a lot of times I've had it where I'll try to climb down or jump up a platform in a hurry and somehow it won't work out. The most glaring issue though is the projectile system, you have to throw crafted/found items quite a bit in order to coat Sligs in a flammable liquid and set them on fire, use smoke to block a security camera/enemies view, rocks to kill bats etc. and it's just very fiddly. The game asks you to be precise at times with your aiming of these projectiles but the system they give you just isn't up to scratch, you're aiming with the right stick then pressing R2 to fire off projectiles whilst controlling abe with the left stick and having to switch items holding in triangle. It would've been much better if you could aim with L2, adjust your throwing arc with the right stick and then let fly or if time temporarily froze whilst you're throwing projectiles to allow you to be more precise in your aim. Overall though, I'm really enjoying it so far and couldn't put it down for the first 5-6 hours. It's included with PS+ this month so if you're a fan of the series or action/puzzle-platformers then I think you might get on with this so give it a go. Definitely not one to sleep on that's for sure, I almost slept on it myself (due to its proximity to Nier) but it gets a recommendation from me. Pics to follow:

Started this over the weekend with the fiancée. I think we're about 4 hours in and just hit Chapter 3. It's a colourful co-op platformer, you play as either Cody or May, a divorcing couple who aren't happy with their lot in life. They have a kid called Rose, who is unsurprisingly sad about their nuptial break, from her sadness her parents' personas get morphed into tiny clay and wooden mini-caricatures (which you play as). You then meet a strange love book called Dr. Hakim who throughout the course of the game tries to mend your broken relationship. All the environments are very homey, you start off in a shed, then explore the exterior and interior of a tree before making it into the house and experiencing some kind of strange pillow fort (which is where we are at the moment). These environments are punctuated by strange and eccentric characters like the aforementioned Dr. Hakim along with militarised Squirrels, Wasps, Beetles and Bumblebees which aren't too dissimilar to Conker's Bad Fur Day. The homey environments are reminiscent to Toy Story too (there's even a reference at one point). I like it so far but it hasn't blown my socks off it's fair to say, I wouldn't say it has started off as strongly as A Way Out did either. It is good though, and can be a lot of fun, I was just expecting to be more impressed at this point than I am. During the first chapter, it was a fairly rudimentary platformer with some cliched co-op elements (pull a level to open a door then your partner crawls through etc.), after that things have gotten a little better luckily with different weapons and tools introduced. Each chapter seems to give you some kind of unique tools or weapons which work in combination with your partners, during the first chapter I (Cody) was given a Nail Gun and the missus (May) was given a Hammer. You use the nail gun to shoot into yellow coloured bits of board so May can then swing off them to get to otherwise unreachable areas. The second chapter gave me a nectar gun, you shoot the nectar onto surfaces and your partner can then shoot it with her rifle to make it explode, reaching previously unreachable areas. These mechanics are all used in puzzles and during the second chapter there is quite a lot of combat as well, with me shooting the enemy Wasps with nectar and Char then exploding them into little Wasp pieces with her rifle. The second chapter is far better than the first and features quite a few set pieces, one where I had to control a plane and Char was in charge of the gun, having to shoot approaching enemies from the front and rear, along with clearing obstacles in our path. There was another set piece where I had to control a rudimentary boat and Char had to clear the way again with her rifle as I navigated down the river. The coolest one by far though is when I was flying the plane and Char had to fight an enemy on the top of it fighting game style, replete with fighting game style health bars and attacks, a really great moment. I wasn't too hot on it in the beginning and a little bored but the second chapter has turned me around on the game already and if it keeps on going like this it will only get better, can't wait to see what's in store for us next time. Pics:

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

It's difficult to talk about this game here since we don't have many Monster Hunters here. There are many nuances that are different to previous games; are they better? at this point I'm undecided. Some ways yes and others no. I dunno how to talk about MH to you guys. Just sack off whatever mediocre shit your playing now and get into this. Fuck your story based games. They're not good: play a few hours of this then watch something from the Criterion Collection. You'll be better for it. The weapon types are made in a way where you need to sink serious time into them and defeat the enemy types optimally. There's true satisfaction in that. The variety of play is so broad and also has so much depth. How ever you prefer to play you're covered, unless you're a stealth pacifist type then either get eaten or disappoint your comrades. But this has been the case this whole time with MH. I can't help you if you're not cool enough to be into it. And I'm sympethetic; I'm also a relative newcomer, but I saw the error of my ways and I hate to see people making the same mistake I did. This is a hard follow up to MH World and not only because of the obvious technical limitations, although a shift in gameplay and level design make up for it since the mobility options make every inch of the map explorable. But I will say that the ground, intuitive routes feel like classic MH so when you start to fuck around with your mobility for a moment it feels like a whole new world is opening up to you. It's so smart. We're here to fight monsters, though. And that's great. Always has been. But what Rise does different is okay. I just say that because the big drama mechanic is mounting monsters and taking control of them, which is really cool to do, but it's rarer, and less immediate than what you can do in Iceborne with the clutch claw. It just feels a bit weird this lesser console having a mechanic (which is literally having control of a monster) more advanced but it just doesn't feel as good as just being able to slam them into a wall from the position you mount them. But there is also a lacking in drama to the gameplay compared to MH World. It's not so lacking it feels like Dauntless, there is definitely more gameplay driven drama here, no doubt. And I can't stress that enough. I guess it just lacks the flourishes I got used to. I always feel like I gotta be more down on something I'm actually hugely enjoying. I'm just countering strawmen in my head. But I'm super enjoying it overall. I would talk more about how the bugs you control give you mobility but I've still not got used to them despite being 15 hours in. I've been doing okay but that new mechanic has a lot of depth I've not been able to figure out yet. Early on you can play like an old idiot and get away with it. But one of the last fights I had was against the new, flagship beast and his fight is clearly designed with high mobility in mind so I guess I gotta work on that.

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

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.

I was just two and a half hours playing the Balan Wonderworld demo. It’s not half as bad as I’d heard on podcasts that had also clearly only played the first two levels of world one before turning it off and deciding to tell everyone it’s the worst game ever. The opening levels are a bit crap but the later sheep and the cog worlds are much better. I’m not talking Mario levels of quality but certainly gets better than the opening world. Plus the later costumes you find you can use when you go back to previous worlds to get to further trophies which in turn opens up more worlds. The music is also better later on. Not completely awful but an alright time waster and with so few games of its kind on xbox and PlayStation beggars can’t be choosers.

There's kind of been 3 types of Ys games over the years. The first couple you just bashed in to enemies, then they became hyper, isometric, all about attacking. Then we got to the 3D versions and it was still a game about going on the attack, but now what type of attack was important. You'd eventually gather 3 characters, a sword character (red), a blunt attack character (blue), and a piercing character (green), different enemy types are weak to different attack types, and you can switch on the fly to suit And that's how it's been for a few games now. Ys IX follows the same formula, but brings in a more traditional RPG structure. Previously side quests would task you with just getting certain drops, you'd get them from your home base, which was a tiny area, and that would be it. 99.9% of the time you were out killing things Ys IX is a little different, structured like a traditional JRPG, it starts slow, with the plot set up, then some short easy combat to ease you in, then a chunk more story. The world is no longer 1 small safe area then a world of combat, instead you're in a city, with combat, shopping, side quests, and exploration taking place throughout, I've not seen this in an Ys game before, even if it's fairly typical for the genre. You're eased in to the world with quests to visit shops and buy gear, it's a little slow going. There's still "dungeons", sections where there's nothing but combat and exploration, but now there's also little dimension pockets where you can enter combat and fight a handful of enemies, then just carry on with whatever you were supposed to be doing The tower defence style sections are still here, now you're whisked away at certain points to fight as a team, protecting a crystal, against waves of enemies. Not especially interesting, and the camera annoyed me a little with this, it maybe could do with being pulled back a bit so you see more of the field, but then they've not been too demanding so far, so maybe it doesn't matter also it's all anime goth now

So, played this for around two and a half hours tonight... so far I'm really enjoying it. I'm not going to pretend that it has triple A production values going on but I've been pleasantly surprised by how good it looks all in all... a photo mode would've been nice. The character animation is probably one of the least appealing things in the game Marianne runs a little like Claire from Code Veronica.? I've just made my way to the spooky Hotel and the game has let me use my abilities, it's actually pretty cool to solve puzzles this way... I thought the lack of combat might hurt things for me but so far the story is carrying things along nicely. I'm looking forward to playing more of this, it was always going to be up my street so to speak.

I guess I'll try and kick off a thread for this. I got this yesterday and played through most of the Berlin mission. I'm basically at the end of it but trying to hold off on progressing too fast and want to savour things a bit. These games are so good at designing levels which are rewarding to explore, I always enjoy the feeling of taking a really long time to work my way to a specific area and then finding a really inconspiocus short cut I could have taken, the multibranched progression through each stage and the way it twists and winds into itself makes it fun to literally just walk around looking at shit. Even while not necessarily making much progress on your targets. I play with almost all the HUD elements turn off except the one which lets me see targets are red guys. Not to make the game obtuse or difficult but to get more of the pleasure of just wandering around looking for ways in, or eavesdropping convos. You do sort of need the instinct vision tho as some targets are not very obvious to look at, especially in Berlin I'm not playing Hitman for the story so I was happy to jump right into the first mission that interested me, I tried a bit of Dubai but it looks more like an introductory mission with some story handholding. Not that that's bad, they do it in the other games too. Berlin is very classic Hitman tho. It even has a flavour of Hitman Absolution to it with the way it sets things up, but I think it's better than Absolution The premise of it is Older Hitman games have played with this concept a bit (Silent Assassin, Blood Money) but it takes center stage here It's quite a pretty game, it doesn't look hugely different to the last two but they made some lighting adjustments like screen space reflections. Not ray tracing, but I don't think it really needs it. The older levels get updated with it as well. I posted some screens in the screenshot thread but they came out a little too dark and don't get the visuals across very well. I imagine it looks great on Series X/PS5. There's also some great line reads in this. I'll probably just dip into levels from all three games now that they're all on the one package and 60GB. I still have to do Japan in 1 and every mission in 2. For now I'll stick with the new stuff.

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

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.

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.

I started playing some of this. I'm definitely going to need digital foundry to hold my hand on what settings I should be turning on, the auto detect option on the game itself recommended I max the game out but that isn't happening. I figured I would settle for 30fps but the camera motion in this is really bad, it doesn't feel good. So I'll have to tweak that. Anyway it's very janky and hard to play so far. Everyone makes a big song and dance about DLSS but it dont play well with camera movement. I guess there is a hell of a lot of detail to be reconstructing all the time. Sometimes the game looks spectacular but sometimes I'm sort of finding it to look kind of terrible. Part of it is the game feels sort of weird. People phase into existence in front of you, cars render in front of you. Obviously there's weird shit with people t-posing but that's minor. At one time in a cutscene V was completely naked for no reason, that made me lol and makes me wonder if your model is always like that cause it's a FPS game and you can't see your tits or dick or whatever. Gameplay wise I find it hard to play and the HUD and text is such a bad clash of colours and design that I can't tell what's going on half the time or what the things I'm picking up are. This could just be the awkward teething phase but it feels kind of gross. The driving is also really swimmy. I mean I'm sure it gets good as you go in but yeah it's like kind of clunky in a really strange way. These guys did make The Witcher III I suppose. It feels like someone took Euro jank and gave it all the money but kept the jank. The game throws a million things at you at once and displays a bunch of info on your HUD that's hard to keep track of. It's not a very gentle easing into the world, it sort of just throws you in and you're constantly bewildered, well I am anyway. I'm confused. There's a lot going on here but it's not so much that it's deep just that there's a fucking lot of it and I can't be arsed to read it all. I played 3 hours of it, one of which was a big shootout. The shooting doesn't feel good, but it sounds good. Aiming is bad, there's a lot of control options to figure out so I will definitely be following whatever guide somebody puts up to fix the issues with it. Anyway it's cyberpunk, it does the Bladerunner thing. Pris is in it, sort of. That's what people wanted, a very Bladerunner-ey game. Except this is less chin stroking and more aggressive 90s Rob Zombie in your face all the time. Feels of an era This game is very hard to run, pretty much never see 60fps at the settings the game recommends for me. It's exactly the kind of game people were expecting, an absolute monster for both GPU and CPU. A new Crysis.

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.