Angel_Sigh

Okay, the positives: - It looks a bit better than TC2. - you can finally remap controls. - nope. That's it. Negatives: - the handling. It's still mindscramblingly awful. It's absolutely miserable to drive any car in the game, and given that's the case nothing else really matters. This is the one thing that has to be good, and it's still so, so bad. I could just stop here because this alone massacres any chance the game has of being any good. - But I won't stop with the handling because there's so much more that's bad. The other atrocity is the AI - the rubber banding in this game makes racing a horrible grind. Your racing line makes almost no difference, you can race perfectly and the opponents will still be just as close to you as if you'd driven like an idiot. It's so joyless. - The grinding that's required to afford any of the pricier cars is so obviously aimed at making the player purchase microtransactions. It's just nauseating. Gran Turismo 7 does something similar with its in-game economy, but at least that game has a great handling model and good AI. - It advertises cars that are exclusive to The Crew **** the autoshow. This is another typically scummy move from a series that traffics in scummy moves. - It's clearly and obviously just a DLC that was expanded to a full-price game for the sake of wringing money out of idiots, idiots like me. There are hardly any new, exciting headline cars: the Bolide has been in Grid Legends already, which leaves the Revuelto as the only really new big name. It's a shockingly weak lineup of new cars. - It forces you, at least in the early part of the game, to drive to a certain location just to unlock a new playlist. Then you have to drive another interminable distance to play the first race in that playlist. It is mindnumbing, having to drive for three or four minutes between every race. Maybe if the cars weren't so horrible to drive I might not resent the lack of fast travel, but as it is it's just annoying, tedious. - I think the upgrade system is still fantastically stupid. - The fact that all you get for paying an extra 15 quid for the ultimate edition is a couple of hideous cars with horrible bodykits and stupid underglow lighting, cars that eventualy become available in-game anyway, demonstrates how much better Horizon 5 is in every way, including in terms of value for money. For the ultimate edition price in FH5 I get two excellent DLCs and a gigantic, very cool car pass. In TCM I get those two(crap) cars. - The map's now much smaller. It looks better, but the map size was about the only thing The Crew had going for it. So now it's got nothing. In summary this game is a Ubisoft cash grab. Were Ubisoft ever any good? I don't know. I can't remember a time when they ever seemed to care that much about their games, and this might be the worst they've ever been, tarting up a The Crew DLC and nudging it out of the door for full price and shipping another, clearly terrible Assassin's Creed game in time for Christmas, instead of taking some time off and giving more than a tupenny f**k about quality. The Crew Motorfest is one of the worst racing games I've ever played. Joyless, cheap, stupid.

Visually stunning, good tuning upgrades, excellent racing model with very good handling. Probably second only to Assetto in terms of satisfying sim handling. Not as realistic, but still very enjoyable. Good range of cars. That bit there ^^^ that's why this has three points out of ten rather than zero. That's it. **** to the negatives. The many, many...MANY negatives. There are little **** and huge, outrageous flaws and everything in between. But I'll start with the biggest issue: - Microtransactions. MTX for short. I have never, ever seen a AAA game implement MTX this disgustingly. It's jawdroppingly shameless. For those of you who don't know what GT7 consists of - well you have to unlock the cars before you can drive them. That means buying them using in=game credits. This is normal in modern AAA racing games. You can also spend real money, in the real world, to buy in-game credits. This is less normal in AAA racing games but it happens, and it's just one of those horrible things we all have to put up with because GTAV started the trend and also because there is no god. So GT7 has these microtransactions. How bad can it really be though? Surely if other games have them it's okay for GT7 to have them too? You naive fool, let me explain just how bad it is in this game: the legendary cars, the really expensive ones, cost 20m credits. How much is that in MTX? Well, about £150. £150 for a single car. In a carlist that numbers in the 400s. So how do you earn money in-game? Grinding. How long would it take to earn the 20m credits for that legendary car? FOURTEEN HOURS. Fourteen hours grinding the most profitable race, a mindnumbing hour long race. So you either spend fourteen hours grinding for that car or you spend £150 of your own real money. Either **** are a f***ing idiot. But there's the roulette system right? The system where you occasionally get to spin a roulette wheel which has some tasty prizes on it. That sounds like a decent way to mitigate the grind and the MTX...right? Wrong, as wrong as you can be. The roulette system is so laughably foul, so ridiculously, comically evil, it's like it's laughing at you when you spin it. Because it's rigged. It's openly rigged. This isn't some suspicion that paranoid GT users have - it's been demonstrated. It's rigged to fall on the smallest reward, and it does so deterministically and with obvious contempt for the playerbase. To me the wheel sums up GT7's economy. They didn't even bother to hide the fact that it's skewed. Polyphony don't seem to care that you know. All of that makes the game a miserable experience for a newcomer like myself. I want to get into **** it hates me and wants me to go away. Of course, that one issue of the game's economy is more than enough to put any sane person off the game for good. But Polyphony wanted to make sure, so they added in hundreds of little ones too: - visual customisation is absolute bumsauce. - the clutch implementation in the game is bewildering. - the UI and general menu system were designed by a madman. - the chase camera is locked to the car in a way that turns off anyone who's come from playing any other racing game made this century. It would take a modder about six or seven minutes to fix this. Polyphony's take is 'f*** you, we're unique'. Yes, but not in a good way. - the career mode, single player in other words, is truly rubbish. Etc. I'm going to stop now otherwise I'll still be here tomorrow. This game is utterly disgraceful, and I cannot believe that the short term benefit of raking in money from halfwitted MTX whales could possibly outweight the long-term disaster of turning so many people off this franchise completely. Add to that the general slow, laborious, grudging way that the developers respond to any complaints, the stubbornness with which they approach a videogaming genre that has changed radically since GT first arrived on the scene, and you have a recipe for alienating huge numbers of paying customers, very quickly, forever. Genius! There's a great driving model underneath it, but **** cares? A scorpion is a brilliantly evolved creature, but it's still a c***. I don't usually approve of review bombing, but in this case it's completely justified.

So far I'm enjoying it, mainly because its plot is dragging me through, and I like the characters. Star Lord is fairly sweet in a dopey kind of way, Gamora is quite cool, Rocket is doing a kind of cross between Bradley Cooper and Bill Burr, probably the best character so far, there is a nice bond between him and Groot. Drax is the most disappointing to me. Maybe Jon DiMaggio would've been a better choice because the guy playing him is just devoid of charisma. The writing is nowhere near the standard of the films, obviously. I say obviously but it shouldn't be obvious really. There must be young, talented indie sitcom writers who could write better, funnier dialogue than this. It's not awful, it's just not that funny, and it's very obvious. But it's okay. You like the characters, so you forgive the game its weak writing. It looks gorgeous: I'd say the graphics and particularly the level design are the highlights. The architecture of the ships, the stunning, weird, liquorice-taffy planet that you explore early on in the game, where giant red strips of what look like candy coil around the strange alien trees. It's a visual triumph really. It's technically very good too, but it's the design that's most impressive. The reason it's not an 8 is simple. The combat. It's too complicated without being fun. Bullet sponge enemies are NEVER enjoyable to fight. And it feels like they just endlessly respawn here too. It's fussy without being deep, which is a problem. Complexity is fine so long as the end result is a deep system that you can learn to master. But this just involves remembering when to use such and such an attack and there are no stringent time limits for it, you just plod through each battle. Star Lord isn't fun to control. His guns are weedy and he can't fly around the battlefield for more than ten to twenty seconds on a cooldown special attack. His melee is pathetic so you're just firing your blasters for 90% of the time, chipping away at surprisingly grindy enemy healthbars. It's a real missed opportunity. I don't think this 'play as one character while directing the rest of the team' style of combat has EVER worked in an action game. V in DMCV was my least favourite character for that reason, and I found Astral Chain annoyingly fussy too. But the rest of the game is likable, and the story progresses quickly enough for the combat not to be too much of an issue. It never becomes satisfying but it's not quite bad either. So the rest of the game isn't dragged down by it too much. I would say it's worth getting. Maybe not a must-buy unless you're a huge fan of the characters, but definitely give it a go if you see it on sale. And I'm tempted to give it another point purely because they resisted the temptation to turn the game into some hideous Avengers-style live-service chimera mutant monstrosity. Single player games like this are rare these days, and should be cherished.

I love drifting. It was Horizon 4 that taught me the basics and ever since then I've become a bit obsessed. I play Forza Horizon 4 every day and I've sunk two thousand hours into it. I'm in the world top 200 on its longest and most gruelling drift zone, the Needle Climb, so I'm a handy drifter by now. And most racing/driving games allow you to drift and have specific challenges for drifting. But only a small handful of games actually get drifting right, and to get it right it has to feel natural. The reason drifting feels natural in FH4(and in Forza Motorsport) is because the reasons you drift in those games are the same reasons you drift in real life. The physics in Forza may be toytown versions of real physics, but they are still accurate. The physics work the same way they do in the real world. By contrast, other racing games, like NFS or Grid, or the execrable Crew 2, simulate drifting in completely unnatural ways. It doesn't feel physical. It feels like the developers just made the back ends of some cars slip out in a way that looks a bit like drifting. Whereas with Forza the reason you drift is because your rear wheels lose traction: simple as that. If they lose a lot of traction you spin out, and if you oversteer too much you spin out. If you don't have enough horsepower your car won't drift very far. And AWD drifting is completely different to RWD drifting. It all feels completely natural. The same goes for Dirt Rally. The best drifting games have drifting that is just a by-product of their physics engines. The drifting is just what happens when you control your oversteer and your rear wheels break traction. It's not added into the game by hand. It feels natural and therefore it feels right. The same goes for Assetto Corsa's formidably realistic drifting. Which is all a long way round of saying: Absolute drift feels the same way. It's simpler than the drifting in the aforementioned games: I haven't seen much need to clutch-kick or any of the advanced techniques I use, But it feels absolutely, physically, right. The weight transfer of the cars, the oversteer, the arcs of your drifts: it's glorious. Your car is tiny, but you feel that connection with it all the same. And even though the game is short and small it's so moreish to play, and to get better at, that you'll repeat certain levels just for the joy of hooning around them. It's a bit more complex than I expected too: there's a clutch, manual gearing, there's a bunch of assists that I recommend you switch off to get the full experience. This tiny gem **** was followed up by Art Of Rally, a more fleshed out rally racing game, with a lot of very slidey, drifty cars. But I think I prefer Absolute Drift at the moment. It's simpler, purer and more addictive. If you life drifting in any way you should get it. Especially on Switch, its natural home. Oh, and give Funselektor ALL THE MONEY; they/he are/is obviously hugely talented, and understands exactly what feels great about pulling that handbrake, breaking that traction and sweeping around a long, lazy corner sideways, puffing on a cigar and grinning at the locals. I would dearly love to see what Funselektor could do with a AA/AAA budget.

I've only been playing for a couple of days now. So bear in mind, as always with early user reviews, that NO-ONE, least of all me, is capable of giving a proper review of the entire game yet. That's what professional critic reviews are for. But I can give my early impressions - and I'm eager to do so: Firstly, it's an audiovisual feast. Demon's Souls is still probably the best looking game on PS5, but this really is a gorgeous game. It is dripping in atmosphere, it's smooth as butter at 60fps and whether the 4k is upscaled or not is irrelevant. It looks fabulous. I'm surprised at what a huge step-up this is for Housemarque in terms of production values - their games have always looked spectacular, but in a lo-fi, indie way. This is a massive leap forward. It's heavily influenced by the Alien films, Prometheus especially, as well as highbrow modern-sci-fi releases like Annihilation and Arrival, the dystopic real world in The Matrix, even Cronenberg's Existenz: you can see hints of all these movies in everything from the squiddy-like enemies, the alien civilisation and its architecture, the alien artifacts(that shimmer and reform when you shoot them, like a swarm of insects) dotted enigmatically around the **** body-horror weapon augments that latch onto the player like parasites. It is stitched together from so many different influences, it'd be easy for it to come across as lacking in personality. But it's too atmospheric for that. And I said it's an audio-visual feast: the music and sound effects, ambient noises, are absolutely fantastic. There are constant unsettling chittering, humming noises to set you at unease, occasional Hans-Zimmer esque synth pulses, and subtle, elegant sound cues warn you of every enemy appearance(which is crucial, given how quickly you can lose your buff build-up if you're not careful and don't spot an enemy in your peripheral). It's just an enormous audiovisual accomplishment. W/r/t gameplay: it is a triple-A action game(maybe more of a double-A), but Housemarque have resisted the temptation to compromise on the responsiveness and speed of the controls. They haven't felt the need to animate the player to move like Nathan Drake thankfully. Gameplay comes first, and the action is incredibly precise and twitch-based, as you'd expect from the devs. It's honed - this was always going to be the game's strong point. ****'s a roguelike. And even though Hades was my game of 2020(by a distance) I still haven't made my mind up about this genre. Hades worked so brilliantly because it turned the most dispiriting part of a roguelike - the moment when you die and lose all that progress - into an outright positive. In that game, death meant more progress in the story, more secrets tumbling out, more cool **** the game's length was so short that losing carried very little sting. I ended up completing Hades 160 times(you need to complete it ten times just to see the proper ending). I do not get that feeling from Returnal. It hasn't softened the edges at all. There are no attempts to make the sting of loss any less stinging. And I remember enjoying Dead Cells just as much as I'm enjoying this game, but I still never bothered finishing it. At some point, having to return right to the start of the game on every death became too much and the lure of permanent power-ups and 'leveling up' my character was too small. I haven't reached that point with **** I have met some dispiriting ends. Sudden deaths from enemies that seemed to come out of nowhere. And it's that kind of thing that'll decide whether you'll end up enjoying this game or not. I love hard games, but only if they have that something that keeps pulling me back. Sekiro is one of my favourite games of all-time. From Software are, imo, the greatest devs on the planet. But the structure of roguelikes is different from Soulslikes. You can get crushed in Souls, but you aren't thrown back to the start. You're pushed back to a bonfire and you lose your souls. But that's not so bitter a blow as to make you lose interest. I haven't lost interest at all in this game. I'm not saying that. I'm just warning anyone reading this that you will need to persist beyond the early stage of the game where each death can be sudden and it feels like you're making no progress at all. There comes a point where permanent power-ups make you feel a lot more confident, where you've managed to unlock enough things that persist beyond a single death. With roguelikes, it's a lot like the early stages of a Soulsborne game: you're weak, vulnerable and everything hits like a truck. And that's the point at which a lot of people just think 'f*** this, I'm out'. But Souls die-hards know that beyond that point lies the most satisfying gaming experience in the world. I don't know if Returnal will give me something like that yet, but I've seen enough of this mysterious, beautiful, butter-smooth twitch-action-game to keep pushing on.

First up I should say I've not had the chance to finish the game yet. Ideally I'd finish every game I review, but I play so many games, on every platform, it makes it difficult. By the time I finish a game it's six months after its release date and the review is a lot less useful. I still post those late reviews, mainly because I like a game so much I feel the need to rave about it. But generally my hand is forced and I review games I haven't yet finished. That out of the way, I'm about 10 - 12 hours in to Hades and I'm playing it on Switch. I got it with 20% off, which, as the review will make clear, is a very, very good deal. PROS: - Voice acting. Oh, the voice acting. Not just the acting but the quality of the writing and the characterisation. Zagreus, your protagonist is a deliciously dry, sarcastic young man - charismatic, caustic, cool. His father Hades is an alternately fulminating and whispering Big Bad, although it's much more complicated than that. Every one of the many characters is beautifully presented, written and voiced. The bosses are favourites of mine. - The plot - it's a strange thing, to talk of a 'plot' in a roguelike, but probably the single cleverest thing Supergiant have done is to introduce a storyline into the spaces between runs. Generally in roguelikes those spaces are simple downtime to gather your wits and fortify your will for another attempt. They tend to have some shops that sell and buy stuff and some sort of mcguffin that powers you up permanently. And Hades has all that too, albeit refracted through the lens of Greek mythology. But Supergiant have introduced a gradually progressing narrative that proceeds with every death. Every time you die in a run and go back to the start the storyline takes another step forward. Characters in the starting hub disappear and reappear, new characters introduce themselves, plot twists are revealed. Secret connections between Zagreus and the rest of the Greek gods are clarified. It is a brilliant solution to the problem that all roguelikes besides Hades bump up against: the feeling of futility between runs. I remember at one point in Dead Cells getting seriously far into the game. It was the culmination of a painstaking effort. And then I died and I was hurtled back to the start. And it was at that point, after so many deaths and runs, that I simply lost interest. As brilliant an action game as it was, that feeling of futility and lack of tangible progression gradually built up as I played, and eventually I just gave up. Hades turns this typical weakness of the genre into a strength: every time you die the plot advances. New characters stop you to chat, or old characters reveal some dark truth about themselves. You learn more. It means that death has less of a sting than in other roguelikes. Death becomes part of the rhythm of the game, even something necessary, rather than a dull bore. It's a subtle, elegant, complete solution to what has been up until now a big negative with the genre. - The gameplay. It's been a long time since I've played something this addictive. The loop of risk/reward is relentless: you're never more than a minute or so away from some shiny trinket that'll buff your character and give you a little adrenaline rush. Combine that with simple but skillful and tactical twitch action and it's up there with Celeste and Super Meat Boy as one of the most compulsive games I've played in the last ten years. CONS: - Well, it's a roguelike, and if you, like me, still have a problem with these kinds of games then there's no getting around that. However, Hades deals with the inherent flaws of the genre better than any other roguelike I've ever played. I dislike a lot of the baggage that accompanies this kind of game, especially procedurally generated levels. Yet the the game is so structurally exquisite I ended up not caring. It works around these flaws with such artistry, even turning some of them into positives. - I'd say that the combat can get a little hard to read on the Switch. It's not a huge deal though. That's about it for flaws... I think right now a 9/10 is sufficient. I can imagine giving it a 10, especially when I think of how polished and stupidly playable this game is, but there is something about roguelikes that **** at me still. Which is unfair I guess: since this game subverts the genre and turns its weaknesses into strengths throughout. Still, 9/10 it is. This one of the most compulsive, lavish, complete and stylish indie games ever. The score is really irrelevant. If I could I'd get rid of it and just write 'GET IT NOW' at the top of my review. It's sublime. 12/10/2020: I have been playing Hades non-stop since my review a week or so ago, and have completed it eight times already. It is one of the best games I've ever played, a true once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece. I originally gave it a high 9/10, but now have come back to change it to a 10/10.

I've just downloaded this from Game Pass and I stepped into it very gingerly. I'd heard tales of how legendarily difficult it is; how punishingly realistic; and while I play a lot of racing games the times when I've turned my hand to the sim end of the market, with games like Assetto corsa, I've been brutalised by the difficulty of even driving a car in a straight line never mind competing in a race. So I expected to bounce off this in a pretty dispiriting way. My first few minutes were spent resetting the controls to the Forza layout(I can't drive without it) and readjusting the audio so that your co-driver is inaudible and the menu music is quiet. Since there are so many games on Game Pass this was one of those titles I expected to muck about in for half an hour or so and then delete a few days later when I turned to something else. Basically I just wanted to test how good the rally cars sounded - Codemasters are the undisputed champions of videogaming car sounds and their recent(and underwhelming) arcade racer GRID was almost worth buying on the strength of its insane engine and exhaust notes. So I took an Alpine out for a spin in the free roaming area*, tested out the chase and cockpit views, drank in the raw, grating gurgle that it makes and then had a look elsewhere in the game. I saw the time trial option and selected some other car, a Nissan I think. Then I took it out for a spin on a Spanish course. Because it's now my habit as a relatively seasoned videogame racer I left all the assists off, set it to manual sequential(clutch still escapes me), and dove in. Straight away I was surprised. I did better than I expected. I smoked the car to pieces and rolled it over repeatedly, sent it flying over inclines and into ditches, but I could at least control the car with my analogue stick, which I was half expecting to be impossible(most sim racers swear by a racing wheel setup). I think I ran it again. By this point I'd forgotten about testing engine noises altogether, I was just having too much fun. Not long after I started a championship, again expecting to get savaged by the AI and my own incompetence. But again I was surprised: this game is punishing, no doubt about it. One mistake can cost you twenty places in a rally run. One mistake can total your car. Clip a rock, just a tiny rock poking into an otherwise open straight and you're at a 45 degree ange, drifting into a bank and then flipping through the air like a gymnast before landing upside down in a forest clearing. But the handling is more forgiving than you'd imagine. There's none of the wheel lock that you find with simulation road cars, where once you start spinning out and losing traction, even sightly, you're basically f***ed - in Dirt Rally 2.0 there's always at least a chance to wrestle back control of your car if you end up going diagonal. Anyway, I think I placed something like seventh on my first attempt at one of these tracks, and that was enough encouragement for me. I've been playing it ever since. It's one of those pure-skill games that certain gamers will love: gamers who love that feeling of slowly learning the nuances of a system of enormous depth and subtlety. Every time you drive it is a constant struggle: there are no moments where you can relax as you hare down a straight, like you can in GT Sport or Forza. Every single centimetre of track constitutes a threat to your time, and you must adjust your drive on a constant basis. The track-racing emphasis on maintaining geometrically perfect driving lines is not so important in Dirt Rally 2.0, and losing traction is not just acceptable, it's often crucial. These are all mental readjustments for someone like me. The one and only rally game I played was an Xbox(original Xbox) rally game, Rallisport Challenge I think, and every racer I've played before and since has been tarmac-centric. Anyway, in the same way that I was sure that I'd love Sekiro from the moment I pulled off my first parry, I was similarly sure I'd love this game when I first completed a track without damaging my vehicle. The feeling of wrangling your car through a tortuous course is exhilarating.. I'm a newcomer so I can't judge this game against previous incarnations. As a result plenty of hardcore fans will feel differently, in the same way that even though I love Forza Horizon 4, if I were to review it here half of said review would be complaints about how FH4 has failed to implement things that hardcore supporters of the franchise have been asking for. I can understand if there are complaints of that nature about this installation of Dirt Rally, it's just I'm not qualified to make them. All I'm qualified to do is judge this as a standalone racing game - and on that front it is absolutely imperious. *I do wish Codemasters would get their act together and make a proper open-world racing game to rival Forza Horizon - if anyone has the knowhow to pull it off it's them.

I'm about fifteen hours in - a few things need to be said: - Ignore the votebombing campaign. A huge amount of the hate it's getting is simply for having gay characters in the lead. The people hating on the game are conservatives with small minds who clearly haven't played it. - For those people who are SINCERELY disappointed in the darker, brutal turn the story takes all I can say **** you play the same The Last Of Us 1 that I did? Joel's daughter is killed in the first hour of the game and he goes on to murder hundreds upon hundreds of human beings. Then he makes a deeply morally questionable decision at the end of the game. This is not a game series for people who like happy endings. And if you're surprised by the turns this game's story takes that's a GOOD thing, no? Did you not want to be surprised? One comment I read here on Metacritic in the User Score section summed up the stupidity of most of the criticism this game's getting: it said: "THE DEVELOPERS IGNORED THE COMMUNITY AND JUST WROTE THEIR OWN STORY!!!" I mean...what do you say to someone who thinks that way? Someone who is so entitled and spoiled and small minded that they believe they have some divine right to dictate the direction of someone else's story in someone else's game? Okay, that out of the way, I can get onto the game itself. I'm going to admit that I was not a huge fan of the first game. I thought it began and ended brilliantly, in fact I think it has easily the greatest ending of any game ever made - the ending is up there with the ending to some of the greatest films ever made too. But the bulk of the game itself wasn't enjoyable for me. It was too slow, the stealth was too laboured and predictable and the gunplay was dull. I'm a huge fan of ND games, Uncharted 2-4 remain some of my all-time favourites, but TLOU was a rare ND game that just didn't click with me. For some reason I'm finding its sequel much, much more enjoyable. First of all, the simple act of moving around the world is greatly improved. You are quicker, more nimble, the mantling animations are fluid, you can climb quickly and easily... A great example of how much care has been taken over making movement responsive and satisfying is the way your horse controls. Think of how many games have horses in **** think of how utterly atrociously difficult it is to control those horses: eg. Red Dead 2, with its painfully slow, tank-like horses, or Shadow of the Colossus with the infuriatingly capricious Agro, Roach in The Witcher 3, etc., etc... Yet your horse in TLOU 2 is an extension of you. It turns on a dime, it accelerates beautifully, it moves from a trot to a gallop to a stop with such fluidity I was a bit startled when I first controlled it. This is the Naughty Dog difference: the sheer care that's gone into making small things as good as they can possibly be. When I reviewed Uncharted 4 I called it 'Luxury Gaming', simply because of the lavishness of the enterprise, the absurd amount of care and attention that had gone into every single component of the game. And while TLOU 2 doesn't have the same obvious graphical splendor and jaw-dropping scenery as Uncharted 4, it has had just as much, maybe more, attention paid to it. It's visually magnificent, although the narrative forces it into less obviously attractive locations than other big hitters in this department like Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead 2 and the aforementioned Uncharted 4. It controls beautifully. ...And the **** human versus human combat...bloody hell. I've just started facing other humans, and it feels substantially different from other action games in this regard. It feels much more tense. A single shot can kill you, a single shot can kill **** enemies shout to each other throughout, threaten you, you can try and outflank them, and you have your heat-vision-y sense powers, but apart from that it's desperation and adrenaline. I'm hoping the game keeps up this level of quality, in its gunplay and in its stealth, and so far this feels like its cribbed a lot of valuable lessons from Uncharted 4(which Neil Druckmann, director of TLOU 1 and 2, also directed) simply in how to make the game more...well, fun. More purely enjoyable. How to make stealth and combat more satisfying. So far it feels like they've succeeded, and I get the same sugar rush from the action elements in this game that I got from Uncharted 4, only there's a good deal more depth to this. I am interested in seeing where the plot goes. But it's the gameplay that so far is impressing me most. Based on my impressions of the game up until now this is a substantial improvement on the first game - more satisfying in every single area. I was not expecting much because I'd had such a hard time with the first game, but it has been riveting so far. Tense, dramatic, with a forward momentum propelling the player forward. It's daring, with the unique 'luxury gaming' touch that you only get with ND.

Sometimes when you start playing a game it takes hours to get into it. Sometimes it takes even longer. My favourite game of all time, Final Fantasy 7, took about three or four, maybe five, hours. Lonely Mountains? It took fifteen seconds to get its hooks into me: that's the time it took for me to accelerate my little diorama bike-rider towards a downhill **** skid-drift around it, accompanied by the delicious sound of churned-up gravel and dirt **** against rubber. As soon as I saw the bike come to a skidding half-stop like that I knew I liked this game. The game is either very basic or incredibly pure and deep, depending on your tastes. You pedal/accelerate with the right **** obviously, the sharper the angle of your descent(so far you're always going downhill) the greater the speed, and you often need to brake in order to avoid careening into a tree, or off a cliff. That's achieved with the left trigger. The left analogue steers, the X button accelerates the bike into a sprint. That's it. Those are all the controls, and yet it is punishingly tricky and deliciously skillful. It's reminiscent, in its purity and respect for the player's abilities, of the Trials series, but it's tonally completely different. Strange to say, but the most common comparison that came to me while I played it was Breath of the Wild: like BOTW it eschews music in favour of simple ambient sound **** breeze, birds chirping, trees rustling and above it all your bike's constant motion, the glorious skids, and grinds and bounces as it navigates one of the four(huge) lonely mountains. There's a hint of BOTW in the freedom it grants you to(literally) go off the beaten track, and experiment: see if you can manage to steer your bike down that almost sheer rock face and avoid a much longer but safer **** never feel like the game is constraining you. Visually it's extremely basic. Some people will hate the way your character is modeled; personally I was slightly put off the game by its cover, which shows a close-up of that angular modelling. But it's not meant to be seen in close-up, and when panned out, as 99% of the game is, it actually looks rather good. Aesthetically pure, clean, uncluttered, and with a clever use of blurring on background scenes. It's just pleasing to look at. Nothing special, due to its low-budget nature, but clean and pretty nevertheless. I can highly recommend you give this a go: it is moreish in the extreme.

I'll get the positives out of the way first, mainly because I only wrote this review to highlight the stupidest, clumsiest part of the game: the controls. So first I'll concede that the game is bleakly beautiful, atmospheric, sad, mysterious, and all the other words reviewers have used in their ecstatic paeans to its apparently undeniable brilliance. It's all those things, yes. And the remaster is astonishing: it's now one of the best looking games on the PS4, not just artistically speaking(because it was always beautiful from an artistic standpoint, even back on PS2), but technically speaking too. The detail, the textures, the animation; it's all fantastically impressive, and frankly light-years ahead of anything Team Ico have ever done, including The Last Guardian. The fur on the Colossi is particularly lovely. Makes you want to grab a hunk of it and bury your face in it. It's a unique game, and it's been extremely influential too - this can be seen in the number of developers that have incorporated 'colossi' of their own into their games(even the great Nintendo paid homage with the four Beast-dungeons in Breath of the Wild.), or the reach of the tonal aesthetic of the game - the relentless use of SotC's muted palette in so many subsequent AAA releases, a kind of bleached, muddy, grey-brown look that arguably influenced the look of games as different as Gears Of War and Killzone. It's an atmospheric game, but in many ways it's not entirely enjoyable to play - there is a loneliness to it all, a sense of crushing solitude that remains unbroken throughout. The hills, the mountains and rivers, lakes and seas, have their own looming presence, like they're watching you from a distance. It's slightly spooky to wander a land in which almost all life, certainly all human life, is absent. A few scurrying lizards and the occasional bird are all you'll see, besides your horse and the colossi themselves. I personally think it requires a reasonably happy mindset to play it. I wouldn't want to play it at a low moment that's for sure. But like I said, after all the positives there is one issue that comes close to ruining the game, and it's not just a problem in SotC - all Team Ico's games suffer from it: The controls in this game are appalling. I've been playing The Last Guardian recently and the controls in that are probably slightly worse, but in tLG at least you're not tasked with anything too demanding or finicky. In SotC however, you are required to climb the colossi, and jump back and forth between parts of their body, all while hanging on to particular handholds, all while your stamina meter gradually dwindles away, at which point you drop to the ground. There are platforms located on the colossi at certain points, but the motion of their movements tosses you into the air and sends you flying around in unpredictable ways. Having fought the third colossus(MILD SPOILER), a huge figure who smashes his sword into the ground allowing you a moment to scamper up it and grab onto his lovely fur, I fell to the ground so often, and generally for no reason except the appalling controls. At one point, after I'd almost killed him, I was attempting to get back on, and the tremor from a single footstep knocked me to the ground. At this point, and for no apparent reason, it takes ten seconds for me to get to my feet, during which time the colossus has lifted his sword and smashed it down onto my tiny frame, killing me. The game is full of moments like this - inexplicable moments of frustration, a commingling of bad game design and bad controls, and it's gotten to the point where I can't just shrug it off and say 'that's Team Ico for you'. It shouldn't be like that - they've had so long to get the controls in their games right, and even after the insane delays to tLG it somehow handled worse than their previous games did. This remaster is brilliant in so many ways, but the most important thing that could have been dealt with has been left intact, and it suffers for it. I don't blame Bluepoint for not dealing with the controls - it would have required extensive reworking of the actual game's structure and even the environments and colossi themselves, because the controls are so integral. And the admittedly beautiful animation wouldn't be half as beautiful if the controls had been rejigged to make them responsive. In fact, I think that's the reason the controls are so bad - Team Ico are obsessive about animation, and the length of the animations in their games precludes responsive controls. In this sense they've put the beauty of the game ahead of controls, and there's only so long they can keep on doing it before people turn on them. It's no longer acceptable, and there's no reason you can't have a beautiful game that handles well. Uncharted manages it. SotC doesn't, and for that it deserves more criticism than it's received. It's wonderful, unique game, but no-one should go into it unaware of just how bad it handles.

WARNING: THIS IS A PROPER, ADULTS' REVIEW That out of the way I'd like to make it clear that I haven't come here to balance out the mentalists giving the game 0/10. They're welcome to their own obsessions, and I remember being a partisan about one side back when the console wars were Sega VS Nintendo and Sonic VS Mario. I'm in my thirties now, and I've played games ever since my first Gameboy back in 1990 or so. I've owned the following consoles: GB, SNES, N64, GC, Wii and Wii-U; PSs 1, 2, 3 and 4; Xboxes 1, 360 and ONE, Gamegear; PC. I've missed very few if any of the truly great games on those machines and I've been consciously and unconsciously building up a 'Top 10 Greatest Games Of All-Time' list in my mind ever since I played the first game that really woke me up to the potential of video games as a medium. That game was Final Fantasy VI on my old import SNES(called Final Fantasy III for the American market.) and a few years after that game blew my mind I bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII for my PC and was even more blown away. Those two formed my top 2 until, a year later, I played Half-Life on my beat-up old PC, in the lowest possible resolution, and was utterly riveted for the duration. Ever since then, ever since that four year run between 1995 and 1999 my top three has remained a level apart from all the other games I've played. Great games like Majora's Mask, San Andreas, Resident Evil 4, Bloodborne...I've loved them all, but something intangible has separated those top three games of mine from the rest. FFVI, FFVII and Half-Life have just rested there, at the very peak, and nothing has really made it halfway up the mountain since. I have been playing Breath Of The Wild for the last month and it is the first time in eighteen years where I feel like I'm playing something that not only belongs in the company of those three games, but by all objective standards, trumps them. It is notoriously difficult, dear reader, to separate your ability to evaluate art from the age you were when you first experienced that art. The music I listened to when I was in my mid-teens hit me like nothing since then ever has. The films I saw when I was that age affected me more than anything that I've watched since. Of course I'm not so unreasonable that I believe that all of history's greatest art was released between 1995 and 1999...I recognise that the intensity of my emotions at that age meant I felt the impact of the art more keenly than I have since then, and that to a certain extent my list of all-time great films, albums, games, etc. is determined by the period into which I was born. If I was a teenager in 1968 I'd have said that The Beatles White Album and The third Velvet Underground album were the greatest albums of all-time, and if I'd been a teenager in the mid-noughties I'd be writing about how obvious it is that Resident Evil 4 is the greatest game ever made. So I realise that the games in my all-time top 3 are protected from being knocked off their perch partly by nostalgia. Don't get me wrong: I will argue for their objective brilliance, and I still think they have qualities that subsequent games in their genres have never come close to recapturing, but I feel that they are protected by the warm, intense rush of teenage nostalgia. My point is that any new game released after my 'golden era' will inevitably suffer by comparison simply because my emotions have become less intense over the years. and as a result it's truly difficult to judge whether a game(or an album, film, whatever), if I'd played it back when I was a teenager, would have made it into my top three. I think I'd have been blown away by Bloodborne if I'd played it when I was sixteen, but I'm not sure. It's a great game, but would it have been an all-time favourite? As it is it's hovering around the no. 5/6 mark in my GOAT list, but it hasn't pierced the top 3. All this self-indulgent reminiscing on my part is for a purpose - I'm trying to put across just how difficult it is for a modern game to shake me. Modern games are handicapped because they lack the sheen of nostalgia, they are handicapped by the sense that I've played something like it many times before, by the massively expanded choice of things to do these days compared with when I was younger. In other words, they have no chance of really hitting me like games used to. And yet...through that fog of cynicism Breath Of The Wild has pierced. It is beautiful. It is jaw-droppingly huge. It is a gamer's game, that allows you to control Link in a way that is unthinkable to CD Projekt Red or Bethesda or Ubisoft - quick and responsive and nimble in a way that no other open world avatar has ever been. And above all, it is mysterious and deep, like a forest that wants to pull you in, or a dark cave on a coastline. I have not stopped playing it since I got it. In short my top three has finally been reordered. BOTW may just be the best game I've ever played

What is Forza famous for? Cars. What is Lego famous for? Building. So logically, what would be the only reason to place these two franchises together? Well, if you could build your own cars of course. So can you build your own cars? Can you at least swap out the outer parts of the Lego cars you're given in order to make different-looking cars? No, of course you can't. That would be far too cool and interesting. Instead the only thing you can actually build in this **** a Lego house. This DLC has taken a long, long time to get here. I hoped it would be worth the wait, and when I finally heard it was going to be a Lego spin-off I was disappointed. But I at least thought there were possibilities there, genuinely interesting ideas that would only be possible with Lego, like building your own cars. That sounded like it might actually be a good reason to shoehorn a child-friendly franchise like Lego into a serious racing game like Horizon - the ability to reconstruct the outer shells of the Lego vehicles would have justified the whole idea, even though the combination of Lego and Forza still felt off. But it turns out we don't even get that. We are stuck with the handful of cars the game gives us. Right at the start of this DLC the announcer says, in a mock-jokey, semi-apologetic way, 'I know half the fun of Lego is building the cars yourself, but I couldn't wait', and you're handed a fully constructed(slightly rubbish-looking) Senna. This is almost an admission on the part of the developers that they've scr-wed the players over and denied us the only reason for having a Lego DLC in the first place. They must know how ridiculous it is to hand us fully-assembled cars and not allow us to change a single thing about them. It's the equivalent of buying a Lego car, taking it home, opening the box, and finding it already assembled, with all the bricks superglued together. I focus on this issue because it's indicative of the DLC as a whole: it is a massive, massive wasted opportunity. The devs could have allowed us to use Lego cars in a way that would have HUGELY opened up the design elements in Forza and allowed our imaginations to roam free. The potential for player creativity was enormous; we could have created a Lego batmobile, a BTTF DeLorean, etc. Anything at all. Instead we're handed a flat piece of land and told to build...a house. Oh yes - I forgot to mention that you'll have to go through a series of mind-numbing mini challenges just in order to earn a paltry amount of blocks in the first place. It's better than not being allowed to build anything at all, but it smacks of the devs feeling guilty about not allowing us to alter the cars. As for the rest of the game: the map itself feels tiny(about a quarter the size of Fortune Island, the previous DLC) and while it's mildly interesting to explore, the combination of Lego and Forza realism simply does not work. There's certainly no incentive to use the photo mode, which is a big thing for me in the base game. I'm a keen Forza photographer but I'm not exactly inspired by the sight of plastic ghosts floating next to rows of identical Lego trees. Further issues: the handling of the Lego cars seems twitchy by comparison with the base game's cars, presumably as a sop to younger gamers who will play this, and the AI in races is almost non-existent. The races are lacking the intensity and relative realism of normal Horizon, and there is no real incentive to play once you arrive at the Lego festival except to earn bricks for your house. Maybe they wanted to have Ken and Barbie Dolls' House crossover but ended up with Lego and had to make do? Who knows. The rationale for Forza Horizon DLCs no longer makes much sense to me. I concede that the DLC's shiny and gleaming and professional, and kids may enjoy it for the very brief amount of fun they'll get from the racing side of it, but it just feels...pointless. At the end of the day there is no compelling reason why this game had to exist: building your own cars could have been that reason but it's not here. Instead we have a rather jarring combination of two worlds that just don't work together. Playground Games need to be very careful because they are in slight danger of killing the golden goose here. They have made some of the greatest racing games of all-time, and Horizon is one of my favourite gaming series, but they do seem to be getting pulled down avenues they shouldn't go down. I suspect that Microsoft has been pushing them into making the game both broader and more 'endless', and it's been at the expense of the audience Horizon already has. I don't like using arguments derived from anecdotal evidence, but the overwhelming majority of Horizon fans have absolutely hated the idea of this DLC and I can't see their opinions changing at all now that it's actually here. In short? It's both pointless and a missed opportunity at the same time. Underwhelming in the extreme.

I'm torn about this game. I enjoyed it more than any beat em up I've played since Bayonetta 2 and its combat system is an absolute joy. Dante in particular is masterful - it's him at his most absurdly adaptable and powerful. He's the Swiss-army-knife of gaming fighters, capable of fistfighting, kickboxing, swordfighting, bo-staffing, nunchukking and...smashing people up with half a razor-sharp motorbike in each hand(don't bother quibbling with the logic). There are also his long-range attacks: pistols, shotgun...a dual-wielded rocket launcher(!)...there's even a weirdly camp cowboy hat/cape combo that allows you to sort of...'jazz-hands' your enemies to death. Those are all the weapons I found on my first playthrough but there are probably more. Imagine that. And then imagine being able to switch between four different fighting styles based around gunplay, fast dodges, swordplay and blocking/parrying enemy attacks...does that sound insanely intricate yet? Okay, now bear in mind that Dante is only one of _three_ characters you'll play as. Neither of the other two are quite as complex or open-ended as Dante, but they all have their own idiosyncracies and different movesets. And then, on top of _all of that,_ there are upgrades available for everyone. It's slightly mindboggling. Now one of those characters is, in my opinion, a write-off. V, the equivalent of a magic build in Dark Souls, is just not that much fun to play as. You feel little connection when you land a blow because it's all done by your proxies in battle, a trio of magical animals/monsters who do your fighting for you. I'm not going to go into him any further as he's just not worth writing about and thankfully he doesn't take up too much of the playtime. Later on you can choose to play as one of the other two(and you will) anyway. The other character is Nero, and much of the complexity and variety in his moveset comes from the huge range of Devil Arms he has; they are artificial mechanical prosthetics that he can switch out, each of which has a unique set of attacks and special moves. He's only marginally less liberating to play as than Dante. His moveset is smaller, but not by that much, and he, just like Dante, is a glorious, swift, efficient wonder of a character to control. I really can't praise the combat enough - if there is a flaw it's in the lack of humanoid enemies, as fighting giant beasts doesn't give you as much satisfaction as fighting something human that you can relate to. This was the case in Bayonetta 2 also, as well as in the God Of War reboot: the highlights of both those games were battles against other human characters, respectively Balder and The Stranger. There's nothing like a one-on-one against a humanoid enemy to get the blood pumping. The final boss in DMC 5 is an absolutely sublime battle for the same reason. So I finished the game having enjoyed pretty much every single second of it, and knowing that I had not even begun to scratch the surface of either Nero's or Dante's(particularly) full combat abilities. And there's the rub: the credits began to roll at what I'd assumed was about the halfway point. Perhaps I was expecting more than I should have been but when it happened I was absolutely gutted and really surprised. I felt that there should have been at least another seven or eight hours' worth of campaign left to play, and it's that that really remains the only major issue I have with the game: I wanted more, so much more, especially after the long wait since the last canon Devil May Cry game. This is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and sublime combat system DMC has come up with: it shines, it glistens, it's been honed to perfection. It may well be the single greatest combat system ever developed for any beat-'em-up, and I'm a huge fan of the genre. Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, the first God Of War; these were all seminal games for me. Visually the game really is gorgeous; after a rather dull, slightly ugly start where you slog through a few too many dreary trainyards, the game's levels begin to flex their muscles and you see some gorgeous if rather generic fantasy environments. They're rarely more than simple arenas in which to beat up enemies, but sometimes you stop and linger on their graphical beauty nevertheless. And the character detail on the avatars...truly superb. The 60ps framerate makes the whole thing even more enjoyable, and just watching Dante respond to your every input within a nanosecond of pressing the button has a certain charm to it. It's just _cool._ Rockstar and the RDR2 team could really learn something about how much difference a _responsive_ avatar makes to gameplay. It's crucial. So I leave you with this: this is a total blast of a beat-em-up, honed to perfection over the five entries, and it offers the most open-ended combat in any game. Ever. If you can bear in mind that it's over way too soon you will love every second.

I love platformers - I think they're the most perfect expression of twitch gaming there is, and my favourite game growing up was Super Mario World on my old SNES. I was blown away by the creativity of the Mario Galaxy games. But 3D platformers have not been hitting the high points recently, not since the demise of the Wii and Nintendo's decision to turn away from the Galaxy games. Lately, the best platformers have all been 2D examples, and, to pick one in particular, Super Meat Boy instantly barged its way into my top 10 Greatest Games OAT list. I'm a huge fan of the genre, and my Switch has been pretty much unplayed since I set the disappointing Mario Odyssey aside - then along came Celeste with its outrageous metascore...what else could I do? I downloaded it immediately and I've been playing nothing else since. It really is as good as everyone's saying, and when a new franchise appears, from a dev who's not world-famous either, and immediately gets a metascore like this, you can be sure there's something there to get excited about. I'll get my complaints out of the way first, because they're pretty minimal: 1. The controls on Switch are not well-suited to split-second 2D platforming. It's just not practically possible to use an analogue stick to play something that demands such precision - it's far too insensitive - and the only other option you have is the Switch's 'd-pad'. The problem is that it's not really a d-pad; rather it's a four-button configuration that stands in for a d-pad, and this means your fingers often slip into the gap at the centre. This isn't a constant issue, but it happens enough for it to mess up some crucial moments in the game, which, like I say, requires absolutely perfect precision. The second problem with the controls, more minor perhaps, is that when you're playing on the big screen and the left and right joy-cons are detached, the left joy-con is simply too small for your hand to fit comfortably around it, and as a result you get the dreaded hand-cramp/-claw-cramp. 2. The narrative is...well-meaning. It has occasional moments of Lynchian intrigue - birds appearing at particular moments throughout - and there are half-hearted attempts to imbue the whole climb itself with an air of metaphysical mystery, as though it might be some kind of dreamlike confabulation brought about by stress. But these elements don't join up well, and the writing ranges from mildly interesting, mildly amusing, to painfully worthy, anaemic stuff that feels like it was cribbed from a self-help book. There are lines about 'believing in yourself' and 'trusting in who you are', and subjects like anxiety attacks and lack of confidence and self-worth are dealt with clumsily. Some people have credited it simply for talking about these issues in the first place, but that's not really enough I don't think. This is a work of art, not a speech by a motivational speaker or a pamphlet on coping with depression, and as a result subjects like this need to be approached with some degree of nuance, and stitched properly into the fabric of the game, rather than awkwardly dumped on the player at the end of a level. It's incongruous, and over-earnest. It's a shame, because as a narrative device climbing a mountain is fertile ground. It has danger, obstacles to be overcome, a clear beginning and a very definite end. In Celeste however it never really feels like you're climbing a mountain at all except insofar as you're generally moving upwards. So those are the flaws, but they are rendered almost irrelevant by the platforming itself, which nudges up against perfection throughout. The warp and weft of the level design is better than anything you'll find in a 2D game outside of Super Meat Boy. It is an absolute joy to control, and the economy of the moveset(jump, dash, climb; that's it) means that the innovation instead comes in the form of certain structural gimmicks that run through each level. These are implemented with such skill, such invention, and are paced so well, that I finished a few of them and literally exhaled in awe. There are huge, diaphanous blocks which extend your dash as you pass through them; there are levels where ferocious winds extend your basic jump, or curtail it; there are levels in which platforms smash forwards whenever you dash; if this sounds confusing, trust me on this: it's all intuitive, and deeply satisfying to play. It's undeniably demanding, but crucially, and as with SMB, the restart time is so short that you can instantly throw yourself back into the level as soon as you die. I've completed it, and I died A LOT(just over i600 times!), but the design is so good there's never a doubt about why you messed up, or what you should've done; not once did I think 'forget this - this is just unhinged' as I did with the post end-game levels in SMB. Celeste's difficulty curve is gloriously smooth. In summary, this is the best platformer, 3D or otherwise, on the Switch. Seriously.

**** can I put this...? Okay, I think most people would say that Nintendo has had a pretty damn amazing 2017: Mario Kart 8, Splatoon 2, Arms, Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and now Mario Odyssey. That's an exclusive lineup of first party titles that any other publisher on earth would kill to have. It's the best year any publisher has had in a very, very long time...perhaps ever. All of those games are excellent, a few of them are game of the year contenders on their own, and Breath Of The Wild...well, I've written a long review where I tried, and failed, to get across in just 5000 characters how good a game it is. For me BotW is the greatest game ever made, so Nintendo would have had an incredible year even if it wasn't for all the other brilliant titles they've released. In light of that, in light of the incredible run of form they're on, and in light of just how much I enjoyed the Mario Galaxy games - which are the only 3D mario games that Nintendo really got right - I was expecting...a lot. I bought a Switch for this(I played BotW on my Wii-U in case you were wondering) and I waited to unbox it on the day Odyssey was released and the game came in the post - all because it's an 'event' kind of game. It genuinely pains me to say it, and I've been fighting against the feeling for a while now, but this is just nowhere near as brilliant as Galaxy 1 or 2. I'd have a hard time saying if it's as good as Super Mario 3D World. The problems are not that numerous but they are significant: - It's too easy. Simple as that. A lot of people have said it, and they're right. - The sensation of actually getting a moon is far less rewarding than getting a star(the moons are basically the Odyssey equivalent of stars from previous Marios) in Galaxy 1/2 or SM64. This is because there are over 800(!) of them. If you've played Breath Of The Wild think of it as the equivalent of collecting Koroks and nothing else- Koroks are fun, and they're a mild diversion in BotW, but to structure an entire game around them would not be enjoyable. And it isn't. Allied to that is the fact that some, even most, of the moons are as easy as finding a Korok. This touched on the problem of difficulty again. - But the difficulty is probably not the main problem. I could deal with it if it wasn't for the fact that the level design is so...uninspired. For anyone who's played either Mario Galaxy, even if you didn't like it as much ass I did, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to remember some piece of level design that impressed you, something that surprised you. For me those games were full of surprising, original, mind-bowing environments - I remember, for example, a level set in a house, where all the lights went off and a spotlight began moving through the place. As long as you stayed inside the spotlight you were okay but step outside and you died. Not because you couldn't keep up, or some enemy got you in the dark, but because the _only parts of the level that existed were the parts lit by the spotlight_ and if you wandered off you just fell into black nothingness. This allowed for a whole load of clever, on-the-fly challenges as you had to keep up with the spotlight. This was such a stunning level, so breathtakingly original, that I had to rewrite the previous bit three times before I could accurately convey what happened when you played it. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in anything I've played so far that comes close to that level, or the many, many ones like it in Galaxy 1 and 2. The license to experiment that came with setting Galaxy in space and zero grav environments is lost in Odyssey, which is just flat progression from island-world to island-world. - Which leads me onto the final significant criticism - it's open world, which a lot of people like. Personally I don't think it works for Mario. Or at least Nintendo still haven't managed to make it work. When they put Mario in tight, focused, self-contained levels it is intense and imaginative and they can experiment with the design. There's no filler in the Galaxy games because they don't involve the constant wandering around and backtracking and empty spaces that all open-world games have. I fundamentally disagree with the idea of 3D Mario games being open-world - I think the twitch gameplay and imagination and focus and intensity of 2D Marios, which I grew up on and which I love, is diluted when it's transferred to an open world. The whole ethos of Mario is pure gameplay - it's not exploration and wandering about, and that kind of stuff just doesn't suit Mario, at least not as Nintendo have done it so far. There are a plenty of good elements to Odyssey - the controls are very tight and some of the Cappy captures ****. And the costumes get a big thumbs up. But fundamentally it is just lacking in the starburst of imagination and breathtaking level design that makes Mario at his best the greatest video game character there is. I am disappointed.

If ever there was a game that is not for everyone, this is it, I can tell you that straight away. This is not twitch gaming, this is not twitch puzzling either, like Tetris. It is utterly unique, but its appeal will be pretty niche. The best way to determine whether you'll enjoy this game is to ask yourself if you've ever enjoyed a cryptic crossword puzzle- now I know most people will say 'no' to that, but a follow up question is this: assuming you spent time to learn the rules behind cryptic crosswords, so that it was just about the puzzle rather than knowing the different linguistic tricks the crossword setters use, can you _then_ imagine yourself enjoying cryptic crosswords? Because The Witness is analogous(in a nevertheless very inexact way) to a vastly more expansive version of a cryptic crossword, only without all the background knowledge that's required of you, and shorn of the need to use words. Basically, if you can think outside the box, if you can think laterally, then you'll be able to do at least a quarter to a third of the puzzles in this game without too much difficulty. The rest of the game is made up of more difficult puzzles, which are solvable given time, and a smaller subset of puzzles that are extremely tricky, obtuse, will take serious mental effort, but are perfectly logical nonetheless. I'd describe The Witness as the ultimate puzzle videogame. Its puzzles always come down to the same thing - you guide a cursor through a maze. No time limit(so far anyway - I haven't done every single puzzle in the game), no real fail state, you can reverse your path through the maze at any time. This sounds almost insultingly simple, and seems like a small palette with which to paint a whole game, but from this single seed an extraordinarily ambitious, breathtakingly inventive variety of puzzle-types bloom. There are puzzles based on symmetry, there are puzzles based on audio cues, there are puzzles based on casting shadows on the surrounding environment...I won't go on; discovering the relationship these simple grids have with the locale is much of the game's appeal, and there are sections which seem entirely obtuse until you notice some little ancillary environmental detail that explains your route through the maze. The island itself serves as a way to break down the barriers that arise when you're stuck on a particular puzzle - if you can't see your way past one of the tougher mazes then you can wander off to explore some less well-trodden part, with a shallower difficulty gradient. The island is thematically inconsistent, with different kinds of natural and architectural environments rubbing up against one another in a slightly unhinged fashion. Throughout, there are human friezes, actual(?) figures caught in various mildly intriguing situations: look down the sides of a mountain and a woman is looking up at you, cresting the final cliff-face with a child strapped to her back. Other scenes add up to the sense that some kind of apocalyptic denouement is taking over the island and its former inhabitants(if that's what they are). It has the presumably intentional feel of a Pompeii without the volcano, and the people are even cast in a similarly grey, ashen material. This meta-narrative is, as I say, only mildly intriguing. There is no sense that putting the work in would result in any kind of moment of epiphany, where the past events are suddenly made clear in satisfyingly cohesive fashion. It's just too chaotic and disordered for that. The placement of figures, and their freeze-framed actions, add up to an impressionistic whole - it's a feeling rather than a narrative throughline that you're left with. To be frank, I'm not even sure what that feeling is. The island certainly has some of the situational absurdity of 'Lost', but it's best to think of it as more **** art installation. If that has, as I suspect, made a few of you throw up in your mouths a bit, I must emphasise that the environment is an easy joy to explore, and it is often very, very beautiful. Every square foot of the island is made to suit the puzzles, rather than the puzzles made to suit the island. As long as you bear that in mind you won't go in expecting something that's not there. In the end the most difficult part of this review is trying to describe what sets this apart from other puzzle games - I freely admit I'm not a puzzle game fan. I never liked Myst, or Monkey Island, etc. But something about the sheer inventiveness of this game's approach, the startling elegance of the solutions, the easy pace with which you can approach it all, drew me in. I bought this on deal, a year after its release, without expectations, and it has startled, fascinated and delighted me at almost every step. Anyone who hasn't come away from this review certain that it isn't for them should take a punt and try it.