In a world lacking in multiplayer experiences to be shared with friends living in the same house (us accounting for a huge population of the 21-35 bracket: one of the biggest gaming markets there is *ahem ahem*!) we make do with shared games, a unanimously decided game to share and play only when we are together, as a three. Mortal Kombat X was the first (when there was 5 in the houe) but a considerable Mortal Kombat experience gap between two of us and the rest meant it soon fell short in popularity - two quickly returning to their rooms for Fifa and Fifa alone... forever. Following that, months and months later, once it was just three in the house, along came Alien: Isolation - the best collective gaming experience I've shared with friends since the days of split screen, made up games on COD with buddies and uni and at home. Of course Alien has no split screen - but when it comes to horror, a couple of buddies by your side helps to shake the fear of being mini-mouthed by the huge hulking horror. Unlike the comando-type versions of the franchise with Isolation you're back to OG Ripley basics: one ship, a few stragglers/survivors and one apex predator: Alien. You slip in to a room only to hear the rumble of the vents in the next, the huge metallic thump as something weighing three times as much as yourself crashes without caution to the ground - the rippling hiss as it snarls, inhaling the scent of the area, ushering fear in to your human heart, only a worthless pistol with 3 bullets to hand, pipe bombs won't save you now, only creeping, hiding and sweating your palms beyond reason might just help you avert the gaze of the huge shadow of a beast that is stalking it's way towards you. The rattled beep of a motion sensor, impaired unless you are facing directly towards the target, becomes an all too familiar friend and foe. Your friend when you know the Alien is only several steps around any one of several corners (for every seven steps you take, Alien only needs one) but your foe when your feet away from an objective leaver or bit of intel and that crusty *bleeilp* sounds off, the rumble of a monster in the ducts above... or is it below... letting you know that objective is potentially a disgustingly long, terrifying minute away now, as you're in a room with no hiding spots and you've got maybe five seconds to leave it and find somewhere, ANYWHERE, before he/she/it comes'a lumbering your way. Graphically it's spot on, you are on the cliche ship, the sliding doors, the bare cables and vents, the 70s vision of the not too distant future; minimalism is the only type of home-comfort style you might find in a small dining area or suit-up room. Otherwise it's corridors worryingly long, loading bays and tight squeezes. Though visually, in spite of the dark and the spray of foggy gases, the sparks of a cable can be stunning, the occasional glimpse of the open void of space through a window a breath of escapism relief from the horror you run from once you turn your head from the pane (out of which you can see the scale of this concrete jungle-hulk of a space-station that has now become the hunting ground for one extremely alien jaguar) and head back in to the dark. Combat is risky and fun. Enemies non-human come in the form of bizarre AI that would never bother to sprint but once they've spotted you, the glow in their eyes and the relentless march is enough to send a concise path of escape in to a frantic dance in to a dead-end corner, only to be violently wrenched around and thrown in to the wall by a less than welcoming off-blue cybernetic creature; "you should not be here" it tells you, far too calmly for the blood shedding pummels it's delivering to your frail, fleshy face. You are Ripley's daughter. You are relatively alone. You are the born survivor who, as of yet, I am unsure but hope is here to eventually take down this beast. As a collective game, we're really enjoying this one. We take it in turns to squeal with terror and joy as we see our more panicky friend make ridiculous wrong turns whilst being chased down by the screeching Alien, only to somehow, by the width of a hair, lose the line of sight and slip somehow beneath a table... unseen... escaped; but hilariously the wrong side of the room/current floor - something that might have taken us 10 minutes to previously get to the right side of. We use our collective brain power to remember pass codes and room numbers and we're constantly back-seat gaming, offering our four extra eyes to spot out enemies, potential loot or mysterious vents. Opening up that map and sharing route tactics to avert the killer on deck. Sonically this game is just as terrifying. Our surround sound magnifies the scale of the ship: the huge booming and creaking of unknown mechanics clunking in the distant, the shudder of an elevator, the loudness of your steps in the ventilation shafts. I don't know how you make this game better - but I don't know that any game is 10/10
My oh my. The negative reviews have their points: some slightly clunky mechanics at times. That being, you might find yourself wondering in to a wall here and there, struggle to have the smoothest of horse rides from time to time - the horse riding is the most clunky... you can jump 'roach' over obstacles but there's times when your going full gallop an a little broken brick wall might be somewhat in your way and where you might hope 'Roach' has the initiative to leap over the little wall instead you come to an abrupt hault before you've seen it... you have to be a horse jump master, basically. But it's hardly a worry because they've ingeniously input a mechanic where if one is riding along a path, if you let go of the analogue controls, you can ride said path without steering, just canter, gallop and glue - makes for nice scenery watching as you ride, though be sure to steer when you get to a cross-road or hair pin or you'll soon be riding in the wrong direction. But other than a minor bit of clunk here and there (trying to angle your screen just right to select one of several bags that you haven't looted yet) this is an otherwise fluid and tasty little game. Anyone **** about loss of combat mechanics is talking rubbish - okay there's not the pedantic math of the huge MMO RPGs but if I'm honest that to me is a bonus; no game should be bestable based on one's ability to sum up the digits... it should be bestable on one's unique talents - I get so down when the only way to be king of the crop is to "HAVE THIS INCREDIBLY SPECIFIC LOADOUT AND SKILLSET AND ARMOUR" - The Witcher delivers this but otherwise relies on a player's collection of potions and bombs, the diagrams they've found and all manner of skill combinations - when it comes down to it, if you can't kill the monster up ahead, it's because you haven't read your beastiary like a real Witcher, you haven't found the right tools for the specific job and you just aint got the stones to take the creature down. No one collection of items does it all - this: me likey very much! Graphically of course it's stunning - overly orange dazzling sunrises over forested peaks and where folks and saying: same old westernised fantasy realm (unoriginal) I beg to differ! The USA is typical for it's glossy caricature of fantasy, Project Red delivers, instead, a far more (in spite of a nice hue at sundown) wind-beaten landscape, craggy, haunting. I've wondered enough fantasy game forests without so much as a whisper of fear only to find myself feeling slightly spooked when first caught in the middle of the mist-veiled trees of Velen. The monsters don't feel like alien lifeforms either, they look like monsters that could very well exist in our human world - pit me against a any of the beasts of ESO or Warcraft any day over the horrible flesh-sloughing, skeletal and fang-ridden horrors of the world of the Witcher. Even the bears have a lumbering, hulking majesty over the roly poly figures I've seen across all manner of other available digital landscapes. There are plenty of fantasy cliches but where I've seen other realms fail to capture the sincerity of their story vs. the humour in their in jokes, the Witcher just seems to breeze both, every cliche is obviously and intentionally hilarious whilst the genuine nature of its more serious undertones feel far more alive, more pressing and genuinely harrowing. I thought I'd hate Geralt's typical American hero, husky, sarcastic and blunt demeanour: instead I genuinely LOVE it - it's relentlessly funny because it's so awfully jarring - some smooth, stereotypical badass trying to reason with confused Welsh peasants; really funny. And there's another win, in spite of the American cast of heroes, everyone else is deliciously Euro/UK regional in accent, the Mancunians, the Yorkshireman, the Glaswegians, the ****, the Spaniards and the Poles... all done with enough racial stereotype but genuinely accurate dialect and mannerisms to make this game feel so much more real and alive than the static; "Hey! You there, please help me with this quest! My sheep are lost and I have a reward for anyone who can find them" NPCs of too many fantasy gaming realms. Sore that you can't kill any old random NPC? Well then you're missing the most integral part of the Witcher universe: several novels and short stories combined emanating from as early on as the 1980s, 2 other games of rich (apparently non-canon but so well-done that many consider them to be) history and storyline and characters not of your own design - they have their own morals or lack of and for me, immersing myself in that story and character mindset appeals to my inner love for fantasy and story over my desire to just run around like a headless Trevor Phillips murdering everything in my path: not that kind of game at all. This game is for the gamers looking for something to last them a few evenings of every week for the next year to come. Get buried in it. I know I am.
As a non-super rally racing fan I have no means of gauging this game's credibility as a sim but having been a casual fan of racers throughout my gaming history I know this is one with a refined and tuned focus on absolute skill. I played Dirt 2 and whatever the next title in the series was called and where I previously was sold by the availability of SUVs and dune buggies I can see a younger me closing the lid on Dirt Rally for lack of that range of vehicle variation. Long gone is the indie, Americanised, 'dude' vibe of the earlier titles, the rewind time options and a lot of features that had me relish in my year or so spent having it over stadium jumps and losing tyres after smashing in to trees on some insane rally cross - but the very core of Dirt has of course, remained the same: Rally racing as tricksy and devilish as it comes and it was this very premise that was the most (obviously) gripping and skill-pushing feature that was the overall reason I clung to those previous titles over the more zany racers like the ever increasingly poor Need for Speed titles. It was 2 months ago me and my house mate were sat in the living room having just played through another hour of Alien Isolation, sweaty from evading the black beast and pondering our life on the sofa, swapping controllers, nostalgically reminiscing the days of split-screen. My friend started pining for a racer - a gripping and intense racer. I pondered the available market and remembered that I'd seen a new Dirt release, fondly remembering my times careering across dune and desert, forest and cliff-side trail. I said that would be the one. Suffice to say when I booted up I was somewhat shell-shocked to find how aesthetically different and stripped back the title was in comparison. All the selling points I'd thrown at my friend were false - it seems we were not in for another addition of crashing and smashing, crowds cheering and dudes dude'ing us on. Nope, we were met by a single-track soundtrack, the retro-vibe of the arcade that pumps through our surround sound system (a tune I can't deny I love more and more with each play - bizarre considering it really is just one song for hours and hours of play) - a menu stark and simple - the only sell I had left were the reviews flooding the web: "[one of the] best Rally Sim[s] EVER!!" "oh" I said, hopefully; "It's a Rally simulator... as opposed to a straight up rally racing 'game'"... Thrown straight in to the rally-cross whilst our game installed (loved that.. you get to play whilst you install? Awesome) my concerns were dropped; a scotch rider at my side shouting details of the course ahead, zero map (in my previous Dirt experiences I intentionally always raced in drivers' seat view, always had my huds completely blank and left it to intuition and skill to best the tracks) and just dirty road ahead: I was comfortable and in all fairness I smashed the race with a clean 1st place! My friend wasn't so lucky... at this point I was worried that we'd just purchased a racing game that was entirely lacking in 'easy' fun. And that was the truth of it. Diry Rally is challenging as it comes. But that's WHY it's so GOOD!! I was worried my friend wouldn't dig it but luckily his natural desire to conquest all challenges (unless they're entirely banal) had him hooked to beat the rocks and trees constantly spinning him out. A few hours in and plenty of 20 second behind finishes and soon we were finally catching the pack. We're a few months in now and we're having it! Sure there's loads of losses and wipe outs but boy oh boy we can give it to the best of them. Dirt Rally is no easy winner, there's no second chances, only relentless penalisation for being a lazy racer, no corner cutting, no shunting and spinning out opponents, no rewinds, no respawns without time penalties... just absolute drive to master every corner and come out feeling like a true racing king... just how I like it. We all like and bit of rough and rumble but I'll gladly leave that for the poor show racing on the latest GTA's sandbox tracks, where smashing is like some sort of law. I've always been about the clean race and the clean finish: across the line without a scratch, after all, every bump is seconds lost and Dirt Rally really reigns that home to the point where you clip and corner and find yourself instantly reaching for the restart option, despite being on the 4th and final painful lap - every second counts! The landscapes are fantastic, the graphics are good enough for a racer, the business ethic, that sort of campaign manager feel with the engineers you hire and of course the racing itself is top notch. My main qualms being, in spite of the realism, that many seemingly soft objects, like plastic mesh fences, small bushes etc. - stuff that should squash beneath the chassis, are apparently immoveable and will stop you in your tracks... immersion lost a bit there. Other than that: class game for anyone looking for a racing challenge!
If I was someone who'd never played the previous titles I can see how the adrenaline rush could whisk one away for a week or so - doesn't take more than 1-2 evenings to best the campaign - and there's enough relative competition in the multiplayer to keep you coming back to best people's times... but overall; as someone who was borne and raised on the PS2 with the original title and it's 2 major sequels (Blur slipped me by and On Tour felt like a cheap indie-pop revival spin-off... I personally consider it a bit of a non-canon 'emo' phase for an otherwise hip-hop funk-fest of a series) I have to say SSX (2012) was disappointing to say the least. I can't deny having the same sinking feeling when presented with what many were calling a 'Call of Duty'-esque sneak-peak trailer - a real juxtapose to one of the original SSX trailers which is essentially various in-game sequences of the funkadelic cast smacking each other, busting ridiculous flips and smashing through glass to the soundtrack of some bad-boy jungle for the best part of 30 seconds - and likewise when it finally came to crunch time: there it was - all the spiralling, speed and slope shooting but none of the outrageous characters and charm that made the original series more than just high-octane racing with ridiculous tricks: it was high octane racing with ridiculous tricks set in a universe just as outrageous. I had no qualms whatsoever with the revived classic characters, in fact I loved how they had aged, as they always did, naturally, from series to series, relative to the years between titles. But where once upon a time you could kit out your riders with different board types and apparel, full 3D renders, catchphrases, animations and all, now it's all conceptual art with an infinity style variation of everything - the most you can do to change your characters wears is the rendered skin colour... dude you used to be able to give Moby some mad dreads, get Mac riding on a Dollar Bill, Put cowboy stuff on Nate and what prepubescent teenager wasn't dressing Elise in the skimpiest shorts and bunny ears? It was that kind of character personalisation and immersion that took the game to a next level - that and the classic: split-freakin'-screen! Live racing dude! Besting someone's time is one thing but whaaaat!? You can't even race online players live in the 2012 revamp? Seriously? I wasn't expecting much from the ever-increasingly monopolised EA, especially considering the founding father BIG studio was no more. But really? SSX used to have a cool, underground sonic aesthetic - now the soundtrack consists of DJ Fresh and Skrillex... where's the subterranean beats EA? That 'cool' vibe? You used to have Mix Master mike on deck dudes... then you pulled in the genuinely likeable DJ Atomica - now we have to put up with an inaudible dude in a heli who sure ain't no disc jockey. You lost your steeze and invested purely in sell-value, and you flopped because of it. Sure you pulled some pennies on this project but you missed the boat that made this series rock - you didn't take any risks whatsoever. You amped up the action value because hey, everyone wants blockbuster action in their video games in the 21st century, right? Wrong - indie's on the rise because as much as we love our Uncharted and our GTAs, we like zany madness too guys! We like abstract and silly. And there are generations of millenials stuck in the backend of a disgusting recession who's housing options are increasingly sharing flats/houses: that's thousands of one of the biggest gaming markets sat in shared living rooms making do with Fifa and Mortal Kombat for shared screen multilayer experiences - swapping controllers to take turns doing laps on Dirt... SSX without Splitscreen or the ability to race real human beans, live, is just... flat man. Flat as it comes. And no punching? No social connections? No Zoe is friends with Moby and Moby hates Elise and Kaori hates Psymon and blah blah blah? Whaaaat!? No big bios. No custom trick-set ups? No tracks based anywhere bar back-country and off piste? What no crowd stands and fireworks and loop the loops and "DO NOT ENTER" glass signs to break through and take the lead? No standing ovation on the podiums? No TOKYO MEGAPLEX REVAMP!? WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? All the steez - all the swagger - all the funk: dropped in place of wing suits, ice picks and oxygen tanks... Hey the danger element is cool. Bring it on. Bring it in. I love it. I love the gear, especially that wing-suit. But don't give us those cool bonuses and then tear away the heart and freaking soul of this game? It's the same body, the speed, the tricks, the fluidity, but none of the heart. None of the personality. No flare. Oh and grinding is now a glue-stuck to the rail affair - no skill required - you used to have to be a bossman to boss rails... now all you have to do is hop on and ride - too easy to become a master by finding the best path on this game. 2012 flopped - do better!
