inopinatus

(0) It's pretty. OK. That's the good part. (1) It’s a dress-up game but you can’t dye your clothes. This terrible design choice brought to you by greedy gacha executives. They then rub your nose in the omission by making a dye production center a major game location. (2) Infinity Nikki’s console port has serious controller flaws. The menu controls are the most janky, inconsistent and incoherent I’ve ever seen in an AAA game. Sometimes you navigate by d-pad, sometimes the stick. Sometimes you scroll with bumpers, sometimes by d-pad, sometimes with stick, sometimes the stick stops responding for a few seconds, or only works in one direction(?!). Sometimes circle progresses something, sometimes it cancels something. Sometimes a screen is modal, sometimes it’s not, and good luck telling the difference. Regular gameplay is mostly okay to control but has some howlers, like having three radial menus none of which work the same, having the “use consumable” button press being a short version of “select consumable”, or being unable to invert the camera Y-axis. All these problems can be explained as a thoughtless and rushed attempt to force a controller to move around a touchscreen interface. (3) The storyline is linear and non branching. Don’t expect your choices to have any consequences. The voice acting is sketchy in English, ok in Japanese, and good in Mandarin. Unfortunately the lip-sync is broken. (4) To sum up: it is pretty, but excessively flawed.

FFXIV is from the previous decade and it shows. Dawntrail does very little to update it. Minor changes to lighting and some textures cannot hide the clunky and outdated game engine. Many older models & textures remain, maps & animations have not been redesigned to match, and the juxtaposition on screen of old & new is super cringey. Inventory management in FFXIV remains a nightmare - in fact, it's worse than ever. Dawntrail introduces literally thousands of new items. Additional space in your inventory: none. Additional space in your glamour dresser: none. Additional space for things in your player housing: none. The developers are really holding a finger up in the player's face with all that. They are cynically inconveniencing players into paying a monthly supplement on your existing subscription for more inventory space (the result of which is still clunky, limited, and annoying to manage). Combat is practically unchanged from previous releases. There are very few-to-no additional gameplay challenges here. The structure of all progression is cut-and-pasted from the last two releases. The playable classes continue to become ever more indistinguishable. The same goes for crafting & gathering. The marketplace is crude and naive. Overall, gameplay is just outright stale. Imagine releasing a AAA title in 2024 with your main storyline delivered as mostly click-through text bubbles and only a tiny fraction of the narrative giving any voice acting. There is no branching plot. There is no player choice. There are no consequences. You may as well read a manga. In 2024, that's an utter failure of production values. NPCs do not interact with each other or the world. 99% of them are just standing still to deliver some flavour text. The sense that you are just wandering around in a lifeless theme park has always been strong in FFXIV and it's never more painfully apparent than in the "second city", and the final zone, of Dawntrail. The community remains as bigoted and as poisonously defensive and hostile as ever. Just don't read the forums, at all. The botched rollout of the Oceania data center continues to have lag problems caused by poor routing of NTT's network. A player in south-east asia should expect 90-100ms to Sydney via the Perth fibre landing. Instead, NTT sends their traffic across the Pacific and back. Enjoy your 400ms ping, folks. This is why none of those players moved. Square Enix's network engineers should be ashamed of themselves for choosing a third-rate hosting company (NTT are only tier 1 in japan, guys). The music is quite good. This has been the one consistent thing in FFXIV. There are always a couple of decent tunes. This alone is not nearly enough to justify playing the game. Also, the in-game jukebox mechanics are garbage. Before playing Dawntrail I finished Baldur's Gate 3 and V Rising. Quite different games, but both are masterpieces of slick modern multiplayer RPGs, one turn-based cooperative, the other action PvP. Whether it's in the narrative structure, player progression, gameplay, emergent interactions, or overall production values, Dawntrail doesn't come close to either. FFXI was two decades ago. FFXIV was one decade ago. Square Enix should've realised that ten years is the lifetime of an MMO. Overall, Dawntrail reveals FFXIV as an obsolete embarrassment that should be retired. The only way to salvage the mess is by developing a fresh new MMO from scratch according to the AAA standards of this decade. Stick a fork in it, this one is done.

You fly, run, skip, and even skate through a series of stylised environments, and the resulting "theme park" experience is certainly pretty. Throughout, NPCs tell stories through tableaux, mime, cave paintings, and interpretive dance. There is a cooperative MMO element, and casual social functions that lend some replayability, but this is time-gated through content "seasons" that are clearly intended to exploit FOMO and force all but the most obsessive players to spend money on pay-to-win options in order to progress before the content is removed. The storytelling through art and NPC interaction is beautifully done and certainly the best aspect of the game. The audio production is wonderful: sound (through player "calls") is even a game mechanism, and elegantly integrated. There are playable instruments, too, with a music score system that can be mastered to play tunes. The lighting is also exceptional, living up to the demands of light being a fundamental resource, with many game mechanics and systems being directly associated to it. HDR works well, too, with only a few glitches during area transitions. Now the downsides. The camera is definitely problematic; there's often a sense of "fighting the camera", a clear hallmark **** not originally designed for a dual-stick controller. Even when responding normally it feels slow & spongey. Sometimes the game grabs camera control entirely (and often unnecessarily) which is not just disorienting, it can lead to quest failure and even reversal of character progress in some cases. During flight, the camera sometimes pans itself into a cloud causing a screen grey-out, losing line-of-sight on your character, and wasting player time re-establishing directional control and camera position. Object targeting can be woeful when there are several interaction options close together, depends on fiddling around with camera position, and may even be impossible in some cases without reporting a player-placed object. Cutscenes are not always skippable, even when you've seen them myriad times already due to replaying an area. Worse, the game sometimes animates a cutscene in-engine with only a tiny notification of what's occurring, leading to partial loss of control and a baffled/annoyed player mashing the "skip cutscene" button to regain flight or ground control. There are also some capricious misbehaviours with flight/jump physics near walls and ledges, especially in tight areas or between platforms. That's most noticeable in the game's very few jumping puzzles; they're not so much a skills challenge as figuring out how to workaround the game's jankiest moments, and clearing them feels more like relief from frustration instead of authentic accomplishment. It's possible, I suppose, that none of these control issues were problematic on mobile, but are exposed by playing on a controller. If so, they amount to porting defects. In any case, they really undermined my enjoyment of the gameplay. There is frequent server lag, sometimes up to ten seconds for object interactions, and some quest steps can even time out because the server side was unresponsive. There would be forum riots if a major AAA-publisher MMO (like WoW or FFXIV) was the same. Whilst this is an indy publisher, if they can't manage better responsiveness then they're out of their depth with infrastructure. Cost is a major factor, the game says "free to play" on the box, and this is technically the truth, but it's shockingly expensive to make progress in a reasonable timeframe, and the way this is structured with regards to disappearing content feels coercive. The cost of an enjoyable experience becomes quickly comparable to a full-price AAA subscription MMO, but providing only a fraction of the entertainment. In a fit of irony, the most recent "season" included a song whose anti-commercial lyric "you cannot eat money" formed a instantly awkward in-game reminder of Sky's sales model. This could've been a score of 9, but I took a point off for the camera/cutscene issues, another for the server lag, and another for the manipulative value proposition. My overall feeling is that they need to significantly improve the gamer experience before I could recommend Sky:CotL's PS5 port.

Looks great, plays great, good cast and a witty, engaging script with lots of subtle narrative. The adaptive dialogue continues to be a highlight; few titles even bother, or do so in the most perfunctory fashion, but HFW hits this out of the park and it really helps deliver the storyline and build player immersion. Combat is fast and flowing action, as before, with some new moves and weapons. One or two glitches on release but nothing game-breaking, and fewer than most big titles. This is very much a sequel, the storyline carries straight on, many familiar characters make a reappearance, and expect many game systems and mechanics to be familiar from the first game. Ignore the review bombing bigots, they just hate that the major characters aren’t white men.

One of the best underwater games ever made and one of the best survival games ever made. A masterpiece of world-building, storytelling, game progression, and balance. The visuals are often stunningly rich and beautiful textured and lit. Also fantastic audio - both the soundtrack, and the environmental sounds, made for the best sonic experience of any game I have ever played and this made a big difference to the emotional impact and sense of being alone in hostile waters. Use a home theatre system if you possibly can and crank up the subwoofer. It would be a 10/10 but read on. Subnautica on PS4 is let down by immersion-breaking graphical glitches (clipping, framerate, and pop-in are all problematic). And there are couple of horribly game-breaking bugs. Those issues might be okay on PC where workarounds can be found, but not on console where there's no workaround or remedy. Don't even bother playing on Hardcore mode, and backup your saves once an hour. The PS4 release needed a lot more polish so 8/10 is the best I can do.

If you like a peerless challenge, The Witness will knock your puzzle socks off, offering a steady progression from the immediately obvious, through moments of frustration & revelation, all the way to the mind-bending and apparently impossible final test, making the a-ha moments all the more satisfying. All presented in a compact but pretty world with a unique art style and a diffuse narrative that's revealed gradually, obliquely, and impressionistically as you climb up the difficulty ladder. Even reliving my playthrough to write this review, five years later, is a moment of very happy memories.

A mediocre sequel to a masterpiece. Below Zero's reduced play area, predictable enemies, meandering/incoherent narrative, underdeveloped characters, and gimmicky mechanics, are a huge let-down. The game feels half-baked, unchallenging, uninspired, and incomplete. As others have reported, it's also unstable to the point of unplayable. When I started it was crashing maybe once an hour, and this was annoying; towards the end it was crashing every five minutes, and this was downright enraging. I eventually lost all progress when the game crashed during save and corrupted itself. I could not be bothered restarting. I'd played through the original twice just for fun, but I won't be returning to Below Zero.

I was disappointed, especially given the positive critic reviews. I felt the director/writer's artistic demands overrode any attempt to build a game. In practice, Observation is a linearly told short story in the sci-fi horror genre. Your role is to occasionally push some buttons. There's no exploration or intellectual challenge here. You have no player agency, and there are no win/lose states. The story itself borrows so much from Arthur C Clarke's 2001 that only great gameplay or execution could save the title. Unfortunately, the sole element I thought well executed was the interior of an ISS-style spacecraft, with the attending spatial disorientation and peculiar soundscape. The player's perspective of an unreliable onboard computer had tons of potential, but this novelty was diluted into insignificance by the inability to affect any outcome and the absolute linearity of progression. Gamers with even basic comprehension of orbital mechanics, structural engineering, crew psychology, electrical engineering, computing, or any of the other scientific or engineering elements of spaceflight, will likely be unable to suspend disbelief thanks to the repeated butchering of these fields at the expense of narrative. There needs to be some element that is really great to overcome such concerns, but no such element is present. It seems to me the kind of title that will primarily impress journalists and artists. I can't help but compare Observation unfavourably to the brilliant intersection of exploration, challenge, immersion, and narrative revelation, that I saw recently in The Witness or in Return of the Obra Dinn. A missed opportunity.

Eight years on from its first appearance, KSP would clearly benefit from a rewrite or replacement by something more polished. The rocket building and physics simulation are still a superb education in orbital mechanics, but it was never a great-looking game, was (and still is) plagued by bugs, and never really had a sense of game progression even in career mode. Visually and in gameplay, the modding community has far surpassed the original. Unfortunately installation and management of mods is complicated and poorly supported; few players will bother. KSP proved that there's demand for a gamified simulation of rocketry and orbital mechanics. The alternatives such as Orbiter and SimpleRockets are either extremely specialised or massively simplified, so for now it's your only option.

A truly unique game crippled by an abysmal port. KSP:EE has game-breaking interface bugs, ugly graphics, and a bizarre control scheme that seems to have been slapped on as an afterthought. The physics engine is extraordinary and vehicle simulation is impressive, but thanks to the game-breaking control design I've had more fun using Microsoft Excel, and the bugs and omissions are unforgiveable. This port is so sloppily executed some controls can't actually be used, suggesting that no real playtesting took place. The number of QA complaints I could list is more than this input can hold, but it's everything from a camera that doesn't go all the way around (especially bad in a space game) to forcing the player to (slowly) delete saves (no overwrite option - and it corrupted my save to boot), terrible copywriting in missions, controls that require that none-existent mouse or keyboard, a button layout that perversely maps the same button to "dismiss text box" and then "take major destructive action". There's a general obsession with input modes that means you're fighting the interface more than you're playing the game. It seems that the developers basically ignored the years of interface design that went into porting similarly complicated games, and did the minimum necessary to make it run and get it past the reviewers. The game also slows down as you play it - one hour in and you'll be experiencing frequent seizures where the game simply stops accepting input for a second - and this is game-breaking during orbital manoeuvres, landing, and docking, and again indicates that no-one bothered significantly play testing this port. If you've seen this game with pretty graphics in Youtube videos then better understand that it has been modded to do so, and those mods are not included. KSP:EE makes no effort to render a realistic environment. You will also see many KSP instructors on Youtube relying on computational or engineering mods that are not available on the console, despite those mods being essential to game playability. The storyline mode is extremely rudimentary and serves mainly as a very partial introduction to some aspects of the simulation engine and a means to add the tiny challenge of a tech tree. I thought that publisher Take-Two Interactive were a AAA company but this feels like a half-baked indie tech demo with a UI designed by a sadist and no playtesting for the console. It's astounding that Sony even allowed it to be released. The physics engine and vehicle simulation is just amazing, but as a game it's crippled. If you can, get the PC version. If you must have this on PS4, get it when it's on at least 50% discount.

Boring even when it works. The co-operative multiplayer has so much potential, but it is entirely squandered. Bethesda clearly don't understand what made open-world multiplayer giants like Eve:Online or A Realm Reborn so effective and long-lived and long-loved. This is their "No Mans Sky" or FFXIV moment, but unlike Hello Games or Square Enix, I have no faith in Bethesda's willingness or ability to re-invent the game to fix it.

This doesn't improve Kerbal Space Program as a game. It's just a pack of new parts and rocket textures, none of which I needed. The mission builder is a minority interest at best and is just another attempt by Take Two Interactive to get the community to do their job for them, and you'll get more interesting and challenging missions from Reddit than the new scenarios. Given that KSP was basically an indie tech demo of Squad's remarkable orbital physics/vehicle simulation and not actually a full-featured game unless you added third-party mods, it is super lame of the new owners to be milking it with DLC already.

An enthralling masterpiece of storytelling and player progression in a wonderfully imagined and rendered open world. My game of the year for sure, eclipsing the turgid political melodrama and tedious combat we've seen in so many open-world games lately. Looks stunning and bears replaying on New Game+ Ultra Hard mode for a completely different challenge.

A catastrophically flawed game. Could have been great, but crippled by Rockstar's abysmally bad matchmaking algorithm, which must rank as the worst MMO matchmaking service ever implemented in a AAA title. You'll be waiting upwards of an hour just to start a heist mission. Which is a shame because on the rare occasions you do get a heist mission going, they're a classic piece of cooperative multiplayer fun. But unless you can coordinate a group offline to play them, forget about progressing in the only really original content. The heists don't even occur in a persistent context, defeating one of the key immersion factors in an MMO. Your actions will have no effect on the game world. The rest of GTA Online is gimmicky car racing, open-world tit-for-tat griefing, or tedious and unimaginative quests. This last item has been rehashed in each new update: Rockstar's idea of "new features" is to invent another context for fetch & delivery & murder quests, and try to entice people into buying "shark cards" by making it expensive to participate. Sometimes, the car racing is fun. That's the only positive thing I can say about it. But there's no attempt to make it a decent MMO. In practice it's just a boring grind overrun with griefing children. Squandering the huge potential afforded by the detailed open world of Los Santos. Heists could've been great - but the terrible matchmaking makes it almost impossible to actually play them. What a shame.

Proving that Uncharted is about more than the cartoonish Nathan Drake, U:TLL continues the tradition of action-adventure and cultural plundering in spectacularly detailed environments. However, this time around the primary characters are a little more human, a little less chest-puffing action hero, which was a welcome upgrade in tone. Voice acting and script are excellent throughout. Since this basically an overgrown DLC, there are no substantial changes to the core game mechanics of ledge-climbing and rotating-pattern puzzles, and no change to your combat pattern of "stealth killing until the stealth screws up, then start shooting". There's a new (but underused) lock-picking mechanic that is just like every other lock-picking you ever saw. The other standard tropes of the genre are present, from "ledge that collapses when you grab it" (which the game leans on just a little too often) too "just narrowly escaping by running from collapsing ancient city"; the bad guys are still trying to dynamite their way to treasures. etc etc. It's all still tremendously engaging, thanks to the stunning environments and characters brought to life by excellent voice work & script. Where the game falls flat is in some of the repetitive later battles, and a final boss that is little more than a series of quick time events. My playthrough was ten hours on hard mode (including the Queen's Ruby side-quest), which is not great value for the sticker price, but I received the game as a free download for the U4 deluxe pack, making that a much better value item so thank you Naughty Dog.

Highlights: Superb map/mission design (especially the Clockwork Mansion, and the time-shifting device used in one mission), high replayability, great stealth mechanics. Lowlights: weak story, cliched character development, insultingly brief & underproduced endings, boring swordplay.

A masterpiece of storytelling, wit, challenge, balance. Possibly the best RPG of all time. I played it to completion when first released and I've replayed it many years later with the same joy and immersion.

THE TWO BEST things about this game: ** (1) the variety of scenery. It looks great, it sounds great, it's highly immersive as a result and progression means unlocking more of the theme park. ** (2) FFXIV rewards and enables cooperative play far better than many MMOs. ** THE TWO WORST things are: ** (1) the PvP is a toy: there is no impact on world state, so there is no player-driven storyline. ** (2) the market is as rudimentary as you can get, supporting only global sell orders with instant delivery. You can make money gathering/crafting/trading, but forget about any economic sophistication: being a merchant isn't a first-class role. ** THE MOST CHALLENGING thing about this game is the sheer number of game mechanics and things to do and learn. However the game is pretty good at helping you keep track. ** THE MOST PECULIAR thing is the sporadic voice acting. A handful of key cut-scenes in the main storyline have voice acting, everything else is a silent mime.

One of the finest games to be built on the Quake 1 / QuakeWorld platform, Team Fortress set the bar high for class-based fast-paced multiplayer FPS. Easy to pick up but difficult to master, Team Fortress quickly spawned what was at the time (mid-1990s) a thriving worldwide community of teams (known as clans), leagues, mapmakers and server managers. With nine classes to mix across a server of up to 32 players, the range of tactics that could be adopted was phenomenal, and the mapmaking community ensured that TF never lacked for a high quality set of standard maps that encouraged creativity and experimentation with strategy. At its height, TF was the most popular online mod for Quake, with more simultaneous players than for any other, holding this position for years. The endless gameplay variations, well-tuned class balance, and large community meant that even a casual game on a public server almost always guaranteed fun times. My personal favourite class was always as a sniper - which could be played for defence, but most entertainingly could be used as a fragile but high DPS offensive class. A skilled stealthy sniper could wreak havoc in an enemy base. The community evaporated in 1999, due to competition from the sequel TFC, and widespread cheating via hacks exploiting vulnerabilities in the now-ageing Quake engine. The sequels - TFC and the wildly successful TF2 - are not quite as fast-paced or have as long a learning curve. Nonetheless they inherit the same DNA and have built huge communities of fans as a result.