ghostgate2001

The idea is solid: race a pre-determined route around environments where it's all kicking off, crossing checkpoints to add valuable seconds to your remaining time, which ticks down constantly. Try to reach the final checkpoint. It put me in mind of Sega's "18 Wheeler" - and not just because the vehicles feel about as speedy and nimble as an 18-wheeler, with a comparable turning-circle. That game had an awesome level where a twister hit the highway, throwing vehicles and debris around, and it was your job to drive through the mayhem. Add an over-the-top commentator who thinks he's in a game like Hydro Thunder - all "That was close!" and "What the...!" - and the inspirations are obvious. But, sadly, the execution is dire. Playing on a base PS4, frame-rate drops are frequent and severe enough to throw you off your game, and always in the same places because it's all pre-scripted, so at least you can learn to get your road positioning right before the bus comes at you and tanks the frame-rate. But the worst part is that you have no choice but to rely on the game to tell you which way to go, which most of the time it does (if a little late to turn in time) but more often than you'd like it takes a perverse delight in NOT telling you anything, leaving you clueless about where it wants you to go, and without enough time on the clock for that kind of nonsense. Frustrating and unnecessary stuff. It's also one of those inconsistent games where you can smash through gates and things when the level wants you to, but flimsy obstacles like road-signs will stop a truck if the game doesn't want you to go that way. And your reward if you do go the wrong way? Everyone's favourite: invisible walls to stop you dead in your tracks. It's buggy, too. I've had it blue-screen crash on me 4 times in only an hour or so of play. Usually while loading a level. Honestly, I could tell it was going to be shoddy from the moment it first booted up. It shows a TV News studio with humorous ticker-tape messages scrolling jerkily along the bottom of the screen. I decided to read those messages, and after about 30 seconds the ticker-tape messages froze up and scrolled no more. The game hadn't crashed and could still be started, but you know you're not dealing with quality coding when even some simple scrolling text on the front menu has issues. The devs don't seem interested in addressing any of its problems, either. The game's been out for over a year and remains completely unpatched, on Version 1.00. Fire and forget software. I only paid a little over 1 buck for it in a sale, but I still feel buyer's remorse. You'd be better off powering up a vintage console and playing any of the retro games that "Speed or Death" wishes it was.

It’s very strange that this game’s User Score is absolutely hammered down into the red-zone by 7 negative scores, none of which “reviews” provide any reason to support WHY they arrived at that conclusion. I guess that’s on Metacritic for allowing people to blast a game with a negative score without providing a single line of critique to back it up. Shame, because it made me avoid this game, thinking there must be something broken about it, until it was 4 years old (on PS4) and on sale for peanuts. Sorry, devs. OK, review time… Vaporum is a “dungeon crawler” which means it’s all about nosing around labyrinthine levels in grid-based movement. Everything’s rendered in true 3D and you have a free look (and, yes, the camera’s Y-axis can be inverted unlike some I’ve played) so it doesn’t feel as static as old-school bitmap examples of the genre. I’ve mostly been playing Japanese takes on this genre recently, which tend to switch to turn-based RPG-style battles, but this one’s real-time, which means you can get assaulted by a nastie while poking around in your inventory if you’re not careful. (yes, you can pause properly if real-life intrudes on your gaming.) It does, however, have a mode that you can switch to at any time where the world only moves when you do, so you can time things with clinical precision if you want. It’s actually necessary for some timed puzzles where you can’t spare the time for a false move. The main difference between this game and the more stripped-down Japanese dungeon-crawlers is that it also has a mode where you bring up what basically amounts to a mouse-pointer to poke at bits of the scenery, push secret buttons, open cabinets, etc. Didn't realise how much I missed that extra layer of interaction until I got it back. It’s also … whatever the PC equivalent of “NES-hard” is. There’s no hand-holding and it’ll leave you on your own to work out some fairly evil puzzles. For example, I was stumped for a while at a bit where you enter a small enclosed space and the door behind you and ahead of you both close, so there’s no escape, and a ticking timer begins giving you only a few seconds before all the floor tiles open as pits and drop you to your death. Turned out the solution was a hidden switch on the door that closes behind you. But once you get into the mindset of how the game “thinks,” make use of that time-freeze mode, realize you’ve only got so many options so it HAS to be something that you can do in that small room, then solving such puzzles are just a matter of narrowing down your options. Personally, I found I enjoyed not being treated like a moron for a change. The game also has an auto-save function that you can use at any moment with a simple button combo, so cautious players can save-scum their way through most situations. Just so it’s not all praise, there are a few things that I wasn’t so keen on, like the way turning counts as moving in the time-freeze mode, leading to some unintentionally amusing situations where you have to run past hazards with your ass to them because there isn’t time to turn :) I’ve also been slightly spoilt by one of the Japanese dungeon-crawlers I played recently, which had an “auto-walk” function where you picked a spot on the level-map and the game auto-walked you there, pausing if you encountered any hazards. No auto-walk here, so you’re manually backtracking through labyrinths (with frequent checks of the map) if you want to get back to a specific spot. It's also ridiculously dark by default, with no "calibrate your brightness" screen before beginning play. The opening bit is supposed to be fairly dark but it's not supposed to be so dark that you can't see a thing. So use that opening bit for calibration and bump up the gamma in the video options until you can just see where you are, and you'll be good for the rest of the game. In summary, it’s a really good dungeon-crawler with some old-school difficulty, puzzles that require actual thought, and a general lack of handholding. If you’re up for that, then you’ll enjoy Vaporum. I’m only about halfway through the game, but I’ve already bought the follow-up prequel.

"In rays of the Light" is a brief "walking simulator" which intrigued me with the imagery and atmosphere of its trailer. I was going to write a long review, but I really can't be bothered ... so I'll just do the pros and cons thing, which will speak for itself. PROS: * Good atmosphere * Some nice audio and visual effects * I liked the subtle ways that the pause-screen changed at some points during the game CONS: * broken camera controls (no dead-zone at all on the right stick, so constant drift) * a couple of needlessly obscure "puzzles" that stopped the game cold (I ended up solving them through trial and error rather than working them out legitimately) * untranslated Russian graffiti everywhere (maybe they're not important, but you feel like you're missing details that a Russian-speaker would get) * poorly-translated text, reminiscent of "all your base are belong to us" * stuff that aims for profound but only achieves pretentiousness * pointless items that feel like they were intended to have a use, but it wasn't implemented * an extremely abrupt ending that's as unsubtle and too on-the-nose as Watership Down. * frankly bizarre choices, like the way the ending screen just sits there forever with you thinking "Is it over, then?" until you get bored and quit out manually, and the fact there's no way to start a new game (to get the alt ending) without manually deleting the game's save-file from your PS4. My main issue with the game, though, is that the imagery which appears in the trailer - aeroplanes just hanging there in the sky in a spooky way, like time was frozen; the imagery that actually drew me in to want to play the game - never actually happens in the game. Summary: The game's cheap and I did enjoy the atmosphere for the couple of hours that it lasted, but in truth most of my enjoyment came from anticipation of that stuff from the trailer happening ... so when the credits rolled with that stuff never actually happening, my lingering final impression of the game was one of disappointment and feeling somewhat conned by the trailer.

This is mainly just to say YES you can invert the camera Y-axis. And the X-axis, too, for that matter. Maybe it wasn't there in the options when the game was first released, but it's definitely there now. Must've been added in an update. Do I have to review the game? OK... It's a weird one. Minimalist and linear, with no alternative modes to distract yourself with, it's one you'll play in short doses between meatier fare. You basically bang your head against a level repeatedly until you finally beat it (more often by luck rather than judgement, but that might just be me!) and you open another level, repeat. Platforming in a first person view isn't for everyone. You can't see your feet, and have no physical presence - in fact, in this game you're literally just a disembodied camera - so you must trust to your situational awareness of where you are to get through. A horde of trucks proceed in convoy through a linear assault-course with a goal at the end. All you have to do to "beat" a level is make it to the end without touching the ground. Thing is, most of the trucks don't make it to the end - so you can't just stand on one and ride it to the end. Trucks crash into each other, are destroyed by various traps, fall off the course, etc - so you're forced to keep trying to move forward up the convoy, trying to identify "safe" trucks to jump to, and trying not to get caught up in a mass-wreck near the back of the pack. I'm not sure I really like the game, because it all seems very random, woolly, and far too reliant on luck. There doesn't seem to be much skill required, unless you count as a "skill" the dogged persistence to keep attempting a level over and over until one time it pans out and you're not sure what (if anything) you did differently to earn that victory. That said, it's kind of fun seeing what the next ridiculous level looks like, though, and there's a certain abstract daftness to the concept that can make the mayhem (briefly) amusing. Pick it up cheap and consider it to be a short-doses kind of game - something to have a quick blast on inbetween other, deeper games - and you might get some fun out of it.

Titan Quest is a 12-year-old PC game. It's a Diablo clone which dates from the time after Diablo 2, when there was no Diablo 3 on the horizon, people wanted more Diablo, and many devs sought to fill that void with their own Diablo clones. Titan Quest was one of the better Diablo clones, with a nice Greek mythology setting (granting it the ready-made, comfortably-familiar bestiary and lore that goes with that) and the same simple but compelling gameplay loop of receiving quests, revealing maps, clicking on lots of monsters until they die, looting their corpses, levelling-up, and repeating. It's a fondly-remembered game on PC, and the PS4 game is the recent "remastered" version that updated the graphics and incorporated the PC game's expansion. The PS4 port by Black Forest Games (of Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams and, er, Bubsy fame) unfortunately fumbles the move to consoles quite badly. The frame-rate is iffy, the text-size is painfully tiny, but the biggest problem is the controls. Devs like Runic (Torchlight) and Blizzard (Diablo) have produced excellent console ports of exactly this same genre of game, translating the mouse and keyboard controls to joypad with an elegance that made owners of the PC originals want the option of joypad control adding to their versions. Sadly, the same can't be said of Titan Quest. A recent patch has addressed some of the issues that you'll see mentioned in the reviews. Your character no longer takes a moment to start moving, and no longer continues walking for a moment after you release the direction, and the analog-stick movement controls feel better for it. However, the targetting is still a mess. If you press attack, your character attempts to pick a target - and, more often than not, runs past several closer enemies to get to the further-away one that he's chosen to attack. Typically for this genre, there are many situations where you'll want to take out certain targets as a priority (monster-generators, etc) and the game's messed-up auto-targetting choices will fight you every step of the way. There IS a manual targetting option, where you hold attack and point a targetting "cone" in the direction of the enemy that you want your character to attack, but it's an inelegant solution and the game still rarely targets the enemy you had in mind. It's a shame the devs felt the need to reinvent the wheel (badly) because Torchlight and Diablo III had no such problems with joypad controls, and those games always seemed to intuitively target the right enemies. So, what you have here is a fairly straight-up port of an old(-ish) PC game that's showing its age in various ways (design, environment interactivity, graphics, etc), which hasn't been tweaked in any way to cater for console gamers (that text-size!), and which has had the translation of its controls fumbled quite badly. It's a game that's basically all about fighting, but which has a broken targetting system that makes fighting a frustrating exercise in watching your character run halfway across the screen to attack the wrong enemy instead of the simple pleasure it ought to be. There's a chance the targetting could be fixed in a further patch, but the bottom line is: you're better off playing this on PC if that's an option.

The professional reviewers got it a bit wrong on this one, I think, as the gap between the user scores (6.9) and official scores (5.1) here probably suggest. The user score is closer to the mark. I picked this game up in a sale for £5, not expecting much, and have been very pleasantly surprised with it so far. It's actually a surprisingly decent Baldur's Gate wannabe - by which I mean the PC version of Baldur's Gate (i.e. a "proper" RPG with pausable real-time party-based combat) not the action-RPG Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance games that appeared on consoles. One thing to be absolutely clear about is that the more natural home for this kind of game is on PC, with mouse control. If playing this game on PC is an option for you then you're best advised to do so, but if playing it on PS4 is your best option then rest assured this console port is not a disaster. When not in combat, you move your party around Diablo-style with direct joystick control of whichever party-member you select as "leader", and when combat kicks off you can pause at any moment to order your various characters to move to specific spots, target specifc enemies, carry out specific actions. Of course it's more fiddly to do that with a gamepad, cycling through allies and enemies rather than clicking on them directly, but it's a serviceable system that you soon get used to - and the pausable combat means you're never under any unfair pressure to issue commands at mouse-speed. You can also set the game to automatically pause (or not) based on a lengthy list of criteria (i.e. enemy spotted, combat begins, character takes damage, character near death, etc) so - with a bit of time - you can fine-tune things to your preference. It all works quite well, and the writing is unexpectedly good - some genuinely amusing dialog - plus the the built-in familiarity (for me, at least) that comes with the licensed AD&D rules, monsters, Sword Coast setting, etc., meant I already had a grounding in what the various monsters are capable of, what the spells do, etc., which helps. Yeah, I know a Gelatinous Cube when I see one :) Overall, I'm pleasantly surprised with this game and was motivated to write a review here because the "official" score doesn't really paint an accurate picture of it. I almost didn't buy it, even for a mere £5, due to its mediocre Metascore. That would've been my loss; don't let it be yours. I'm a jaded old gamer and this game actually managed to do the trick, enagage my interest, and keep me coming back for more - which is more than can be said for many allegedly "better" games I've bought. Just so it's not all praise, let's balance things out with some moans. There are some technical hiccups - just moments where it doesn't feel as polished as you'd like - but nothing major, and there's no horrendous screen-tearing, thankfully. Some aspects of the gameplay could've been better explained, i.e. cycling through your party-members is straightforward but I had no idea how to then cycle through targets for that character. Maybe it said how to do it, and I missed it? Never mind; I worked it out eventually with a bit of button-pressing experimentation! And be aware that the game's text-size could be uncomfortably small for some people, and maybe not ideal for gaming set-ups where you're sat further back from the screen.

Despite some reservations about the quality of the PS4 port - which I'll cover - I can't bring myself to give this game anything less than a "green" score, because it's such a darn good game. I'm sure you already know what kind of game it is, so let's keep the description brief. It's a 2.5D (i.e. played on a 2D plane but depicted with 3D graphics) non-linear exploration-based platform / shooter game. Adhering to the classic "Metroidvania" template, there's a sprawling map just begging to be explored, and re-visiting earlier areas with new-found abilities means you'll be able to access places you could see but not reach before. In my humble opinion, this is about as good as a "Metroidvania" game gets - apart, of course, from an actual "Super Metroid" or "Symphony of the Night" Castlevania game! There are the games which gave the genre its name, and then - right behind those - there's Shadow Complex. It's that good. Your mileage may vary, but my playtime was around the 10-hour mark. I'm not sure where other people are getting a "4 hour" figure from. I can only assume they rush through games ignoring everything but their immediate objective! Which is a darn strange way to play a game of this sort, which is about exploring every nook and cranny. Put it this way: completing the game with 100% map discovery in 2 hours is one of the Trophy challenges, and only 0.4% of players have managed that feat. That's a seriously hard "speed-run" challenge for people who know the map inside-out. For any normal player, exploring the game for the first time, 10 hours is a much more likely figure. No game is perfect, and Shadow Complex has a few design "quirks" that prevent it from being a perfect 10. For example, there are scenes where the game uses the "2.5D" perspective to have enemies attack from the background, not just to left and right of you. Occasionally in those scenes it can be a bit iffy whether the right-stick aiming chooses to aim upward or into the back of the screen. It’s nothing game-killing, but it does add a little unwelcome aiming-uncertainty to some gunfight situations. The view can also zoom in a bit too close for comfort in certain areas, meaning you can end up in a firefight with off-screen enemies. These are minor complaints, though, when the core game is so good. As for the PS4 port ... well, it's not as great as I had hoped. "Serviceable" would be the word for it. The game shows its age with some quite dated-looking and ugly “Unreal Engine 3” character models, particularly in cut-scenes. Despite the alleged "HD remaster" it still looks exactly like what it is: a Xbox 360 digital release from 7 years ago that's being rendered at 1080p instead of 720p, but is otherwise essentially unchanged. Not a problem. It never was the prettiest game out there, but it's a great example of gameplay that's so engaging you won't be worrying that the graphics aren’t “cutting-edge”. What's less easy to overlook, though, are the frequent stutters in the PS4 port. Again, it's not bad enough to be game-killing, but it is bad enough to drag the experience down and make things look more shonky than they should. You'd hope that a PS4 could run a 7-year old Xbox 360 game (never a massively demanding title to begin with) with presentation that was more slick and buttery-smooth that the original hardware - but that's not the case here. The PS4 port “works”, and is perfectly playable, but it feels like the game has been shovelled over to the newer console in a perfunctory state that’s merely “functional", and lacks the polish and love that it deserved. One section where you have to time a jump out of a rolling mine-cart is particularly choppy, harming the playability – and that's a shame to see. In the 3+ months since the game's EU release there has been no patch to address those performance hitches. Clearly, Epic Games consider the port to be "good enough." I wish they had loved it a little more, because the game deserves better. Overall, though, it's still the great game it was in 2009, and the gameplay is good enough to allow us to (mostly) overlook the port's lack of polish. How many games have you played where right at the beginning of the game-proper, tasked with rescuing your girlfriend, you can actually choose not to bother - get back in the car, drive off, leave her to her fate, and see the credits roll - game over? Now THAT'S what I call "player agency" :)

The game's core gimmick seems quite promising - it's a 2D platformer in which you can flit "in" and "out" of the screen between 3 different parallax layers of scenery - but unfortunately the design and execution are both lousy. Seriously, I haven't seen a platformer where you can get trapped in an "infinite death loop" since Jet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum ... but it happened 3 times in my first hour of play. OK, the game gives you infinite lives, and there is seemingly no penalty for dying - and you can pause the game and quit back to the level selection screen at any time - but these are just desperate attempts to paper over the cracks in the game's broken coding. The "layers" idea is fundamentally flawed in its execution. You frequently can't see where you are, due to foreground layers obscuring your view, and it's ultimately just plain NOT FUN. The game's exploration relies on coloured keys, bought in a "shop", to gate your progress ... meaning you spend time navigating its convoluted levels only to reach a brick wall - a gate, requiring a key you don't have - with no way of knowing in advance which colour key you were going to need. You then you have no choice but to quit out of the level or backtrack laboriously, get the colour of key you need, and then backtrack again. Does that sound like fun to you? If navigating the levels was fun, it wouldn't be so bad, but it's not. It's a grinding chore. Other problems include the on-screen text (character speech bubbles) being ridiculously small; the "in" and "out" buttons being inexplicably mapped to "L1" and "R1" (buttons placed to the left and right of each other, when it would be far more intuitive to map them to "L1" and "L2" or "R1" and "R2" - y'know, buttons where the placement actually corresponds to the direction of travel!); glitchy scenery that (ironically) can't decide what's in front of what, leading to bits of scenery flickering in and out of existence as you move; leaps of faith where you can't see what's below you (you can pan the scenery left and right a bit, but not up and down); foreground layers obscuring your view ... the list just goes on and on. Even the way the character interacts with something as simple as a slope is semi-broken, with your character inexplicably sliding down to the height of the next scenery "block" - amateur coding. It all just feels shoddy and unfinished, and - most damningly - the game's core "gimmick" just doesn't work in practice. I paid less than £2 for this in a sale, and - being a long-time fan of 2D platform games - I thought I could overlook a few flaws and get some enjoyment out of it, especially at that price. After an hour of being repeatedly disgusted with the poor design and execrable coding, I deleted it, knowing I'd never return.

I'm getting increasingly fond of developer Vector Unit, having first encountered their work with "Hydro Thunder Hurricane" on the Xbox 360. They understood what made the original "Hydro Thunder" fun, and clearly loved it as much as I did. Their first two PS4 games ("Beach Buggy Racing" and "Riptide GP2") were both well-made, if a little "lite" and lacking in personality, but they were both ports of mobile phone games. So, when I heard they were releasing a new Riptide GP game on PS4 and Steam - and this time it was going to be designed for PC / PS4 first (with phone ports to follow) I sat up and paid attention. While I would've preferred a new "Hydro Thunder", this is a very decent alternative and it very deliberately moves the jet-ski-based Riptide games closer toward Hydro Thunder territory. The course design strongly echoes the Hydro Thunder games, with huge jumps and some crazy course-specific mayhem going on. On the technical front it's very strong too, with nice wave physics and a commitment to a rock-solid 60fps. Online racing is included, as is split-screen local mulltiplayer for up to 4 players. Whether it can maintain 60fps in 4-player split-screen, I don't know - haven't had a chance to try it yet - but it's great that the game caters for 4-up couch-gaming with friends, something that many devs don't bother with anymore, which is a shame. What I'm less fond of is the mechanic of doing stunts to gain boost, and the way pressing the boost button expends all of your stored boost in one go - you basically boost until it's all gone. It's a personal-taste thing, but I prefer Hydro Thunder's system of picking up boosts and the way that game allows you to use up your boost bar more strategically, all at once or in shorter bursts at optimum moments. I was also a bit worried when I saw the game's main campaign mode was a "story mode" (I hate story modes in racing games) but luckily it's fine: brief and unobtrusive. Overall, this is very decent game that does exactly what it sets out to do - it's the closest thing to a new Hydro Thunder on current systems, and it's well-made. The only thing you can really say against it is that it still feels slightly "low-ambition" - i.e. it's good but not great, it's nice but it won't change your world, it's a lot like Hydro Thunder but not quite as awesome as Hydro Thunder, etc. You get the idea! But it also only costs about a tenner (£9-something on a launch promo, £11-something thereafter) so as long as you adjust your expectations accordingly you will be well-pleased.