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Welcome

Aren't you glad Team Fortress 2 didn't wind up looking like this? Valve has created quite a game with the long-awaited Team Fortress sequel, bearing many similarities to its predecessor, though incorporating enough changes to make it feel fresh. The most obvious aspect, which you may have noticed from any of the screens and video posted, is the visual style. Even after getting sucked into probably too many hours of play in the beta over the past few weeks, we're still amazed at the art design, both in how it looks and how it animates.But let's not get too carried away with the graphics. It's a game, after all, and the most important factor is how it plays and if it's entertaining. It's interesting to see both Team Fortress 2, which has been in development on and off for some seven years now, and Splash Damage's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which has seen its own share of setbacks and delays, finally come out right around the same time. Their nearly simultaneous retail release presents and interesting situation for you, the consumer, as to how to spend your cash. You may fondly remember your days in Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, dropping air strikes on hapless attackers and eagerly charging into bunkers to spout forth deadly plumes of flamethrower fuel. Yet you can't forget your days with Team Fortress Classic, or even further back with the original Team Fortress Quake mod, with its now painfully dated character models but compelling team-focused online play.There's really no right answer in this case as to which game is ultimately better. It's merely personal preference. Quake Wars is assuredly the more complicated game. For those uninitiated in the ways of Enemy Territory, the scope, dynamic objectives, speed at which the tide of battle can turn and the number of things you need to quickly consider when that happens, and user interface can be rather daunting. After learning the ins and outs it's clearly an excellent product, but it lacks that immediate, irresistible appeal so prominent in Valve's Team Fortress 2. And accessibility may very well be the deciding factor in determining which product users prefer. Regardless, it's an excellent time to be a gamer, since as tough as it may be to pick one or the other, making either choice rewards you with a well designed and highly entertaining title. Like in Team Fortress Classic (TFC), Team Fortress 2 has nine character classes: Spy, Pyro, Soldier, Heavy, Medic, Sniper, Demoman, Scout and Engineer. Each class' abilities on the battlefield have been streamlined, which, along with the graphics, is what makes Team Fortress 2 so much more accessible than TFC. No longer do you have Engineers running around with railguns and EMP grenades. Medics can't "infect" the other team, Spies don't have tranquilizer darts, and none of the classes have hand grenades. In TF2, each class has roughly three main ways of attacking - a primary weapon (the Heavy's minigun, Pyro's flamethrower, Engineer's sentry gun, etc.) and secondary (various classes have shotguns, others pistols, while the Demoman has a highly effective mine thrower) and melee weapons (the Scout's bat, the Medic's bonesaw, and so on). Though classes now possess fewer means of attacking, the resulting gameplay feels much more focused. Each class has a very clearly defined role and the means to ensure they perform successfully. The only limiting factor is, of course, how effectively your team meshes together. If your Engineers aren't guarding their structures, Spies can wipe them out in seconds with a few sapper charges. If your team is full of Heavies and Soldiers but lacks Medics, you're not going to get very far. If you're playing a capture point map without any Scouts on your team, you might as well just leave the server or start berating your squadmates until a few switch classes. The Medic, though, seems to be the hinge on which all gameplay balance swivels. For TF2 they've been given a health hose, which blasts out a restorative stream at friendlies within range and "sticks" to them as long as you keep the fire button depressed. As you heal injured teammates, or "overheal" to 150 percent health, an ubercharge meter builds in the bottom right of the screen. Unleashing this renders both target and Medic invulnerable for a few seconds, which is sometimes the only way to break through chokepoints po[CENSORED]ted with Heavies, Medics, and multiple tier three sentry guns. Even though Medics may be the most vital to a team's success, the other classes remain useful. Scouts, who are now rather deadly, are far and away the fastest, and their ability to double-jump and change direction in mid-air makes then all the more difficult to hit. Spies, in addition to being able to one-hit kill backstab the enemy, cause general chaos among enemy ranks. If your opponents know a spy is running around, they'll waste time and lose focus by shooting at their own teammates to try and reveal a disguised culprit. Pyros tend to be the most effective spy detectors, and can be frequently seen doing fiery pirouettes in 2Fort matches all over the beta servers, as a spy incognito will betray his cover by bursting into flames upon contact with the burning spray.In a September 26 Steam update, friendly fire was removed from TF2, which was definitely a good move. Friendly fire ruins much of the game considering the close-quarters maps combined with the wide area of effect attacks of Heavies, Pyros, Demomen, and Soldiers. Without FF, teammates are free to shoot each other, since if they bleed health, they're a spy. If you've been keeping up with our preview coverage, most of this is information you already knew. Hardcore gamers are playing the game already, since beta access was granted to those who pre-ordered through Steam. So enough with the descriptions, how does the game play? That really depends on what map you're on, since each map is tied to a mode, with no switching possible. This means 2Fort is only going to be capture the flag (or intelligence briefcase). You can't switch to team deathmatch, at least not yet. Granary and Well are control point maps, where your team scrambles to capture all five points for the win, which can only be captured in a sequential order. Dustbowl actually consists of three sections with two capture points each, and each team takes turns attacking and defending. Gravel Pit is a more open map that gives the attacking team a choice of the point capture order, as opposed to the linear order in which Granary and Well's points must be captured. Then there's Hydro, labeled as a territorial control map instead of a capture point map. It's basically one large map with capture points positioned all over, and sets teams down in walled-off sections for every round. Each team must simultaneously attack and defend, and if they successfully capture the other team's point, they advance to the next section of the overall map. This process is repeated until one team takes over the whole thing. While it's a good idea, we just couldn't shake the feeling that some sections of Hydro allowed for Scouts to capture points far too quickly, ending the round as the slow-moving Heavies are still puttering around in the starting area. Other than that, the old favorite 2Fort remains very similar and is still just as fun, and the updated versions of Well and Dustbowl are a blast, though our favorite at this point is Gravel Pit. Attackers have a choice of points A or B at the map's beginning, and for whatever reason most people online choose to go A first. It's an easier capture, sure, but why chain yourself to the sequential progression of the English alphabet? In response, defensive squads seem to always head to A as well, leaving B often wide open. Once the community gets used to the notion of sending scouts to both locations, it should be interesting to see how capture strategies develop. After A and B are taken by the attackers, point C becomes vulnerable, nestled atop a wooden spire threaded with ramps and planks in the center of a large arena. It's a great setting for a final battle, with plenty of cover spots, open space, and plateaus for creative sentry gun deployment. If there's any issue, it's that the capture speed at which C can be taken once you're actually standing on it could probably use some tweaking. If nobody wins the game at the end of a round, TF2 transitions to an overtime round where teams are no longer allowed to respawn, health pickups disappear, and resupply cabinets no longer give out health. You need to instead rely on medics and dispensers to heal any damage. Strangely, if nobody wins in overtime or wipes out the other team, the round ends in a draw. Sort of defeats the purpose of overtime, doesn't it? Moving on to features, Team Fortress 2 does not support bots as of right now. Quake Wars, on the other hand, does, and its bots which cover five classes on both sides behave rather intelligently. It does, however, feature fully integrated voice chat along with a set of in-game chat messages to call for medics and the like. Being able to communicate with teammates via headset makes a huge difference, especially when compared to playing something like Quake Wars without it. Organizing your team, telling medics exactly when to initiate the ubercharge, calling out spy positions and disguises, and alerting your team to security gun positions are all essential parts of success, and, as most gamers know, most effectively accomplished by being able to speak to each other. TF2 broadens its appeal even further with an amazing attention to detail. Critical hits, for instance, which pop out of your gun in the form of glittering bullets (or grenades, or rockets) cause green "critical hit" text prompts to pop up over your target's head. Special animations or occurrences surrounding a critical hit are nothing new, but they're done particularly well in TF2, giving you that satisfied feeling that you accomplished something special, making you feel skilled even if the critical hit happened by chance. The feeling is even more pronounced when your opponent explodes into chunky bits of gore laced together with globules of vital fluids. It may sound gross, but you'll find yourself laughing, a result of the game's cartoonish style. The graphics in this game are simply stunning. During rounds, you'll see Heavies laugh heartily while blasting forth a cone of lead from their miniguns. The animations of dispensers and sentry guns as they're being erected will cause you to actually stop playing the game and just watch as the various parts lock into place like a Transformer. You'll switch between weapons just to see the weapon readying animation of the characters, like the way the wire on the Sniper's rifle scope sways ever so slightly, or how the patches of tinted metal on the Scout's scattergun gleam in the sunlight. After every time you die, you're treated to a freeze frame of your killer, who's often caught in hilarious poses, particularly if you were a Pyro and had set him on fire. If you were splattered to pieces, the snapshot labels body parts like your head, pancreas, and appendix with little colored flags if they're in the scene. It's a simple feature that adds nothing to the gameplay, but does so much to keep you coming back in anticipation of the next surprise, wanting to find something else to smile about. If you're killed repeatedly by the same player, you'll also see "domination" appear next to their name on the kill screens. Simultaneously a message is sent out across the server alerting everyone to the fact that you're getting your ass kicked by the same guy over and over. It's embarrassing, to say the least, and a mechanic that drives you to play better and get revenge, which broadcasts another server message to let everyone know you aren't as bad as it seemed. Stages look just as good as the character models, with sometimes blocky stage designs completely offset by an impeccable, gorgeously realized artistic style. It's such a strong style that you can't help but wish more had been done with the 1950s spy / espionage theme, like adding in some storyline and true characterization beyond the wildly endearing models and animations. But this is an arena shooter, and that's something for another game&#Array;we hope. Sound design is marvelous as well, with nice little touches like the Pyro's voice chats being muffled (he's wearing a fireproof suit, after all), the Demoman's Scottish accent, and the Scout's urgent cries for a medic. Weapon sounds boom, making firing even a Scout pistol a thrilling experience, and make more or less useless weapons like the Medic's hypo gun fun to shoot. The music, of which there is very little, blends perfectly with the visuals when it does play, strengthening TF2's artistic vision even further. Some of the sounds are recycled from previous Valve games, something fans are sure to appreciate and the newcomers unlikely to notice, and they blend in well with the rest of the audio package. Team Fortress 2 is finally available, and it's one hell of a game. With its powerful artistic style and blazingly quick, yet accessible gameplay, it's enough to melt the icy cynicism imprisoning the hearts of even the most jaded among us. That being said, it's not the most complex shooter out there, and lacks bot support for now. Still, the game's got enough to it to last for a long while, and there's a statistics system built into Steam to help keep track of everything. Buy it, load it up and let loose. It's near-impossible to be disappointed.

With Warframe'srelease on Switch, we’ve taken a fresh look at the whole game in 2018. This review and score replaces both our original PC and PS4 reviews from 2013, and you can find our new Switch-specific impressions below. Read more on IGN's re-review policy.] There aren’t many games that make me feel as cool as Warframe does when I’m bullet-jumping through the air at breakneck speeds. While this free-to-play co-op shooter has wildly outgrown its original “space ninja” reputation since it first came out in 2013 – adding open-world areas, deep story missions, and even a hoverboard with a Tony Hawk-style scoring system – it’s the way it makes everything you do feel fast, powerful, and just plain awesome that keeps me coming back to its almost-endless well of loot. Warframe is a dense game – a tangled ball of yarn made up of almost six years of updates, additions, system reworks, and content drops. Its different bits and pieces overlap and twist together in a way that can make it overwhelming to even think about trying to untangle it all, but it also means that there’s an almost inconceivable amount of deep and often extremely entertaining content to discover once you do.Its fast pace and shorter mission structure can often have the same appeal as Diablo 3, rushing through procedurally pieced-together maps mowing down waves of enemies, collecting powerful items and crafting materials along the way. But varied objectives, enemies, and locations, coupled with non-stop waves of limited-time events and special missions, means there’s always some unique twist to that loop. Constantly being pulled so many different ways makes Warframe a notoriously difficult game for new players to get into. Even after a few dozen hours, it can be hard to make sense of what missions you should be completing and what items you should be trying to collect. This is, for better or worse, a game that you’re going to need a wiki to play, as nearly all of the info about where exactly to find specific crafting components or blueprints isn’t directly available in-game. Thankfully, Warframe’s player base is one of the nicest and most enthusiastic communities I’ve ever interacted with. The wikis available are insanely comprehensive and easy to use, and even just asking for answers or help in the global chat will often result in friendly players giving you a hand. Still, it can be frustrating to get an exciting new weapon blueprint only to see it requires a crafting material you didn’t even know existed and are dozens of hours away from acquiring. Once I made it over that large hump of confusion and started setting clear goals for myself – get to the next planet, craft a certain weapon, complete a quest line – Warframe stopped looking like a tangled ball and started feeling more like a sandbox full of treasures waiting to be dug up. There are plenty of curated quests that offer set goals as well, but picking your own is vital to keeping your head above water in the ocean of stuff there is to do. While the later-game quests have been pushing into plot and cutscene-driven stories more frequently (to great success, I might add), 99% of the time I’ve put into Warframe has been spent running through its halls looking for new stuff to gather – crafting materials, item blueprints, weapon mods, or one of its copious amounts of currencies. Ninjas With Guns Layer after layer of new systems has undoubtedly made Warframe harder to penetrate, but the actual run-and-gun (and slash and bash) gameplay is so dang satisfying that it’s worth digging into. The movement has been refined and rebuilt over the years into something that feels lighting fast and incredibly versatile. Meanwhile, every rifle, pistol, shotgun, bow, hammer, sword, whip, and blade fan feels distinct in how they handle, giving real variety to the weaponry you choose beyond raw stats. Pinning enemies to walls with the heavy-hitting Boltor is a very different feeling from the rapid-fire Furis pistols, just like slamming someone with the Fragor hammer is satisfying in a different way from slicing off limbs with the Heat Sword. The battlesuits Warframe is named after let you flex your preferred playstyle as well, with each one representing a unique personality and theme. There are straightforward Warframes like Mag or Frost, which use magnetic and ice abilities, respectively, but also stranger options like Limbo, which can temporarily put enemies in another plane of existence, or Titania, which can turn into a tiny butterfly and zip around at rapid speeds.However, I’d occasionally go whole missions without using those abilities at all, as they can sometimes seem either ineffective or like overkill depending on the situation you’re in. The healing abilities of Trinity are almost always useful, but moves like Mag’s Magnetize I pretty much only used against a very specific type of recurring boss. Choosing which Warframes to use and how to effectively harness their abilities is another thing that just can’t realistically be learned in-game. I do love that any Warframe can use any weapon combination, meaning you can mix and match what feels best to you. It also lets you go hard into one type of damage if you are facing enemies weak to it, or you can take new or under-leveled weapons along with maxed-out Warframes to quickly catch them up to your other equipment – similar to putting your weaker Pokemon at the front of the party before swapping them out. Enemy variety is broken into distinct and interestingly designed factions, most frequently the militaristic Grineer, the tech-focused Corpus, or the ravenous Infested monsters. You kill most of them the same way – shoot or punch them a bunch – but each faction has special enemy units that can’t always be tackled so directly. Some will have bubble shields to wear down or weak points that need to be hit, and each faction has its own strengths and weaknesses to certain damage types and elemental effects. I really like that you always know what faction you’ll be fighting before a mission so you can prep accordingly. Warframe is primarily a PvE game – there are multiple PvP modes with fan bases of their own, but they were never very interesting to me and never felt like they were essential – so there’s a wonderful freedom in using whatever guns and abilities you find fun. There are, of course, better and worse options, but you don’t really have to start worrying about min-maxing your loadout for pure power until you get into the significantly harder missions toward the outer reaches of the solar system map. That means if you see a cool Warframe that can breathe fire, you can make it your goal to learn how to get it, find its blueprint pieces, and then breathe some dang fire. It’ll probably take a long time, but picking and pursuing journeys like that is the point, and it was endlessly gratifying for me.And if you are into min-maxing, the potential here is absurd. There’s a deep and rewarding well of number crunching for the dedicated to dive into, though again, that also makes it borderline hostile toward more casual players who want to take on the hardest fights Warframe has to offer without having to do tons of out-of-game research. Warframe’s convoluted weapon-mod system is often where people say “I don’t think I can play this” when I show it off to them, and not unreasonably so. Every weapon type, Warframe, companion, vehicle, and more has its own set of dozens and dozens of mods to collect – usually stat boosts like increased damage, reload speed, or special elemental damage effects. Those mods can then be upgraded (using a special mod-only currency called Endo) and installed into an item’s mod slots to unlock their true power. Mods and mod slots also have matching polarities to take into account, and you’ll need a whole different (and very rare) item to change or improve those. It’s… a lot, and I’ve barely scratched the surface here. Modding is pretty much mandatory, though, because most weapons and Warframes start extremely weak, and mods are the only way to actually make them worth using. Nearly everything you acquire starts at Mastery Rank 0, leveling up to Rank 30 as you use them and letting you install more mods. It’s not intuitively clear at the start, but having the wrong mods equipped can easily be the difference between breezing through a mission and getting annihilated outright.Once I figured all of this out the mod system provided a wonderful depth of choice, letting me customize my playstyle around a certain damage type or weapon and allowing pretty much any item I wanted to use to be a decent choice with the right mods. Giving Soma Prime, one of my favorite guns, a mod for a percentage-based increase to its already massive magazine meant I basically never had to stop firing, and a mod for higher crit chance capitalized on that endless stream of bullets. Mods also mean that somebody who buys a super-rare weapon with real money (which, yes, you can do but really shouldn’t) usually still needs to rank it up and get the right mods before it’s any good. Of course, the importance and nuances of the mod system are never properly explained. Even after years of playing and plenty of time spent reading wikis, it’s a system I still don’t like fully engaging with – I often use the option to auto-select my mods, then make tweaks based on what it suggests because the mod menus are cumbersome to navigate. I’m glad the automating option exists, as otherwise it would have completely overwhelmed me early on. Thankfully, a more actively curated modding approach is only really required when you hit the wall of a mission that’s too hard to beat. At that point, I’d dive back into the wiki and figure out what type of weapon damage my enemy was weak to, what guns and Warframes might be best against them, and what mods I needed to upgrade to buff those choices. Shining moments where a well-laid-out plan pays off are extraordinarily rewarding, and make the mess of menus, currencies, and upgrades empowering instead of intimidating – but I still wish everything involving mods was easier to deal with and learn. Playing with friends or finding a community within Warframe can help smooth this over, but it is actually fairly easy to play solo as well if you’d rather not engage with that side of things. With the exception of high level missions, as well as one objective that has you protecting four capture points at once, it’s fairly doable. Matchmaking is there whenever you need it, and I always enjoyed queuing into random groups once I got a handle on things – except for in certain stealth objectives, which felt too much like I was putting the mission’s fate in a stranger’s hands. Some of the more structured story quests actually require you to play on your own as well, offering more bite-sized bits of story with special missions, fights, and rewards. For example, progression to new planets is often locked behind certain quests, and a lot of them revolve around the story of a specific Warframe that you’ll then unlock access to after completion. A larger plot with your character as the central protagonist has also been slowly unfolding through main quests over the last two years or so, and it’s filled with quality cutscenes and acting that I wouldn’t have expected from Warframe’s earlier missions. They are genuinely exciting and engaging, and I rush back to play every time a new chapter is added. The quality of the quests overall is mostly positive, however they can be a little hit and miss. A quest called The Glast Gambit was painful to get through, forcing me to replay the same uninteresting PvP game mode against AI a half dozen times. But another called Octavia’s Anthem had one of the most clever and cool final bosses I’ve seen in any game, having you battle enemies while jumping around a giant musical instrument. Thankfully, there are enough quests and other missions to keep you going for dozens of hours before running out or even having to be bogged down by a bad one, and even then you can be confident developer Digital Extremes is working on the next one. The studio’s support of Warframe is nothing short of incredible, standing as the gold standard for live games, let alone free ones.Warframe’s free-to-play model generally doesn’t get in the way of the fun either. Apart from the majority of cosmetics, pretty much everything can be acquired through playing – though unsurprisingly some of it will take you a significant amount of time and grinding to do so. But it’s hard to be too upset by that when updates are free, new story missions are free, and pretty much anything else that would make you feel like you might be missing out if you don’t pay is free. The only place it really hurts is inventory space, which is limited unless you use a premium currency called Platinum to expand it. Like I said, Warframe is a game about collecting, and the restrictive inventory space is antithetical to that – you can only hold two Warframes before you need to buy more Warframe slots, but there are currently 59 collectible ones. For someone who doesn’t want to pay, that stings. The silver lining is that those inventory expansions are relatively cheap (getting two extra weapon slots costs 12 Platinum, which is roughly less than a dollar) and are literally the only part of Warframe where it felt remotely necessary to spend money. You likely won’t even start to worry about running out of space for a few dozen hours. And if you really want to avoid paying, you can also take rare items you find and sell them to other players for Platinum in a trading hub to afford more slots – a method that works, but is fairly slow. But Warframe has provided me with so many hours of enjoyment that it has never been a hard decision for me to spend money. I don’t ever spend Platinum on items or crafting materials because that would essentially be paying to not play Warfame – even the items that take a crazy-long time to collect all the materials for are supremely rewarding to finally craft with your own hard work – but you get an insane amount of content for no money. A couple bucks to carry more guns wasn’t a hard call for me. The cosmetic options are also surprisingly expansive. There are a fair amount of base colors to choose from (with an absurd amount of different shades and palettes to buy with Platinum) and every piece of equipment has five different color areas to modify, in addition to adjustable decals, armor attachments, and fancy new helmets. Even without spending money, you can do a lot to define a signature look for yourself in what the community affectionately calls “Fashionframe.” Warframe just has so much to do whether you spend money or not. Even if some of its missions and modes can be hit and miss, it’s extremely easy to ignore the stuff you dislike, focus on the stuff you do, and still have a near-endless amount of game to play. The newest addition, Warframe’s second open-world area called The Orb Vallis, is practically a whole game you could get lost in for hours before remembering there are more than a dozen other planets waiting to be explored.Warframe’s Switch port has been extremely solid. Its graphical quality has been noticeably tuned down a bit relative to the PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 versions, just as with other visually lush games ported to Switch (like Doom or Wolfenstein II), but it still looks surprisingly great and runs well. The framerate is locked at 30fps docked or undocked, but it seems to have held that extremely well in my time with it, with only slight slowdowns occasionally. And because Warframe is largely a PvE game, I haven’t experienced any annoying lag while playing on Wi-Fi (unless I’m connected to someone with a massive ping). I appreciate that you don’t need the Nintendo Switch Online membership to play, and flat-out love that it can do voice chat by plugging a headset directly into the Switch in the same way Fortnite does – any game that avoids the terrible Nintendo voice chat phone app is doing it right. Unlike Fortnite, there’s no cross-platform play and no way to use the same account across different platforms, but neither of those issues are limitations of the Switch version specifically. It is notable that if you’ve been playing on PC you’ll be able to copy your account over to the Switch, though after that you can’t sync up your progress going forward. The lack of offline mode does mean you won’t be able to play Warframe on the go, even while playing solo – which, unfortunately, undermines the major selling point of the Switch as a whole – but it otherwise feels right at home. I’ll always prefer a mouse and keyboard to a controller for Warframe (though it does have optional Breath of the Wild-style motion aiming with the Joy Con that has proved helpful) but it’s still undoubtedly one of the best free-to-play games available on the Switch. THE VERDICT Warframe isn’t an easily approachable game, but it’s one that’s worth getting comfortable with. It’s a game that never stops growing from a developer who is passionate about working with its community. It also just feels amazing to play, with a satisfying kill-collect-craft loop that’s supported by a mountain of player choice and some wonderfully responsive movement mechanics. Some of its systems are needlessly complex and improperly explained, making it easy to get overwhelmed or burnt out, but there’s just so much to do here that Warframe always excitingly pulls me back with its next update.

This review replaces our original 2015 review which, thanks to Blizzard's constant updates, no longer reflects the state ofHeroes of the Storm. If variety is the spice of life, then Heroes of the Storm is the MOBA genre’s ghost pepper. Recognizable characters from Blizzard’s most iconic games face off against each other on themed maps with unique objectives that serve as lightning rods for teamfights. Heroes of the Storm also takes a more simplified and accessible approach to the genre that bucks MOBA trends by implementing a streamlined talent system and team-shared experience. It doesn’t always work, but when its at its best Heroes of the Storm can be one of the most varied and exciting 5v5 competitive games around. This is a MOBA with all the hallmarks of a Blizzard-produced game: a punchy art style, responsive controls, and loads of stuff to do to work toward satisfying unlocks. But most importantly, Heroes of the Storm’s take on the MOBA formula is distinctive because it’s willing to kill some of the genre’s sacred cows in order to make its mechanics easier to learn and its matches flow differently.Each person on the two five-person teams selects a hero to play as, and each of its maps (called battlegrounds) have AI-controlled minion waves and bases protected by a series of towers, but upon closer inspection they've got less in common with League of Legends and Dota 2 than it seems. From the first moments of a Heroes of the Storm match you’re doing something entirely different: because you don’t have to kill minions to earn gold (in fact, there’s no gold and no items to worry about at all) there’s less at stake if you leave your lane to help out a ally in a jam. While staying in lane soaking up experience is important, there were plenty of times where moving around the map to help teammates was an equally useful play. Another distinctive design choice that works in Heroes of the Storm’s favor is its loads of map variety – a welcome change of pace in a genre known for focusing on a single sports arena-like map. Each of its 14 maps is built around a unique mechanic that moves the fight from the lanes to a special objective that becomes the focal point of every game. It’s both mechanically and thematically fun to run around a well-kept garden collecting seeds to grow a giant plant monster for my team to pilot on Garden of Terror, or to fight alongside angels and demons on the Diablo-themed Battlefield of Eternity map. Each battleground offers something special in both aesthetic and play style, which keeps things feeling fresh even after having played over a hundred hours. The design of these battlegrounds is largely well thought out. Great maps like Tomb of the Spider Queen, where you race to collect and turn in gems to call down game-changing spiders, or Braxis Holdout, which is a fun blend of point control and intense base defenses against hordes of Zerg, pack a punch. On Dragon Shire, a map where your team attempts to hold two control points simultaneously and then send a runner towards the middle of the map to take a base-sieging dragon form, I was asked to make split-second tactical calls that could make or break the game. I had to decide whether it was better to defend an already-captured point or aide my teammates in assaulting the enemy’s hold on the other. These tense and exciting-to-make decisions felt like they were a direct result of the map’s layout and objective design, which constantly pushed my team into making meaningful moves regardless of the results. When they’re firing on cylinders, the battlegrounds add to the fun, taking on a life of their own while helping keep the action peppered with interesting and consequential decisions.Of course, any time you have a long list of maps some will rise above the others, but it still doesn’t make it any easier to stomach the weaker maps (especially since it still isn’t possible to ban the bad apples). The rage-inducing Blackheart’s Bay, for example, has you collect and turn in coins in to a ghostly pirate in exchange for a cannon bombardment on the enemy defenses. But it feels needlessly large, making it difficult to rotate effectively to collect coins and far too easy to simply sit and camp the turn-in location, leading to a barrage of frustration rather than fun. There are more good maps than annoying ones, though, so the balance is in Heroes of the Storm’s favor. For Blizzard fans, at least, Heroes of the Storm holds a huge advantage over other MOBAs because it draws its characters from games and universes that Blizzard has been building for decades. It feels like the Blizzard version of Super Smash Bros., with 77 heroes and villains from across Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and classic franchises all bringing their own unique flavor to the battlefield as they take part in fast-paced teamfights. When I played a match as Sylvanas, a connection to that hero had already been forged during my time with World of Warcraft (and Warcraft 3, where she made her debut way back in 2002). That cast has grown quickly and steadily, with one or two new heroes being added per month. And as the source material expands through new characters in games like Overwatch, Hearthstone, and WoW, the roster has even more opportunity to grow as well. Heroes of the Storm capitalizes on the this, delivering some incredibly varied hero design in the process.Take Cho’Gall, the twin-headed ogre mage, for example. In an unconventional design seen nowhere else in the genre, he is made to be played by two players simultaneously, with each controlling a head and its unique set of abilities. It sounds like madness – and it totally is, in all the right ways. In two pairs of capable hands, Cho’Gall can be a fearsome opponent to square off against – but on the flip side, hilarity can ensue if the two players aren’t well-versed in piloting a single ogre. When playing a finesse character like this, two heads are only better than one if they know what they’re doing. The same outside-the-box principles apply to the design of the StarCraft Firebat Blaze, who can set up a Terran bunker for allied heroes to hop into for extra defense, grab a flamethrower, and torch the enemy while holding a critical objective or choke point. Those are just a couple of examples, but most of these heroes feel vastly different from one another and remain consistently fun to play and experiment with across the board. In addition to each hero’s starting set of three skills, there’s a level-based talent system that deftly replaces the tried-and-true MOBA item shop, keeping you close to the action instead of forcing you back to base to purchase upgrades. Every few levels you can augment your hero’s abilities (including choosing between two unique ultimate abilities at level 10) to best fit how you want to play during that match. For instance, if I wanted to focus on Overwatch hero Hanzo’s Scatter Arrow in order to turn the enemy team into walking pincushions, there are talents that improve that ability. But another equally compelling route instead focuses on the long-range, single-target poke damage from his Storm Bow ability. Each talent decision has strengths and weaknesses that are fun to consider, and that makes choices matter. It’s exciting and rewarding to be adaptable throughout a match, especially when you start factoring in the map you’re on and the enemies you’re facing off against.The biggest drawback of this system is that your experience is level shared across your entire team. Teamwork has always been a key component in competitive gaming, but having your power be tied directly to the performance of others made for some fiery exchanges between teammates playing the blame game whenever we fell behind. Heroes of the Storm leans into the idea that ‘teamwork makes the dream work,’ but there’s also a level of individual skill expression that feels like its missing because I’m so inextricably linked to my allies. The good news is that, when all goes well, victory feels like a complete team effort and GGs are thrown about with glee. Just get ready for when it doesn’t, because feeling like you have no control over the course of a match is no fun. The fear of being dropped into a map your team isn’t prepared for can be remedied easily by switching out of the ranked ladder mode. The accessible Quick Play can be great for casual sessions, but the addition of Unranked Draft adds the strategic elements of picking and banning heroes for a specific map without the stress of the ranked ladder until you’re ready to face the real thing. Of course, Hero League is there for those who want to plug into Heroes of the Storm’s most competitive outlet. It’s got all the modern trappings that hardcore ranked MOBA players are looking for: Ranks, skill-based matchmaking, promotion matches, drafts, and the extra intensity that inherently comes with ranked play are all here. It’s a great option for those who want to get serious and test their mettle and see where they stack up.Being a free-to-play game, Heroes of the Storm puts a huge emphasis on out-of-game progression systems, many of which tie directly into monetization. There’s three currencies (gold, gems, shards), extra rewards for leveling up heroes, about six-quintillion customization items, and yes, loot chests. Let’s just get this out of the way: Unless there’s a way to opt out of randomized progression, it’ll always be a sub-optimal way to earn items. It robs me of clear goals other than hoping I’ll roll what I want with my next lever pull. With that being said, there were plenty of ways to earn in-game items through leveling heroes, completing quests, and reaching milestones. Parts of the progression may be locked within loot crates, but at least Blizzard is generous with them.

This review exclusively covers the single-player portion of Grand Theft Auto V, since it launched without any multiplayer mode. For me, Grand Theft Auto V’s extraordinary scope is summed up in two favourite moments. One is from a mid-game mission in which I flew a plane into another plane, fought the crew, hijacked the thing, and then parachuted out and watched it crash into the sea to escape death at the hands of incoming military fighter jets. Another time, whilst driving around in an off-road buggy, I got distracted by something that looked like a path up one of the San Andreas mountains. Turns out it was a path, and I spent 15 minutes following to the summit, where I nearly ran over a group of hikers. “Typical!” one of them yelled at me, as if he nearly gets run over by a rogue ATV on top of a mountain every time he goes on a hike.I could go on like this for ages. GTA V has an abundance of such moments, big and small, that make San Andreas – the city of Los Santos and its surrounding areas – feel like a living world where anything can happen. It both gives you tremendous freedom to explore an astonishingly well-realised world and tells a story that’s gripping, thrilling, and darkly comic. It is a leap forward in narrative sophistication for the series, and there’s no mechanical element of the gameplay that hasn’t been improved over Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s immediately noticeable that the cover system is more reliable and the auto-aim less touchy. The cars handle less like their tires are made of butter and stick better to the road, though their exaggerated handling still leaves plenty of room for spectacular wipeouts. And at long last, Rockstar has finally slain one of its most persistent demons, mission checkpointing, ensuring that you never have to do a long, tedious drive six times when you repeatedly fail a mission ever again.Grand Theft Auto V is also an intelligent, wickedly comic, and bitingly relevant commentary on contemporary, post-economic crisis America. Everything about it drips satire: it rips into the Millennial generation, celebrities, the far right, the far left, the middle class, the media... Nothing is safe from Rockstar’s sharp tongue, including modern video games. One prominent supporting character spends most of his time in his room shouting sexual threats at people on a headset whilst playing a first-person shooter called Righteous Slaughter (“Rated PG – pretty much the same as the last game.”) It’s not exactly subtle – he literally has the word “Entitled” tattooed on his neck, and the in-game radio and TV’s outright piss-takes don’t leave much to the imagination – but it is often extremely funny, and sometimes provocative with it. Grand Theft Auto’s San Andreas is a fantasy, but the things it satirises – greed, corruption, hypocrisy, the abuse of power – are all very real. If GTA IV was a targeted assassination of the American dream, GTA V takes aim at the modern American reality. The attention to detail that goes into making its world feel alive and believable is also what makes its satire so biting.Grand Theft Auto V’s plot happily operates at the boundaries of plausibility, sending you out to ride dirt bikes along the top of trains, hijack military aircraft, and engage in absurd shootouts with scores of policemen, but its three main characters are what keep it relatable even at its most extreme. The well-written and acted interplay between them provides the biggest laughs and most affecting moments, and the way that their relationships with one another developed and my opinion of them changed throughout the story gave the narrative its power. They feel like people – albeit extraordinarily fed up people.Michael is a retired con man in his 40s, filling out around the middle as he drinks beside the pool in his Vinewood mansion with a layabout son, air-headed daughter, serially unfaithful wife, and very expensive therapist – all of whom hate him. Franklin is a young man from downtown Los Santos who laments the gang-banger stereotype even as he’s reluctantly seduced by the prospect of a bigger score. And then there’s Trevor, a volatile career criminal who lives in the desert selling drugs and murdering rednecks; a psychopath whose bloodthirsty lunacy is fuelled by a combination of methamphetamine and a seriously messed-up childhood.The missions flit between their individual stories and an overarching plotline that involves all three, and it’s a credit to GTA V’s versatility and universal quality that each character has his share of standout missions. As their arcs developed I felt very differently about each of them at different times – they’re not entirely the archetypes that they seem to be.This three-character structure makes for excellent pacing and great variety in the storyline, but it also allows Rockstar to compartmentalise different aspects of Grand Theft Auto’s personality. In doing so, it sidesteps some of the troubling disconnect that arose when Niko Bellic abruptly alternated between anti-violent philosophising and sociopathic killing sprees in GTA IV. Here, many of Michael’s missions revolve around his family and his past, Franklin is usually on call for vehicular mayhem, and extreme murderous rampages are left to Trevor. Each has a special ability suited to his skills – Franklin can to slow time while driving, for example – which gives them a unique touch. Narratively, it’s effective – even off-mission I found myself playing in character, acting like a mid-life-crisis guy with anger issues as Michael, a thrill-seeker as Franklin, and a maniac as Trevor. The first thing I did when Franklin finally made some good money was buy him an awesome car, because I felt like that’s what he’d want.Trevor feels a like a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card for Rockstar, providing an outlet for all the preposterous antics and murderous behaviour that otherwise might not fit in with GTA V’s narrative ambitions. I found his violent insanity a little overblown and tiresome at first. As get-out clauses go, though, it’s pretty effective, and Trevor’s over-the-top missions are some of GTA V’s action-packed highlights. It’s a successful way of solving a problem that’s prevalent in open-world games: the tension between the story that the writers are trying to tell, and the story you create yourself within its systems and its world. Grand Theft Auto V accommodates both, masterfully, allowing neither to undermine the other. The actual act of switching between them also provides a window into their individual lives and habits, fleshing out their personalities in a way that feels natural and novel. Pick a character and the camera zooms out over the San Andreas map, closing back in on wherever they happen to be. Michael might be at home watching TV when you drop in on him, or speeding along the motorway blasting ‘80s hits, or having a cigarette at the golf club; Franklin might be walking out of a strip club, munching a bag of snacks at home, or arguing with his ex-girlfriend; there’s a good chance that Trevor could be passed out half naked on a beach surrounded by dead bodies or, on one memorable occasion, drunk in a stolen police helicopter. It could be nearly anything, because there is a bewildering multiplicity of things to do in the new San Andreas – tennis, yoga, hiking, racing on sea and on land, flying planes, golfing, cycling, diving, hunting, and more. The missions are an able guide to both San Andreas’ locations and its activities, touring you around the map and whetting your appetite for independent exploration of it all. The way that we’re introduced to San Andreas never feels artificial – the map is completely open from the start, for example – which contributes to the impression that it’s a real place, somewhere you can get to know. If GTA IV’s Liberty City feels like a living city, San Andreas feels like a living world. I saw people walking their dogs along the beach in the country as I jet-skied past, arguing on the street outside a cinema in Los Santos, and camped – with tents and everything – overnight on Mount Chiliad, before packing up and continuing a hike in the morning. It’s astounding. The ambience changes dramatically depending on where you are, too. Trevor’s dusty trailer out in the middle of nowhere in Blaine County feels like a different world from downtown Los Santos or Vespucci Beach. It wasn’t until the first time I flew a plane out of the city and over the mountains I was cycling around a few hours before that the full scale of it became obvious. It pushes the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 further than it has any right to, and it looks incredible. The biggest jump in quality since Grand Theft Auto IV is the character animation, but the world is also much more expansive, detailed, and populous. The price we pay for that is occasional framerate dips and texture pop-in, which I found became more prominent the longer I played, but never significantly detracted from my experience. For such a gigantic and flexible world it’s also remarkably bug-free – I encountered just three minor issues in the 35 hours I spent on my first playthrough, none of which caused me to fail a mission. San Andreas’s extraordinary sense of place is heightened by the fact that so much of it isn’t on the map. There’s so much going on that it’s easy to find things organically, rather than spend your life following a mission marker. I once stole a passenger jet from the airport for the hell of it, then parachuted onto the top of the tallest building in Los Santos. (I then accidentally jumped off the top and fell to my death, forgetting that I’d already used the parachute, but I usually leave that bit out.) Out driving in the country, I came across a man tied to a telephone pole in womens’ underwear. I chased down criminals who randomly swipe purses on the street, and happened across gunbattles between police and other miscreants, events that add a sense that this world isn’t completely uneventful if I wasn’t here to disrupt normalcy. I bought an expensive mountain bike and cycled around in the hills, enjoying the view. These little moments can be captured on your phone camera – which, brilliantly, can also take selfies. I have several snaps of Trevor doing his unhinged version of a smile in his underpants on top of a mountain. The story that GTA V tells through its missions takes full advantage of all this variety beyond driving and shooting (though the driving and shooting is still supremely enjoyable). It’s got so many great moments. It had me racing Michael’s lazy blob of a son across Vespucci Beach in one of many misguided attempts at father-son bonding, using a thermal scope to search for someone from a helicopter before chasing them across the city on the ground, torching a meth lab, towing cars for Franklin’s crack-addict cousin to prevent him from losing his job, infiltrating a facility from the sea in a wetsuit and flippers, piloting a submarine, impersonating a construction worker, doing yoga, escaping on jet skis, failing multiple times to land a plane loaded with drugs at a hangar out in the desert… it goes on and on. The days of a repetitive series of “drive here, find this guy, shoot this guy” are behind us. Even missions that would otherwise be formulaic are imbued with novelty and excitement by the potential to play them from three different viewpoints – in a shootout, Trevor might be firing RPGs from a rooftop as Michael and Franklin flank the enemy on the ground. It’s the heists – multi-stage, huge-scale events that serve as the story’s climactic peaks – that show Grand Theft Auto V at its most ambitious and accomplished. Usually there’s a choice between a more involved, stealthier option that will (hopefully) attract less heat, and an all-out option that will be less tense but more explosively chaotic – and what crew to take along with you on the job. All of GTA V’s missions are replayable at any time, letting you relive favourite moments or try out another approach. They also have optional objectives in the vein of Assassin’s Creed’s synchronisation challenges, but crucially, these are invisible the first time you play a mission, and so they don’t distract you from doing things your own way. Sometimes your own way won’t be the way that the designers expected you to do something, and though Grand Theft Auto V is usually very good at bending around you when that happens, there were one or two occasions where it wasn’t prepared for my personal brand of chaos. Overtake a car you’re not supposed to overtake and it will zip through lines of traffic as if by magic. Despite the introduction of new stealth mechanics, enemies will miraculously see you when the mission dictates that they should. Kill someone before you’re supposed to, and that’s sometimes Mission Failed. Most of the time the scripting is good enough to be invisible, but when it’s not, you really notice it – if only because most of the time it’s so seamless. As ever, some of the wittiest writing shows up on the in-game radio that plays behind all of the exploration and mayhem. “There’s nothing more successful, more masculine, more American than a big wad of cash,” blasts one of the in-game ads. “We know times are tough, but they don’t have to be tough for you. Still got some liquidity in your house? Are you insane?” The music selection is also typically excellent, leading to many of those serendipitous moments where you’re driving along and the perfect song comes on. During a heist, when the radio isn’t blaring the background, a dynamic soundtrack seriously builds tension. The satire is helped by integration of modern life into the game world. Every character revolves around their smartphone – it’s used to trade stocks, call up friends to meet up and send emails. There’s a great Facebook spoof, Life Invader, on the in-game Interne, with the slogan “Where Your Personal Information Becomes A Marketing Profile (That We Can Sell)”. You’ll hear adverts for preposterous parodic TV shows that you can actually watch on your TV at home, optionally whilst enjoying a toke. It might not be realistic, but it definitely feels authentic. It’s worth mentioning that when it comes to sex, drugs, and violence, GTA V pushes boundaries much further than ever before. If the morality police were worried about Hot Coffee, there’s a lot here that will provoke moral hysteria. It’s deliciously subversive, and firmly tongue in cheek... but once or twice, it pushes the boundaries of taste, too. There’s one particular scene, a torture scene in which you have no choice but to actively participate, that I found so troubling that I had difficulty playing it; even couched in obvious criticism of the US government’s recourse to torture post 9/11, it’s a shocking moment that will attract justified controversy. It brings to mind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s No Russian mission, except worse, and without the option to skip over it. Some other stuff, like the ever-present prostitution and extensive strip-club minigames, feels like it’s there just because it can be rather than because it has anything to say. There is nothing in San Andreas, though, that doesn’t serve Rockstar’s purpose in creating an exaggerated projection of America that’s suffused with crime, violence and sleaze. There are no good guys in GTA V. Everyone you meet is a sociopath, narcissist, criminal, lunatic, sadist, cheat, liar, layabout, or some combination of those. Even a man who pays good money to assassinate Los Santos’ worst examples of corporate greed is playing the stock market to his advantage whilst he does it. In a world like this, it’s not hard to see why violence is so often the first recourse. All the pieces fit. THE VERDICT Grand Theft Auto V is not only a preposterously enjoyable video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary America. It represents a refinement of everything that GTA IV brought to the table five years ago. It’s technically more accomplished in every conceivable way, but it’s also tremendously ambitious in its own right. No other world in video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp intelligence behind its sense of humour and gift for mayhem. It tells a compelling, unpredictable, and provocative story without ever letting it get in the way of your own self-directed adventures through San Andreas. It is one of the very best video games ever made.

Max Payne has suffered beyond reasonable limits. (It's all in the name.) Nine years have passed since the last game in the series, yet little has changed for its long-suffering protagonist, who remains deeply traumatised by the death of his wife and child. ‘Trauma’ is the key word – in Greek, it means ‘wound’, and Max is someone who has never let his fully heal. To move on would be to forget – a betrayal of those he loved – and so instead he chooses to wallow in the past and the pain, with the help of brown liquor and white pills.But thankfully, Max Payne 3isn’t content to simply relive the past, and makes bold stylistic and narrative decisions to avoid stagnation. And though these choices have significant consequences on the game’s pacing that may prove divisive, Max Payne 3 is overall a brilliant, darkly-engrossing third outing for one of video games' most troubled characters.Ostensibly, Max Payne 3 looks very different from its predecessors. The rundown tenements and shadowy sidewalks of New York have been replaced by the hedonistic nightclubs and baking heat of São Paulo, where Max has taken a job working private security for wealthy businessman Rodrigo Branco. Unsurprisingly, things don’t work out for Max: Rodrigo’s trophy wife, Fabiana, is kidnapped on Max’s watch, which sets in motion a chain of events that draws Max into a much larger, more sinister story.The change of location is underscored by a raft of cinematic effects: scan lines, chromatic aberration, shifting film stock. Initially, it all seems a bit much, too noisy and distracting, but after a while you acclimatise and it becomes part of the game’s distinctive texture. But it’s not just stylish gloss – like everything in the game, it feeds into the characterisation of Max, emphasising his jaded disconnection from the world around him.Despite swapping the shadows for the sun, the series hasn’t lost its hardboiled heritage. The non-linear narrative, the cast of suspicious characters, a plot twisted by deception and corruption – it’s all present and correct. If you’re not a fan of genre fiction, you might find the supporting cast risibly generic, the plot a bit flimsy, but there’s a marked difference between using archetypal characters because you’re creatively spent and deliberately tapping into a rich tradition. Max Payne 3 does the latter – it’s a game that is fully literate in the genre of which it strives to be a part, and judged on those terms it’s one of the finest executions of game noir to date. And nowhere is this better exemplified than in James McCaffrey’s standout performance as Max Payne. It’s gnarled and bitter, as you would expect – he effortlessly delivers the script’s many Chandlerlisms with calloused cynicism – but it’s also a surprisingly nuanced turn. Throughout the game, you're never sure if Payne's searching for absolution, trying to save another man's wife, or if he's really on a protracted suicide mission, trying to embrace his own destruction.Almost half-way through this review, and I’ve yet to mention gameplay. Maybe that’s a tacit criticism in itself. It’s not that Max Payne 3’s gameplay is substandard – far from it – but it’s always firmly in the service of its overarching narrative. Consequently, the game is heavily punctuated by cut scenes – some brief, some quite long. And it’s easy to see how their frequency may prove too intrusive; some players might feel that control is being taken away from them too soon or given back a little too late. Ultimately, it’s a trade-off, and if you buy into Max’s plight, cut scenes become engrossing, and it’s joy to see them bleed seamlessly into the furious action.The core gameplay is simple yet refined. Although there are a range of distinctive weapons in the game, you can only carry two side-arms and one two-handed weapon at any given time. And if you choose to dual-wield, you’re forced into dropping the larger, potentially more powerful weapon. It keeps things straightforward and uncluttered. Max’s signature time-bending moves – Bullet Time and Shoot Dodge – return, and are easy to pick up and master. The game’s fully-destructible environments really intensify firefights – seeing the air around you slowly woven with spiralling bullets, fractured glass, and plumes of shredded paper is genuinely thrilling. They’re simple mechanics, but once you’ve mastered combining them, the action and destruction you can orchestrate is breathtaking. It’s a little disappointing for a game that invests so heavily in the development of its protagonist not to reflect this at the level of gameplay: Max has no new abilities available to him that aren’t there from the start. But the inclusion of a non-regenerating health system does a great job of forcing you to play like a desperate man on the edge. You can’t cowardly hide behind a pillar waiting for you health to return – it won’t, and the pillar will crumble.Max Payne 3 is unapologetically violent. In fact, it lingers on violence, but not in a tawdry or sensational way. Yes, it focuses on some of its most visceral manifestations – ragged bullet wounds, charred flesh, dismembered limbs – but it also peers into the unseen causes that lie behind such acts of violence. It touches on the disparity between rich and poor, and how resentment and desperation can fester in the slums and the penthouses alike. This isn’t only tackled in the main story, but also in nice scraps of incidental narrative recovered in clues dotted about the meticulously-crafted environments.The game’s kill camera -- another one of the game’s many visual flourishes -- tracks the final bullet from Max’s gun to its intended target, but it never sublimates the violence. Although you’ll kill hundreds of people in Max Payne 3, it remains a grisly business throughout. However, the action set-pieces seem a little muted, especially when compared to, say, the spectacular recent capers of Nathan Drake. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The difference in execution is perhaps best explained through a comparison. In Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, there’s a well-known scene in which Sully and Drake must escape from a French château before it burns to the ground. It’s exciting and adrenaline-inducing, but it doesn’t really serve much purpose in terms of the game’s narrative. It’s just another one of Uncharted’s many impressive set-pieces. A similar scene occurs in Max Payne 3; a building is set on fire and Max must escape before he is incinerated. But this isn’t just eye-candy or glitzy spectacle. Admittedly, it’s less exhilarating than Uncharted’s equivalent scene but it’s also has greater significance. Max has found himself at his lowest ebb inhabiting an environment quickly resembling hell – the metaphorical significance of which isn’t lost on Max. This is when the game is at its strongest – when gameplay, character and narrative all wonderfully fuse and interplay. For adrenaline junkies -- those who lust after bigger and fierier explosions, more extravagant death-defying scenarios -- the set-pieces in Max Payne 3 might seem a tad sedate. (Saying that, you still get to shoot missiles out of the air in slow-motion while dangling from a helicopter.) But it’s a game that is more concerned with making its spectacles mean something within the confines of its story.For a Rockstar game there’s also conspicuous lack of freedom in Max Payne 3. It’s easy to imagine how Sao Paolo’s favelas could have been realised as kind of destitute labyrinth, with a disorientated Max lost amidst its ramshackle alleys, but instead the game always provides you with a well-defined pathway. There’s never any doubt where to go or who to shoot, since you can always feel the spectral touch of an authorial hand pushing you forwards, towards the next checkpoint, the next cutscene. Occasionally the promise of liberty is dangled in front of the player – when Max is equipped with a silenced weapon, you wonder if sections can be tackled with a more stealthy approach – but it’s never long before the excrement collides with the industrial turbine.The single-player story lasts around 10-12 hours. Max Payne 3 has a variety of Arcade modes – from score challenges to speed runs to keep you busy once you finish the main story. In New York Minute, you're tasked with playing through the campaign with a clock counting down from five minutes above your head. The premise is simple: kill guys to earn time. It's like Time Crisis, and a lot of fun, but it's unlikely that you'll play through the entire again exclusively in this mode. Still, it's nice way to sample key parts of the narrative again, especially if you're partial to a state of constant anxiety.It’s the multiplayer that is the real surprise, however. It’s gleeful pandemonium. Gang Wars, in particular, attempts something rather ambitious, trying to weave narrative into what is usually a player-determined mode. You'll play four rounds, with different objectives that alter depending on what happens in each of them: from claiming territory to defusing bombs to assassinating a randomly selected leader of the opposing gang. This accumulates a point advantage going into the fifth and final round, which always takes the form of an all-out death match. Bursts, which function like perks, are central to this mode, and confer advantages to the members of your crew, from raising the calibre of your weapons to inducing paranoia in the opposing team, making friendlies appear as enemies. Gang Wars has lofty aspirations, and it's not entirely successful - you're not left with enduring memories of these vignettes, nor does it feel as if they're really filling in gaps in the game's narrative once Max has exited stage left pursued by hooded thug. But it doesn't really matter since the gameplay itself is relentless fun, giving players a sense of freedom absent from the single-player campaign. It's also laudable to see a developer trying to innovate in the multiplayer space, rather than simply rehashing the mainstays. Max Payne’s multiplayer is definitely not an afterthought, and will certainly reward players with months of enjoyment.There are plenty of games which are celebrated for their gameplay but lack anything in way of story or character. Max Payne 3 is a different type of proposition. The gameplay is simple yet satisfying, but it’s entirely in the service of a strongly-authored narrative. Players aren’t at the liberty to roam, to explore, or to shake things up. Some might find this too controlling, but in return for your freedom, you’re rewarded with a mature genre piece which is also a finely-realised character study. Action games continue to inch the dial towards 11, sometimes at the expense of their narrative integrity. Max Payne 3, however, has the conviction to reign in the action, imbue it with purpose - the spectacle still sparkles but it also makes sense.

We originally reviewed Dota 2 in 2013. It has changed significantly since then, so much so that we decided to review it again. Our original review can still be found here. For more about why we've chosen to re-review certain games, head here Given that it started life as a faithful recreation of the original Defence of the Ancients mod, you’d be forgiven for thinking of Dota 2 as the archetypical MOBA. Yet this isn’t the case: in practice, Dota 2’s purism sets it apart from the vast majority of games in this genre. What we think of as the MOBA really began with Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends—games that took that roughshod family of WarCraft custom maps and professionalised them, commercialised them, found them a form that would enshrine the MOBA at the top of the gaming world for the better part of a decade. Dota 2 is different. Adopted by Valve, that original mod became a tool for boosting Steam’s po[CENSORED]rity in places where the service hadn’t reached the ubiquity that it enjoyed in Europe and North America—such as Russia, Southeast Asia and China, traditional strongholds of the DotA scene. And the best way to do this proved to be to remain steadfastly idiosyncratic . What this resulted in was a free to play MOBA where all of the heroes are free, where there are no account levels to grind, where design compromises imposed by the limitations of a noughties map editor have been embraced as design law. Dota’s leap from mod-scene darling to million-dollar phenomenon was whiplash-inducingly quick, its uncommercial credibility ripped away like a bandaid—so fast that you might not notice it was gone.What does this mean for you as a prospective player? Principally, it means that this is a dizzyingly deep competitive team strategy game whose core design benefits from fifteen years of unbroken refinement. It was in this strategic sandbox that the basic assumptions of the MOBA were established: two teams, three lanes, five heroes per team, towers, creeps, jungles, bases, and Ancients. On paper, your job is to lay siege to the enemy base and blow up the enemy ancient. In practice, your job is to mani[CENSORED]te the strategic, economic and psychological tempo of the match, a challenge whose variables change every time you play.You’ve also got to pick the right wizard, cast the right spells, and make sure they buy the right shoes. Obviously. This is Dota we're talking about.Dota 2’s learning curve is mountainous, but everybody has to start somewhere. You’ll start by picking a character you like and learning how to use their abilities effectively—lining up stuns, dishing out damage, turning foes into frogs, being the best helicopter or bear or fishman that you can be. Then you’ll learn something about how to play that hero as part of a team, which stat-boosting items to buy, and at what stage in the game you’re at your most powerful. You’ll learn some hard lessons about getting too close to enemy towers, about carrying a town portal scroll to get from place to place on time, about vision-granting wards and why everybody’s always yelling for someone else to buy them. Then you’ll improve, maybe learn a few more heroes, learn to look at your minimap, and then you’ll realise that you’re going to have to unlearn about 75% of the things you think you know in order to surmount the next step of Dota 2’s endless staircase. If you enjoy this process of learning, failing, and learning again, then thousands of hours will pass: and before you know it, you’ll be a below-average Dota 2 player like everybody else.Although the community has always maintained certain customs about the best way to play, Dota itself has never enforced a particular methodology. This is the key thing that separates it from its peers: while other MOBAs have tended to fold the community metagame into the design of the games themselves—codifying player roles like tanks, supports and damage-dealers as fixed archetypes within their rosters—this doesn’t work quite the same way in Dota 2. This is a game with a simulationist heart, where a character isn’t a good tank because they were always intended to be so, but because of the specific way they interact with Dota 2’s underlying matrix of items, statistics, and map features. This is a game where the addition or subtraction of a tree in a single part of the map might change the viability of a hero—a game of endless interrelated butterfly effects.What this means is that Dota 2 is a game you will never finish learning, one that cannot be perfected either by its developers or its players. It goes without saying that it’s hard to learn: I’ve been playing consistently for the last six years and I’m pretty bad at it. But that journey has been one of the most rewarding and remarkable experiences I’ve ever had with a videogame. The process of learning, sharing knowledge and adapting to continual change brings people together: I have made lifelong friends playing Dota 2, people with whom I now share an extensive vocabulary rooted in this expansive, strange, beautiful game.That inherent flexibility is also the reason Dota 2 makes for such a compelling esport. Its complex sandbox allows for huge divergence in playstyles across teams, players, and regions. While restrictive metagames have emerged from time to time, they have never lasted: and in seven years of high-profile competition, the field has remained open to challengers from all parts of the world, with all sorts of different approaches to that core strategic challenge. Indeed, the creativity that Dota 2’s core simulation supports is something that the best players are ideally positioned to exploit, and watching the metagame get turned on its head by a brilliant bit of lateral thinking—something that happens at least once per International—is a pure thrill. If you’ve never felt a basketball stadium full of people explode with excitement because a teen millionaire has selected an unusual dragon, then, well, you’re missing out.It’d be impractical to recount every way that Dota 2 has changed since I first reviewed the game for PC Gamer back in 2013. It has a better in-game UI and a much improved main menu, including faster load times and a more sophisticated interface for pregame strategising. Most recently, Valve introduced new quality-of-life features like context-sensitive indicators to let you know when a hero or item has been altered in a patch. Given that balance passes now take place fortnightly, allowing players ready access to this information is very welcome.The Arcade was a flagship new feature when it launched, a freeform custom game lobby that recreates the conditions of the WarCraft III custom map scene from which the original DotA emerged. As in those days, a few game modes—chiefly tower defence mods and a couple of combat-heavy Dota variants—dominate.