Manc_Prophecy

If like me, you grew up during a time where Saved by The Bell was a hit tv show, and Liverpool FC actually won league titles, then you'll be more familiar with the all time popular game Mario Bros. Which has through the years evolved into a game people of all ages can enjoy. So what does Mario Odyssey offer what other Mario games do not? Well the first most notable is the new 2 player feature, which allows players to enjoy the Mario experience with friends and family! The setup is that similar of Mario Sunshine which was an absolute ground breaking game in the series, and a much improvement on the big seller Mario 64. The special ability to over take enemies like Hammer bro, Goomba, Bullet bill and even a T-Rex...... A FRIGGIN' T-REX!!! An ability introduced into the game makes it really enjoyable to play, and it's good to see from Mario Sunshine that Nintendo EDP have come up with innovative ways to keep Mario fresh with a change of ideas by involving these abilities as apart of a story. Now I use the term "story" loosely as Mario doesn't really have a story, well a good one anyway. Now if like me you're thinking "who buys a Mario game for the story?" then I can level with you, but the fact that they have tried to implement a story (and a weak one at that) tells me that they didn't really take in consideration how weak it really was. It's so unnecessary, that you don't even need to pay any attention to it, the ending is only stupid anyway. It's far from an amazing game, but if you want fun and easy game time, then this is a certain purchase for you.

I should start this off by stating I've put in 65 hours and acquired the platinum trophy for this game, as I feel as though my views should be based on the entirety of the game and not the first 3 hours, with that said lets get into it. **** Punch's new IP Ghost of Tsushima is one of the most enjoyable PS exclusives I have played since Persona 5, along with God of War and Spider-Man I feel these games have been the best exclusives Sony has offered. Although Ghost of Tsushima is a brilliant game it isn't without it's faults, so I'll cover the good and bad parts. Let's start with the main focus point, the visuals. Graphically not one of the best as I do feel as though there are games out there better, but as far as PS4 games go I have yet to see a game visually better... The mix of the contrast and colours is sublime, it really makes the scenery beautifully immersive and playing on a 4K OLED TV in Dolby Vision HDR really increases the potential of the game. One thing that lets it down is the awful lip syncing to the Japanese audio, I feel as though even in English the lip sync would look bad. The sound is outstanding, to the point where I had to use my soundbar as I felt TV speakers just wasn't hitting it well enough. The soundtrack is brilliant, the voice acting (played with Japanese audio) is spot on and the subtle sounds of archers shouting allowing you to know which direction enemies are firing from helps so much. Gameplay is so enjoyable, there's nothing innovative but everything it does, it does really well. The balance of stealth and samurai is done really well and you don't feel forced to do either so it's really on your personal preference. The stealth could have been polished a bit more, it's not bad but it is very basic and doesn't have much range and flavour. The final aspect I want to hit is the story, now as it starts there's not much emotion in the characters other than serious, every character is serious in this game and it's expected considering it's during a war but as you progress through the Story the emotions between characters become more in depth and you gain more of an appreciation for them. By the third and final act I was really invested in each characters story (side missions) and I grew quite attached to some of the none essential characters even becoming quite emotionally attached to them. As things go this year Ghost of Tsushima is probably my favourite game so far, that's saying something as well considering Ori and The Will of the Wisp was an incredibly good game,

The Devil In Me is probably one of the worse games in the Dark Pictures Anthology, from the introduction of the main characters, to the very first death scene, the structure just falls completely flat. Never in a DPA game have I been so underwhelmed and uninterested in a single character that I even feel compelled to at least save a single person. The Story is as bland as the characters, and the voice acting is so, so bad.... I didn't think it was possible for the VA to get worse in a Supermassive Games project, but low and behold they managed to find a group of uninspired voice actors along with directors and writers less uninspired. I normally long for the goofy "doesn't take itself too serious" Supermassive Games titles in the Dark Pictures Anthology such as Man of Medan, Little Hope and House of Ashes all which I enjoyed playfully.... Even The Quarry with it's goofy dialogue and bad voice acting had a bit of "so bad, it's good" charm to it. I'm currently about 3 hours into the game and literally from the first hour, every time I pick it up I find myself thinking about putting it back down again almost 5 minutes later.

Horizon Forbidden West feels as though they've massively improved on their 5 year old counterpart (Zero Dawn) in the combat department... I think with the 60fps feature the combat feels a lot more smooth and natural, making it easier to dodge and hit vital components. My main issue with the game so far is that being 11 hours in I've only lightly scratched the surface, unlocking about 1/5 of the map and have a long way to go... according to howlongtobeat it roughly takes about 43 hours for main story and extras, now depending on what that means I feel being someone who will want to complete all side quests and main quests, I may fall under the 40-50 hour bracket, which I feel is going to be far too long for me personally considering I'm only really near the beginning and I'm already not invested in any of the characters or the main plot. I've also encountered numerous game breaking bugs such as, Aloy being stuck between a rock and a step, the mount just continuously running in one spot, and Aloy throwing attacks rapidly but not landing them.... I've also had immersion breaking bugs such as, floating corpses, floating objects, mount being stuck in background during dialogue cut-scenes... Gameplay wise I am having fun despite the bugs, but you could literally replace the characters with completely different characters and a completely different story and I wouldn't even notice or be bothered as none of those two aspects are interesting me at all... It's literally a carbon of Zero Dawn with a few improvements, but with a less interesting Story, and characters you either forgot or care little about. I'm a bit disheartened paying £70 for this game, I think if you can pick it up for £45-50 then go for it, but it doesn't justify the new gen price bump, and I normally let off reviewing games until I complete them but because the game hasn't really offered much in 11 hours, and has already become a bit tedious, I don't really need to complete it to formulate an opinion.

Before I start I should probably mention the glitches and crashes I had... At one point my PS5 crashed 3 times in the space of 5 hours, another part light attacks would stop landing and just clip through enemies until I reset the game, and again I had to reset the game when a specific challenge (Lyre) just vanished from the map, so I had to save near the location, reset and reload for it to appear normally, Immortals: Fenyx Rising is probably the most impressive and enjoyable game I have played by Ubisoft since Assassins Creed 2. Many would see elements of Assassins Creed in this game but I mostly see a lot of elements from Breath of the Wild, the stamina bar climbing, swimming and jumping, the gliding, and the number of puzzles scattered around the world. The world itself is a reasonable size and has very little open space that consist of nothing, so even though the map might not be as big as whichever game you want to compare it to, everything within the map is nicely packed in a reasonable distance so you don't feel like your traversing through empty space for minutes on end. The visuals are stunning in 4k HDR, even though the character models themselves aren't the best, but the aesthetic design reminds me so much of Zelda mixed with Fable, and the way the controls feels also replicate these games also. The story has it moments and really does a good job describing some greek gods/goddesses as well as basically slagging off Zeus' behaviour and the way he mistreated other gods/goddesses, however the dialogue can be pretty bad most the time, at times it seems designed for little children but the sexual innuendos and the vague jokes that of a young adult would get seems to make me think the game doesn't know what it's target audience is. The absolute worse thing I can think of is how tedious some of the trophies are to get, as things stand I have 100% platinum trophy for this game and it took me 50 hours and 30 minutes (to the nearest minute) of game time, I think the game could be done in about 30-35 hours but I wanted to get all trophies as it was rated easy to obtain. Now the platinum was easy to obtain but tedious as hell, some of the objectives I had to do ended up me googling a map as I didn't want to spend needless hours walking around looking for a specific monster or chest... At one point I needed to obtain a rare resource called golden amber, most easily obtained through normal chests (x3 from each chest), I ended the game still requiring 60+ amber to get one last trophy, so I had to start a new game+ just to reset the chests. It was so tedious and annoying obtaining some of the collections and pretty much killed my gaming experience, I think a slight tweak to the script and more vigorous story as well as a better trophy setup I believe this game could have potentially hit the 8/10 mark.

Watch_Dogs: Legion is an emotionless copy and paste of it's predecessors. Enter the world of Ubisoft where your main character is nothing but a vessel for you to control, you could change the character to a duffle bag and I wouldn't notice anything different. Ubisoft's characters have no substance or (ironically) character, and their stories and worlds are a mishmash of over the top representation of how the world sees the far-left, and how the far-left sees the world. Their script team must have bullet points which consist of: - Government bad - Anti-Establishment hip - British people love the word shag I've never attempted to speed run a game as badly as I did with this one. I must have gotten into about 7-9 hours of the game (most of it playing the keepy-up football mini game) and I had to google the mission list, and when I saw that I was near the start I lost all interest in the characters and the story and decided to just gun for it. Let's talk about the characters, play who you want sounded like such a potential quirk in a video game, but alas it doesn't matter as they have no defining features, even their special traits are lacklustre and bear no usefulness once you unlock a verity of standard abilities which all of your characters will posses. In the end I think I stuck to one character, and the rest were just there for convenience whenever my chosen character would die and then I would be forced to pick someone else. Now the story... Literally YouTube watch it, I'm sure there is someone out there who actually cared about it, but the dialogue and voice acting was too bad for me to handle another second of cinematic cut scenes... The only time in video game history I'm thankful for a skip button. The missions are mind numbingly repetitive... Drive to destination, break into destination, hack terminal, escape. I'm not sure what made me think that this franchise would be revived after the borefest that was Wath_Dogs 2, but it felt basically the same but with a different setting. The first game wasn't amazing but the story had emotion and the main character had background, so you felt sort of invested at the start... This is basically you start the game, you die at the start, your organisation gets rebuilt... Oh and there's a witty AI that basically comes off as an Aldi version of JARVIS. I've clocked 21 hours on this game according to my PS5, but I reckon 6 hours of them 21 were spent on pause whilst I got distracted by YouTube , or doing something else... but I put in those hours just so I could complete it and give my honest opinion. I couldn't recommend this game without feeling some part of my soul being obtained by the devil himself. You may have a few hours of fun doing the same thing over and over again, but I'd highly recommend you save your hard earned money and buy something else. TL;DR: Watch_Dogs: Legion is a repetitive borefest, that is a carbon copy of it's predecessor. Don't waste your money, or at least wait for it to be on sale for £15-20, which won't be too long.

The swords of Ditto: Mormo's Curse is a visionary to behold. With a slight blend of pastel colours added to the aesthetics the colours really pop making the animations look really solid, from the basic movements, to the swinging of a sword the game is very easy on the eyes making you appreciate the finer details in the game itself. The basic mechanics are simple, you traverse around the map freely whist encountering enemies along the way which you defeat by the use of your sword which is unique to the character you control (more on that later), and you also have a vary of secondary weapons. There are multiple stores, one for toys (secondary weapons), one for items (health related) and another for stickers (power ups/abilities that you can equip to your weapons and armour), these require purchasing with the use of coins that you collect as you defeat enemies, cut grass or break pots (very Zelda-esque). Now for the grind parts, the aim of the game is to defeat the evil Mormo in a time limit of 24 hours, now there is a day and night cycle that seems to pass which has zero effect to the 24 hour limit and there is no indication of how much time passes in the game, so the 24 hour limit is somewhat very vague. In order to take on Mormo first you need to strengthen your hero before engaging in the final battle, this requires you taking on a vary of side tasks and defeating multiple enemies in order to level up your hero's sword which takes a considerable amount of time as the level up process is very long winded. The worse part of the game is the load screens, they are atrocious, like really bad. The only game I can think of so far for the switch with a worse load time is My Time At Portia. They aren't as long as MTAP, but they occur every time you enter a dungeon/cave or leave an area (which is extremely frequent). Load times vary from about 5-10 seconds at a time which at first isn't so bad but after an hour of gameplay you've spent around 2-3 minutes staring at a load screen which becomes infuriating. The one thing I did find intriguing (and as I mentioned earlier about unique swords) was that upon failing to kill Mormo your character is forever lost, time passes and a new hero is born once every 100 years... It's a subtle mechanic but one I actually enjoy. On a whole, The swords of Ditto: Mormo's Curse is a fun game to play (ignoring the load screens) but they failed to reach the potential of what could have been a really good game. The grind can be tedious even with the array of weapons and power-ups you can obtain it can still become dull and flat, however still, the colour palette and design style is simply up there with some of the best I have seen in this genre.

Breath of the wild is as pleasant to listen to as it is to look at, with its visually stunning scenery Zelda:BOTW is almost like a fine painting! I use the key word almost as what the game lacks is character. Breath of the wild's open world is often empty and pedestrian, I almost felt the map could have been downsized by 40% at the very least. The main quest objectives were fun and enjoyable, but I felt forced into doing the tedious side quests in order to gain some advantage at the end game. So like the map I reckon the playtime could have been cut down by about 50 hours also! At the end completing the game didn't feel like an accomplishment, as by the midway point i had already lost interest, but didn't want to add the game to the list of games I've played yet not completed.