Shoebox

Dark Souls is a game that doesn't really make much sense, it has a lot of glaring problems and it's only advertised feature is that it will actively punish you for playing it. That alone speaks volumes about the game itself, which is both a nightmare to enjoy and wrap your head around. Playing the game is the same as playing any run of the mill MMORPG, with monsters running at you single file when you approach them and flailing wildly whenever you're in attacking range. The ranged enemies don't try to get a better vantage point when you're behind a wall, instead choosing to fire at the wall that you're standing behind. Many of the trash monsters in the game have one hit kill attacks that they will use as often as possible and the bosses seemingly lack this feature, making them the easiest things in the game to fight. The last boss in particular is a walk in the park. All in all, the game does punish you for playing it and you will die a lot, but the difficulty of the game is really only in line with how much time you intend on investing in farming titanite or souls to advance your character. The online component of the game is peer to peer, meaning much of the things rife in other games, such as laggers, exploiters and hackers, run rampant here as well. Overall, if you're considering buying the game to bring back nostalgia from the games of old, this is the opposite of the game you're looking for. If you're looking for a game that punishes you at every turn, there are free games on the internet that are much more fun and challenging. If you're looking for a difficult role playing game, I'd advise you to get a guide, as there is absolutely no feature documentation in game or the manual. I'm giving the game a five if only for the fact the trophies are easy to acquire and it does tend to be interesting at certain points. However the online and core gameplay is just too tedious to enjoy and reviewing this as a single player experience with intermittent online, there's not enough here unless you want to platinum the game.

Need for Speed: World could have been a great game. It has a huge open world consisting of both Rockport and Palmont City. It has quite a selection of cars and they all handle fairly predictably, as you would expect. Unfortunately, this game is the absolute essence of 'Pay to Win', with powerups like Nitrous and the ability to turn the car in front of you into a Traffic Magnet, and the ability to purchase almost every car in the game directly with Microtransactions. Many of the customization options are also only available to those with fat wallets. This turns the game from a fun and competitive racer into a frustrating race to open your wallet so you can win. The game also seems to have a problem with hackers. Overall, if you own any of the earlier Need for Speed titles and two controllers, you will have infinitely more fun than you ever will here. The Pursuit modes are quite entertaining, but largely unchanged apart from the ability to play them in a multiplayer mode. And generally playing them with random people can be as much fun as it can be frustrating. It's unfortunate, it has a lot of potential but the removal of the Drag Racing and Drift Modes in the game means you can only ever race or do pursuit on the same tracks in Most Wanted and Carbon, minus the Mountain tracks. The removal of the Roll-Up races from Free Roam mean that the enormous place you have to drive around in is just a Lobby and much of the multiplayer Races are plagued by people who use as many powerups as humanly possible, hackers or people who just try to smash everyone off the road. They should have taken some hints from Burnout Paradise and went with their own game but instead they just turned a great concept into an undercooked Pay to Winfest. There aren't many online racing games, but try to avoid this one.

Uncharted 3 left me severely disappointed. I liked Uncharted, loved Uncharted 2 but Uncharted 3 falls short of the mark it's predecessors set before it. It has everything the other games had, breathtaking vistas, engrossing cutscenes and wonderful animations. The story however, will disappoint you. Horrendously. It builds up and builds up, but instead of something amazing, you get 'it was all just a dream'. The game ends just like any TV show, with everything back where it all started. It's not what I expected from something that is, for the most part, well written and so immersive sometimes you will forget you're the one controlling what's on screen. All in all, I'm giving this game a six because there is undeniably a level of quality not seen in many games these days, but being the last in it's series the ending was bound to be disappointing, but I wanted it to be because I wanted more, not because the writers took a lunch break and left it to the interns. I wasn't even aware I had finished the game until I got the trophy for completing it, the final boss is that forgettable. If you haven't got Uncharted 3, but have played 1 and 2, pretend you never saw Uncharted 3. Forget it ever existed and that this review appeared in a vision. It will be better to remember Uncharted as the series that never got finished, rather than the anti-climax that did. I can't give this anything less than a six because of how engrossing the whole experience can be at certain points, but overall the combat and ending will hurt this for you, no matter how much of a fan of Uncharted you are.

I treated this as a teaser for the upcoming MMO from 38 Studios, which is reportedly under the same IP. As such, in treating this game as the single-player MMORPG that it is, I was pleasantly surprised. It has a nice pace, the character advancement is interesting and all of it can really only be enhanced by a multi-player aspect. Some of the gameplay suffers as a result of this and we are left with only fragments of the story, but they can't lay all of their cards on the table just yet. If you're on the fence about buying this game, there is conveniently a demo you can get on all platforms, which gives you a nice taste of what to expect in the full game. But I don't think it would be worth acquiring now unless you want to support the development of 'Project Copernicus', which I think is a worthy cause, to say the least.

A lot of people tend to try and justify the purchase of something that they cannot return. It's quite sad that people, held hostage by their own denial, have mistaken holding forward for gameplay and 'listless' narrative for a storyline. Sure, it has graphics, but every game has graphics. In fact, lots of films have graphics and some books have pictures in them too. And I think a film or graphic novel would be an infinitely more rewarding experience than this 45 minute "game", for the same price. Don't buy this.