. PREDATOR

Game Informations : Developer: Runner Duck Publishers : Curve Digital Platforms: PS4 , Nitendo Switch , Xbox One , Microsoft Windows , Linux , macOS Initial release date: October 19th 2017 Beneath Bomber Crew’s cutesy exterior is a tough-as-nails World War II aircraft simulation with an eye toward historical accuracy. Its frantic real-time gameplay sets it apart from other ship sims, and there are lots of interesting options for tackling its tough levels.Like the classic roguelike FTL: Faster Than Light, Bomber Crew puts you in charge of a vehicle which you must staff and manage as it goes on missions, but the comparisons end there. That’s mainly because you can’t pause to give orders, so the challenge comes from performing all the duties of a bomber crew, from gunnery to navigation to bombardment, at the same time. Targeting enemy fighters, picking destinations, and lining up bombing runs all work the same way: press the middle mouse button to zoom out into targeting mode, find your target, and hold your sights on it until the circle is filled.It requires careful coordination: you can’t drop your bombs without opening the bay doors, but opening them too soon slows down your bomber and wastes precious fuel. You have to make that decision while you’re juggling other tasks like lining up the plane for a run, extinguishing engine fires, and resuscitating downed crewmates. Sometimes all at once. Some of the best missions have special requirements for completion. One of my favorite mission types involves the Dam-Buster bomb, a weapon built during World War II that required bombers to fly dangerously close to the ground and skip bombs across the surface of a lake to hit their target. It’s a tricky shot because it requires perfect timing, dropping the bomb when two circles in the targeting reticule overlap, but there’s nothing as exciting as blowing open a dam with a well-placed hit. The Grand Slam was the biggest non-nuclear bomb used in the 20th century. Another great mission type involves the Grand Slam, the biggest non-nuclear bomb used in the 20th century. Most bombs can be dropped at low altitude, but the Grand Slam’s detonation is so large requires you to bomb from much higher up – so high that the cold can freeze your crew and a poor oxygen supply can result in quick asphyxiation. The targets are a lot smaller from high altitude, too, but pulling it off is all the more satisfying. And those are just the main objectives. Bomber Crew throws some optional objectives into the mix as well, most of which involving reconnaissance photos, but I’ve also shot down enemy aces and incoming V-1 guided bombs and V-2 missiles. My proudest achievement was when I dropped a bomb directly onto a V-1 in mid-flight. Beyond the reward of self-satisfaction, completing missions unlocks a wide range of upgrades. Those range from simple, passive things like leveling up engines for more speed or gunners for dealing more damage to more interesting stuff, like the ability to call in a squadron of Spitfires to back you up in a fight or giving your homing pigeon a tiny helmet, increasing its chances of survival after a crash. Those frequent unlocks make every mission feel like a meaningful step forward. Bomber Crew won’t go easy on you. You’ll need them, because Bomber Crew won’t go easy on you. After the training missions the difficulty ramps up considerably, and some missions will seem impossible when you first try them. Slow, piston-engined fighters are eventually replaced by rocket-powered enemies that are much harder to hit and can chew up a poorly defended bomber in a matter of seconds. Victory is a matter of experimenting with combinations of upgrades or running easier alternative missions that can make the challenging ones easier. Higher-level missions are daunting because a single mistake can doom your crew. In one mission, my hydraulic systems broke, which meant my turrets couldn't aim at enemies, who promptly took advantage of that fact and set fire to my engines. I sent my engineer to repair the engines, but he fell to his death when the next attack blew a hole in the plane. Gravity then took its natural course, and my bomber crashed shortly after, leaving me to consider what I’d done wrong. Maybe if I had sent the engineer to revive a downed crewman instead, that crewman could have fixed the hydraulics, allowing the turrets to defend the bomber and preventing the engineer from dying long enough to fix the engine, and keeping the plane aloft. In hindsight it’s clear, but it takes some trial and error to figure out. But because the missions take place in real-time and you can’t save mid-mission, failure can feel like a major setback. A crash means restarting, rebuilding your bomber, and replaying the first half of what can be a tough 20-minute mission, and doing that a few times in a row is frustrating. Games like FTL are great because even though a whole run ends if you die, individual encounters are much shorter, and some locations are completely peaceful. With Bomber Crew, once you're in the air over Europe you're likely to face constant flak fire and enemy fighters until it’s over, so if something goes wrong it can feel like there's rest and no way out. Fortunately, most of the missions balance the challenge well; and at the very least I was always engaged with keeping my bomber in the air, so I was never bored. Still, it rarely feels unfair because there are so many options for different approaches. Most of the missions are fun, win or lose, and every action you take offers tangible feedback for how to improve or unlocks new upgrades. If something goes wrong, you can try again with a different build or take on a different mission first. There’s always something new to try. Bomber Crew's user interface has a few weaknesses that make the job a little harder than it probably should be. Tooltips would be especially useful, because even after a couple of dozen hours I occasionally find myself forgetting what certain upgrades do. I once crashed because I moved my pilot by accident, causing the plane to fall from the sky – it should probably be a little harder to do that by mistake. Another failure came a few times, when I told a crewmember to man a turret, but he chose to stand next to it instead because I wasn’t quite as precise as it demands with my clicks. And, as a weird, minor thing that came up, there’s no way to adjust the volume in-game. Verdict Bomber Crew is an exciting, in-depth management sim with a charming style that offsets the occasionally brutal difficulty of keeping your crew alive and trying to hit a target, all in real time. A rewarding upgrade cycle makes some trial-and-error frustration worthwhile, and once you get into the groove you can lose hours to its enjoyable rhythm.

Game Informations : Developer: Naughty Dog Publishers : Sony Interactive Entertainment , SIE Worldwide Studios , Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Platforms: PS3 , PS4 Initial release date: 14 juin 2013 The Last of Us is a near-perfect analog for The Road, a literary masterpiece written by Cormac McCarthy. Both present a hopeless, post-apocalyptic situation navigated by two characters – an adult and a child – with nothing but absolute despair surrounding them. Like The Road, The Last of Us is perpetually dangerous and unpredictable, and like The Road, what happened to get society to a point of rapid decay isn’t the focus. It’s the story of the characters at hand, and those characters alone, at the center of both plots. The beauty of The Last of Us when compared to The Road, however, is that it’s fully interactive, complete with all of the vulnerability, uncertainty and perpetual insecurity such a situation inherently provides.The Last of Us seamlessly intertwines satisfying, choice-based gameplay with a stellar narrative. It never slows down, it never lets up, and frankly, it never disappoints. It’s PlayStation 3’s best exclusive, and the entire experience, from start to finish, is remarkable. I lost myself in Naughty Dog’s vision of a pandemic-ridden United States, in the characters that po[CENSORED]te this unfortunate wasteland, and in their individual stories. The 17 hours I spent playing through the campaign are among the most memorable I’ve ever spent with a game. Players are cast in the role of Joel, a grizzled and tired survivor stuck in a cycle any person could imagine finding oneself in two decades after the collapse of society. He takes odd jobs, acquires food, clothing, and shelter, and repeats the process endlessly, a process that only gets more arduous and desperate as time goes on. Joel does what’s necessary to stay alive, and in the ruined United States he travels around, his survival often means someone else’s untimely death. Occasionally haunted by his past but living in his dystopian present, Joel is surprisingly easy to root for. In many ways, he’s strangely relatable. He retains shreds of his humanity as best he can, considering the extraordinary circumstances he finds himself in. He has a sharpness to him, but a tenderness, too, which he occasionally displays to his partner, a woman named Tess. In the time it took me to beat The Last of Us, I came to care about Joel, and I became invested in his story, and the stories of those he meets along the way. The Last of Us takes place in 2033, so the regular world Joel harkens back to on occasion is one you and I understand. It’s fascinating to think about how he’s evolved since the world crumbled around him, and even if he does what’s necessary to stay alive – including stealing and murdering – it’s hard to fault him for it. In fact, one of the great ironies of The Last of Us is that you’ll be pulling for him no matter how dark things get, or how violent his actions are. He does what’s required. Joel knows it’s either him or them. There’s no gray area. Joel can be cold and ruthless, but those around him have the propensity to be far worse. As riveting as Joel is, he isn’t the only character of consequence in The Last of Us. Indeed, calling him the main character is true only to an extent, because it’s his companion, a young girl named Ellie, who truly steals the show. Joel makes a business arrangement early in the adventure to help transport Ellie across what remains of the United States, a wasteland marked with boundless wildlife alongside cities and towns ruthlessly reclaimed by nature. From there on out, the two are virtually inseparable, even if they are at first skeptical of one another, forced together by circumstances in a world where trust and faith are in extremely short supply. Joel and Ellie develop a sort of dysfunctional father-daughter relationship as their collective experiences bind them, and rooting for Ellie in particular is commonplace in The Last of Us. Her success means the player is successful, and her hardened exterior is the perfect complement to her complete ignorance of the world before it was destroyed. Ellie was born after the collapse, and as such, she’s full of questions and wonder, often communicated through the many contextual conversations she and Joel share. She’ll pick through records at a music store, become fascinated with wildlife she’s never seen before, and ask a million questions about the past. You watch her learn, grow, and gain meaning. It’s impossible not to become attached to her. The interplay between Joel and Ellie, as well as the other characters you meet on your adventure, is one of the great highlights in The Last of Us. Voice acting is not only consistently superb, but the game’s graphical beauty makes the events of The Last of Us overflow with realism. Everything that happens is immediately more memorable, more powerful, and more poignant because your surroundings are so believable. Forests, fields and wooded trails are overgrown, dense, and lush. Abandoned villages and metropolises alike are eerie, silent, and crumbling. Each environment is unique, thoughtfully created, and bursting with little details, including notes, letters, voice recorders and more that tell ancillary stories of survivors you rarely ever meet in person. The game took me so long to beat because I was obsessed with seeing every inch of it. The Last of Us demands exploration, not only to scour for needed supplies, but to satisfy your curiosity. The Last of Us is undoubtedly pretty to look at, but that beauty is often overshadowed by imminent peril. Joel and Ellie will confront enemies in all of the various locations they visit, and these battles represent the other side of what makes The Last of Us shine. Combat is tense and nerve-racking. Fighting is as emotionally taxing as it is physically dangerous, because the people Joel fights are, like him, just normal folks trying to survive. In a world where everyone has a singular motivation to keep breathing for one more day, it’s hard to judge even the harshest remnants of humanity you encounter. Stealthily killing entire rooms of enemies is incredibly satisfying, so much so that when you blow your cover, it’s hard not to feel a sense of disappointment (especially when one of your companions occasionally fires a gun or walks in front of an enemy, which you can’t control). Holding down R2 while crouching lets Joel listen carefully to his surroundings, giving him a glimpse of enemy locations in his direct vicinity and an edge in staying away from danger. Some players may consider this a bit cheap, but I’d merely call it gamey. Just like the L3 prompts that tell you where to look and hints that appear if the game determines you’ve been stuck in an area too long (all of which can be turned off), Joel’s listening skill can simply be ignored if you feel like it doesn’t fit. But rest assured, it’s very helpful, especially later in your quest. The beauty of stealth in The Last of Us is the incredible, uncomfortable realism you’re forced to witness each and every time you execute a silent kill. Watching a survivor fruitlessly swat at Joel’s arms as he strangles him to death is disturbing, as is quickly shiving a man in his neck and listening to him gurgle some parting breaths as he collapses to the ground. The Last of Us does a phenomenal job of making each and every enemy feel human. Every life taken has weight and each target feels unique and alive. It’s hard not to think about some of the older folks in particular, ones that remember the real world, lived in it, and were once normal. There’s an emotional pang when you’re taking out thugs that look a whole lot like you and your allies. Of course, there are enemies that are decidedly inhuman in The Last of Us, too. The collapse of society was instigated by the sudden prevalence of a fungus that wreaks havoc on the human mind, and those humans – known not-so-lovingly as The Infected – are alive, but not well. No matter which faction of humanity a person falls on, whether he’s with the remnants of the federal government, or rogue groups known as Hunters, or even the mysterious resistance organization known as The Fireflies, everyone is united against The Infected. This is simply because The Infected can in turn infect others, further eroding humanity’s already dwindling numbers. They are a perpetual threat to even the slightest hope that humanity can one day step back from the precipice of extinction, and running into them is always frightening. Unlike your human adversaries, who often work together, audibly communicate, plan their actions, and practice self-preservation, The Infected attack with reckless abandon, with absolutely no regard for their safety and with every intention of killing you. Fighting them is terrifying, especially during your first few encounters, and feels completely different than your engagements with pockets of humanity. The lesser versions of The Infected, colloquially known as Runners, can be taken out with firearms and melee strikes alike, but it’s the Clickers – characters so infected by the Cordyceps fungus that they can’t even see – that will haunt your dreams. They can only be killed with silent shiv strikes or via firearm – silence is more often than not your best weapon against them -- but if they so much as get their hands on you, it’s game over. In this world, they are the true threat. It’s unlikely you’ll ever get comfortable dealing with them, of being mere feet away from them, crouching, hoping they don’t somehow sense you. Another brilliant aspect of The Last of Us is its crafting options, all of which happen in real-time. With the exception of actually going to a pause menu, there’s no way to stop the action, so you need to find lulls in order to scavenge for items, put them together and create new goods that can be used both curatively and offensively. The system is extra tense considering you can use, say, alcohol and rags to create either a healing pack or a Molotov Cocktail, but not both with the same goods. Thoroughly exploring environments nets you the components necessary for item creation, giving you yet another reason to inspect surroundings already begging to be rummaged. And item scarcity, a perpetual issue in the world of The Last of Us, means that everything you find is precious in its own way. There aren’t any factories making more of anything you find, and that includes the greatest prize of all: bullets. This perpetuates real consequences based on your decisions. Will you use those scissors and some tape to create a shiv? Or will you attach them to the end of a pole to create a makeshift weapon of war? Will you create a smoke bomb only because you found sugar in the environment and can only carry more if you use what you already have? Or do you bypass the sugar and hope you don’t need it – or what you can make from it – later on? Will you opt for melee strikes to save ammo for another day? Or will you walk in guns-blazing and hope you find shells on the bodies you leave in your wake? How you choose to navigate these forks in the road have considerable effects on how you approach future enemy encounters, adding a special dynamic to The Last of Us not found in very many games. Joel can also upgrade himself with pills and other supplements hidden throughout the adventure, though here you’ll also have to make careful choices, as there isn’t enough medicine in one playthrough to fully upgrade him. Likewise, all of your weapons, from pistols to shotguns and rifles, can also be upgraded using parts and tools found on your journey. Similarly, you won’t be able to max-out everything, so you’ll need to make thoughtful decisions. This adds an analytical, tactical slant to The Last of Us not found in the likes of Uncharted, though if you really want to upgrade Joel and his goods fully, you could always take advantage of The Last of Us’ very welcome New Game+ feature. While the campaign is absolutely worth playing through multiple times, The Last of Us also comes packing a robust, rich multiplayer mode that isn’t simply a retread of Uncharted’s. In fact, The Last of Us’ multiplayer seems decidedly scaled back in order to fit it into the context of the post-civilization United States, with small player counts and only two modes that pay exceptional detail to the greater context of the single-player campaign. The Last of Us’ online functionality exists within a mode called Factions. Once you begin, you choose one of two sides and then jump into one of two sub-modes: Supply Raid and Survivors. Both are atypical in their approach, especially Survivors, which presents players with a best-of-seven series in a four-on-four match where death is brutally permanent. Survivors forces meticulous play virtually ripped right out of the campaign, except instead of fighting AI-controlled partners, you’ll be dealing with even smarter humans. It’s a truly fun mode, one where every player on the map is overflowing with nerves and afraid to make a mistake. Supply Raid, on the other hand, is about whittling down your team by eroding their overall life count. It’s more generic than its counterpart, but the idea of having a shared number of lives forces you to strive for better play. It makes you not want to be the reason your team loses, it makes you not want to make silly blunders. Like Survivors, Supply Raid also allows you to craft items on the fly using components found on the map and feels a whole lot like the single-player game. By scaling back the modes and the player counts from the likes of Uncharted, Naughty Dog has removed the tall barrier between single player and multiplayer and has made the two feel interconnected, even ancillarily. What’s especially neat about The Last of Us’ online functionality is the metagame that transcends everything you do. When playing online, your character – who is fully customizable in both appearance and loadout – is the leader of a band of survivors. Successfully navigating online matches, collecting items and engaging in one-off challenges called Missions helps grow your band. Of course, if you fail, your band decreases in size. It’s a simple system in premise, but it’s undeniably addicting when you start getting into it. It creates another, higher level, a different way to gauge your overall success by something other than wins or losses and your kill-to-death ratio. Like the single-player campaign, which judges your actions based on future consequences, so too does multiplayer in The Last of Us reward or detract based upon performances that, at the time, may not seem entirely consequential. Then again, The Last of Us is still all about its single player campaign. Many players will never jump online, and frankly, they won’t be missing out on what truly makes the overall package so incredibly special, so exceptionally noteworthy, such a must-play experience. Verdict PlayStation 3 isn’t only well-known for its number of exclusive games, but for the sheer number of quality exclusives. That’s what makes The Last of Us even more impressive, because not only does it join the ranks of Uncharted, Killzone, God of War, Infamous and more, but it bests them all. In short, Naughty Dog has crafted a game that impresses in virtually every way. The Last of Us is a true feat. Its unrivaled presentation in particular sets the bar even higher than the Uncharted trilogy already did, and its writing, voice acting and layered gameplay combine to create what is very easily the game to beat for Game of the Year 2013.

Game Informations : Developer: Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development Publishers : Nintendo Platforms: Nitendo Switch , Wii U Initial release date: 3 march 2017 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s sheer freedom and sense of adventure is a remarkable achievement. Right from the start, the vast landscape of Hyrule is thrown completely open to you, and it constantly finds ways to pique your curiosity with mysterious landmarks, complex hidden puzzles, and enemy camps to raid for treasure and weapons. The fact that you can tackle any one of these things at your own pace and almost never get pulled to the main path is liberating, but the way all of Breath of the Wild’s systems fit elegantly into complex light survival game is even more impressive. I’ve been running around for over 50 hours and I still have plenty of mysteries left to track down and lots of wonderfully crafted puzzles to solve. I’m in awe of the scope and scale of this adventure, and I often find myself counting the hours until I can get back in. The untamed, post-apocalyptic, techno-fantasy land of Hyrule is the main character in Breath of the Wild. Not only is it vast, beautiful, and filled with a diverse set of locations from grassy fields to craggy alpine mountains, but it follows surprisingly realistic rules that let you pull off solutions so intuitive that you might be surprised they actually work. The trees bear fruit, grass fields can be set ablaze, and even enemies and animals behave in a believable manner, based on the skittish and aggressive reactions I’ve seen in the wild. But the realistic touches don’t end there. Each object you encounter, from sticks to apples to rocks and metallic blocks, is made of a material, and those materials usually respond to forces like fire and magnetism as you’d expect. It all sets up a surprisingly fun and responsive sandbox to interact with, and one I’ve rarely seen executed so well in an action-adventure game. If you think something should work, it usually does, and that led me to all kinds of fun and hilarious experimentation. You can stand under an apple tree with a torch and bake the fruit into a quick-healing snack before you even pick it, or drop a metal sword in front of a weaponless enemy and watch it get fried by a bolt of lighting. Meanwhile, Link needs warmer clothes to survive the cold and flame-resistant gear to near the volcanic Death Mountain. It’s consistently amazing to learn how all of these systems interact with each other while you play. What elevates Breath of Wild above its contemporaries is its sheer freedom. But what elevates Breath of Wild above its open-world contemporaries is its sheer freedom, both in its non-linear questing structure and in your ability to climb almost any surface and travel in any direction once you leave the starting area. It is the heart of what makes this action-adventure game truly special and addictive. Like many open-world games it delivers on the implied promise that if you can see it out in the distance, chances are you can eventually reach it – but here, figuring out how to get there is more often than not a satisfying puzzle in itself, and one that never gets old. For instance, a tantalizing island far off the coast of the mainland was just out of my paragliding reach for the first several hours until after I’d upgraded my abilities. When I finally did, what took place when I finally reached my objective was a great twist that blew my mind – including finding an easier alternate route I’d missed. That paraglider is easily one of the most useful tools in Breath of the Wild because it's so versatile. You can use it to effortlessly glide across lakes and gaps or ride updrafts into new areas, and I often used each long trip across the map as a way to scan the marvelously lit horizon in search of clues or meditate on what I need to do next. From overhead you get a glimpse of what’s even more evident from the ground: each individual area has its own little ecology, and systems built around extreme hot and cold temperatures and high altitudes mean you have to take the time to think and prepare in order to travel safely through them. It doesn’t matter, for example, if you can glide into the chilly mountains if you’ll freeze to death before you hit the ground. Going in with the right equipment makes all the difference. As you continue to improve Link’s stamina meter and skills you can reach even more of these varied locations. But no matter how much stronger you get, the world and its resident Mother Nature is always more powerful than you will ever be. Random events like rain and thunderstorms slow down your movement across slick surfaces, and dangerous lightning bolts can strike with little warning if you’re wearing any metal. Additionally, the day/night cycle is constantly running, and makes meaningful differences: nighttime brings monsters that spring up from the ground, it's easier to spot some useful bugs and plants, and other secrets that are best discovered for yourself. These are all constant reminders that you are always at the mercy of the world itself. Yet there are still pockets of serenity and beauty spread throughout the gorgeous, tantalizing landscape. In these moments, subtle music queues matched the tempo of my adventure, swaying between playful piano melodies and ambient sounds of wildlife. In the foreground, Breath of the Wild’s anime-inspired art style is colorful, remarkably lively, and beautifully animated, but it comes at the cost of brief framerate hiccups and object pop-in that’s most noticeable when you’re playing the Switch in TV mode, where it renders at 900p, and when there are a lot of physics particle effects flying around the screen. The issues are less frequent playing on in portable mode on the 720p screen, but regardless of where I played the performance problems never significantly soured my gameplay. Performance on the Wii U version is roughly the same as the Switch, although it's important to note it renders at 720p. This makes the jaggies a little more visible and lighting appear slightly different. Otherwise, it looks good on Wii U. The light and flexible cooking system offers lots of opportunity to experiment. Unlike a lot of survival games in which every item you use must be created from felled trees and dug-up minerals, Breath of the Wild focuses all its crafting systems on cooking. It’s a light and flexible system that offers lots of opportunity for experimenting with different ingredient combinations to help you survive. Raw food and quick-and-dirty snacks cooked by a fire will replenish a small amount of health, but the most interesting and stat-boosting dishes come from tossing ingredients into a pot to make a hearty meal. I’ve spent many hours figuring out the best recipes by using clues noted in the ingredient descriptions to come up with effects like stamina boosts and elemental resistances of various potencies, and I loved that whenever I got a little carried away with the my recipes I ended up with a censored-out dish appropriately called Dubious Food that’s apparently too disgusting to even look at. Making buff-imbuing potions is equally as flexible, and you’ll find plenty of bugs and monster parts with which to mix up a special brew. Breath of the Wild’s skillful combat is as approachable as it is deep, but you’ll need to study its nuances if you want to survive in the late game. Link can still use swords, spears, and axes (as well as other amusing blunt objects) he finds in the world, but for the first time in the Zelda series they’ll wear down and eventually break from use, which fits perfectly with the survival angle. Especially in the early game, when most item durability is low, you’re constantly swapping out weapons, never getting too attached to one sword or hammer and always ready to improvise by, say, picking up a bony limb of a downed Stal Bokoblin and using it to finish off the last of a group of enemies. Breath of the Wild’s skillful combat is as approachable as it is deep. But no matter how prepared you think you are, you can still run into large Moblins and other enemies that can slay you in one hit. Naturally, as you make progress in the main quest you’ll gain access to empowering special abilities that will improve your chances to survive, but to say more about them would be spoiler territory. I like that Nintendo allows you to switch certain items off and continue using the most basic tools if you feel these they’re too powerful, creating an informal hardcore mode. Archery plays a much bigger role in combat this time around, and it’s for the better. Link can quickly pull out his bow and take aim at enemies at any time, using a wide range of arrow types (like ice and fire) to take advantage of their weaknesses. The metallic ping you hear whenever you land a headshot is an immediately satisfying treat, as are the slow-motion attacks initiated by jumping off of high places and drawing your bow as you fall toward a batch of enemies below. Since the duration of this arrow-time effect is dictated by your stamina, early on it feels like you rarely have a huge advantage. A few stamina upgrades will buy you more time, but the stronger enemies you’ll face on the outer fringes of Hyrule can usually withstand several headshots, which brings it back into balance. The way you can work the glider into combat is equally impressive and it makes for some engagingly versatile, skill-based action. Link can glide in, let go of the glider, and go into slow motion to fire off a few headshots, then grab hold of the glider again only to fall and downward-stab another unsuspecting enemy. The combat is open enough that it inspires more of the same playful experimentation as the world itself. Breath of the Wild tosses difficult encounters at you early on. Tense boss fights against larger foes are still a major highlight of the Zelda series, and Breath of the Wild tosses up more difficult encounters at you pretty early on, such as the imposing rock monster named Steppe Talus who will come right out of the ground. If you feel overwhelmed, you can always run away and come back to them later, and these emergent challenges add another welcome layer of danger to the survival sandbox. And you’ll find plenty more optional bosses well-hidden in this massive world. On the other hand, dungeon bosses are challenging face-offs you can’t run away from. They’re as big on spectacle as ever, and my favorite ones involve ingenious combat puzzles where you need to use your Shekiah Slate, a powerful tool given to you early on that gives you special abilities like magnetising metal objects or creating bombs, to weaken the boss before you can take it down. The Sheikah Slate is a major piece of the main quest, which puts Link on a journey to reclaim his memories of Princess Zelda after an apocalyptic event left Hyrule in ruins. It took me roughly 40 hours to slay the final boss and piece together what happened 100 years ago. While most Zelda games are rooted in heavy tradition, this coming-of-age story is anything but and has plenty of charming characters and surprises to reveal. It’s amazing that it works so well while letting you tackle its dungeons in any order you want. My favorite quests involved piecing together a series of clues. Hundreds of NPCs waiting to send you on side quests and puzzle shrines pepper the landscape, and there’s even more to discover hidden behind vague clues. The fetch-questy ones aren’t as interesting as the bonafide rabbit holes of The Witcher 3, but they still introduce you to interesting characters and dole out helpful info, meals, and materials. My favorite quests involved piecing together a series of clues: in one example, a wandering minstrel sang a mysterious song that dropped hints as to the location of a special shrine. Some don’t even show up as quests in your log, so you have to pay attention. Puzzle shrines yield their own useful rewards in the form of materials and handy weapon upgrades. These shrines involve short, inventive puzzle rooms which present you with a few clues and leave your to experiment in order to solve them. There’s a wide variety of them and a majority are excellent little puzzles to figure out, but a few of the combat-focused challenges are repeated and another handful use motion controls that just don’t feel quite as sharp enough due to wonky physics. Motion controls don't feel quite as sharp. Still, the techniques you learn from Shrines become essential training for Breath of the Wild’s fantastic dungeons. For the sake of avoiding spoilers I won’t go into too much detail, but these daunting, massive logic puzzles demand that you look at all the moving pieces in order to solve them. But every time I came across a new Shrine I was excited to uncover whatever new challenge it contained, with some Shrines in particular feeling as intricate as early levels in Portal, because they hinted at something much bigger and more impressive to come. There are even more cryptic challenges throughout Hyrule, some hidden behind riddles, and others are large mazes or other inventive ideas. Even after 50 hours, I still can’t believe I haven’t seen almost everything, but the surprises keep on coming. I estimate it would take over 100 hours to solve every side quest, puzzle, and collectible. It is a truly massive game to tackle. Verdict The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a masterclass in open-world design and a watershed game that reinvents a 30-year-old franchise. It presents a wonderful sandbox full of mystery, dangling dozens upon dozens of tantalizing things in front of you that just beg to be explored. I’ve had so many adventures in Breath of the Wild, and each one has a unique story behind what led me to them, making them stories on top of stories. And even after I’ve spent more than 50 hours searching the far reaches of Hyrule, I still manage to come across things I haven’t seen before. I’ll easily spend 50 to 100 more trying to track down its fascinating moments.

Game Informations : Developer: Obsidian Entertainment Publishers : Paradox interactive , Obsidian Entertainment Platforms: Microsoft windows , Mac OS , Linux Initial release date: August 25, 2015 Five minutes into Pillars of Eternity: The White March Part I, a snowball thrown by an ogre smacks Durance the fire priest dead. "Looks like we lost the angry one," my tank calls out. Not thirty seconds later, Sagani the ranger goes down to a cannon blast. It was all tough, frantic, and a little absurd, but it led me to believe that this little patch of content would live up to the greatness of the base Pillars of Eternity experience. The hours ahead, though enjoyable enough, proved otherwise though. Despite the fun of tougher encounters and a new setting, The White March often feels like a step down from the greatness of the vanilla release. The high point here is the setting of the White March mountains themselves, whose icy expanses provide a welcome counterpoint to the forests that characterized the base release. It's a land that's more crowded with loot and little tidbits of mouseover lore than the leafy expanses we've seen up until now, and it mercifully features more NPCs with their own quests and conversation options instead of the original's Kickstarter NPCs with bite-sized fan fiction. It's a shame, though, that the vaguely Nordic shacks and pitiful puddles of its hub town end up being used for little more than bleached backdrops for battles and conversations with the gloomy po[CENSORED]ce. This thread of inadequately wielded wonder runs throughout the whole expansion. It manifests itself in the disappointingly straightforward story of entrepreneurs attempting to reclaim an ancient dwarven forge, in predictable encounters with dwarven workers long dead, and it even shows up in the two new battle companions. One, a monk who's found hiding in a fish barrel, boasts a dual-wielding proficiency that's usually more interesting than the humor-laced platitudes that come out of his scarred mouth. Then there's the Devil of Caroc, a robotic-looking golem rogue whose main quirk is that she's unapologetically inclined to evil. Both possess strong foundations for memorable storylines and their general personalities exhibit Obsidian's usually stellar writing, but they quickly slip into predictable conversations that lack the memorable nuances of the old cast. Further caveats arise from the expansion's requirement of a save from before the main game's "point of no return" and after the first handful of events of Act II. It's a good thing that I recently started replaying Pillars of Eternity as a Barbarian, as my original playthrough had no elligible saves, which means I would have had to replay the entire game before I reached the relevant segment. I suspect it will be the same for other players, or at least those who aren't so fastidious about deleting old saves as I am. That's one of the most awkward things about expansions like this: they force you to step back to times when you had poorer gear and before you picked up a full loadout of skills. Especially when you've carefully made all the "right" decisions, replaying old saves feels a little like questing after Stephen King's Dark Tower. As a bonus, though, if you're one of the lucky bastards with a save point at, say, the Burial Isle before Pillars of Eternity's last chapters, you can choose to upscale the monsters to your level. If you're fine with jumping into combat with gear that far exceeds the content, that's fine, too — especially considering the often plodding nature of Pillars of Eternity's "pause and bark orders" combat. If that retro-centric design soured you on the original release, you'll be happy to know that The White March showcases Pillars of Eternity's recently improved AI, which grants enemies smarter moves and allows companions like Edér and Durance to use some of their abilities of their own accord. It's simple stuff — certainly not anything in the league of the multiple options you get in a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition — but it's usually enough to speed up the pace of combat so orchestrating each character's actions doesn't drag out the game's running time by hours. Greater combat challenges also reveal themselves, chiefly in the form of a high-level dungeon called Cragholdt Bluffs that will thwomp most parties below level 10 into the the ground faster than you can say "Icewind Dale." Much as in that beloved dungeon romp from 2000, combat is king here, and The White March does a good job of delivering it even if it lacks some of the inspiration of Black Isle's game. As the ogres in Stalwart demonstrated all too painfully, it occasionally manages to be harder than the core game and it tosses in extra variables such as enemies who are completely immune to certain types of damage. Enemies are usually positioned better too, thus prompting more thoughtful strategies to combat them. The level cap boost from 12 to 14 even provided handful of new abilities to meet these new challenges with. For instance, the Barbarian's newfound ability to leap into a throng of foes and wreak havok was particularly giddy fun. I enjoyed these changes, and despite my reservations, I generally enjoyed my roughly 20 hours with this first part of The White March. I loved Pillars of Eternity, and this at least does a decent job of scratching the itch for a bit more. Even so, I could never shake my disappointment that it lacks the storytelling finesse that made the original one of the great RPGs of our time. As much as I'm a sucker for these kinds of snow-tossed settings, the whole affair left me wondering why the Watcher was even bothering with this far-flung escapade in the first place. Time is of the essence and all that. But at least I got to see Durance get killed by a snowball. That's always something. Verdict The White March Part I provides some incentive to return to the Dyrwood in the form of a higher level cap, and the delightfully brutal combat, but few of the other new features leave a lasting impression. Despite an avalanche of possibilities provided by the wintry setting and the two ostensibly unique companions, the first half of The White March never feels like more than a side quest that was never implemented. There's still plenty on offer here for players who enjoy Pillars' combat above all else, but it's an expansion best suited to new players rather than veterans.

Game Informations : Developer: Naughty Dog Publishers : Sony Interactive Entertainment Platforms: PS4 , PS3 Initial release date: 1 novembre 2011 Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is the reason I play video games. From the smile plastered on my face during the opening montage to the disbelief that swept over me as Chapter 2 began to the middle of the night text message I shot a friend about a relationship reveal, I couldn't stop loving this touching, beautiful, fun and engaging game. From the moment the music swells on the title screen to the moment the credits roll, Uncharted 3 is a masterpiece.That shouldn't surprise you. The original Drake's Fortune set the bar for visuals and third-person adventures on the PlayStation 3. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves greatly improved on that, added multiplayer and climbed its way to the 2009 IGN Game of the Year award. Developer Naughty Dog spent the two years since then making bigger moments -- think platforming in a capsized cruise ship and surviving a cargo plane crash -- and working on the few complaints from the last title. Complaints primarily stemming from the fact that, to some, Uncharted 2 felt too much like the original Uncharted. Uncharted 3's tale sounds familiar. We have the same cast of characters in our handsome hero Nathan Drake and his seasoned mentor Victor "Sully" Sullivan and the same general idea of a lost city that needs finding before the bad guys get there. But this isn't the games that came before. Uncharted 3's greatest strength is its unpredictability. From the barroom brawl that opens the game and introduces its new melee system to a mid-game conversation between villainess Katherine Marlowe and Drake that literally redefines a pillar of this franchise, I didn't know what to expect in Uncharted 3. Naughty Dog sets aside the betrayal/twist formula used in the first two games and focuses on Nate and Sully's relationship. It takes you to the precipice of the Uncharted hallmarks you might expect, lets you stare at them, and then veers off in another direction. For the first time, the words "fun" and "useful" describe melee combat. Yes, the gameplay still revolves around climbing walls and shooting bad guys, but refinement is found those mechanics. For the first time, the words "fun" and "useful" describe melee combat. Uncharted 2's clumsy stealth parts no longer exist. Running through levels and taking cover doesn't get old because Naughty Dog has done so much to merge the gameplay with the story, perfecting the pacing and making everything look fantastic in the process thanks to cutting edge graphics and excellent cinematography. The end product rises above what the buttons do and how you maneuver Drake. Calling it a game sells Uncharted 3 short. This is an experience, a complete package. When I rant about why Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is better than just about anything on the market -- about why I think it's my new favorite game of all time -- I don't talk about the firefights, the new ability to throw grenades back at enemies or collecting the game's 101 well-hidden treasures. I talk about the heart-wrenching section where Drake is by himself and completely lost. He's on his last legs, he's desperate, and I'm right there with him. I'm pushing him through the journey at hand and it's clear that it's a game, but as he stumbles, seeks shelter and loses hope, my heart breaks. This is what Naughty Dog has been building to for the last four years. In a way, this is what Naughty Dog has been building to for the last four years. Players know the Uncharted cast. Most love the banter between Drake and Sully, the love affair between Elena and Drake or the one-liners Drake shouts to himself as the game goes on. Naughty Dog created a universe here that players feel connected with, but, again, the developers toy with that. They insert things that take the mentor/pupil relationship to another level. They flesh out backstories, they break bonds, and they make us face the characters' worst fears. And, no, those fears aren't clowns. A story-driven affair, Uncharted 3's believability and connection with the player comes from its performances. For the third game in a row, the cast dazzles. The actors record their lines along with their movements, and this leads to characters that feel real. The chemistry between them lights up the game in a way most mediums would kill for -- from tiny touches like fist bumps to major moments of bickering between lovers. Add in a musical score that accentuates the action and layer on the game's trademark, "best in the industry" graphics -- sand clinging to Drake's hair, fire creeping up walls, sunlight filtering through tattered roofs -- and you can see where this game becomes more than pressing the X button and jamming on analog sticks. When the tale finishes, you can look forward to multiplayer. Uncharted 2 introduced competitive and cooperative modes for the series, and Uncharted 3 improves them to make something special. The standard menu returns (team deathmatch, capture the flag, etc.), but Naughty Dog adds bonuses known as Boosters and Kickbacks to round out the experience. These are upgradable bonuses that you equip to make the multiplayer experience more your own. Boosters augment your entire session -- one reduces respawn time, one lets you climb faster -- whereas the in-match medals you earn count toward unlocking your Kickback, which can instantly spawn an RPG or double your cash earned for a short period of time. These spice up the gameplay; you can pepper them into one of your four saved loadouts and have a skill set for any situation. This stuff will keep me coming back. Even when I have a terrible match in Uncharted 3 multiplayer, I see the cash I've earned counting toward my next level and I see my Boosters earning experience and becoming more powerful. Toss all this into the pot, and matches in Uncharted 3 multiplayer feel fresh every time. The verticality mixed with gunplay leads to different attack plans. There's a sweet science to deploying a Kickback at the perfect time for a critical kill. New Power Plays give teams getting blown out a leg-up like double damage so that everyone feels like they have a shot at competing. Plus, three team deathmatch (2v2v2) is awesome, and you can play split-screen with two different PSN profiles, a rarity on the PlayStation 3. For many of you, these multiplayer facts aren't news, as fans have been playing the final version of multiplayer as part of a North American Subway promotion for weeks. However, there was an outcry when the beta went live because Naughty Dog adjusted the damage dealt by bullets and players were now able to absorb more. Many threw their hands up in disgust, and Naughty Dog listened. The developers went in and dialed the damage back to what it was in the summer beta. Don't mistake this anecdote as a mistake; it points out the commitment Naughty Dog puts into this multiplayer community. The developers make a game and they want people to enjoy it, they listen to feedback, and they act. There's not much more you can ask from a game creator, and it's one of the reasons I want to keep playing and keep leveling. Add in the fact that Naughty Dog supported Uncharted 2 multiplayer until now and already has seven DLC packs planned for Uncharted 3 multiplayer, and it's clear this game has legs. Verdict IGN defines a 10.0 -- a masterpiece -- as "the pinnacle of gaming, a masterpiece may not be flawless, but it is so exceptional that it is hard to imagine a game being better." That's Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. From start to finish, single player to multiplayer, this game sings. The characters, the graphics, the sound, the story – they’re all top notch. If you’re willing to skip Uncharted 3, be prepared to miss one of gaming’s finest moments.

Game Informations : Developer: Gearbox Software. Publishers : 2K Games. Platforms: Microsoft Windows Initial release date: March 26, 2020 We are gathered here today to talk about Guns, Love, and Tentacles, the sharply written Lovecraftian DLC for Borderlands 3 which puts the wedding of Sir Hammerlock and Wainwright Jacobs in the center of its scopes. Though everything about it is exactly what you’d expect from Borderlands DLC – in a good way – it also doesn’t do much to make its few short hours really stand out. What starts out as an eccentric couple’s wedding on the creepy, remote world of Xylourgos predictably turns into a nightmarish cataclysm of eldritch horrors. So, y’know, just some normal Borderlands stuff. You’ll smack, blast, and meat-bicycle your way through some unique areas like the eerie, possessed town of Cursehaven; the dark, sickening groves of Cankerwood; and the accursed halls of a manor controlled by a cult that worships a Cthulu-inspired God called Gythian. For a series that once had a big problem with the lack of diversity in its exclusively Pandoran environments, Guns, Love, and Tentacles feels like a victory lap of breathtaking views and unique areas. As usual, the Borderlands staples you know and love have been tweaked to fit the new setting, and in this case it results in some pretty gross aesthetics. For example, chests have a squid-like quality to them and gurgle and slither out juicy, slime-covered weapons, or they open a portal to another dimension and spit out some new items for your perusal. You’ll also have some new tentacle-themed cosmetics to unlock, like character skins and weapon ornaments. It’s a bummer, though, that there are no Lovecraftian weapons to chase. That’s a missed opportunity! It’s an overwhelmingly entertaining few hours thanks to stellar writing. The campaign is solid but short – you can blow through the bulk of it in just a few hours. That said, it’s an overwhelmingly entertaining few hours thanks to stellar writing and jokes that land more often than they miss. There are some misses in the level design, too, like a few sections which require platforming – something Borderlands has never been great with. One such section is a boss fight that requires you to jump onto levitating platforms to take down the enemy’s shields and if you make a wrong move you’ll need to start the fight all over again (unless you’re playing with a friend you can use as a spawn anchor). Fortunately for those of us who’ve been waiting for more DLC since December, there’s plenty to do aside from the main story. Sidequests are mostly entertaining distractions, and there are occult creature hunts to go on for Sir Hammerlock which can be fairly challenging. For rewards, you’ll have eight new legendary weapons to chase for those who want to be best equipped to slay Gythian’s octo-pals with extreme prejudice. On the other hand, some tasks are pretty dry, like picking flowers for your new testicle-eating friend. Yup. That’s a thing. On Xylourgos you’ll mainly fight against occult followers of Gythian. These weirdos interact with you and one another in all sorts of interesting ways during combat, like buffing and healing one another, resurrecting fallen allies from the dead as exploding suiciders, or even eating your guns. That’s right: they literally eat your guns, those monsters! Each encounter with these tentacle-loving psychopaths has to be considered before being tackled, because not killing necromancers before taking on everyone else could result in you getting overwhelmed by undead explodey boys. Xylourgos’ mobs are deadly, sometimes annoyingly so, but the end result is some of the most interesting combat encounters we’ve seen in Borderlands. It’s more Borderlands 3, which is great, but it feels by-the-numbers. Aside from the interesting new mobs, though, there isn’t really a whole lot that Guns, Love, and Tentacles does that’s unique. It’s more Borderlands 3, which is great, but it all ends up feeling like a very by-the-numbers expansion that’s fun for a few hours and not especially groundbreaking. Even the formidable bosses aren’t much more than bullet sponges with a bad attitude. But, y’know, when you find yourself shoving your fist into piles of wendigo dung, remember: this is exactly what you signed up for. Verdict Guns, Love, and Tentacles is a witty, solid expansion for Borderlands 3 that mostly plays it safe with a proven formula without introducing anything that makes it a must-play. Still, the environments and enemies are unique and interesting enough to provide new challenges to players. Oh, and do you like testicle jokes? It has testicle jokes.

Game Informations : Developer: TaleWorlds Entertainment Publishers : TaleWorlds Entertainment Platforms: Microsoft Windows Initial release date: 30 Marsh 2020 Not as much has changed in the world of Mount & Blade since 2010’s Warband as I might have expected. But when I get into one of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlords’ pitched battles and charge through an enemy infantry formation while gleefully swinging my sword like a champion, it honestly feels like maybe what wasn’t broken didn’t need fixing. Sure, it’s not the most polished of experiences, hence the early access launch. But its exciting, tactical combat and gorgeous sandbox campaign map full of new lands to win and new characters to meet feed my deep, burning need for a nitty-gritty, intimate take on medieval-ish warfare. Bannerlord’s graphics are the most immediately impactful improvement from its decade-old predecessor. The stunning map allows you to scroll completely seamlessly from practically right over your character’s shoulder all the way up to a high-level strategic view, where you can decide whether to raid caravans, fight as a mercenary for a powerful lord, or even found your own kingdom. The lighting, textures, and terrain are all impressive, and the level of detail really makes me feel like I’m in a living world. The character models and armor textures are pretty slick as well, even if they do still seem a few steps behind the current generation of blockbusters. Bannerlord has also been drastically improved over Warband’s notoriously janky interface. It’s visually pleasing, well-organized, and easy to work with when you’re organizing your troops or unraveling the intriguing political web that binds each of the eight major factions. However, there are certain things that don’t have tooltips which I wish were better explained, such as what Morale actually does – there’s not even an encyclopedia entry for it. And there’s a significant amount of lag when switching between menus that kind of gets on my nerves. But it’s still a huge step up from what Warband players had to deal with that it feels like a big breath of fresh air. The interface is a huge step up from what Warband players had to deal with. Not everything else about Bannerlord does, though. For something that’s been in development for about eight years, there’s still a surprising amount of jank on display. Especially early on, before you get to the really good stuff, it’s easy to get the feeling that you’re just playing Warband with better graphics. Targeting and interacting with items and characters in towns and on battle maps is still imprecise and sometimes unresponsive. And there are some weird design decisions, like the fact that you have to wait through three loading screens to do something really simple like initiate a battle: one to speak to the enemy commander, one to load back into the world map, and one to actually start the fight. Even on an SSD with relatively short load times, that can get irritating. There are a lot of little things that really don’t feel modern, which are especially noticeable next to all of the ones that do. So naturally, the early gameplay will be pretty familiar to Mount & Blade veterans: You ride around the countryside doing missions and fighting bandits to gain gold, equipment, and reputation. These missions have a good deal of variety, which is nice since Warband could often feel like an endless loop of the same small list of tasks. Aside from old mainstays like escorting a caravan or hunting down poachers, you might be called on to resolve a blood feud or help merchants secure permits to sell their wares in a major town. These also inject a bit of worldbuilding and moral ambiguity in some interesting ways. That band of poachers might implore you not to side with the fat-cat nobles who are denying them the right to a livelihood, opening up an alternate path for resolving the situation. Each of the six playable factions has its own rich personality, backstory, and style of fighting. The worldbuilding in general is pretty great. Set about 200 years before Warband, we see the ancestors of some of the factions we know locked in a tense struggle centered on a collapsing, Roman-inspired empire that has broken into three parts. Each of the six playable factions has its own rich personality, backstory, and style of fighting. I wish your choice of national origin had a little bit more of an impact, though. As it stands, it’s mostly flavor that doesn’t impose restrictions that might make you significantly alter your playstyle. Anyone can recruit any kind of troops and join any faction they wish. You only get one small campaign bonus based on where you were born, like being able to build structures faster or reduced movement penalty in forest terrain. Once I got out and about and started meeting the various princes, lords, and knights, my interest in the world really picked up. There is an intricate political web to unravel between the leaders of the various factions, with each having a different story about what happened at a pivotal battle right before the start of the campaign that set the present events in motion. Piecing together the details will eventually lead you to two significant choices: joining an existing faction or starting your own, and trying to restore the old Calradian Empire or wiping its remnants from the map. While the story is presented pretty simplistically and without much dramatic flair, I could see these options providing a lot of replayability just due to the different flavor your campaign can take on based on which route you choose. Do you want to be the barbarian at the gates, or the successor to ancient glories? It’s on the battlefield where Bannerlord really delivers. But it’s on the battlefield where Bannerlord really delivers. The hitboxes on weapons and soldiers are impressively realistic, creating a high skill ceiling and a welcome sense of authenticity. You can have a spear thrust miss between someone’s shoulder and their helmet, and it’s always clear why the blow didn’t connect. This forced me to develop a good sense of timing and muscle memory to consistently get clean kills, which is a way more satisfying sense of progression than just putting points into a skill tree. I still don’t love the four-directional parry system, since we’ve seen that same thing done better in other games recently, and the lack of a stamina system can make one-on-one duels spammy and annoying, but at least I could strap on a shield and never have to worry about it. Battles also feature smoother animations and much better unit AI than Warband, which was prone to somehow find the worst possible way to interpret any orders it was given. The new command interface is clean, readable, and makes it very easy to form control groups and give specific, detailed orders like forming a shield wall or keeping their distance and skirmishing with ranged weapons. The tactical options available are broad and executing them is relatively painless, which is much more than I could say for Warband. I did run into some significant performance issues and stuttering on larger battles, and especially sieges, but it’s been getting better with the almost daily patches TaleWorlds has been releasing. The tactical options available are broad and executing them is relatively painless. Bannerlord’s biggest new systems are the Clan and Kingdom screens. Your clan includes your family and retainers, which can include a spouse and eventually children who can grow up and fight. If you join or end up ruling a kingdom, you can make changes like setting new tax laws – as long as your vassals approve, of course. The vassal management system is a bit clunky and unwieldy and mostly involves getting other lords on your side by tracking them down and earning their favor by picking correct dialogue options… but there’s a chance you’ll fail based on your Charm stat even if you say all the right things, and that’s just annoying. This is one area that could definitely use some more love before Bannerlord is ready to cast off its early access label. As is typical of an early access game, I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about weird and even game-breaking bugs out in the community, but mercifully I haven’t been the victim of any serious ones so far. I’ve hit a few irritating video and audio glitches here and there, of course. Reloading a save once caused some troops I recruited to mysteriously disappear. I also ran into a consistent crash bug when I tried to launch a siege after taking over as its leader from another character. Thankfully, the patches have been coming quickly and relentlessly and there seem to be fewer technical issues every time I boot Bannerlord up. Verdict It’s easy to focus on all the ways Mount & Blade II is still stuck in a rut starting out, but Bannerlord is an onion with lots of new layers that show themselves once you start to really dig into it. Especially for an early access game, it’s ambitious and reasonably well-polished, even if it still has a long way to go. And with the huge graphical and general usability improvements, a latter-day rehash of Warband – one of my favorite games of the last decade – isn’t even a bad thing by itself when you get right down to it.

Game Informations : Developer: Fireproof Studios Publishers : Fireproof Studios Platforms: Microsoft Windows , PS4 , Oculus Initial release date: 2020 I was already amused with the intricately designed puzzle boxes The Room VR: A Dark Matter was asking me to solve after its first couple levels, but the moment I was really sold on this eery VR puzzler was when it shrank me down to the size of a mouse to solve one from the inside. Its short series of fairly one-note challenges ultimately left me wanting more surprising moments like that, but Developer Fireproof Games has been making well-loved The Room games for more than eight years now, and the premise for the series is a fairly simple one: You’re dropped into a series of relatively small spaces (sometimes a single room, sometimes a series of connected ones) where you have to find clues in the environment and solve puzzles in order to complete a goal – in The Room VR’s case, you’re asked to find a handful of hidden relics. The Room VR: A Dark Matter Gameplay Screenshots The Room VR weaves these relics into a creepy, otherworldly plot about dark magic and invading monsters... I think? Honestly, I’m not totally sure. Its atmosphere is appropriately spooky throughout, but the story itself is poorly explained through a few hand-scrawled notes and brief glimpses of Myst-style FMV characters (one of whom so clearly seems to be wearing a fake rubber mask that it’s downright laughable), while also being completely pointless and unrelated to any of the puzzles you are actually solving. Though a villain was seemingly introduced, I genuinely have no idea who they were or what the ultimate threat was. Thankfully, I didn’t need any of that context to enjoy solving the puzzles at hand. The Room VR has three main levels – plus two short ones that mostly bookend the plot – each with an interesting theme (one is about Egyptian relics, while another is set in an old church) and a compelling set of challenges to best. Most of those take the form of more traditionally presented puzzle boxes, with your job being to twist a hidden piece, insert the right item, or find the correct combination to open part of it and be rewarded with your next clue – all of which is made more tactile and engaging when you get to use your actual VR hands to do that stuff. You’ll rarely just stand at a box until you find all its secrets. But what’s really nice about how The Room VR structures its puzzles is that you’ll rarely just stand in front of a box until you find all of its secrets and move on to the next one. Instead, clues and collectible objects intertwine – you may solve one part of a puzzle box only to get a pendant that you then need to take to another, which then gives you a clue for solving another, and so on. It adds a welcome bit of motion to the experience, and also frequently means there are multiple paths you could be making progress down at any given time. The Room VR also cuts out the impulse to check every little corner for clues by tying movement to predetermined teleportation points (with no free-movement option). That means you’ll only be able to go to a place if it has something useful for you within arms reach, which is certainly helpful even if it also makes puzzles a little more straightforward than I’d expected when I first arrived. Either way, I did appreciate that old points (and even objects you pick up) are often removed as options entirely when you’ve exhausted their purpose. Those little assistances feel necessary because the intuitive nature of VR muddles the clarity of what you can and can’t interact with at any given time. Part of the reason for that is because The Room VR really does look fantastic, and its intricately designed props are awesome to admire and inspect up close. But since the interactable bits of both the puzzle boxes and the environments around them blend into the decorative bits, I spent a lot of my time just grabbing at things to see if they were grabbable – which they frequently weren’t. Having every object bolted to the table unless you need to use it doesn’t feel great in VR, and can sometimes make figuring out solutions a matter of going through the motions rather than engaging in tricky problem solving. The moments I did get stuck were very rarely because a puzzle was too “hard,” but because the interactable nature of something just wasn’t made clear. There is a helpful built-in hint system I had to consult a couple of times, but doing so almost always made me go “Oh, I literally didn’t know I could interact with that,” rather than offering a moment of clever realization. It’s a shame that there’s just not much of this game total. That said, there were still plenty of very cool moments of cleverness thanks to a mechanic introduced in its church level: one that lets you shrink down and enter certain tiny openings. The first of these has you unlocking a cupboard by entering its keyhole and picking the lock from within by manually moving each pin, which was just awesome. Another great puzzle has you move the mechanisms inside a puzzle box at full size in order to build a bridge that you can then cross once shrunk down inside it. It’s a very weird and cool feeling, and one that absolutely takes advantage of what VR does well. It’s a shame that there’s just not much of this game total, though. The Room VR took me just over two hours to beat, which left me a bit startled when it was already over. While I certainly enjoyed what was there, I couldn’t help but want more of its cleverest ideas. This isn’t Fireproof Games’ fault, but in a post-Half-Life: Alyx VR world (that game’s hacking puzzles alone can be more challenging and more interesting than some similar ones The Room VR has to offer), this doesn’t feel like enough. Verdict The Room VR: A Dark Matter does a great job of making its interactive puzzle boxes more than just hunting for the right knob, often leaning into what VR does best by putting you into cool situations that are shown off in flashy and polished fashion. Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of it here, and its intricate detail can occasionally cause confusion as you flail at the mostly inert world around you. Still, its two hours of puzzles were certainly worth solving.

Game Informations : Developer: Eugen Systems Publishers : Eugen Systems Platforms: Microsoft Windows Initial release date: 20 June 2019 A grandiose rendering of World War 2's Eastern Front, Steel Division 2 details Operation Bagration: The Red Army's back-breaking push against the Nazi war machine. It's an ambitious real-time strategy game, and though it ultimately fails to live up to a lot of that ambition—especially with its singleplayer campaign—the vastness of its battles captures the scale of total war with lavish detail. Operation Bagration was the June to August 1944 offensive that threw a huge number of the Soviet army's best troops against the German army in occupied Belarus and Poland. At the same time as the Normandy invasion thousands of kilometers away, the Soviet army surrounded and crushed Germany's Army Group Center, signaling the end for Germany in the east. The combatant divisions of troops in this game are weary veterans who have been at war for three years, many equipped with some of the most advanced weapons to be produced during the war. Others are fresh-faced conscripts and raw recruits, or back-line battalions forced into front line service by the onrushing offensive. You build your own customized divisions using the composition of these historical formations. Tactical battles are the heart of the game, real-time conflicts pitting dozens of units against each other in conflicts that feel real. Battles with 10 players on each team, each commanding a couple dozen units, feature prominently in online play and take place on a map so big you couldn't hope to support your furthest ally if you wanted to. It's warfare at a scale that inspires awe when you watch a replay. War Stories Steel Division 2 pushes realism as far as it can be pushed in the genre and still remain fun: A tank's main gun can fire massive distances—up to 2,000 meters—and even that kind of range doesn't scratch the width of a map. A multiple-rocket artillery piece can take minutes to reload. Infantry can fight for so long in urban warfare that they run completely dry of their thousands of rounds of ammunition, requiring you to bring in supply trucks with the next wave of reinforcements. SD2's tactical play forces you to care about details like force composition and deployment speed and how terrain affects the battlefield—and not in boring, simple ways, like Light Cover or Heavy Cover, but in a human scale that shapes the world your units move in. Two kilometers is a huge distance to ask your soldiers to charge on foot with people shooting at them. It's not a huge distance for the tank gun taking aim at your men. Matches are won or lost on the front line of combat, a colored line overlaying the field that pushes and pulls as units move. It's satisfying to shift, forming dynamic pockets and bulges and salients. New to SD2 are capture points, so battles are won by taking notable terrain features: hilltops, bridges, towns, roads. It's a marked improvement from the simple percentage of map control in Normandy '44. Interacting with that terrain is simple. The game's built-in range and line of sight checking tool is well made—it's hotkeyed to C—and sliding across the terrain to reveal high ground for overwatch or sheltered dells to advance along is a joy. Battles take place over three phases, A, B, and C, each of which escalates the fight, introduces new units, and changes your income of points to call in those units with. All of this is quite complex: there are systems for suppression, morale, armor penetration, resupply, repair, surrenders, shock, air combat, cover, and transports, and that isn't an exhaustive list. In an unforgivable sin, there is neither tutorial nor manual to help you learn the basics of the game. The UI is also woefully unequipped to direct you. How much fuel does this particular plane have left? Who are my soldiers shooting at? These are not things it will tell you at a glance. However, the result of all that complexity is a good, historical, tactical RTS. The scale of Steel Division 2 is grander than Normandy 44, and fielding a formation of 12 tanks or hundreds of infantry is no longer the exception in any given battle, it's the rule. The feel of it all fits the historical conflicts of the Eastern Front, battles that alternated between brutal frontal assaults and slick outmaneuvering. The maps play directly into this. Based on ordnance survey and aerial reconnaissance photography from the time, they have a remarkable fidelity and allow for tactical diversity. General disappointment One would hope that this fidelity would apply to Army General, the much-hyped single player campaign that scraps Normandy 44's scripted scenarios for a full-on strategic wargame. The sprawling Army General maps are a war table hundreds of kilometers square, each recreating a particular section of Operation Bagration. You’re given basic objectives and a historical layout of battalions to move about in turn-based rounds with your opponent. When you clash, you bring some of those battalions into real-time skirmishes. This sounds excellent, a partnership of real-time tactics and turn-based strategy. It is anything but. Army General suffers from a frustrating, terrible interface and poorly-explained, poorly-suited mechanics. It does have a manual, but one so vague as to be unhelpful. Units are moved around the map and attack via an action points system, but that system can be baffling to understand because it's married to real-world measurements in kilometers and an invisible grid overlay, with no indication as to why a battalion can't attack enemies or why it's moving so slowly even though you’re sure it's on a road and not in the adjacent swamp. It's the worst kind of wargame design: rote and derivative, detailed where it doesn't need to be, abstracted where it hurts most. The Army General mechanics even manage to throw off the tactical battles. Deployment phases are thrown out the window in favor of phases based on the position of the battalions on the map. (Which is finicky and frustrating, remember.) So sometimes you're stuck with no tanks, or no infantry, for half a fight. It's a bizarre choice for a game that otherwise prides itself on realism. Why would the recon group charge the German bunker line rather than wait 20 minutes for the tanks to show up? Worse, the AI is disastrously terrible at taking charge of allied battalions in these matches, turning from the otherwise-competent Skirmish partner into one that bull-headedly chooses a lane on the map and marches up it repeatedly. Also, you can't save during Army General battles, which can take an hour to resolve. Better together Despite the campaign's shortcomings, the multiplayer and skirmish warfare are still excellent. They feature some great innovations on Normandy '44. Command networks let you link your Leaders with a high-ranking officer for greater bonuses to those under their command. Radio-equipped artillery spotters let you lower aim time for your guns, so a well-placed spotter can increase the speed of your bombardments. They're both systems that play into the strength of Steel Division's gameplay: Planning, foresight, and careful deployment. The fights for prominent plateaus in particular are some of the most memorable struggles I've had in an RTS for a long time. Another player and I took up opposing positions in two woods on top of a large plateau in a map's center, with a field running east-west between us and a capture point in the middle. I got there first, the front line pushed out—the point was mine. I consolidated my position, using the high ground to support allies on either flank with anti-tank fire. I saw that enemies were bringing up some Panzer II light tanks, so I prepared machine guns and a medium tank. I realized too late that their infantry were assault units. Smoke shells made my carefully-prepared killing field moot, and their rush overwhelmed my riflemen while the light tanks flanked. The ridge was lost: I wrote off my surviving troops and saturated it with Katyusha rocket artillery. The new division building mechanics, on the other hand, are a misstep for the series. While in Normandy '44 each division's selection of units were locked to a particular phase, Steel Division 2 lets you take near any unit at any point—the tradeoff being that you can get more of the unit, or get it at a higher level of veterancy, if it appears in a later battle phase. It makes the process of readying a division for battle painfully fiddly. Do I want two Tigers in phase A, or four in phase B, or two veteran Tigers in phase B, or one elite in phase C? Moreover, it throws off the entire rhythm of the multiplayer matches. Phase A is no longer a tense maneuver of reconnaissance and light vehicles punctuated by a few heavy hitters, with a steady escalation from there culminating in a phase C of desperate last stands and heroic pushes for victory. The realism of phased deployment and careful force structure are out the window. Competitive multiplayer is now an exercise in brutal, calculated abuse of the forces available to you. Steel Division 2 is a good game buried under layers of frustrating obfuscation and burdened with a poor single player experience. Every time I was close to getting fully immersed, a new, ugly problem reared up to distract me. The ambitious bones of a truly great game are here, but ultimately it's hard to recommend this to anyone but those who already love the series' unique multiplayer.

Game Informations : Developer: Studio Ghibli , QLOC , Level-5 Publishers : Level-5 , Bandai Namco Entertainment , Sony interactive Entertainment , Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows , Nitendo Switch , PS3 , Nitendo DS Initial release date: 2019 Very few games look better than their sequels, but then Ni No Kuni is an exception to most rules. It makes its debut on PC after its successor, last year’s well-liked Revenant Kingdom, which took its visual cues from Wrath of the White Witch, but was made without the direct involvement of Studio Ghibli. This remaster doesn’t quite provoke the same saucer-eyed wonderment as the original did six years ago on PS3, but with Ghibli’s exceptional world building and typically gorgeous animation it’s still a beautiful thing. Before you get to its autumnal forests and icy grottoes, however, you’ll spend some time in the equally well-realised town of Motorville. When his mother dies, a young boy called Oliver travels to a fantastical world in the hope of bringing her back to life. He’s joined by Drippy, a teardrop-shaped fairy with a lantern dangling off the end of his nose, who is easily the best reason to stick with the English-language dub. Larking about and cracking wise in his rich Welsh burr—the highlight of what is a pretty terrific localisation all round—he’s one of the most appealing partner characters in any RPG. Some might find him overly chatty at times, but he’s always on the right side of annoying. Then again, Drippy does contribute to the game’s coddling approach to the problems you face, whether it’s a tricky boss or an environmental puzzle. Over the course of the game, Oliver gains a series of spells that let him unlock doors and chests, for example, or restore withered fungi into springy steps. He can even gather emotions from those with an excess of them: with permission, a lively villager will hand over their surplus exuberance so Oliver can perk up a lethargic guard, say. But the solution is almost always handed to you on a plate, giving you no room to work things out for yourself. I’m not sure its nannying tendencies are excused by the fact that it’s, y’know, for kids—children are brighter than games aimed at them often give them credit for. Blending command-based and real-time elements, the combat system isn’t nearly so straightforward. You can control Oliver—though the stick he starts out with has little effect, and the wand he gets a couple of hours in isn’t much of an improvement. So for the most part, you’re better leaving him on the sidelines and relying instead on a range of familiars, friendly creatures you’ll find throughout your adventure, and which you can feed and bond with between encounters. Positioning as well as timing is key: you’ll control your familiars directly, while giving them commands to attack, defend or dodge. Clear tells and long wind-ups for powerful attacks give you the chance to pull off counter-attacks or cause opponents to miss you, leaving them vulnerable for a short time. You’ll need to quickly collect the health and magic pickups that drop sporadically, and the rare golden orbs that allow for special attacks unique to each familiar. You’ll need to switch them out when they’re tired, while elemental strengths encourage you to chop and change depending on the opponents you’re facing. In places, it can feel fiddly and complex rather than deep, and in the early game you can get away with sending out your most powerful familiar and simply repeating the attack command. But when new characters and their familiars join your party, opening up new tactical possibilities—the AI isn’t perfect, but you can get them to focus on healing, or go all-out when a monster is stunned—it comes into its own. It may borrow various bits and pieces from other games but it combines them into something distinct. And though the monsters aren’t vintage Ghibli designs by any means, they’re still cute and characterful enough that you’ll likely grow quite attached to them. The story, by comparison, is more conventional, though a relentlessly punning script lends a bit of flavour to some fairly well-worn JRPG tropes. Find the great sages! Seek out the magical stones! As such, the appeal lies not in wondering what exciting plot development awaits you next (because, well, there aren’t any) but rather what gorgeous new setting you’re about to visit—and in Wrath of the White Witch, even the sewers are lovely. Technically speaking, it’s only a minor improvement over the original, though with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing and the option to uncap the frame rate make this the best-looking, best-performing version of an already handsome game. It helps no end to have Ghibli’s regular composer Joe Hisaishi on board: delicate and plaintive during the emotional moments, grand and sweeping in battle, his score makes the game sound almost as good as it looks. Your movement speed across the field map is slow, each trek to the next area punctuated by throwaway encounters against cannon-fodder enemies, but Hisaishi makes it all feel like an epic odyssey. As you progress, you’ll steadily fill up a lavish in-game tome that acts as a memento of your journey. It’s nice just to leaf through it every now and again to see how far you’ve come. On paper it sounds sickeningly sweet, though there are hints of the undercurrent of darkness that runs through Ghibli’s best work, even if it’s hardly Grave of the Fireflies. Wrath of the White Witch is traditional to a fault, and lacks the kingdom-building hook of its sequel, but it makes for a mostly pleasant, sporadically delightful, 40-plus hours of playful escapism.

Game Informations : Developer: Monolith Productions Publishers : Fox interactive , Mac Play , Sierra Entertainment , Vivendi Games , Vivendi , Imagineer , FoxNext , Wendros AB Platforms: Microsoft Windows , Mac OS , Play Station 2 Initial release date: 2014 No One Lives Forever review Hardly anybody does it better than Monolith does with this smart, cocky first-person spy thriller. At some point over the last couple of years, first-person shooters stopped having fun. I mean, they were still fun to play, but the developers seemed to shift away from the wide-eyed wonder of first-person action and delve instead into dark, somber, ultra-realist melodramas straight out of those awful gun-strapped paperbacks. No One Lives Forever is a welcome change: a swiftly paced, engaging adventure that cleverly mixes up gameplay styles. The plot is just like a nutty early Bond flick, the atmosphere is one of over-the-top Austin Powers Sixties grandeur, and the action shifts constantly from mode to mode as if you were playing a different game with each new mission. It's a ton of fun—like an old episode of Mission: Impossible as re-imagined by John Woo. Err… You play as Cate Archer, a predictably glamorous junior agent in the employ of UNITY, a secret international spy organization dedicated, hilariously, to stopping megalomaniacs. After UNITY's ranks are thinned by a vicious assassin, she's given access to Santa's Workshop, the tools-'n'-toys bureau of UNITY in which field agents are outfitted with the very latest in wild weapons and secret gadgets. A super-agent at last, it's time for Cate to roar. The first mission takes you to Morocco, where you have to guard the life of an ambassador. Here we get the first of a wide variety of gameplay modes: it's essentially a sniper game in this first sequence, as you pick off assassins from a hotel window and thwart the ambushes waiting for the ambassador as he moves through the level. This is where we first see how No One Lives Forever benefits from the realistic settings made possible by the LithTech 2.5 engine. The urban environment of Morocco—its city streets, the hotel, and the alleys interconnecting the map—are all rendered with exacting detail. The hotel lobby is filled with stuff—soda machines, potted plants, lounge chairs, throw rugs—all of which adds a weight of texture that's incredibly convincing. This same look and feel extends to the game's other locales, which include Berlin, the German Alps, and a tropical island hideaway. Each mission wields some devilishly varied action. In the Morocco stage alone, you'll move from a sniper nest to a more traditional alley-crawl to a motorcycle ride out to the coast, and finally (after a sweet Great Escape–style fence jump) on foot to storm a compound. Before the game is over, you'll have escaped a crashing plane (a brilliant sequence—you jump and free-fall to catch up with an enemy, then steal his parachute just in time for a full-on firefight in descent), leaped from a bridge onto a passing barge, scuba-dived to search a sunken freight ship, taken photos of secret files with a sunglasses-camera, and eventually made your way off-planet as a stowaway aboard a shuttle bound for an evil genius' space station. That's all in one game, folks! The value of all this variety can't be overstated. My biggest knock against almost any PC game these days is that it suffers from monotony. Soldier of Fortune, for example, is a ton of fun for the first couple of hours—but as soon as its novelty violence wore off, I got thoroughly bored with it, and fast. No One Lives Forever is aggressively new and different, mission by mission. You get an unbelievable amount of hardware to play around with, with each mission introducing new spy toys. The real-life weapons include a .38 revolver, an AK-47, an M79 grenade launcher, and even a Sportsman EX crossbow. Cate can stock up on dum-dum ammunition for increased destructive power, or phosphorous rounds when she needs to blast her way through total darkness. Sniper scopes, silencers, and laser targeting sights add to your killing power—and keep the shooter portion of the game from ever getting boring. And as far as gadgets go, there are some real doozies. Exploding lipstick grenades, anyone? Or how about a briefcase that conceals a built-in RPG? A perfume bottle that sprays acid? Let's just say the elves in Santa's Workshop produce lots of fun toys. Another huge appeal of the game, which again rewards mission by mission, is the fact that you can use multiple approaches successfully to complete objectives. Perhaps even more so than in the wonderful Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever convincingly allows you to use stealth to solve a lot of missions. Rather than just letting you slip behind the backs of guards, you need to worry about security cameras, attack dogs, and other hurdles to quiet progress. Or, if you say bollocks to the whole “sneaky” approach, you can get there even faster by going in guns a'-blazing. You won't be let down by the combat. The enemy AI is great: guards duck and cover, hide behind pillars, and scramble for their lives when caught out in the open. They react with far more plausibility than the bots in Quake III or Unreal Tournament. After you solve the single-player campaign (about 25 hours of gameplay), you can explore the multiplayer modes. They're mainly variations on standard deathmatch and team battle, but NOLF offers one very cool team mode in which one side plays as UNITY, the other as H.A.R.M. (the uproarious name for the insidious, well-financed anarchist group that emerges as the villain of the single-player game). In the team mode, maps from the single-player game are reconfigured for new, multi-team mission objectives, and the teams engage in a frenetic Spy vs. Spy scenario to win the day. The highest compliment I can pay No One Lives Forever is that it feels like I sampled five different games before reaching the end. And in an age where completing just one game can seem like a bit of a chore, this wildly varied adventure kept me hooked. If there's any real flaw, it's that the whole mood of the game is wacky enough to maybe turn some people off. Supposedly “secret” documents are lying out on park benches for the world to see. Goons wander the streets as if they were crossing guards. H.A.R.M. agents include a bloated Scotsman named Magnus Armstrong and a bloated German barmaid named Inge (both replete with absurd accents). An air of silliness is pervasive. It wasn't enough to bother me much, and at times I really appreciated the antics. But compare them to moments when trusted allies get killed, and Cate is crying, and suddenly the mood is supposed to be intensely real. It's a bit of a muddle, and for a game that devotes so much time to story-advancing cinematics, the whole feel should have been more consistent. But there's just no denying the fun factor of NOLF's many action sequences. You'll find a lot of gaming goodness packed into this box.

Game Informations : Developer: Koei tecmo games , Koei tecmo Holdings , Omega force Publishers : Bandai Namco Entertainment Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox one , Microsoft Windows Initial release date: March 27 , 2020 I thought I would be bored by the time I beat up my 500,000th marine lackey, but to my surprise, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 never let the smile fall from my face – except for when it’s trying to make me cry with its many faithfully recreated scenes of One Piece’s most emotional moments. One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is an Omega Force musou game through and through, letting you satisfyingly steamroll hundreds of thousands of enemies single handedly as powerful hero (or villain) characters. But it comes with most of the typical baggage that goes along with that distinction: it’s not the prettiest looking game in the world, there are lots of reused assets from prior games, and outside of a few select boss fights, its hoards of baddies offer very little resistance. The Greatest One Piece Moments of All Time That said, Pirate Warriors 4 managed to surprise me with a well thought out combat system that has a ton of variety strewn across its selection of more than 40 playable characters, excellent cooperative support, and a highly respectable retelling of One Piece’s absolutely massive story. Wealth, Fame, Power Pirate Warriors 4’s main story mode, Dramatic Log, attempts to summarize nearly 900 episodes worth of One Piece plot into a single 15-hour campaign. It’s an impossible task, to be frank, but a lot of effort was made to make these storybook-esque recaps as entertaining and informative as they can possibly be. Everything is fully voiced by the original Japanese cast; there’s a good mix of narration, still imagery, and scenes from the show recreated in-engine to keep things visually interesting; and when they do decide to go all out and do a full-on CG version of One Piece’s biggest moments, they always look and sound stunning with Omega Force’s signature guitar riff-heavy soundtrack pumping in the background, though many of those moments are straight-up reused from prior Pirate Warriors games. It’s also worth noting that if you’re coming into Pirate Warriors 4 as anything less than a gigantic One Piece fan who has watched everything up to the start of the currently airing Wano arc, you’re going to get spoiled big time. This definitely is not a replacement for actually watching the show. Pirate Warriors 4 covers six main arcs: Alabasta, Enies Lobby, the Paramount War, Dressrosa, Whole Cake Island, and a shoddily thrown together original version of the Wano arc that exists solely to give Pirate Warriors 4 an actual ending since the real Wano arc isn’t finished yet. Those who played Pirate Warriors 3 may get a little bit of deja vu, as the only completely new arcs are Whole Cake Island and Wano, but Pirate Warriors 4 goes much deeper into each of them than its predecessor, with every arc consisting of at least six missions. Each chapter has its own selection of playable characters to choose from, with some levels restricting you to just the one character that’s relevant to the story, while others allow you to choose from a wide variety of heroes that are present in the scene. I always jumped at the opportunity to try out a new character, and fortunately, those opportunities presented themselves at just about every turn. It was this variety that kept Dramatic Log fun and interesting throughout its 15 hour length, despite the repetition inherent to Pirate Warriors 4’s gameplay. Dramatic Log is the main course of Pirate Warriors 4, but there’s also the Treasure Log mode which is a series of mostly context-less levels that come with their own rewards and ready-made challenges. Just about everything in Pirate Warriors 4 can be played with two-players co-op in split-screen, but certain levels in Treasure Log can also be played with four players online, and have unique objectives as a result, which is great. Multiplayer is definitely a strong suit for Pirate Warriors 4, especially considering how easy it is to pick up, smash some buttons, and watch the fireworks fly. Take it to the Sky(piea) If you’ve played a musou game before, you know what to expect from Pirate Warriors 4 on a base level. This is a game all about simple button presses leading to impressive actions. One that treats enemies like they’re a million styrofoam peanuts and the player like they’re a leaf blower. This is a game all about simple button presses leading to impressive actions. Pirate Warriors 4 adds a few interesting wrinkles to the fold, mainly the ability for every character to utilize air combos, which actually does a lot to further differentiate its roster. By pressing the jump button in the middle of a combo, characters take everything around them up into the air where they have an all-new series of attacks. Some characters, like Sanji, absolutely thrive in the air where they can use multiple special moves to deal big damage or utilize a buff that gives them unlimited stamina, which allows them to continuously cancel and restart combos with an air dash to stay in the air for as long as they want. Other characters, like Jimbei, are hopeless in the air and basically need to be on the ground in order to do significant damage. The gameplay is super fast. With the ability to connect a three to four-hit ground combo, then launch enemies up for another combo, then combo that into a special move, which can then be canceled into more air combos, there’s just a ton of frenetic movement that always keeps the action fluid and exciting. Despite that though, the implementation of aerial combat is not perfect. Some characters are given the ability to fly freely, but the controls are messy. There’s no way to control your height, which can make it frustratingly difficult to actually hit enemies when you’re above them, and sometimes characters can move so fast that it can be hard to actually focus on a single enemy like a commander or boss if you need to take them down first. Above all else though, Pirate Warriors 4 is a One Piece power trip, and it’s a really good one at that. Just about every character feels insanely strong in their own satisfying way. Luffy in particular feels nigh unstoppable when he transforms into either of his Gear Four forms, but especially when he’s in Bounce Man form and starts charging up a Kong Gun that ominously looms over the heads of hundreds of helpless enemies that are about to get sent flying. Omega Force has done a great job with its progression mechanics as well. Not only does each character have their own skill trees that build upon their arsenal of unique moves and stats, but there’s also a universal skill tree that provides bonuses to all characters. It’s a nice system that forces you to make some interesting decisions when it comes to stats with regards to whether you spend resources making everyone a little bit stronger, or you focus in on making a single character stronger that you might only use for one level. Between the 15-hour story mode, the many additional hours that it’ll take to complete Treasure Log, and unlockable characters that are tied to getting S ranks on missions, there’s a ton of worthwhile content in Pirate Warriors 4 that will keep me busy for quite some time. Verdict One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4 is a great One Piece game, and though it wears its many flaws on its sleeveless, red button-down top and straw hat, its smart additions to combat go a long way in reducing the notorious tedium that typically plagues the musou genre. It’s still a tough sell to a non-One Piece fan, but as someone who absolutely loves One Piece and was only just sort of into Musou games, I found a ton to like in Pirate Warriors 4.

Game Informations : Developer: nWay Games , Animoca Publishers : nWay Games , Limited Run Games , Lionsgate Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox one , Google stadia , Microsoft Windows Initial release date: 2019 Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is a great example of how far rock-solid mechanics and strong characters can take a fighting game, even when everything else is working against it. This nostalgia-fest has the look of a free-to-play mobile game, a complete lack of voice acting, a barebones set of modes and features, only nine characters, only five stages, repetitive and generic music, all on top of the stigma of being based off a licensed property not known for having a great video game track record. But against all odds, underneath all of that beats the heart of a fighting system developed with thought, care, and an obvious love for 2D tag fighting games. Battle for the Grid is a 3-on-3 tag fighter with a four-button combat system consisting of light, medium, heavy, and special attacks, much like Dragon Ball FighterZ. Also, like FighterZ, there are no complicated button inputs for special moves, with every move being performable by pressing a direction and a button. The result is a fighting system that all but removes the executional barrier of entry and focuses instead on fundamentals, which is great because the simplicity of the combat system is complemented by much more complex tag mechanics and a wild array of special moves that will have skilled players mixing opponents up like batter. The comeback mechanic is unique and totally in line with the Power Rangers brand. Beyond that, much of the depth comes from push blocks, armored EX moves, super moves, and a big, satisfying comeback mechanic in the form of a one-time use ultra attack that calls either a Megazord, Dragonzord, or Mega Goldar to use extremely powerful attacks that cover nearly the entire screen for a short time. The comeback mechanic is especially great, as it's unique, totally in line with the Power Rangers brand, and succeeds as a way to turn the tide of a losing match in your favor without feeling like a cheap win button. Battle for the Grid borrows its wonderful tag mechanics primarily from BlazBlue Cross Tag battle, and it works just as well here. You can call in an assist to have them do an attack, but then you also have the option to take control of the assist and tag your other character out, allowing you to convert combos off throws and continue combos with assists in fun and interesting ways. While there are only nine characters in Battle for the Grid, which is a paltry number by any measure, they are at least all extremely well defined and fun to play. Most typical fighting game archetypes are covered: Kat is a hyper rushdown-focused character, Tommy and Jason are great all-rounders that can do a little bit of everything, Mastodon Sentry and Ranger Killer are extremely effective zoners, Goldar and Magna Defender are the big, slow bruisers that dish out huge damage with just a few successful hits, Gia is a mid-range-focused powerhouse, and Drakkon fills the role of the tricky character with his highly technical mixups and move set. The main issue with Battle for the Grid is that everything surrounding its fundamentally solid and fun fighting system is utterly lacking. It’s not a very appealing game to look at, coming across as a marginally better-looking version of the Power Rangers: Legacy Wars mobile game and nowhere near up to the standard of the recent surge of fighting games; there’s virtually no voice acting outside of the announcer at the start of a match and a couple of monstrous growls from Goldar; the music is generic soft rock that quickly becomes repetitive because there are only five themes across the five stages; Arcade Mode is a bust, with virtually no story and poor AI; Training Mode lacks the basic function of being able to record and playback moves; there are plenty of graphical and sound bugs; and there’s no option to rematch in online play. To be fair, Battle for the Grid is a budget-priced game with $20 for the standard version at launch, and the content offered certainly matches up with its reduced price. There is also a $40 Collector’s Edition with the Season One pass, featuring three additional fighters down the line and a few skins, which seems of much more questionable value. There seem to be some substantial online bugs relating to blocking. Battle for the Grid will ultimately live or die based on the community that develops around it. Online play has been mostly solid on wired ethernet, but playing wirelessly on Switch had frequent drops in connection and otherwise laggy play, so I’d recommend avoiding wifi if possible. There also seem to be some substantial bugs that are exclusive to online play relating to blocking. In several matches, I experienced issues with consistently getting hit by lows despite doing nothing but holding crouch block, and also getting hit by normal jump-ins despite doing nothing but holding standing block. Hopefully, nWay is able to fix it because it really hurts the online experience. Verdict: There are some surprisingly good fighting game mechanics in Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, but there’s very little meat on that skeleton. A well-rounded roster of fun, nostalgic characters is represented poorly by dated graphics, slapdash presentation, and – most damningly – a lack of meaningful single-player content, other modes, characters, and stages. It’s a solid start for developer nWay’s first foray into the fighting game genre, but there’s a long way to go to make Power Rangers a contender in a space that’s become crowded with high-quality games.