Search the Community

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

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

Anyone have/picking this up? I've just got it on Switch to review and need people to play online with ?

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

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

Transistor is an isometric action RPG from Supergiant, the makers of Bastion. It's set in a place called Cloudbank, which mixes cyberpunk elements with early 20th century Art Nouveau stylings, it looks gorgeous. I just looked back at the Bastion thread on here, and I'd forgotten that we weren't as crazy about it as the rest of the Internet seemed to be. I still think it was a very good game, I feel more fondly about it now than when I was playing, and still think the atmosphere, the presentation and the way they delivered the story to you were the best bits. They've succeded in those areas again with Transistor. The art and music are absolutely stunning. I also really like the world they created. Just like Bastion, it excels at creating a lonely, melancholic atmosphere. And I enjoyed playing it a lot more. Although you could potentially play this like Bastion, I can't imagine it'd be that much fun. You don't have much in the way of defensive or evasive moves, instead, combat is all about using the "turn" ability. In combat, there's a bar along the top of the screen. As long as that's full you can use your abilities to fight enemies, or you can hit a button that pauses everything and puts you into a tactical view. Here you can move and queue up attacks that get executed when you resume normal time. These attacks happen much quicker than you could manage in real time, and let you setup up combos. The cost of this is you can't use your abilities until the bar is recharged. I found this combat a lot of fun. Your abilities in the game are called functions, you start with one or two abilities and get more as you level up. You have 4 active function slots, mapped to the controller face buttons, but as you progress you can unlock passive and upgrade slots. Each ability behaves differently depending to where it's equipped. Putting it in an active slot makes it something you can use in combat, but if you put it into an upgrade slot, it will add extra effects or bonuses to the active ability it's applied to. Putting it in a passive slot will do something else again, such as limited health regeneration, a shield that deflects a certain amount of damage, etc. Each function also contains a small biog of a character in the story, but it isn't complete until you equip and use it in an active, upgrade and passive slot. This is a pretty good way of encouraging you to experiment with different combinations (if you care about this background story). I loved messing around with different combinations to see what they could do. The story is delivered in pretty much the same way as Bastion, you're dropped into the world without really knowing what's going on but build up a picture via a trickle of info as the game goes on. This time it's a little more vague than Bastion, and you're left to infer a lot of stuff. It's lead to some interesting theories online. The soundtrack is amazing: http://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/transistor-original-soundtrack One of my favourite things is a feature that serves no purpose in the game other than being awesome: holding down one of the bumper buttons makes the character stop. The background fades a little, she is spotlighted in the middle of the screen and starts to hum the music. There seems to be a hummed version for pretty much every background track, and they sound amazing.

First things first. If you've not enjoyed these games before, abandon thread now. There's no point in you wasting your time here. It's more of the same with tweaks, mostly good tweaks, but nothing that's going to convince you you want to spend time with the series. For the people that do like the games, you're in for a treat. First of all, despite looking like a budget game, it looks glorious in motion.Debris and chitin breaks off everything while you're shooting it, blood flies across the tarmac and up[ the skyscrapers in the most ridiculous fashion turning the levels into a B movie version of Splatoon. Buildings drop after taking set amounts of damage rather than falling to the ground after being hit with explosives once. There's a significant improvement visually. The best thing? Zero frame drops in this chaos. However you will see a slight stutter as it loads in the next wave occasionally, it doesn't happen every time but there's a bit of a performance blip. It never truly stunts the action though, which is the most important thing. Enemies.The Hectors are gone (Or have not showed up yet) and have been replaced by giant bipedal frogs. The AI behaviour of these frogs, as well as the danger they present offers a nice tactical hinge where they differ from killing swarms. I found it best to use cover and then when you get close enough to them use shotguns to kill them in one magazines worth of buckshot. However, you can pelt them from a distance and amputate limbs which will cause them to react differently dependant on what gets blown apart. Don't leave it too long because limbs can grow back. Levels. I don't want to spoil this too much, but those settings from previous games where it's basically sunny all the time and in the day or underground? Not anymore. Weapons. You can level up weapons now. A lot of the weapons have returned, but there's also new ones to get. For instance I was using a rocket last night that worked like the one from Half Life 2 where you have a laser that can guide the rocket precisely where you want. The other weapons seem to have had a rebalance as well, the shotguns seem to have a place now. I've not seen anything super crazy yet, but most of what I have seen has been good. Classes. I've only played as Ranger so far, but the sprint feature they've added has helped no end. It's basically Gear's roadie run, although it ends with a weird slide I don't like. Useful for getting out of bad situations or collecting items. Speaking of which, while you are running you have a circle around you that automatically picks up items. I think this collection circle is around vehicles as well, although I've not witnessed that with my own eyes yet. The Ranger can also call in small vehicles for himself, but I've only had a bike and to be perfectly honest it's not as good as the built in perks you get from being on foot. Other alterations. After every mission amour collected and weapons are distributed between the 4 classes, with the class you are playing getting the lions share. There's a bad aspect to this screen though, since if you've collected a lot of weapons it goes through the whole process of levelling them up and explaining what they are. I don't think it's a bad thing completely, but for a game you could spend hundreds of hours in, having a skip button to cut through that crap would have been nice. Regardless, it's going to make it so that if you want to try out another class you're not starting with a blank slate, which is a good thing since EDF is one of those games where altering your teams composition is something that is encouraged. Also I think the drops are more generous than before. Other changes. Inferno is locked so no going to the end of the game to get super powered weapons. In fact the armour and weapon limit persists right into Inferno and the only way to shut it off is to hit 70% of missions complete to remove limits. They might have taken away with one hand, but they've given with the other. difficulties now stack, so no need to play on difficulties you're blazing through. I'll probably be back with another huge wall of text later when I've played some more.

Got sent this to review and was a bit daunted by the prospect. I attempted the first Disgaea twice, on the ds and ps2. Got many many hours in to them but ended up dropping them. They're too much, too many layers Good news, Disgaea 5 is easier. The story is essentially one long tutorial, things like the item world and the more complex mechanics are gated, and a lot of them you don't really need to worry about. That being said I've hit one of those points. I'm 5 worlds in, 30 hours, and I'm at a point where I have to do some bullshit before I can linearly push on. Basically there's a difficulty spike, the jump in enemy level isn't a huge problem, I can, theoretically dwindle their numbers down enough, but their placement is a problem. The enemies giving me grief are way up high, too high for my melee and gun characters to reach, but my archers and mages are too weak. So I have a few choices. Grind them up a bit, they only level with a kill, buy them ultra strong armour, assuming it's available, or head in to the item world and level up some armour myself. This is what Disgaea is, at least from my experiences with the series, and that's fine if you've got nothing else on your plate. The combat is fun enough, I like the humour and nonsense of the series, and this is a good looking take on the series There's a bunch of stuff in the game I haven't touched, like innocents, bribing the council, changing evilities. It's good, but it's Disgaea with everything that comes with that

Moonlighter is a game about running a shop by day, and adventuring at night. That is the most basic way of explaining it without getting too complicated. You want to know more about it than that, so here goes, Moonlighter is viewed top down and is split into a few parts. There's a bit where you manage a shop and a bit where you go out adventuring to stock the shop with items to sell.. Lets get the fighting bit out the way first. There are 4 (maybe 5) dungeons in the game that work off tile sets and are randomly generated each time you enter them. You know the deal. The fighting is not complicated, there's a few weapons that you can equip, 2 at a time, and then go hit or shoot stuff. You can heal yourself if you have potions, as well as use and evasive roll which has a very large invincibility period. Killing enemies or opening chests in the dungeon has loot in them, or artefacts as the game calls them. It's these artefacts you sell in your shop. Except it's not as easy as that, because of course it never is. Item inventory plays a big part in this. Remember all those times you spent moving stuff about in Resi 4 trying to get everything packed in? Well, it's the same here, except it's got a different spin. Items from chests sometimes have requirements on them. They either have to be kept in the left or right of your bag, or the top or bottom. Now this doesn't sound too bad, but there's other items with arrows on them. You have to read the banner on these items, because it all comes into how you pack your bag. Some of them immediately destroy items if the arrow is facing towards and item, some items break an item they're pointing to when you teleport back to town, other can break if you take too many hits, there's an item that changes whatever is pointed at to the item it is so you can transmog a bit of junk into something nice and finally one where the arrowed item sends something home to your box back in the shop. Dungeons are split into 4 floors, with a boss on the fourth floor. They gradually get harder as you plunge the depths. You have a pendant that can teleport you back to the shop, however the deeper you go the more gold it costs to send you home. If you are caught short on gold you can also sell items to a mirror which you find when you go down a floor. You get a percentage of whatever the item you put ins worth. There's also another item called the catalyst which allows you to put a gate down and return to the point you're at for 2000 gold each time, although I'm sure this will go up as you get further into the game. This is a one use only, you have to pay each time, but I can imagine once you're rolling in it plopping it outside the boss door will be the smart thing to do. I think the biggest pain in the arse here is selling stuff to the mirror, instead of assigning it a button so you can send shit right to the mirror you have to directly drop the item in and it sort of feels like it was done with a mouse in mind and not a controller. It's easily patchable, whether they'll do that is another question entirely. If you do not survive the dungeon and your HP reaches zero, it spits you out. Any items in your bag are lost for good. However, items on the top line of the inventory are kept, so if there's something really important you need you can bring it out with you no matter what. When you're in town you have a shop where you can put the items on a table and open the doors. People come in and depending on how you've priced stuff will take of leave it. Occasionally you'll get a rich person come in that will buy inflated prices. More likely you'll get shoplifters who you have to apprehend once they've picked something up and tried to do a runner. If they get out the door your items are lost. What to do with the gold you earn from all this? There's a blacksmith, a enchanter, a trader, a decorator and a banker you can spend gold on to bring into your town. These all use gold and items found in the dungeons to craft and upgrade weapons and armour, as well as enchanting them. The trader can get you items at an inflated price if you can't find them yourself, and the decorator allows you to put RPG like buffs on your shop, such and making people move faster or tip more. The shop itself is also upgradable. You start off with a chest and a table with a bed to sleep in. As you progress you get more storage, bargain bins as well as more places to put decorative items that later the way your customers act. The bed gives you a set amount of HP above your standard health, I think it's bugged because it specifically says you get the buff after sleeping in the bed but you get it whenever you return from a dive. There's also cash registers that add tips to the base cost of an item which help mark up those items you cannot sell for a lot. There's other stuff in here as well, stuff like supply and demand also rear their heads, if you flood the market with a certain item people will refuse to buy it at a regular price. I think that's about it. In a way it reminds me of Rogue Legacy or The Swindle in that although you can die and lose your stuff, there's a part of the game where everything is still set in stone and is safe as long as you've banked it. Although I've not actually seen the boss of the first world I'm not that far off it, depending on how hard it is I'll have probably beaten it the next time I play. I'm wearing the thickest armour I can, I'm wielding the toughest weapons I can craft, it's just a case of getting to the fourth floor and giving it a hiding so I can get to the next dungeon and repeat until the end. This game isn't for everyone, but there's a select few here that would be all over it. It's also the type of game I reckon would play well on Switch.

I seem to remember @illdog posting about playing this, but I can't find the thread where it is. I'm a big fan of the original Megadrive game and this is basically that game but looking a bit better with added enemies and friends, online multiplayer and stuff. I don't think it's a sequel, seems more of a reboot of the first game. Anyway, it's a rouge-like if you haven't played it before and it is '90's as fuck. The music has always been great with extra funky basslines, and this one is no different. I was a bit concerned when they announced it that it would end up being shit, but a few hours of play on it so far and it's been fantastic. I'm not sure what people new to it would make of it, but for fans of the original, it's great. Level 0 is still there, so they didn't fuck that up.

Finally, after years of watching videos of other people play this, bought the Switch version and had my first go of this with a couple of mates. Initially, we had the bomb defuser holding the Switch out of the dock but as there are two couches in my mate’s living room, eventually just settled on sitting on the couch not facing the TV and either using a laptop or phone for the manual. If you don’t know what it is, one person can see the bomb and has to cut wires and press buttons. The other person (or people) either download and print out the bomb manual or view it on a screen and have to guide the bomb defuser by communicating what the bomb holder is looking at. Colours of wires, how many, etc. It’s a manic affair and best if you swap over a few times, as then the bomb defuser will know what information the manual guy is really after and which information is superfluous. On the PC and PS4, it’s playable in VR which is probably the best way to play it. But we figured out we could actually play it together on Skype with only one copy. It really starts ramping up in difficulty, throwing memory puzzles at you, morse code, etc and we got as far as extra modules you had to keep an eye on that couldn’t be solved from the manual. There’s these things called “needy modules” where they’ll be like a short timer on it and before it gets to 0 and blows up the bomb, you have to hammer a button to reset it. That’s along with the modules that will actually disarm the bomb. Plus the lights will occasionally go out for a few seconds. Or the alarm clock next to the bomb will go off really loudly so you have to put the bomb down and hit snooze on the alarm. It’s fantastic but I’m glad I played with people I have good friendships with!

This is looking and sounding ultra sweet. Anyone excited? A sandbox racing game? It's gotta be at least worth a look! Anyway, there's a demo coming next week! Click me. Could be just PS3, just 360 or both. Me wanty.

So this is a twin stick shooter by the resogun people, there are 6 worlds/levels with maybe 15 or so stages each, and a boss stage. there a humans to save, and combo, by collecting/saving the next one before a countdown expires -for better score. there's loads of hidden humans/levels/scoring things to find - too many for me - but my memory is crap so i never remember where all that stuff is. you can roll out of the way/through stuff, and special weapons to choose from, my favorite is the rocket launcher, but it seems like the smart bomb is supposed to be the best (they have a small delay before you can use them again), they are all pretty good apart from the sword. there are powerups too, most important is the shield, so you can take a hit, then you need to get more points to gain another powerup/shield - if you've already got all the other powerups then the next one you get will be shield - otherwise they're random i think. you get a powerup each time this bar fills in - i guess by scoring/killing stuff. it's brilliant, but annoying at the same time. for me it's much better than some of their other twin stick games that have upgrading/loot/ammo/reloading - none of that stupid stuff here, this is more a proper arcade game. the annoying stuff comes from lack of visibility, of all sorts of stuff - where is the edge of the playing area? - can't see stuff because of explosions - hit boxes seems quite big, or there's a delay from pressing roll/dodge to becoming invincible. basically that stuff leads to deaths where it doesn't seem fair which leads to annoyance, also when you die after a respawn you get back into the action really quick and can die again instantly before you've worked out where you are, so sometimes one annoying death can turn into 4 and yeah annoying. but it's also great fun and i keep going back to it to get a better score so it's obviously doing something right. also when you continue you lose all powerups, so depending on what stage you're on it can be extremely hard to make any progress - other shmups do this a lot better, you've already lost your score so what does it matter - have a max-power power up. oh they are possibly working on a mode with better visibility. there's a few different modes - arcade mode where you play all the levels in order - with different difficulty modes. there's some challenges on a smaller set of stages where enemies are faster etc. with gold/silver/bronze medals. and there's a mode where you can do one world at a time. i've sort of 1cc'd the middle difficulty arcade mode (see spoiler) and am trying to do the difficulty level up, but the 3rd and 4th bosses take up loads of lives, not got past the 4th boss yet. scoring i'm not too sure about, seems to be just, collect everything, get all secret stages and combo all humans - which is more than i can cope with at the moment. to combo the humans i think you need to know some stages where stuff spawns so you can kill it quick enough so your combo doesn't run out before the stage ends, but some stages it doesn't seem as tight on timing. anyone else playing this?

Refunct is cool as fuck, really chilled It's a first person platformer, which ordinarily is immediately bad game design, but it's very generous with ledge grabs and how likely you are to just fall off something. The game is jumping up pillars to activate switches, which will cause more pillars to rise. What's cool is that you pretty quickly start to learn how to play without being told how to (although it is worth mentioning there is a duck button). You go from carefully lining up jumps to rebounding off. It's really short, like 20 minutes or so, but it is also only 65p on Steam at the minute

I bought this ages ago but have only just started playing it. It's a pretty good action RPG - my only memories of Wonderboy (bar Jack Black and KG) are from the simplistic original platformer and one on the Master System that I didn't like because it had stats and shit (like this, really). I think it might have been Dragon's Trap. Oh well, will have to hunt it down. Anyway this is a great little game, it's quite frustrating in places - as soon as you die you go straight back to the title screen, and saving costs you money so it can get quite tough. So far I'm enjoying it and it's something a bit different so I'd recommend it. Here's a bit of gameplay footage to watch.

Very much impressed with Telltales output these days. Walking Dead is brilliant. As is The Wolf Among Us. So being a massive GOT fan, I was well up for this. And Episode 1 is a very good start indeed. Pretty important to state though that the opening section has a massive spoiler if you're not caught up to the events of the start of Series 4/Book 3. So be aware of that. It's the tried-and-tested Telltale format, which I'm perfectly happy with. You play as the Forrester family, and interact with a few of the series main fore-runners. After his frankly god-awful role as Ghost in Destiny, Peter Dinklige is back on form here as Tyrion. 5 more episodes to go, but this is a promising start.

This is a Metroidvania set in the retro robot future by our friends at Double Fine. You play as a floating head in a space helmet that can vacuum the heads of of resident robots and land on their bodies and take control. Certain coloured doors must be opened by certain colour robots, so sometimes you gotta find the right colour then take it back to an area to be able to progress. Apart from the unique hook it's pretty much a Metroidvania by numbers. Lots of back tracking, unlocking of powers, sprawling maps with hidden rooms. It's a good one mind, it's set in the future with a 60's vibe which gives it a cool look. I've finished it 100%, took me about 11 hours. It can be a bit of a pain getting around the map sometimes which is a critisim I find in most of these type of games. Also, when there's a lot going on and you find yourself with out a body it can be fucking hard to see your tiny head amongst the lasers, explosions and colours. Overall though I h(e)ad a great time. Currently part of Xbox Game Pass which was a nice surprise as I've been waiting for it to go on sale since it came out. Here's the Giant Bomb quick look if you fancy it: You can pick your starter head, i was a woman so that guy aint my headlander! Definately worth a go.

Started this earlier on the Switch. Played the opening 20 minutes or so. The game reviewed well when it came out last year and the comparisons to Studio Ghibli were enough to convince me to buy it. The game is basically a side-scrolling adventure in a Ghibli-esque world, or something out of an Enid Blyton story. The setting seems to be a world where forgotten things go, most of the characters in the game seem to be objects and household items, things like that, but you play as a girl. There’s also an older man who is trying to develop a way to get back to the real world. From what I gathered. The game looks beautiful and the opening is very cinematic.

I started this today and it's really good, although it does have a couple of problems. It's an action rpg, and it's got a few nice ideas in there. You have a standard melee attack and a magic attack, a dodge, which you'll need as you see an indicator of where, and how far an enemy will attack. If I had to throw in a comparison, it's not a million miles away from something like Ys, except smaller. The most notable good idea I like is that there's only limited types of weapons and armour in the game, so if you pick up a duplicate it levels up that weapon. It's random, or seemingly random, what you get, so you might have to switch from a build you like because something else has streaked ahead. What that means is, you might have a sword that does decent damage, but the wand that's just levelled up might do so much more magic damage it makes sense to switch My issue with the game then, and I am really liking Cat's Quest, is that it feels very small. The map gets restricted very early by very powerful enemies. I got a story mission I was warned not to go and do until I'd levelled up a bit, so I had to circle around the same small area for a couple of hours picking up side quests to gain some levels. The game never told me what level I needed to be at to take on that story mission, maybe it does in some menu somewhere, but it meant that when I'd started to run out of side quests, or hit a bit of a wall with them, and went to do the main mission, I pissed all over it The quests almost always involve you going to a point, possibly then to another, fighting some monsters, completing quest. It's fine, some of the set ups are pretty good but then some are kind of repeated. I picked it up fairly cheap, it's not a bad Switch game, not sure it's something you'll play solidly for a week

Time for impressions me thinks. I've decided its great. It's a futuristic racing game where the car's have big wheels and can drive upside-down. It's high speed so you can ride up walls, ceilings and generally flip around. It's very fun. The game starts off very easy - you can come last and still progress - but now I've spent some time with it I see that early parts of the game are just about learning the tracks and how your car reacts to the environments. So I will just say you may progress easily but it's important to pay attention. You'll need to because later where positions are more important you can't just fling yourself around; your flinging has got to be considered. Handling is a weird combination of twitchy and heavy. Like steering between other cars on the straights is twitchy but when the tracks start throwing sharp turns at you you need to be heavy on the breaks and the car's suddenly feel like barges. It's weird to get used to but it does make an odd sense after extended play. It has a good variety of modes. Races come in different guises: You have your basic races, there are races based on points (you get points nailing others with Mario Kart style weapons and sick jumps), an arena mode like a death match taking place in an open area and others. I think it's really cool. It's hard, and like a lot of weapons based racing games it can definitely be frustrating but then there are lots of highs, too, so it's a game you have that kind of dysfunctional relationship with, especially with all the flipping. Here, I have a clip of me racing that has a bit of GRIP drama in it (shout out to the self correction after being screwed *chefs kiss*. Boo to me being an idiot and driving into the edge of a pipe)

I’ve always enjoyed Telltale’s output. It was pretty gutting to see them go down in flames. There was a lot of doubt about this game getting finished. But, it was. Personally, I’ve felt that their WD series peaked with the outstanding first season. 2 was good, until the rushed last two chapters. New Frontier annoyed me. Season 2 had a possibility of 3 very different endings. New Frontier decided to make all of those choices meaningless, funnelling Clementine down the one ending they felt was “canon”. Still, despite me preferring their other series (Wolf Among Us, Batman and Guardians Of The Galaxy are vastly superior to anything TWD did after the first season), I was always going to get around to this eventually. If you’ve played any Telltale game, you know what to expect. Very little puzzle solving, mostly making decisions that a character ‘Will remember’, unless they die soon afterwards. The story here is mostly good, focussing on Clem’s continued efforts to raise AJ in a world dominated by Walkers. You meet a new group of survivors, and try to fit in with them. Choices you make influence how AJ reacts to scripted situations. And some of those choices were pretty meaningful in the long run. There’s plenty of action sequences, though I found a lot of them frustrating. If you get attacked while trying to kill a walker, you die. The key to survival is stunning them with a leg stab, then taking them on one at a time. But the controls for movement felt a bit janky at times. I’d stun a walker, then try to kill another one nearby, but it wouldn’t register, so I got killed. It didn’t happen that often, but it was bloody annoying when it did. Did it all pay off in the end? Well, obviously I’ll spoiler it, but I didn’t like the ending. I’ll say why, but obviously, it’s a SPOILER. So, here goes: Anyway, that’s it. It was mostly enjoyable. Definitely some exciting moments. Just a shame it’s the end of the road for Telltale.

Have you played Minecraft before? If it's a yes, you already know what it's about, probably best to click off the thread. If no, pull up a chair. Minecraft isn't for everyone. It's a very directionless game where outside the simple premise of building a house for yourself, you are free to do what you want. In the day time the game plays out as a building sim where you spend time harvesting blocks of various materials. You start off by punching them, but soon enough you are able to knock together a means which will allow you to make tools. Tools allow specific materials to be harvested faster, axes allow wood to be gathered faster, shovels allow dirt or gravels to be smashed u[p faster and so on. On top of that, each tool you make takes a durability hit each time you use it, although as you progress you can make better and better tools for harvesting materials that you couldn't previously. Of course, the more materials you have the more things you can make, and the more things you can make the more materials you can get. It's a vicious circle or harvesting and producing. At night you have one of three choices. You either hole up in the house or shack you managed to find or throw up before the sun went down and sleep the night off in a comfy bed, you curse yourself for over reaching yourself in building a house or you make equip yourself with the armours and weapons you made during the day time to try and endure the night. If you ended up doing the latter two options, you just entered the survival horror part of the game. They might be blocky sprites, but when you hear their howling or attack call it will make you panic. If you survive the night, it's back to the day time cycle. There are a lot of things to do, even outside of building massive houses and castles for you to live in. The beauty of this game is that you can play for one day cycle which is about 20 minutes from what I worked out, or you could play for hours upon hours. If I was to do some game algebra it would be Animal Crossing + Keftlings + Survival Horror + First Person Perspective + LEGO = Minecraft. It's something you should at least try the demo of and see whether you like it if you have not tried it already. You can have a good piss about before the demo ends and get an idea of what you are getting into. I personally didn't try the online part of the game, but I did grab about 40 minutes in splitscreen and it works really nice. The only think I do not like about it is that the menus have not really been optimised properly for a controller. The crafting part is fine, but just moving stuff about your inventory is a bit of a pain in the arse, I'm not sure how they could have handled it better, but I'm sure they could have done it somehow. It's made even more annoying by the fact that the hints and reminders are constantly pushing the inventory box to one side, it could have seriously done without that.

I just realised we don't have a thread for this. It came out in Japan in 2014 but only came out over here last year. As you can see by the tags, it's out on pretty much everything bar PC. For anyone that doesn't know, Puyo Puyo is Mean Bean Machine and it mixes that with Tetris. The game modes are insane. You can play against people playing one style while you play the other one (or the same if you like), you can play a weird hybrid mode where the two styles are combined and you will get Puyos and Tetris pieces in the same zone, you can play an alternating mode where you play one style for say 30 seconds and then it switches to the other style, or you can play a puzzle mode where you have to fill in certain puzzle shapes. I played quite a bit in multiplayer over the Christmas break and it gets really fierce and fun. I wouldn't recommend playing online against randoms because fucking hell. You can view replays of other people playing and they are like machines.

So, the downsides are there. It’s locked to 30fps on base machines (though I can’t actually tell the difference), there’s one music track on the menu when you boot it up and then you need a premium Spotify account to play and control music through the menus. There’s no online or offline multiplayer at the moment. There isn’t even a tutorial of any kind, you’re just thrown straight in expecting you to be a Burnout fan. But it’s fast, fun and completely mind blowing that this was made by just 7 people. I’ve hooked up my Spotify and am currently hurtling round the tracks listening to a Prodigy playlist. I can tell you that bouncing round to No Good, Voodoo People and Break & Enter is fantastic. It’s a shame that there’s no specific music and if you’re using another premium music service you’re out of luck. Also the music doesn’t get filtered like it did on Burnout when you boost. But if no-one else will make it, Burnout fans should embrace this as the good outways the bad. Also, I’m gonna make a collaborative playlist if anyone wants in.

Soon going to be playing through the 3rd (and probably final) DLC for this. So seems a good time to throw down an opinion. This is definitely one of the most fun games i’ve played this year. I’ve a lot of respect for Rebellion,their Sniper Elite series is consistently brilliant (shooting Nazis in the nads? Who doesn’t love that.). So I was definitely interested in this. It doesn’t carry across the gory X-Ray cam feature of Sniper Elite. But that’s understandable,as it’s going for a different vibe. It plays out like an Olden days Adventure movie, with a Narrator providing a running commentary,often genuinely being hilarious (though for some reason has an absolute hatred of cats,and isn’t afraid to show it). The combat is simple to grasp,with a small selection of weapons (sniper rifles,SMGs,shotguns), with additional extra powerful weapons that you can buy from crates,using gold you get from treasure chests and killing enemies. You also get special moves that you can activate with enough charge,ranging from damage reduction,to smart bombs. One complaint though has to come with boss fights. Many of them require an accurate shot on a particular weak spot, often a quite small one. Doesn’t sound bad in theory. But when that boss is constantly moving,accuracy proves difficult. Add that to a swarm of enemies ganking you,and the difficulty in getting a decent shot gets even worse. Co-op definitely helps in that regard. Bosses that took me a good 20 minutes to kill on my own,became a breeze when I was with a mate. Its been a really enjoyable game,and the DLC missions have been quite decent. Charging £6 for each additional new character can go bollocks though. It hit the PSN sales at Halloween,and probably will do so again before long. I’d certainly recommend it.