SchroederRock

Modern Warfare 3 largely disappoints. Had this been a Game Pass offering I'd have fewer complaints but I shelled out $70 and regretfully I wish I hadn't. That being said, I spent the money and here we are. The campaign is largely forgettable - not awful, just nothing that I think back to and think to myself "that was fun, I'd play that again". Which begs the question: why have campaigns if you're going to half-a** them, right? As for the multiplayer, there's still plenty for me to explore but after about 5 hours or so of multiplayer there's only a little that actually new/different from MW2 (2022) and that's a problem. While I LOVE the return of the classic MW2 maps, this game should offer creative/new ideas into the mix and some unique experiences. Not to be found - it's all 100% classic map reskins and a few weapons mixed in with your kits from MW2. I guess I just don't get it - why call it MW3? It's not really a new game. It's MW2 story continuation and a map pack that doesn't dip into the MW2 collection (which I'm happy with as MW2 had very few quality maps to play through). If you love Warzone, you love Warzone. I was a huge WZ advocate for a year or so but I've fallen off since my friend community no longer plays. I won't weigh in on that component since it's not a major driver of COD for me anymore. I just don't know if we need a new COD every year anymore. I'd be happy with Microsoft (now owning Activision) scrapping annual COD games and maybe consider just running 1 or 2 variations on a 2-year release cadence that gives the studios 4-year spans to come up with their next game. Do a major DLC dump or campaign expansion ~6-12 months after release to keep things going then let it go. At least COD would be a little more "fresh" with each release instead of it feeling like clockwork release content to just get dollars in the coffers.

25 hours of gameplay and enjoying the experience. It's Fallout but better in every way. The biggest gripes are that I can't fly into a planet's atmosphere and experience that travel without a fast travel - a little bit of a miss IMO. It also doesn't feel all that different from a Fallout game, something I think others are really leaning into as a big negative and while I agree, it's not something that makes the game irrelevant. It does feel like this game was probably meant for 2019-2020 and the scale was just too difficult to deliver on, especially with the pandemic interrupting productivity. Regardless, I'm digging this game quite a bit. Hopefully I can one day experience it closer to a stable 60 FPS but I don't have the cash that I'm willing to blow just to sniff that kind out output on my rig.

It's what you'd expect from an open-world game in 2023. Go anywhere, do almost anything, take on all kinds of missions/stories. The main story is engaging enough and the characters are deep enough to be interesting and worth exploring their backstories (if you're into that kind of progression in these games). Perhaps the most fun things for me are the combat and the ship-building & outpost-building - I don't know why, but I dig those aspects of this game more than previous Bethesda games. Usually, the shooting mechanics are pretty janky but this game finally offers a more streamlined and somewhat smooth combat experience. It's not something as smooth/fluid as a competitive shooter like COD or Apex but it's a step up from the typical Bethesda game. At first, I didn't know if I was going to get into Starfield and put any time into it. Now I'm about 20+ hours in and have no plans to slow down. I think I've put more time into other missions than the main mission. It's great to run into complex engagements that have some ripple effects downstream. I know, Fallout had some of these same cornerstones but this just seems to be much stronger overall. My only gripes are that on the Series X you only 30 FPS. It's not a big deal and I understand that Starfield is THAT BIG and it's tough to render everything and get above 30 FPS even with a console as powerful as the SX but I still wish it could be that much smoother and locked at 60 FPS. I hope there's a way to unlock that down the line - unlikely, but it would be cool if they could. The second gripe is that you can't really travel from one planet to the next or enter a planet atmosphere without fast traveling. I was hoping that, like No Man's Sky, you'd be able to experience that entry to a planet and then use the landing automation or something. Again, not a dealbreaker just a missed opportunity. I think people would have enjoyed taking their ships into atmosphere and guiding themselves toward a landing pad. It's a great game - one that validates my ownership of Game Pass and allows me to actually enjoy what I pay on a 6-month cadence because I'm finally getting something that makes me want to sit down for hours and play.

The campaign is clearly the standout asset that MWII delivers. A clear improvement over the average experience of MW, 22's MWII brings a better cinematic feel to it with great attention to characters and gameplay experience. Whoever drove this part of COD's development and creative decision-making deserves the most accolades without a doubt. As for the multiplayer? It's par for the course. Nothing is truly different. There are such small-scale changes to things like the gunsmith and perk systems with mixed results. The COD experience is still there and usually, it's fun, even if the 6v6 maps aren't all that great to start (I have a few favorites and everything else is just... there). I expect more variety and at least some quality with a regular rotation of new content (maps) coming once the Battle Pass system kicks off a couple short weeks after the game's launch. I would like to see COD deliver something new that can be a cornerstone for the franchise. Maybe that's a phenomenal campaign experience that continues beyond the core campaign (which they sort of do but it doesn't get the attention it should if the emphasis was there) but really, multiplayer is the calling card for COD and we should see something that really hooks us after the millionth COD release that makes it a 12-month must-play for me and my friends. I hope to see some innovation here with Microsoft likely acquiring Activision soon.

Call of Duty remains consistent as a baseline shooter with above-average controls and gameplay. Visually speaking, Modern Warfare 2's campaign is strong, albeit a little underwhelming in some instances. The variety of locations and lighting is the big standout and makes it feel like you're covering new territory most of the time. That said, the story is just good enough to be mildly enjoyed but not a standout for shooters. Speaking of visuals, the multiplayer barely looks like an upgrade from the previous Modern Warfare entry. 120 Hz refresh rate is nice but I think we've hit that point where the refresh rate push needs to slow down - there's not enough return to warrant a constant emphasis on pushing that boundary. The eye can only see so many frames per second and refreshing the image beyond 60 times per second rapidly loses value. The tradeoff comes with the detail of the game and what you're encountering, whether in the campaign or in a multiplayer match. Granted, it's not like you're constantly checking out the environment when engaged in a firefight but you still like to have the immersion when you enter a game of this caliber. Speaking more toward the gameplay and its variety - it's COD as usual. The baseline matchmaking content is there as it has been for decades. That stuff is fine - I'm getting close to being over normal matchmaking games though so while I do spend most of my time in this part of the game it's mostly because my friends are there - not because I feel it's the best experience. What is the best experience? In my opinion, it's in the other gameplay modes. There's a 3rd person combat experience (what a shakeup!) and a Battlefield-esque Ground War - no longer just a slightly larger standard map but rather a larger-scale experience with unique environments where you have a lot more room to move and quadruple the player count - quite a shift in dynamics and options. This is where I think Call of Duty has its most potential to grow. Vehicle play is pretty good, usually tight, but there's not a lot of emphasis on airborne combat - that's mostly left to killstreaks/scorestreaks while you scramble on the ground by foot or by tank/hummer. Modern Warfare 2 is welcome simply because shooters are in a tough space. Halo fell apart within a few months of launching, Bethesda's Starfield got delayed, leaving you to play mostly Apex, Warzone 1.0, Destiny for the most polished shooter experiences. Speaking of Warzone, Warzone 2.0 launches a couple weeks after launch. As of this review it hasn't launched but I do look forward to mixing up the COD experience again with a revamped Warzone experience. My biggest complaint against Warzone 1.0 was its sluggish performance, limited framerate, sometimes janky controls. If 2.0 plays just like typical matchmaking I will be impressed and will find more enjoyment out of that kind of step forward. But that's technically not MW2 - that's a separate aspect of COD and just so happens to be releasing near MW2. Modern Warfare 2 is pretty good it just doesn't standout well above the competition. It's greatest strength, if we're being honest, is it launched more polished than Battlefield 2042 and is likely set to receive consistent content updates and Battle Pass content every couple months. If you were waiting for Call of Duty to take a giant leap forward, I think it's safe to say that you are still waiting and it's likely that COD won't reshape its formula ever. Expect the studios relating to COD to have to release an entirely new IP that is much different, stands alone from COD. I actually expect that but that's a different conversation.

Having spent about 25 or so hours on the campaign, nearly full completing it and seeing the stage set for what comes next, I can confidently say this is the best Halo. I'll summarize the look, feel, execution of the game as absolutely solid. No major or hardly even minor bugs to speak of. The game is ultra-smooth and I have a feeling that the extra year 343 got to take on the game really allowed this game to launch with most of its core features in-tact (campaign, multiplayer, online features/store). But what I really want to express is my love for the campaign - the story told. I was a little frustrated that the gap between Halo 5 and Infinite from a story point was so janky. I knew a little bit of what was going on by watching some lore videos that connect the events leading into this game but felt that the game itself did a poor job of setting the stage and making me really care about what's going on - or even just know what's going on. It ended up working out. The storytelling is intentional and you get most of the picture through clever narrative choices, objects in the game that unfold the major plot progression from the moments Halo 5 conclude to where you end up in Halo Infinite. I will refrain from spoilers but the entire conclusion is masterful - this is the BEST Halo story ever told. I wish the best for 343 and where they go from here with a story that seems to be finishing but not yet totally finished. Play the campaign, listen to the story, see where you think things end up. It was beautifully done and finally served Master Chief with some believable vulnerability and puts a bow on a major plotline that has persisted through 5 Halo games. I loved every minute of it and Infinite makes me feel like 343 finally figured out how to make a Halo game that's theirs. My complaints are near-zero. I don't think the Slipspace Engine that Infinite was built using is quite as good as I had hoped. I feel like the option to rely on Halo 3 visual art was maybe too much lip-service to Halo fans. I'm a core Halo fan, been playing since the first game debuted, and I would have been happy to see 343 take a few steps forward for immersion via graphics. If you've seen what a few screenshots looked like using the Unreal Engine (search for it online) you'll see what I mean - there's something about a more realistic version of Halo that made me wish the Slipsplace Engine delivered that kind of visual entertainment. It's kinda nit-picky though and I still feel this is by-far the best-looking Halo ever, both because of its 4K delivery AND it's fantastic HDR delivery - the lighting is amazing. My other light complaint is the fact that the campaign space clearly rips off Far Cry. Not a bad thing - it was a fun time experiencing Far Cry but in a Halo setting, but I hope 343 thinks through their open-world delivery (it's clearly not the end of this format) as the things you do on the side present as mostly unimportant. They do drag out the campaign experience by many hours on Normal to around 30 hours, which is awesome in my opinion. I only wish there was even more content to work through that would push it beyond that. I will only have Legendary to attempt some day, but that'll be for another time. Halo Infinite is about as good as it could have been. My other nit-picky issue, and it's minor,

I don't know the last time I rated a game a 10 - I'm not convinced I've ever done it, but here we are. I think part of it is because Gears 5 is just outperforming my expectations by a country-mile. Gears of War 4 hadn't really blown by skirt up in that it was a decent Gears game with a decent story but I kept feeling like the formula was feeling a touch stale. Gears 5 would be in trouble for feeling repetitive but this time, the story is EXCELLENT, the voice acting is actually high quality, and the level design throughout it a huge win. And I'm roughly 13 hours into the campaign (almost done with it) and yet I still have the final chapters to play. The variance in gameplay, the dynamic pacing, and the deeper storytelling (with an awesome reveal of how the Locust Horde came to be) is what really puts this game a cut above. I think this game was sorely missed by a lot of gamers out there. The multiplayer continues to be roughly the same. There are some mild changes/updates, and with newer Xbox hardware everything plays silky-smooth, but otherwise, that aspect of the game seems to not be any major shift - and that's probably fine for most people. For me, the campaign becoming a bigger deal is what will make this game memorable and worthy of a replay. I know campaigns aren't always the highlight with social/multiplayer play being such a key focus these days, but Gears 5 has a story to tell and it's definitely worth tuning in for. If you're just trying to push through and not sink too many hours into that part of the game you'll be happy to know that there are ways to bypass "accessory missions" which are meant to equip you better down the road but are not mandatory to be successful. Still, I spent more time on the campaign because I spent time gearing up. Speaking of which, the significance and utility of Jack is something of a revelation for this series by giving you some cool future-like technology without interrupting the feel of the game.

Bless Unleashed has its charms but it constantly gets in its own way. Much of the early going is fumbled extremely bad and fails to prepare players on how to manage their characters and communicate story progression effectively. There is an unfathomable amount of fetch questing and which sometimes filler is necessary it's a bit of a drag when relied upon so regularly. Bless has a lot of nice things going for it: plenty of open world boss fights that require multiple players who will usually gather willingly to take on more challenging fights in order to gain a good chunk of XP and a shot at more rare items. This type of approach to open world play definitely borrows from the great ideas Guild Wars 2 put in place, but where GW2 was smooth and concise in its execution, Bless is typically more rigid/unrefined. These boss fights do have their own dynamics and they're not just mindless DPS races but they're also a bit of a chore as they're the primary way to level up your character since questing frequently varies in its rewards and availability. As of level 20 I've found myself in constant stand-stills for leveling that require excessive grinding only to eventually hit a massive influx of XP. What might take 3-4 hours of play to gain a level one day might only take 30 mins the next. It's all because the XP gains are unevenly distributed and the quest availability sometimes doesn't favor the player. For instance, at level 20 I'm having to fight things that are 2-4 levels higher than me and requiring better gear score to more "casually coast" through the content. This is a problem that two other friends of mine have run into as well. Everyone is doing the quests and trying to hit big XP opportunities with world bosses when the groups form for them and the bosses are available but there's an unmistakable failure in how Bandai Namco paced the XP rewards with questing. It seems that despite heavy questing and mob killing you're inevitably going to be behind to a point where you'll just have to cycle through boss fights and dynamic world events to move your XP gains along to get you to a point where you'll be more appropriately suited to take on the challenges that you're facing. That's a bit of a head-scratching error for an MMORPG that, if it was tested appropriately, could easily be fixed by simply increasing quest XP awards. My gut-instinct is the quest XP needs about a 20% buff in order to help players maintain appropriate leveling for the storyline content. Then there's the combat which isn't overly simplistic but also kinda feels clunky at times. As a priest, I find my role kinda muddled. You get these unique trees of abilities which is nice and varies your gameplay depending on which ability tree you follow but they're all somewhat limited and don't always help players carve out a role, at least with the priest class. That's another odd fumble. There are 7 ability trees (I assume for all classes) and only one of them puts a priest in a healing-centric role while the rest have healing as an afterthought and rely on damage dealing. I think Bless should have considered making more established roles and branching those roles out a bit more. To this day I still feel that World of Warcraft is one of the few MMORPGs that nailed class play and varied it all enough to make it interesting to play the game as a different class. Bless almost feels more like Destiny in that your class is more of an afterthought than an important choice in how you experience the game and that's not what this genre should be doing (that's my opinion though, perhaps you'd enjoy that approach). The game definitely is opening up a bit at level 20 though. There's an online marketplace and there's a crafting system to develop your skills, though it's a bit tough to progress them and keep them anywhere close to the point where you'd be crafting yourself usable gear for your level. The open world boss fights are mostly great. The open world big events are mostly great. The only problem with the open world highlighted events is... they're not highlighted. You'll know where they are but you won't know when those bosses respawn and you won't be notified of any important events. You'll have to rely on the cumbersome general chat feed to be made aware of new events and that's a huge letdown for me. If Bless Unleashed can smooth itself out in the very near future, it has a healthy future for itself. Much of what ails it is completely fixable. But the question is obvious: when will that be? We have new consoles coming out in 2020 and there's bound to be a plethora of new RPG content coming within the next 18 months that could overshadow what Bless Unleashed has to offer. Side note: the game is rather not-pretty given the hardware it's running on. It has vague moments of nice visuals but even on the Xbox One X it's nothing to be proud of visually. It's not ugly but it's not attractive either.

I haven't played a minute of Monster Hunter games in the past. I spent nearly an hour with it and didn't like a second of it. Sorry :/ The game was incredibly confusing, was not given appropriate modifications for English so all of the dub ins feel weird because the lips are not motioning to English lip movements and were constantly off. The cooperative aspect was also not working despite the company saying the game fixed the coop/online stuff to make it "easier". My buddy and I were glad it was on Xbox Game Pass because i would have been irritated to blow $60 on what felt like an incomplete game. To those that enjoyed it: you and I must have differing taste in games. I just can't even with this game.

The Division 2 avoids virtually every problem that the first game had. It's smoother to play, consistently loads, doesn't over-buff enemies making them bullet sponges, and simplifies the complicated stats system that required a couple high-level statistics and probability classes to understand fully. It's basically what the first Division game should have been from the start and it was extremely imperative that Ubisoft didn't repeat history or the IP would have been lost for good. But what it doesn't do is refresh the gameplay to the point where this feels like a new and improved Division experience. Nothing feels radically better and I'm kind of bugged by that. It would have been nice for the developers to consider what steps could be taken to tighten up the gameplay a bit more and whether some new creative license could be used to make the skills system more impacting and varied. There's also the issue that i have in that the stats system seems to almost get oversimplified to the point where it's basically Division stats for dummies, vol. 1 and I don't really like that. I prefer the simpler version to the super complicated one but having the ability to deeply craft your agent's abilities and effectiveness in different ways is a big part of what makes any RPG game highly replayable and unique. Despite some of my wishes for changes or different paths for design in this game, it's largely a good game and while I don't feel excited to jump in to it like I did the first game I largely enjoy it. The biggest reason to buy this game is the lengthy campaign and deep, varied endgame content which transforms your general playable world and introduces you to tougher enemies and new specialization skills and weapons that at least offers some differences in gameplay but not in ways that radically change how you play - they're mild changes but they do have appeal and that's at least a good start. Then there's the guarantee that year 1 DLC is all free and Ubisoft has suggested that there will be 3 nice-sized expansions to Division 2 post-launch before it offers what is probably going to be a big expansion pack a-la Destiny's Forsaken, but what's nice to know is that these smaller DLC packs that are free will advance the storyline of the base game as well as introduce new missions and endgame content. If you loved The Division's 1.8 patch then you'll love Division 2 which essentially takes everything that Ubisoft learned from the first game and applies that knowledge to the second game. If Ubisoft plays their cards right then Division 2 should have a longer shelf life, giving players 2-3 years of meaningful content to play post-launch and that would be a huge win in an era where nothing is truly free and DLCs are more of an afterthought or gimmick than an essential extension of good core games.

So far Division 2 is a more stable, flowing product than its predecessor. Truth be told, if Ubisoft hadn't screwed up Division 1 so bad we wouldn't have a need for a sequel (not at this time anyways), but here we are. What Division 2 gets right is everything that made Division 1 good after their much-praised 1.8 update. But then you add in a more streamlined experience in the stat building and skill system and you can easily adjust to a big game and its nuances in ways that the previous Division game simply failed at. But the game's biggest asset is one that the press has completely left untouched: endgame. There is a SIGNIFICANT endgame experience here that really opens up the game in a similar way Destiny 2's Dreaming City did for the Forsaken expansion. You have this base game that you play through to get adjusted to the game and its system and its story but it becomes something more shortly after finishing the core game. I think The Division overall has a very good thing going for it BUT I think the game is also very limited in its vision and direction. There are no vehicles to play with, there is no open world aspect (just shared world), and the crafting system isn't all that deep which makes it hard to create an "agent" that's truly unique. Sure, the skill system attempts to address that but it really doesn't do a great job at solving that desire that I'd wager most gamers have when playing these kinds of games. I wish there was a skill tree that people could go down that made them better at certain things and less better at others so that a more varied and situational experience would unfold.

Crackdown 3 is an occasionally-fun shooter that puts you in an open world with Terry Crews (or whoever you choose to be if not Terry) to do big Terry Crews stuff - this is perhaps the most redeeming aspect of the game from start to finish. An open world campaign is pretty corny but is redeemed at times with tough boss fights that take place in unique settings. There's definitely a great game here but it hasn't surfaced yet. Visuals are disappointing given that so much was made about the physics performance with the help of Microsoft's Azure handling so much of that workload while the world of Crackdown 3 looks like an unfinished Tron metropolitan city. At launch, there's a lot of quirks too like objects stuttering and being hard to jump/mantle on or pick up because they're not staying in place or playing co-op and weapons malfunctioning and glitching out players (my buddy used a weapon that creates a mini black hole which affected me and glitched me out of existence and underneath the map until I finally died 5 minutes later after being locked out of the game). If there was a well-written campaign with a better focus that wasn't so short then I'd be much more interested in this game. If there was more attention put toward visuals and physics performance then I'd appreciate looking at and experiencing this game. If there was a multiplayer system that worked like any other game in 2019 and not 2001 then I'd enjoy this game even more despite the multiplayer mode being bland and rarely exciting. Crackdown 3 isn't finished and it's obvious. You might still enjoy the game and I had my laughs and fun at times but I'm so glad that I was able to play this game on Xbox Game Pass or I would really hate on this game because nobody should be paying $60 for this. Sorry, not sorry.

There's a good start here but Apex Legends suffers from limited team capabilities, a singular map to play at launch, questionable weapon and skill balancing, and limited options for skills/abilities. This won't unseat PUBG and Fortnite, not as-is anyways, but what it can do is challenge those BR titles as a free-to-play shooter that puts people into the popular first-person viewpoint and uses the Titanfall control setup and universe to offer a fast paced experience. I kind of like it but I hate playing by myself. The solo experience in this game is simply unacceptable and impossible to win. 3-person teams also feel insanely small and prevent you from playing with more of your friends should you run into a game with a premade group. Lastly, the 60-player cap feels a bit on the light side as it's possible to not see anyone until you're one of the last 10 players alive, which is really odd given how not big the map is. Apex Legends needs work.

It's a sharp looking game with a lot of flashy environmental tech that makes you think you're in a showdown in a controlled battle royale, very Hunger Games looking. You get weapons and set-abilities that are all cut out of the Titanfall games (for the most part) that are scavenged on a map that you drop in on with a fixed 3-man team that is controlled by a single player so you can stay together easier (or you can split up if you choose with the press of a button and drop wherever you prefer). This game is designed from the ground up to be a 3-man squad shooter/survival experience, so there's no solo mode and queueing up with a group of random people is going to be... rough. Communication, capability, precision, and a little luck is what you need working in tandem to win a game, even just getting to the top 3 squad showdown at the end. Playing by yourself is risky, to say the least. I find myself an above-average player for shooters and survival games and I have a hard time making it more than a few minutes beyond the initial drop if my team dropped anywhere near another team. Playing with a group of friends completely changes the outcome - I typically make top 10 most of the time (haven't landed the #1 spot as of writing this review). Everything about this game looks promising but I don't think it's ready for primetime. Simply not having a solo mode is a mild turnoff and simply copying and pasting the Titanfall universe content and pasting it into a BR map lacks imagination and I'm surprised to accuse Respawn Entertainment of that since Titanfall was fairly creative and unique. There's also only one map at launch and it gets old after a while if you're going to binge this game. Oh, it's only 60 players total which, depending on whether teams fan out or condense at the start, feels like a low population cap as there are games where my team would see zero other players until the final phases. Apex Legends is a nice foundation but it has a lot of work to do in order to really challenge PUBG and Fortnite for BR dominance. It feels a lot like Call of Duty's Blackout mode and that's another problem that surfaces - this game exists already within COD Black Ops 4. Apex Legends might be free to play but a load of people were already playing BO4 and it seems to me that people were fairly happy with Blackout. To put it simply: Apex Legends wants to stand out but after 10 hours of play I don't think it does. If it weren't free I'd never buy it. I have some fun with it and I am confident that RE will work to deepen the experience (classes are very limited at launch and desperately need to be expanded upon) but as of the time of writing this review I don't think Apex Legends is anything more than a flash in the pan. I could be wrong but it comes out during a busy games season that include The Division 2 and Anthem which will be launched just a few weeks after Apex Legends was made available.

Unlike Destiny 2's initial launch and its 2 DLC packs in what Bungie has called "Year 1", Forsaken actually delivers quality content through both a great storyline and a few meaningful additions to what Guardians will be able to do in the Destiny universe. The Cayde-6 character is lost (not a spoiler - it's literally in every Forsaken promo) but another extremely interesting character that we thought may have never come back is reborn (sort of...), which really intrigued me given the events of Destiny 1 and its later DLC packs. Where Osiris and Warmind were mostly empty extensions of Destiny 2 (and, once again, allegedly cut from the core release of the game and sold off as DLC), Forsaken offers real substance and proves that Bungie can learn from its community and craft something that is worth playing. I was furious at Bungie for destroying what was potentially the most important franchise of our current time and failing to build an RPG-driven shooter given all of the sampling content the studio had to look at. Despite my frustration and bailing on Curse of Osiris after 1 day and basically not playing Warmind until Forsaken was a week away, I gambled on Forsaken and so far I've been happy with the $40 purchase. It almost feels like a separate game given how much was put into the mix. The new Gambit gametype may not necessarily require Forsaken (though I haven't confirmed that, it just sounded like Bungie offered it to anyone with the seasons pass based on limited reading) but it has come because of it. The PVE/PVP mode harkens back to early World of Warcraft days where you could take a team and push through a PVE instance but risked being jumped by members of an opposing faction. The mashup really plays out well in Forsaken and makes me hope for more Gambit-style offerings in the future with different goals/progression. The grind is also back and that's a good thing since Destiny 2 took hardly any time to max out characters at all. You'll have to earn your high power levels through heavy gameplay. The good news is that you won't be bashing your head against the wall trying to power level up, you just might be stuck hoping for a gear drop now and then for a low-level slot that helps bump your score up a few points. The grind and the separation in Guardian gearing is vast with the new 500 soft cap and the 600 hard cap in Forsaken. The 600 hard cap will either take you a few weeks of intense playtime or perhaps a couple months of regular play that includes conquering the more challenging content (like the Last WIsh raid and the Nightfall). When you consider that you get a great, somewhat lengthy story, two new explorable/playable open world areas (the second of which is unlocked at the end of the story and is the best open area ever created in Destiny), Gambit, and what seems to be a good raid all alongside meaningful tweaks and deeper customization options, I think there's a lot to be had for $40. The only gimmick there is that you need all of the Year 1 content to buy Forsaken - you can't just buy D2 and then buy Forsaken and be good to go. Buying all of the Year 1 content will set you back an extra $20 and I'm a little put off by that cheap trick. Activision has certainly destroyed Destiny, or at least tried to, time and time again with content fragmentation and high price points for shallow and borderline-worthless DLC packages. Forsaken sort of rights the wrongs but there's supposedly more in Year 2 coming out over the 6 months following Forsaken's launch that will extend the experience. It will require an annual pass to access and, at this time, Bungie is asking you to put down another $29.99 without giving you much in the way of detail as to what that will include. Because of that it's hard to know how far Forsaken's higher-quality reach will go after such an abysmal year 1 for the game. If there are new raids, more social spaces, and story expansions then the price would be merited (assuming it's all decent). But beware: Forsaken's saving grace for Destiny 2 may not extend beyond the Forsaken DLC, so buying Forsaken means you're willing to be OK with what's here for the next several months until more games come out that might steal you away.

Well I binged Destiny 2's core content and did everything but the prestige mode Leviathan raid, because there was no incentive to do so. I love what Destiny could be but, outside of The Taken King and maybe the initial Destiny 1 launch content, it's never lived up to the hype. Most of the DLCs for this game have been mediocre at-best. For the Curse of Osiris, not much changes. What is good about this particular DLC? You get to interact, albeit shortly, with Osiris - the guy that we've had competitive festivals over. There are moments where exploring the Vex-infused world of Mercury is absolutely stunning and well crafted. Without spoiling anything, there are time travel elements (temporary) that allow you to see eventualities or past events which help build the narrative around Osiris, who's lore was mostly buried within grimoire cards in Destiny 1. Time travel is not a thing that should spoil this game for any players that have been with it for a while since that's what the Vex have been trying to do: create alternate realities and test invasion tactics on all living things until they find a course that works. That's something you'll be tasked with disrupting in Curse of Osiris and when we speak about the campaign in summary, it sounds awesome. However, it never delivers much in terms of memorable content and every mission is buried with a lot of filler content in what is known as the Infinite Garden - a Vex-crafted world that generates itself in certain ways to offer you a playing surface, until you get to a Vex portal you need to pass through in order to get to your real objective. Like the Infinite Garden, there's a lot of recycled content, including a mission which takes you through a core Destiny 2 strike and doesn't deviate whatsoever. This is quite annoying because the DLC rarely feels like it has expanded on anything and delivered interesting and new worlds to explore, nor does it really do anything to enhance the ones we already have. To be honest, the only parts of this DLC that I've liked, without playing the raid, have been the end of the campaign battle which takes on very simple raid battle mechanics and the adventures that follow, which are also buried behind the Infinite Garden - you play 80% of the DLC there :(. There's a new Mercury public event but it appears that there's only one. It's a great, semi-complex encounter that keeps players moving around and should easily attract players to it, since it's in the middle of the smallest playable space in all of Destiny that isn't a small multiplayer map (no joke, this open space is basically the size of a larger multiplayer map). To ruin the experience, Osiris isn't narrated very well and his involvement is sparse and dying to be expanded upon. Because the campaign can be beaten in roughly 2 hours or so we're left with limited exposure with a Destiny character that is among the most important we've ever encountered. Osiris is hardly more than a blip on the map and the campaign is extremely bland, just like most of the playable content. So if you've got the season pass, you're already locked in. However, if you don't have the season pass there's a MAJOR PROBLEM HERE. Some core Destiny 2 content will be soft-locked for you. Prestige mode content will not be playable to any player that doesn't have the DLC because the difficulties are increased well beyond what a strike team can realistically handle (even a set of Guardians at light level 305 will struggle to handle the higher power level content that suggests 320-330 power level). So, to make this simple to understand, Bungie is taking away playable content if you don't buy their DLC. It's stupid. Perhaps they'll fix it, but the first week of the DLC's launch currently operates like this. It seems that for every good thing Bungie does with Destiny, there are 3 things they do horribly wrong. Until they fix their game and stop letting Activision run it to the ground via paywalls there's little hope that Destiny as a franchise can ascend to the potential many gamers see in it. That's too bad and it means that the Curse of Osiris will quickly be forgotten by gamers that aren't going to be serious about the expanded Leviathan raid, because there's next to nothing else to do here.

Without taking into the new raid into consideration, Curse of Osiris does next to nothing to advance Destiny 2. Furthermore, it fumbles what would have been an incredible opportunity to explore and expand upon one of Destiny's more important characters from its own lore. The new sharable space is small, the campaign is very brief (MAYBE 2 hours in length for most gamers) and just falls flat altogether. The raid can remedy some of the negativity felt after playing this piece of DLC but there will be a significant population of Destiny 2 players that either will never step into the raid or never fully push through it before the online population fades like it did weeks after Destiny 2's launch. It seems that, despite offering a well-tuned shooter experience, Destiny 2 is in the hands of a studio that just cannot land anything well in the MMO space nor does it take Destiny far enough into the RPG space to make its character development feel significant. Weapons have very little variation in effectiveness and, while loot drops are somewhat slower and the climb to 335 will take quite a bit of time, players will likely give up on this Curse of Osiris long before they complete all it has to offer. Bungie is seriously damaging its franchise and following in Destiny 1's footsteps with poor DLC. Had it not been for The Taken King, Destiny would have the worst DLC track record for a AAA game I've ever played. I really hope there's more effort coming from Bungie. I'm close to abandoning this game entirely, especially with promising titles on the horizon, such as Anthem.

The Curse of Osiris held incredible intrigue for me after spending time shoring up my Destiny lore knowledgebase. Orisis the character is incredibly important in the Destiny canon and his return could have hailed a huge opportunity to break open the narrative of Destiny and bring fans in much closer than ever before. Instead, Curse of Osiris ends up being a ho-hum campaign experience that offers very little substance and forces players to wander an Infinite Forrest that is both incredibly unique and extremely boring all at the same time. The greatest moment of the Curse of Osiris campaign doesn't land until the very end, where a boss fight with raid mechanics comes into play. However, as cool as that sounds, it's a pretty weak encounter when you look back at what you did in that encounter. There is a little more to the expansion than a meager campaign, but nothing feels inspired or important and much of the new content is small. Bungie takes zero opportunities to expand the horizons of Destiny 2 and it quickly returns you to the meaningless grind once the story is completed. Shame on Bungie for releasing this. Shame on Bungie for Destiny 2 which ended up being the biggest letdown of 2017. High hopes are being slammed to the ground and it is becoming abundantly clear that Bungie has no clue what they're doing with this franchise. Without a rally point in the near future, Destiny is doomed.

This is perhaps the smoothest and interesting Assassin's Creed I've played since Brotherhood. I enjoyed Black Sails but didn't bother with either of the two games that followed it. Maybe it's just the elongated break that makes Origins so good to me but there's a lot of great RPG implementations that were either lacking or presented in smaller ways in previous titles that I played. The setting is fantastic and the game looks very good on Xbox One X, though it's not the absolute best visual demonstration of that console's power. There are at least 50 hours of gameplay here if you're not trying to shortcut everything and the game has to offer and play on the Normal mode, a great bargain for the $60 investment you'll put toward this game should you buy it new. Ubisoft has never truly failed at delivering a decent Assassin's Creed game but they have had problems in recent years delivering something above-average. 'Origins' stands out - both for its beautiful setting and more accessible storyline with interesting characters. There are small gameplay improvements here too that will reduce the frustration that some of us would experience with the sluggish/clumsy controls that were experienced in previous games. I recommend AC: Origins more than any recent AC title. If you have a new Xbox One X, you should be picking this game up to see a sample of what the One X can do visually.

Battlefront continues the problems that the previous installment was plagued by. The game feels overly simplistic - always lacking precision and struggling to provide coherent player development/advancement in any way that is interesting or rewarding. The game doesn't fully fail like the first installment does. There is a campaign and there is a semblance of progress here but there isn't enough to push this game into recommendation territory. Kids will enjoy it for what it is: simple, short-lived action that preys on players' love of Star Wars but Battlefront 2 is just too disoriented and boring to enjoy over long periods of time. Rent it, borrow it... don't buy it. P.S. why can't DICE deliver good flight controls in this series when they offer crisp and sensible controls for flight in the Battlefield series!?

Outside of an OK campaign and strong **** Zombies game mode, there's not much to love with WWII. For $60, that will make CoD WWII another letdown for CoD, which has again churned out a somewhat boring yearly release. No timeline change can mask the problems with the gameplay design and the lack of imagination. Only a significant drop in sales will signal to Activision to kill off this series and let the studios do their own thing. If you haven't been happy with CoD for years, you're not going to like this much at all. My advice: rent the game for a couple days and play the campaign. If you love **** Zombies, that's about the only high replay value you can find from this otherwise-limited shooter. If you love the era, what are you doing buying this game? Battlefield 1, though more complex and less rookie-friendly at times, is a MUCH better display into this era of history and should be favored over WWII. Side note: this game looks pretty lame in multiplayer - Call of Duty has finally shown its age as its game engine has lacked convincing detail on consoles. Some may find it appealing but I'd have to contest their gameplay catalog as several other AAA titles do a significantly better job of showing something beautiful on-screen.

WWII suits Call of Duty better, to a degree, than all the future stuff. However, where CoD WWII stumbled the most is in its scale. The campaign has its moments and ends up being a good reason to pick up Call of Duty to begin with but its multiplayer pairing is not so fortunate. Much of WWII's multiplayer feels heavily rehashed from previous games, adding little new to spice up the formula. Maps are typically dense and lead to more encounters between players but that doesn't translate to more fun. Often times, players can be cornered into spawn kill/deaths, especially if an opposing team knows where to stop pressing to keep the predictable computing from spawn-swapping. It really bugs me that no Activision title with the CoD moniker has fixed this problem after years of abuse. **** Zombies always has its fun moments, bringing a more visceral experience to the shooter. It's clear to me that this game mode is the only aspect that delivers time after time. It shows complexity, strategic thinking, and white-knuckle experiences because of how unpredictable the game mode can be. Good on Sledgehammer for keeping this part of the game fun and interesting. However, outside of an OK campaign, there isn't much to love here. Call of Duty continues to be nothing more than a re-skinned version of itself, year after year. This is a huge irritation as Call of Duty is begging to break out of its shell. Perhaps the future will yield a larger sandbox feel to CoD, especially as console and PCs continue to advance and offer more horsepower to smoothly handle the heavy computing that can come with AAA games. As for WWII - if you like the setting, this is not the game to play. Battlefield 1 offers a much deeper and open experience that encourages a little role play here and there. Only CoD fanboys that wait on the scraps that fall from Activision's table will ever find a lot to love here. WWII continues the tradition of CoD failing to impress. It is clearer to me year after year that the original Infinity Ward crew were the lifeblood of Call of Duty and once Activision broke up that team, some of which went on to make Titanfall years later, that the pulse of CoD fell dramatically. With the exception of Black Ops, Call of Duty hasn't been interesting since the Modern Warfare series. I'm still waiting for the franchise to be resurrected and WWII does nothing to make that happen. Buy at your own risk.

The "professional" review groups mostly got this one wrong. The reason I know that is because there was no way anyone could play the end-game content and press weren't given much in the way of advanced screenings of the game. So how could they rate the entirety of this game? It's an FPS that tries to be an RPG, though it mostly flops on the later. Destiny 2 is smooth and precise in most of what it does, it just regularly does those things without a lot of true feeling - most of the campaign felt numb despite the dire situation that humanity is put in. I don't know why Destiny 2 falls short of expectations as the fanbase has been very vocal about what they (we) want out of the sequel, which arguably came too soon. This is a very shallow RPG at-best so it's really all on the shooter side of things that the game makes its hay, and it occasionally does. There's an outline **** game here. It plays like one, it looks like one, but it never feels like one. Destiny 2, like Destiny, is fairly hollow. Had it not been for The Taken King, I think Destiny would have been abandoned long ago. Perhaps quality DLC can save what is arguably the briefest narrative and weakest RPG experience of AAA gaming in history (that's subject to debate, but I'm mad at this game so I'm gunning for it right now), but why the heck do we need DLC to save a game? Is it because it's under the Activision umbrella? Who knows, it's just not that good.

Destiny 2 is the best Destiny. It's better looking (somewhat), performs better and does a lot to keep players engaged in the world that has been created by Bungie. The story is much improved and the enemies are more fleshed out than ever before. Most of my complaints from the first game have addressed outside of a few small ones. 1) The explorable worlds still feel small in scale once you gain access to your speeder, 2) fireteams are still 3, 4 or 6 players and most content is designed for only 3 players (making it tougher to play with lots of friends at the same time), 3) RNG still plays a big role in your character progression instead of the core leveling system and doing harder tasks that reap better rewards. I want Destiny to take larger steps toward becoming an MMORPG. Perhaps its a resource shortage problem with the XB1/PS4, but with the PS4 Pro and XB1X there should be plenty of processing power to yield larger, more populated areas with content that can be tackled with larger friend groups. I'm not fond of the game removing the 6-player Crucible games. But overall I'm more happy with what Destiny 2 has to offer compared to Destiny 1 and I believe all the DLC for Destiny 2 will slot in better to the core game than those mostly-trash DLC packs did for Destiny 1.

I don't know what lead so many people to trash the user rating on this game. It's not the BEST Mass Effect game (I think I'd give that honor to the 2nd game) but it's still a serviceable-or-better ME game. It's got plenty to do and the story is better than some of those that are out there in the game world. My biggest knock on Andromeda is the combat and movement systems. They feel a little more disconnected compared to Mass Effect 3. Running around and trying to get ammo and health/shield pickups feels a bit clumsy. Still, outside of some under-polished mechanics and quirks, Andromeda is a solid launch point for the series after the previous trilogy basically wraps up. I have faith that the overall quality of this new series will only get better going forward.

Wildlands is all over the place from a quality and consistency standpoint. The discrete militant group known as the Ghosts head to Bolivia to reign in a cocaine mega-distributor known as El Sueno who has Bolivia's law enforcement bought so well that no citizen can hope for reprieve. Your team, directed by a CIA operative known as Bowman, moves throughout Bolivia with the intention of dismantling Sueno's entire operation. This means you'll be taking down 4 arms of his operation that controls things like manufacturing, marketing, distribution, security, money, etc. As you put the squeeze on Sueno, it forces him to try and react. That's the premise, and the world and order you make your moves are both massive and varied. There is no linear story line that players will play through since it really doesn't matter as you're simply capturing high value targets and blowing up portions of Sueno's operation. What Wildlands does better than some games like it is how well it plays whether you're in a cooperative setting or just playing by yourself. People can join games in progress with friends or randomly - whatever you want. This kind of freedom can make Wildlands seem better than it really is. At its core, Wildlands is a Far Cry copycat, where everything you do and interact with is heavily copied from recent Far Cry games. It's clear that Ubisoft had no problems being extremely unoriginal and hoped that the product would be so good that nobody cared. They got close. Wildlands is so big and can take so long to complete that it's value in terms of what you pay for what you play is significant. For me, it took 3 days of playing time (that's 72 hours) to fully beat each mission in this game. I played it on the 2nd-hardest difficulty so people playing on easier difficulties might be able to get everything done sooner. My biggest problem with this game, besides it not being original, is that even the potential in the story and characters don't feel fully realized. There's a few great moment in the narrative as it pertains to certain members of El Sueno's followers and your encounters with them, but otherwise I felt like the details were more on the bland side like early Destiny. You get the point of what's going on but nothing is really that memorable. There is also a lot of collection that occurs in this game with weapons, accessories, and skills development. This portion of the game is done at least fairly well but the skill trees aren't all that interesting and it's absolutely possible to beat this game on anything but the hardest difficulty without investing much into skills and support. Lastly, the AI is all over the place. Sometimes it performs very well, other times it seems fairly dumb. In the end, I liked Wildlands because it was just barely interesting enough to keep me going but not interesting enough for me to glue myself to my seat and pay close attention to a world of fantastic people and story lines. If things like that are a big reason why you play games, Wildlands doesn't succeed as well. However, given that Ubisoft's last Tom Clancy title was the fundamentally-broken The Division, Wildlands comes off as a greater success. It's not going to be a waste of your money but it's nowhere near contention for game of the year.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands is Far Cry. There are no ifs/ands/buts - this game has completely ripped off Far Cry, except for maybe the quality story and villain elements. Everything this game ends up being can't help but be compared to Far Cry, because everything from drug cartels, enemy spotting, strongholds, open play-style, and more have all been done exactly (or near-exactly) the same way in Wildlands. That doesn't mean Wildlands is a bad game. It's good enough to hang with the big shooters, especially with a solid online cooperative element, but it won't blow your mind. I like it, I'll play it, but I won't sink 100 hours into it unless my friends are online and playing with me.

Halo Wars 2 does a lot so well, but even with that being the case it doesn't dazzle as much as I'd like it to. Unlike the first Halo Wars, there are fewer cinematic sequences that push the narrative and build the characters beyond what you'd find during the overhead RTS gameplay style. That doesn't make the campaign a washout, just not as good as I think it could have been. When all is said and done, Microsoft and Creative Assembly leave an obvious nod to a Halo Wars 3 (unless they intend to extend the story via DLC, which is entirely possible). Playing on Normal difficulty, you'll probably manage a 7-10 hour campaign. The variance comes at the player's skill and whether you choose to exercise the optional missions within each primary mission. I enjoyed most of what I played. Halo Wars as a franchise remains one of the most well-tuned RTS experiences on consoles - a great accomplishment given that this game is not played with a keyboard and mouse on the Xbox console. There are some small attempts to broaden the gameplay as well, with more secondary actions - instead of killing you can use Spartans to steal enemy vehicles to give you an upper hand in many situations. However, despite there being enough good to sell the game, there are a few obvious shortcomings. First, the graphics during the cinematic portions are fantastic but the actual gameplay is way less detailed than I expected. For a 2017 launch, this is unacceptable from a Microsoft exclusive and the Xbox One is absolutely capable of handling a bigger graphic workload than what you get here. Second, while there is some evidence of progress over Halo Wars, Halo Wars 2 doesn't do too much to distinguish itself from other RTS games. There is a style to it that is its own but Halo Wars needs to become a must-have, unique title for Microsoft and it's not quite there yet - a shame given Creative Assembly's heritage with Age of Empires. Third, multiplayer is extremely daunting for newbies. The Rumble playlist is absolute insanity and mostly a waste of time. Other playlists offer a more traditional RTS experience, but the real standout is Blitz. Blitz uses strategy card game mechanics to create an on-field army. This is perhaps the one area that Halo Wars 2 actually broke out of the RTS mold. That being said, there are only a few other options for multiplayer and that's it. These negatives do not bring down the game substantially, and while I voiced a few of my issues there are a couple other small annoyances that can be pointed out. Halo Wars 2 doesn't do much to make RTS games more approachable, but it absolutely carries on the spirit of the genre and occasionally plays with the rules a bit to break the tiresome point & click & watch formula. Being able to occasionally do something more thank click "X" to target enemies is an idea that Microsoft needs to go after aggressively. Making this RTS game less static and more fluid, offering a more dynamic gameplay experience, is exactly what will put this game on everyone's map.

The Division doesn't have anywhere near the player-base that it had a year ago, mostly due to game-breaking bugs and poor support in general. Now, with its 3rd DLC release, The Last Stand attempts to offer more in the way of controlled PvP encounters and a new incursion. Sure, if you love The Division (for whatever reason) and love the chaos of the Dark Zone, Last Stand is exactly what you're wanting more of. The 8v8 gametype puts you in a closed-off section of the Dark Zone and has you fighting for control over 3 different plots (think territories from Halo or Gears of War). While the action has potential, it's still going to screw newer players over by forcing them to engage with other agents that are far-better equipped (gear-wise). This will make it very tough to stick with the Last Stand section of this DLC as it's going to take at least 10 games to properly outfit out-of-date players. There are other aspects to this DLC besides the PvP add-on, but it's the highlight as an incursion is only good for about a week or two before people master them and move on. This is also the FINAL DLC for the season pass holders, and it's a mediocre one. Everything Massive (Ubisoft) has done with this game has been a dramatic under-deliverance of content and story expansion. The narrative is completely buried and the joys of cooperative play feel long gone. The Division, at first, was full of promise and grand scale. But after the shine began to wear off, the game has held little appeal. Hopefully a sequel is in the works with a far-better development team, because had The Division delivered on its promise, it would be a game I'd still be diving into multiple times per week. Today marked the first day I had played it in 2017 and I doubt I'll play it for more than a couple days as Ghost Recon: Wildlands is about to release and it has plenty in common with The Division, minus the multitude of bugs and a fantastic cooperative approach. I wouldn't recommend this DLC to anyone other than die-hard Division fans. It's just not worth your money and time.

With new game updates that bring together the community of ESO, the game is as welcoming to newcomers as it has ever been. Drastic overhauls to how players progress have hit the game since its launch back in mid 2015. These changes have taken the game from uninteresting to me to a semi-regular time sink. Things like no level requirements for quests - everything is matched to your level so that you're never too powerful or too weak to conquer a challenge in-game. Just because you complete a story for one of the three factions doesn't mean you can't take that same character and experience the main story from a different point of view (e.g. another faction). Then there's the typical Elder Scrolls style of character development in that you don't really need to stick to script. Most races have access to nearly all the playable classes, allowing you to decide whether you want to be a damage dealer, a healer, or a tank (damage sponge) and even change your style after you've capped your level. These things make ESO the people's MMORPG. But ESO wasn't made to be an MMO and it does suffer some setbacks. The game doesn't function very well when the MMO side really kicks in. Consoles will struggle to keep up when a small handful of players go at it in PvP areas. Controls are easy enough to understand but they're sometimes too easy and too simplified. Anyone coming from a PC style MMORPG will find themselves asking why there's only 5 actions per skill bar (Xbox One players could have adopted more controls via an Elite controler or Bethesda could have use some kind of alt trigger to expand skill base). So if you don't absolutely have the best set of skills, you're going to have a bad day against other competent players and some dungeons. PvP in general is kind of a bore for me. I'm great at other player-vs-player games across multiple genres but this game challenges me the most. I'm okay with challenges, I'm not okay with straight-up unfair play at times and this game toes the line of balanced gameplay and unbalanced gameplay. It will depend on your viewpoint and current playable character(s) whether you agree with me or not. So ESO does a few things very well, sometimes better than the big bad MMO's like World of Warcraft. Sometimes ESO does things very poorly, but it's not always in a way that will really affect you. If you spend more time away from PvP and stick to cooperative gameplay you may find more to be happy with in this game, which is what I'm basically aiming to keep with now that I'm ascending through the Champion ranks, which take place after you reach max level. This is a cool idea that takes in some of the skill leveling of previous ES games but forces you to keep the grind going well beyond the level 50 max. You may or may not find that grind all that interesting but it's mandatory to put the time in if your character is to be on equal grounds with others.

This game lacks imagination. It has no soul. It is the culmination of relentless copycatting and it drives me crazy. CoD campaigns are rarely BAD, outside of Ghosts which was atrocious and a complete abomination to gaming as a whole. Infinite Warfare doesn't stand with the best campaigns of the series but it also doesn't **** the bottom of the barrel, so take that however you like. There are some ideas that are thrown into the mix that open up the feel a bit when choosing missions, sort of what has happened in recent CoD titles, but those ideas are repeatedly handcuffed and never seen all the way through. As for multiplayer, I hated just watching the beta - playing the game itself is not much of an improvement. I love the mobility elements explored in recent CoD games, BO3 really being the most successful attempt, but I play Titanfall (now Titanfall 2) for that so I don't NEED that in a CoD title. Anyways, my experience is summed up by saying that all of this is probably OK to a first or second-time CoD player, but anyone staying with the series is going to likely be uninspired by this shooter. It's only redoing all of its tricks - many of them not the best of the series. Infinity Ward could have literally remastered MW/MW2/MW3 and packaged them together this year and they would have raked in the cash so hard. They didn't. Instead we got 1 of those remasters and CoD is space. BOR-ING. I won't recommend this to anyone but I'm sure there is a shrinking crowd that will still find CoD appealing.

A whole lot of "bleh" is what Infinite Warfare is for me. I hated the launch trailer and couldn't be more underwhelmed by the final product. Ghosts was bad, and so is this. There's a crap narrative to follow and a handicapped multiplayer compared to last year's Black Ops 3, which was not perfect but at least had some measure of creativity in its gameplay and campaign. Call of Duty has become more about refining the ideas that have already been cast in years past and nothing about forging ahead with new ideas that would freshen up the series. When you've got Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1 to play this year, why would anyone waste their money on another Call of Duty game that has done what each of its previous ones have done: rip off each other. The last great CoD games were Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2. Since then, this series has done the absolute least to push itself forward. If apathetic attention to detail and a horribly-mediocre effort to be either creative or militaristic-ly precise are what drives you to games, then Infinite Warfare is your jam. But let's be honest, few people actually want to play these games anymore and Activision is steering its ship right into every iceberg at sea. It's only a matter of time before the entire ship sinks, and it will absolutely sink.

Infinite Warfare steals all of its ideas from previous Call of Duty games and throws in a little space action. Though there are a few moments where good ideas peek through, this game constantly fails to impress. Combat feels mundane, as if the folks at Infinity Ward and Activision want little to do with creating any strategic systems or burn the walls that prevent their games from feeling visceral - like we're actually experiencing all of this. I cannot feel any of it. The studios handling CoD continually detach gamers from stories, characters and plot development by always feeling the need to be dramatic and overly-cinematic. I feel like every moment is a near-brush with death and I get tired of it really quick. Not every moment has to or is a near-death experience and that crushes the dynamics of story telling. Comparing it to Titanfall 2, Infinite Warfare comes off looking like a game that has phoned it all in. There are no more ideas and no spouts of creativity. It's all fine-tuning the same game year after year. Sure, if you haven't played Call of Duty games before this will seem pretty decent but never great. As for the multiplayer - yawn. It's less flexible than Black Ops 3. In fact, it's basically Advanced Warfare 2 in many ways but even less exciting than that game was for me (although that campaign was good enough to finish). At this point, I want Call of Duty to die. It's a bad franchise that over-markets itself and steals available dollars from dramatically-better games. Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 are so much better it makes Infinite Warfare look like a joke, and since the guys that made Modern Warfare/Modern Warfare 2 are leading the team over Titanfall/Titanfall 2, it's an easy recommendation for anyone looking for something familiar to Call of Duty but is either bored or just simply hates it. If you buy Infinite Warfare, all I can say is: best of luck because it just wasn't inspiring for me. At least I am able to get close to purchase price for it so it's not a complete waste of spending.

Everything about Titanfall 2 is a step up over its predecessor. There's a full-fledged campaign with a narrative that's much easier to follow, explaining the IMC/Militia war on what is known as the "Frontier" (life away from Earth as humans push to populate and reap the resources of other planets) and the intricacies of Pilots and their Titans. Overall I find the narrative to be a solid selling point of the game, though at least in its early-goings could use a little polish. The overarching theme feels a bit like Pacific Rim but doesn't always land the intimacy that the many facets of the story are aiming at. That's not to say that it's bad, or even just so-so - I found it to be pretty engaging (I hadn't expected a whole lot from this side of the game). A lot of the crew making this game are remnants of the team(s) involved with Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, so the quality that's there is of no real surprise. However, while the campaign is the new blood to the series in its still-infancy, the multiplayer continues to be the most honed of the game. Though Black Ops 3, Halo 5 and Advanced Warfare have taken their stabs at improved mobility in the midst of fast-paced combat. There's a few obvious additions to multiplayer: more weapons, new abilities, new Titans, new maps... mostly expected of a sequel. But what's really special is how these additional elements are tastefully added to the already-competent mix to help further motivate a game that's big of movement, strategy, and big-metal combat to broaden its horizons without deviating from its roots. You'll find that Titanfall 2 firmly entrenches itself as the new behemoth on the block, challenging Call of Duty, Halo, and even the fantastic Battlefield series by being more imaginative than the competition. Lastly, you'll find the environments in Titanfall 2 to have considerably more detail. It's mostly nuanced, but level design is noticeably improved over the first game. Lighting effects sometimes catch your eye and nearly pull you out of whatever moment you find yourself in, only to be snapped back sharply when a couple transformer-looking mechs come steaming through, forcing you to strategically proceed or get the heck out of dodge. Titanfall 2 does a lot to be better than its foundation-setting predecessor - converting missed opportunities into good ideas, not trying to be everything to everyone but simultaneously taking into consideration fan feedback to begin to hone what I think is going to be called the best shooter of 2016. If you loved Titanfall already, you're just going to love Titanfall 2 more. If you were on the fence before or just couldn't fully embrace Titanfall for the long-run, this game could seriously change your mind. Only those with a great distaste for this genre of video games will walk away without any feeling of satisfaction.

When some game companies are pushing to the future, DICE and EA take it back to WWI - an era heavily under-explored in gaming. The multiplayer and game mechanics are as tight as ever, though the fewer technologies really force you into soldier combat a lot more. The horses are well put together - powerful but vulnerable. Perhaps that's the best way to describe this game - there are moments where you have a lot of power and can be tough to kill, but your dominance can quickly be overthrown in the face of any worthy foe. I'll admit I've only handled the early parts of BF1's campaign, but the early going is significantly better than any Battlefield campaign I've played so far. That doesn't mean it'll be the best you'll find in a shooter this year. If you like Battlefield, there's nothing to keep you from liking BF1. It looks better than any BF entry before it and maintains good player balancing in a gated sandbox setting. At the same time, if there's any shooter that needs more powerful hardware it would be the Battlefield series. PC gamers will get the best experience visually - I would love to see this game on Scorpio.

Gears of War 4 plays things close to the chest by honoring the past without forging to heavily into the future. Fans of the previous games will have plenty to enjoy in this sequel to Gears of War 3. The only reason you're not going to love Gears of War 4 is because you didn't like any of the previous games or grew tired of the formula the series stuck to, which is this game's greatest criticism. One thing that has notably improved: the narrative. For the first time in the series I found the story to be more interesting and the characters within it to be more relatable. The Coalition, the studio behind this game, basically treat Gears 4 like The Force Awakens: staying true to source material as they figure out how to build something that will please the fans and help usher them into a new era. Now, it's time for Gears to find its new center and surge into new territory or it could quickly become a shadow of its former self.

Rise of Iron is an extremely big step back for Destiny. The content is just heavily void of importance in any way/shape/form. Much of the new content is so brief that you'll blow through it within an hour, two at the most. Coming from The Taken King, that's a huge disappointment as that expansion did a good job of building out Destiny's story and characters. With Rise of Iron, the narrative and new content are vastly inferior to The Taken King. The story missions are completed within your first hour or so (depending on pace of play) and only a few post-story missions that are based on the same regions you've already played in exist at that point. The new enemy is very cool, however it also is void of importance since it exists hardly anywhere. Compare that to the Taken forces which span all of the playable Destiny regions and Strikes. If you wanted more of what you got last year in The Taken King, Rise of Iron will greatly disappoint. However, if you're someone that just wanted to jump into Destiny and play up to a new cap, you're going to be okay with whatever you get (within reason, I'm sure). I don't like paying $30 for comparable content I paid $20 for in The Dark Below. You get 1 new Raid, 2 new strikes (1 is recycled from original Destiny), 1 new social space, new weapons and armor and a lot of buried character progression stuff in Rise of Iron. You also get a tease **** story, instead of something more substantial from last year's raved-about The Taken King. I guess we're just going to have to wait for Destiny 2 before Destiny has a chance to reach its true potential as a streamlined MMORPG/FPS.

Rise of Iron is nothing more than a weak extension of The Taken King. While last year's TTK was phenomenal in terms of expansion content and broadening the things to do in Destiny, Rise of Iron is the polar opposite. It borrows everything TTK did, only in less interesting ways. There's not a lot of NEW content, something that people wanting to be good with their money will be irritated to learn after they've spent $30 on a lackluster expansion. What makes Rise of Iron good is... Destiny - the game is still as well functioning and well-balanced as ever. It's the Halo of FPS/RPGs (literally) and plays so well it's hard to hate on it. It's clear that Bungie/Activision don't know what they're doing or Rise of Iron wouldn't be released. I don't say that lightly because I LOVED The Taken King (even though it didn't have much end-game content). If Destiny is to survive as more and more good games come to take the attention away from it, a 2+ year old game, it needs to hold the attention of its players. Only 2 days have passed since the Rise of Iron DLC has landed and I've already forgotten what it's about, who its characters are, and what I'm fighting for. That's the mark of a BAD game, and Rise of Iron is borderline bad. Bungie had almost everything right in The Taken King - a good narrative, cool strikes, a host of non-raid content to keep you busy for at least a little while, and a raid - even though the raid could be beaten within 1-2 weeks of the content launching. If you loved Destiny already and just wanted new content to play, this will satisfy you for a little while. If you wanted Destiny to grow and branch out - this "expansion" literally does NOTHING to progress the game. It's a sad $30 expansion. It has a little more than House of Wolves and Dark Below but not nearly as much as The Taken King. For a game as old as Destiny, I expect $30 to go way further than it already has. If World of Warcraft can offer 10x the content for only a little more, I expect Bungie to build out Destiny much more than they have so far. Perhaps I'm the fool for thinking they'd actually deliver, but Rise of Iron is both a welcomed add-on and a wasted opportunity. I'll play it, but only until Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 come around. At least I know those games are good and are doing big things to expand upon predecessor games.

Sadly this is not the game I hoped it would be. No Man's Sky has a big vision and large universe to explore but it doesn't keep me interested as the game's sim approach seems to restrict creativity rather than allow it to flourish. There's also the issue of pacing - several hours in this game tests my patience heavily as there's little combat. In addition to the slow pacing, there's a huge frustration with having to gather loads of resources to advance yourself and the inventory control is abysmal at-best. There's also some major bugs that crash the game about once or even twice per hour and it's seizing many consoles outside of my own. All said and done, Sony will probably be very displeased with how this game turned out after knowing it had a PC/PS4 exclusive day 1 - this won't win anyone over to buy a PS4 that doesn't already have one - that's unfortunate given how much this game was hyped by so many people.

Not a waste of money and time, not enough to entice players to invest another 50-100 hours of playtime into Ubisoft's almost-open-world shooter. The Division's Underground DLC is a rather anemic offering of new content for $15. Players that have been following Ubisoft's plagued third person shooter might be tricked into thinking that Underground brings forth several new gear sets, tweaks along with a new Incursion and Underground "dungeon" content, yet the DLC really only adds a couple of those things as the 1.3 patch was also deployed alongside the release for Xbox One and PC. The Underground variant has some interesting elements to it, which include an independent dungeon progression system and a variable level builder that assembles a new version of the subway tunnels that you'll move through every time. The biggest problem here is that there's only a handful of rooms available and the scenery rarely changes. In fact, the coolest part of the Underground is the starter mission which has players raiding an underground rave scene filled with Cleaners. Also, this DLC fails to progress the story in any meaningful way - instead of expanding on the obviously-deeper plot that was rolled out in the core game Ubisoft Massive completely miss the opportunity to add more shape to the game. Instead you will pave a trail of dead bodies for one thing: loot. There is no other motivator here. The Dark Zone also remains an impossibly-hard area that even 4-man groups that are well geared will get torches in with one misstep. For all the potential The Division had, Ubisoft Massive have failed time and time again to right the ship and fix the game's numerous code errors. Glitches and broken gameplay run rampant still, though there are signs that the problems are beginning to lessen. Still, the fact that this game was delayed so many times is a great show of how under-talented the teams that built The Division are. The PC variant of The Division has been gouged of its online community as a result and players constantly voice their frustration with the game on consoles. It will be a miracle if this game makes it to its second DLC before everyone moves on to greener pastures - something that is almost guaranteed given the 2016 fall/winter games lineup that is sure to produce at least one mega shooter.

This game loosened my grip on Halo as my go-to FPS. CoD4 has one of the greatest campaign modes ever for an FPS and boasted a streamlined multiplayer experience that encouraged constant player engagement and some customization. While the series would expand with a great sequel, CoD4 is regarded as one of the most important games of the 2000-2009 decade and is still talked about with great fondness to this day. So much so that Infinity Wars, creators of CoD4, are remastering it with a special release of Infinite Warfare in 2016. For me, Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 hold some of my most memorable moments in campaign and multiplayer. If you haven't played them and you're a shooter fan, you owe it to yourself to give the Modern Warfare series a play-through..

I'm not sure if I like this new DOOM enough to really want to keep playing it. There was a sharp increase in hype over this new DOOM game that made me think I could get in, get totally creeped out and have fun doing it. There's still some gameplay to forge through but I'm underwhelmed with DOOM, and I think that many others will share my complacent attitude towards this game. Many may love it, many will hate it, few will fall in the middle.

Talk about a "whoops". After changing hands mid-production, Homefront: The Revolution just ended up falling flat. What I saw a couple years ago, a promising platform for mayhem in a Korean-militarized United States, has not come to fruition in the least bit. I'm guessing the original creators folded on Homefront when they realized it was a lost cause. The concept is awesome, the execution is anything but.

Talk about a "whoops". After changing hands mid-production, Homefront: The Revolution just ended up falling flat. What I saw a couple years ago, a promising platform for mayhem in a Korean-militarized United States, has not come to fruition in the least bit. I'm guessing the original creators folded on Homefront when they realized it was a lost cause. The concept is awesome, the execution is anything but.

Talk about a "whoops". After changing hands mid-production, Homefront: The Revolution just ended up falling flat. What I saw a couple years ago, a promising platform for mayhem in a Korean-militarized United States, has not come to fruition in the least bit. I'm guessing the original creators folded on Homefront when they realized it was a lost cause. The concept is awesome, the execution is anything but.

Updated review: within 3 1/2 months of the game launching, I stopped playing it entirely. The first map pack came out, which actually wasn't terrible (for a change) and offered some decent new places to play but it was all for nothing as this game continues to die off quickly. Black Ops 3 was a lofty goal for Treyarch that extended from the events of Black Ops 2, the only problem being that, unlike the origins of the Black Ops series, the third installment lacked some originality. There is a somewhat interesting story to go through but it's early-goings are way too bland to be enjoyable. It takes several missions for things to heat up and the campaign to become interesting. By the time things wrapped up, I had to give Treyarch a little credit for not making hot garbage out of the campaign. Still, there's little that can be considered original as it all seems like it was ripped out of a Christopher Nolan movie with less of a thrill. The multiplayer is certainly the weak point of this game. Lots of wall jumping and double jumping, and that's fine, but it all gets shoved into a system that is flawed from the start (no true dedicated servers, only hybrid servers that all-too-often experience problems). Matchmaking couldn't be more frustrating at times, giving The Master Chief Collection a little bit of competition. If you paid $60 for this game, you got cheated. If you paid $20-$30 for this game, it's not a loss. Call of Duty is running on fumes these days - it will take a miracle for one of these games to be good again.

A clash of small-game genres with an RPG edge, Dungeon of the Endless is both a fantastic indie title and a bit of a disaster. There's a lot to like about how the game plays and the challenges it presents - ascending through levels is tough and beating the game requires a lot of practice and smart play. However, the game's bumbling UI and lack of explanation about ANYTHING makes it extremely tough to pick and and immediately enjoy. It took ~3 hours before I started getting the whole picture, since I had mistakenly come across some of the game's deeper features. The resource system doesn't make a lot of sense either. What's most impressive is that, even though the game lacks in its initial presentation, Dungeon of the Endless still ends up being fun while channeling a lot of visual style from SNES titles like Final Fantasy and Out of This World.

The Division doesn't try to be another Destiny, it defines itself in the details and offers a much larger and certainly more interesting world than its obvious contender. No question about it - The Division is much more of an RPG than Destiny will probably ever be without radical overhauls to that game. With so much to do from day one, it will take most players weeks or months to max out their characters and, even if they do max out quickly, there's the very competitive Dark Zone where you and your friends can try to fight for more impressive gear. While players might find the story a bit distant for the first several hours of gameplay, knocking out main story missions and engaging in bits of filler story scattered throughout Manhattan will quickly begin to paint a picture. Of course, players that stray a bit might find themselves trying to remember why they're out doing some seemingly-random tasks. The biggest opportunities for improvement lie in The Division's cover system, which usually functions well but has a few quirky glitches now and then that might frustrate you in a moment of combat. Where Destiny wants you to replay every single mission over and over to push forward as a player, The Division is built to be progressed through a story that isn't told through heavy repetitive missions. In fact, you'll never be encouraged to replay a mission unless you found it fun or need to recap what's going on with the story in that specific mission. Otherwise there are always new missions to play through until the very end (level 30 at launch). Graphics are solid, albeit not quite as impressive as they were three years ago when the game launched. This is unfortunate since the Snowdrop engine being used by Ubisoft is very powerful. Though we don't get the greatest visual experience on Xbox One, the visuals are still strong - especially when you consider this is a massive world. Even things like heavy snowfall and fog can play a vital role in visibility in some cases. Perhaps the most encouraging news is that Ubisoft isn't pressing for your hard-earned cash right away. The first few minor DLC packs will be free, with a pair of major DLC expansions that will really stretch the game - all within The Division's first year. Where Destiny is a bumbling mess when it comes to the long-game, The Division is much more strategic and engaging right from the get-go. If you can appreciate the third-person shooter viewpoint and dig open worlds that encourage social engagement then The Division is worth a try.

The Division doesn't try to be another Destiny, it defines itself in the details and offers a much larger and certainly more interesting world than its obvious contender. With so much to do from day one, it will take most players weeks to max out their characters and, even if they do max out quickly, there's the very competitive Dark Zone where you and your friends can try to fight for more impressive gear. While players might find the story a bit distant for the first several hours of gameplay, knocking out main story missions and engaging in bits of filler story scattered throughout Manhattan will quickly begin to paint a picture. Of course, players that stray a bit might find themselves trying to remember why they're out doing some seemingly-random tasks. The biggest opportunities for improvement lie in The Division's cover system, which usually functions well but has a few quirky glitches now and then that might frustrate you in a moment of combat. Where Destiny wants you to replay every single mission over and over to push forward as a player, The Division is built to be progressed through a story that isn't told through heavy repetitive missions. In fact, you'll never be encouraged to replay a mission unless you found it fun or need to recap what's going on with the story in that specific mission. Otherwise there are always new missions to play through until the very end (level 30 at launch). Graphics are solid, albeit not quite as impressive as they were three years ago when the game launched. This is unfortunate since the Snowdrop engine being used by Ubisoft is very powerful. Though we don't get the greatest visual experience on consoles, the visuals are still strong - especially when you consider this is a massive world. Even things like heavy snowfall and fog can play a vital role in visibility in some cases. Perhaps the most encouraging news is that Ubisoft isn't pressing for your hard-earned cash right away. The first few minor DLC packs will be free, with a pair of major DLC expansions that will really stretch the game - all within The Division's first year. Where Destiny is a bumbling mess when it comes to the long-game, The Division is much more strategic and engaging right from the get-go. If you can appreciate the third-person shooter viewpoint and dig open worlds that encourage social engagement then The Division is worth a try.

Excellent port. My rig isn't powerful enough to really push the graphics without taking a huge hit in framerate performance. Still, it's GoW, and it's a great series. If you're looking to either take a stroll down memory lane or haven't played a Gears title and would love a beautiful new 3rd person shooter, you owe it to yourself to give this Ultimate Edition re-release a try. There are a couple issues out of the gate in relation to graphic card compatibility, but I know that one of the big ones for Nvidia was already patched and whatever is going on with a select few AMD cards is about to be patched, so all of these 0 ratings are pure crap - they are in no way affiliated to the quality of the game and aren't wide-spread.