Recente recensies door jb2097

Hmmmm....*shrugs* it's another one of THOSE games. You know the ones: You can get involved and enjoy playing it, but when it comes to summing up why you enjoyed it....There's so many little disappointments chucked in there, with a relatively short list of positives to balance out any argument.

I played for around 20 hours of the free weekend and haven't yet finished it, but that's long enough to form a considered opinion.

Dying Light 2, for those unfamiliar with the series, is an open-world title set during a zombie outbreak, and it has three aces up its sleeve to differentiate itself from this overdone premise.

1) The zombies aren't shambling vegetables with about as much literal bite to their bark as a toothless pensioner, but are more like Usain Bolt on a cocktail of steroids, a dash of meth amphetamine, a touch of pcp, and topped off with a slathering of rabies for good measure.

In short: they're either being a bunch of plodding muppets, or a terrifyingly agile enemy that have almost as much agility and traversal skills as the player character. This leads into the other strengths that the game has.

2) Parkour is your main means of getting around the city the game takes place in, and each environment has to be designed with flowing paths over its rooftops and death-defying jumps. The control-scheme has to be slick to ensure that this practice is smooth, but at the same time the challenge still has to be maintained and the game is very good at this.

Some locations have a mild puzzle element, some are the home of hi-octane chase sequences where very few places are out of reach for your pursuers. The main hub area offers a mix of hiding-spots and mad dashes to safety, or just the pleasure of flinging yourself wherever you want to go and 9 times out of 10 there will be something that manages to ensure you don't plummet thirty feet to the ground and break both legs.

It can be exhilirating, but, as much as this is slick fun....it's gonna be letting itself down in other ways later.

3) Night-time in-game.....hoo, boy! All I'll say is you might want a spare pair of pants handy, because they crank the fear-factor upto 11 when the sun goes down. That's when the super zombies come out to play, and they take some serious effort to kill. More agile than normal, more vicious, more persistent and more ugly.

Your best bet is to run, but, of course, it's dark (they only come out at night) and you can't see sh*t even with a torch on, so you're running about in a blind terror as the audio ramps up with piercing shrieks of rage that come from everywhere. Because, you see, all the bog-standard zombies go up a level at night too, and so it only takes one spotting you to bring down a sh*t-tonne of savage critters that can go where you go.....

So that's the aces up its sleeve, those elements that come together to make this still somewhat unique and an enjoyable experience. This is genuinely scary at times, and the verticality of the level design does make parkouring a brilliant way of getting about. However....that only goes so far, and when it runs out of steam, what does the game have then?

Well....the story is decently told. With solid dramatic twists and turns, and some surprisingly dark outcomes to quests, it's better than I expected. More than that, it's actually pretty good, at least upto the point I reached. Graphically its decent enough, and on old hardware I can still get a steady 30 fps. The game has been mostly bug-free, and when it has glitched they've been minor rather than game-breaking.

You may have noticed I haven't talked out about the game-play so much, because there is combat to this along with the traversal, and...well....it doesn't have the legs to support everything else. Battling the zombies is violent blood-thirsty fun but it never develops beyond that, and it becomes more apparent with each side-quest that you do, as the rpg(ish) loot systems and skill-trees come into play.

The big issue is that there isn't much to get invested in when it comes to either of those. Weapon types have different strengths, such as heavy clubs walloping multiple enemies and knocking them down, but taking a lot of your stamina. Whilst bladed weapons are more likely to dismember foes and slow them down, or outright decapitate them.

But when it comes to their damage output, or construction, it's all a bit "blah-blah-blah! bigger numbers!!!!! whooooooo!" after a while. I obtained somewhere in the vicinity of 50 thousand weapons during my play-time, and although you can get synergies between your armour perks and play-style, it still comes down to bashing a button in combat and dodging around.

Does your weapon do fire damage? Does it do toxic damage, or shock damage? It got to the point where I didn't really care, and whichever weapon killed them quicker was the one I stuck with. Fundamentally the combat doesn't change or grow, and its this that becomes somewhat stale throughout the course of the game. Sure, there's tougher enemies and ones with varied attacks, yet it doesn't change much from minute one to hour twenty.

What about the skill-tree? Uh...well, it's there. There is one and it has skills that you can purchase, so that's, uh, what a skill-tree is defined as. But they're crappy, measly offerings that have incremental differences, rather than big additions that would keep the experience fresh. I upgraded several times over the course of twenty hours and none of them offered much to the fighting side.

It becomes a slog after a while and rewards very little xp, so you don't bother if you don't have to. At least on the streets, when its a mission in a self-contained area it is limited but fine. The same is true for quests, as whilst the narrative for them can be good, they don't give you much beyond that for completion. They might give you special rewards, but, uh, rarely do they feel special or even vaguely necessary.

So.....the loot is crap, your character development is stunted, and the fighting becomes a chore, but!!! The parkour is always fun, having to be out at night-time can really get your heart pounding and for a while the visceral, brutal combat can be entertaining. With a reasonably decent story underpinning it, this was overall more enjoyable than my gripes with it would suggest.

But that doesn't change the fact that a lot of it is dubious, and although I do want to finish it, I don't want a Dying Light 3 unless they can tone down the rpg / loot padding and really focus on making it a more involved experience. Unfortunately the emphasis on melee combat does get repetitive and in turn the general game-play gets less and less scary, so they force you more and more to conduct missions at night. Eventually even that becomes a bit ho-hum.

It's a shame really, because the enemy AI is quite reasonable with how sight and sound works for detecting you, and in general everything is super-slick. But when it comes to the game-play this could have done with the linear set-pieces of something like the Metro games and Days Gone, or having the tension of Amnesia The Bunker.

Instead its like Dynasty Warriors crossed with Assassins Creed and gets stuck in a fairly shallow rut that gets less compelling once the thrill of gory violence wears off. As long as you don't focus too much on it, and are the type of player who flits about like a magpie distracted by shiny things, then it can be fun.

But if you can't switch your brain off like that, and instead start dissecting it...well, as I said before, I'm not that keen on another sequel unless they can massively re-jig it. The potential is there for something truly thrilling and with some depth to it, yet whilst this sequel isn't bad, it also isn't showing any signs they are closer to reaching that potential.

Dying Light 1 as a new IP got away with it, but to all intents and purposes this is Dead Island 4 and the combat still has the same problems.

This is a pretty slick puzzle game, that manages to avoid being too frustrating to solve as its challenges are reasonably logical. The hints it provides are just enough to get you on the right track generally, as rather than outright offer the solution it gently nudges you towards things you may have missed.

At it's best there's an enjoyable mental challenge to be had, along with pretty slick and engaging presentation for what is presumably a small team or solo developer. At its worst, well, the vast majority ranges from fine to great, but there's a couple of irritating perspective puzzles that I really hated.

It was annoying when Hellblade did it, along with Horizon Zero Dawn and Middle-earth shadow of war, and its no different in this game. Fiddly, tedious and not really an actual intellectual conundrum in my book. More just an exercise in managing to restrain yourself from punching your monitor and gritting your teeth till its solved, and then getting some happy relief that they don't do this too often. Just enough times that its somewhat of a blemish on an otherwise excellent and satisfying product.

There's a story to this and its relatively engaging, albeit a means to keep you involved rather than anything truly exceptional. It succeeds mainly through teasing your brain and some pleasant stimulation of your senses, with appealing graphics and sound, and snazzy sequences considering it is quite limited in terms of assets.

You have this box and it keeps warping and morphing, as with each puzzle solved it seems to transform into another stage that breaks any physical realism regarding its form, but it looks pretty nifty and cool. The controls are straight-forward and overall its a pleasant enough way to spend a few hours.

If you took away the crappy perspective puzzles (that stumped me far longer than anything else) there's still around three hours to be had, and considering the reasonably low price I'd still highly recommend it. Though I hope they got rid of them for the sequels and focused on more thoughtful logic problems, which the majority of this game is.

Cookie Cutter is a side-scrolling action platformer in the vein of metroidvanias. I like metroidvanias, and combat, and platforming, so why then do I not like this?

As a genre it can be broken down into 4 elements: the presentation (be that the graphical quality, or being rich in atmosphere, or having excellent music), the story, the combat, and the exploration. In those regards Cookie Cutter only gets two out of the four right, albeit with both of them still being a bit dubious.

I don't like the art-style, but it does look pleasant enough graphically, with crisp, vibrant colours and smooth expressive animation. Though often it's far too eager throwing this in your face, and come the point that the action sequences start ramping up, it becomes a mess of flashy effects for your attacks and flashy effects for your enemies, and its easy to be unable to see yourself on-screen.

Combat is the other decent thing that it has, with responsive controls and a varied selection for your attacks. Mechanically its quite slick, and to an extent fairly enjoyable, but it undoes this partly through the visual overload, and the rest is undermined by clumsy design.

As an example: When facing a ranged enemy it becomes awkward that they are deliberately allowed to shoot through the floor and other obstacles, which doesn't feel right to me. Nor the fact that, midway through you battering them in a combo, they can just suddenly fire off a really quick energy blast at point-blank range that you can't even block, because there is no block function in the first place.

There's only parrying and (a) it doesn't work on their attack, and (b) it doesn't work for me 90% of the time either. That's another area where they sabotage the games appeal: The wind-up for enemy attacks is so slow, but then the actual attack is so insanely quick that I could rarely time it right. Which then makes it even trickier, as parrying stuns enemies, whereas your other general attacks hardly do anything by comparison.

For all that there are slick combos and aerial juggles, ground-pounds and special attacks, it often devolved into simply walloping enemies over and over again with a special attack. As the design made encounters somewhat clumsy and messy affairs: here's four melee enemy with their ridiculous windows for attacks and parrying, here's another three ranged enemy going to shoot you with an unblockable, un-parryable attack, that also goes through the platforms you're trying to get onto as you escape the others.

Being unable to parry the melee types left me spamming a move that instantly slammed most enemy types to the floor, and that actually interrupted their attacks, which your other moves don't. Despite having a lot of potential, I just didn't find the end result to be enjoyable, and all that eye-candy whizz-bang can't distract me from the thought it's all a bit mediocre.

And those are the relatively good points, I still haven't gotten around to the bad points. So here goes....Is there anything truly awful about it? I wouldn't say so, but the remaining two elements (story / exploration) are rather underwhelming.

The story is pish. It's not badly written, or poorly translated, but its pretty typical guff. Sure, I guess playing as a chunky blood-thirsty bow-legged lesbian robot who walks around like she has ricketts, is a fairly unique proposition. On the other hand: this is saturday morning cartoons / 1990's JRPG's levels of drama and writing that I just don't find compelling or engaging.

Whilst I doubt this would change my opinion of it, it surely would be less boring overall if the music wasn't utterly bland lounge tunes that plod along. When the action is plodding (which it does for the first hour or so) and the music is so wishy-washy that even basic background ambience would have more life to it, then it becomes a slog exploring.

There's no atmosphere, just this wanky, slow, chill-out music that bored the sh*t out of me 25+ years ago as a genre, and that hasn't changed since. When fighting starts it does get more up-tempo and rawk-y, but it's at odds with the generally dull main track you'll hear the rest of the time.

Add all of these things together and it amounts to a game that's somewhat disappointing on the game-play front, somewhat minging to my eyes in terms of its design, but technically kind of nice to look at, but also a bit too over the top to remain readable during the action. The musics sh*t and the plot is mediocre tweenage guff that thinks its adult simply because the protagonist swears a lot and has a nonchalent approach to committing acts of extreme violence.

That only works for me if there's a reasonable level of drama behind it, or at least a ridiculously exciting style of choreography to the brutality. This is like Wolfenstein Youngblood with a protagonist spouting such sophisticated dialogue as "f**k yeah dude! I am going to f**k up some evil f**kers face, whoo! yeah!...whoo!!"

*coughs* It's not exactly God Of War.....but, hey! You do get to play as a chunky bow-legged blood-thirsty lesbian robot with ricketts, so that, at least, is..uh..something, right?

It cost me £3 and I still regret it.

Two years ago a virus was unleashed that caused infected humans to devolve into powerful, unthinking, violent savages that brought civilisation to it's knees. Deacon St John was caught up in these events, and was separated from his wife Sarah after putting her on a rescue chopper as the doodoo was beginning to hit the fan.

In the years since then Deacon came to believe that Sarah had been killed, and subsequently became rather cold-hearted and hardened in his grief. Getting by as a ruthless bounty-hunter, a chance encounter with the man who helped rescue his wife, whom Deacon had presumed died at the same time, makes him question whether Sarah is alive.

He sets out to try and find her, but that's not the only part of his past, good or bad, that is resurfacing. It's not just hordes of brutal mutants he must face in pursuit of the truth, but also cannibals, murderous bandits who he may, or may not, have screwed over or killed some of them, and an insane cult that worship the mutants.

There's plenty of things ready to throw a spanner in the works as Deacon searches for clues as to whether his wife survived.

'Days Gone' isn't a particularly original game in either its mechanics or its storytelling, but it is fun to play and the narrative is engaging. Just as something unique can still be a load of old arse, this is derivative and yet it is so slickly done that its inspirations pale by comparison.

There's many influences you can pick from it, as it combines the open-world design of Far Cry with a fun way of getting about on your motorbike, added to the visceral action and set-pieces of The Last Of Us. The game offers incredibly snappy 3rd person melee and ranged combat, but also has very decent options for a stealthy approach.

It's also somewhat of a horror title and manages to be pretty intense even when you have unlocked new combat skills and weaponry. As your character will still get mauled pretty quickly by wild predators, some of which can run almost as fast as your bike goes, or when facing more than a handful of mutants and you know that gunshots might attract even bigger numbers or other predators.

The combination of these factors really makes a lot of difference when you play it on a harder difficulty level, as the experience ramps up through the aggressive nature of the inhuman foes, and the fairly smart behaviours of human enemies. When the game gets into triple digits for the number of enemies onscreen, it can get quite mental, and that is one of its biggest draws.

You will do quests for people and these earn you xp to unlock skills and cash to buy supplies, or maybe unlock certain things such as weapons, or resources. It also allows for crafting your own items, so exploration for the required materials is a necessity, as some things can't be purchased.

Maybe the deserted house you are checking is empty, or maybe its a nest of monsters and you'll get a massive shock as a screaming mob of bloodthirsty mutants pours out. It always takes careful consideration of the environment, as you want to loot these buildings because the challenge throughout is tough, but at the same time sh*t can easily go sideways.

Perhaps you were lining up a headshot just as a creature was about to notice you, and you miss and it screams. And its screams draw the attention of whatever else is in the area, leaving you quickly outnumbered and with no choice but to run and hide.

Your character gets around on a motorbike and the handling is superb, which makes it a pleasure riding around the expansive map. The sensation of speed is good, and it easily could be it's own arcade-y drift-y slide-y racing game, as it controls so well. When you've got a horde of 100 mutants chasing after you, and you're weaving between trees and making mad dashes down the rocky terrain, it is exhilirating.

When you add in the fact that you can run over enemies, and also do shooting whilst riding, it becomes another element that adds to the flavour. Because the game has random encounters you never know what will be around the next corner, so manually driving about (rather than fast-travelling, though it does have it too) never becomes a chore.

You might be fleeing from a bloodthirsty mob and hear the howl of wolves nearby, then suddenly one of them is running alongside your bike before leaping up to knock you off. Now you're stuck between the wolf and your pursuers, but that's okay because they are just as likely to start fighting instead, and hey! Here's a bunch of roaming human marauders who've now stumbled into it, and they're all attacking each other.

As many times as this can be helpful, there's just as many times where someone will shoot at you and the sound will draw the attention of something that's most likely going to savage them and you as well. A bear will make quick work of taking down foes, but it will also soak up precious ammo if you try to take it on. Better to try and get it to do your dirty-work for you, then jump on your bike and peg it away to safety.

Although it is nothing original or unique as an action game, or for its exploration and resource management, it all comes together for a very enjoyable, dynamic and challenging experience. When this was released on playstation 4 I remember some reviews being dismissive because of the formulaic template that apes Bethesda and Ubisoft design.

But when you add in humongous crowds of enemies, the slick manner in which you drive around, and the intense combat, you get a title that is much more thrilling than first impressions might suggest. Albeit these elements scale up over time as your character progresses, so I too was somewhat uninterested for a long while until I finally bought it and played it.

Having done so, 60 hours later I'd had a darn good time by the end.

Even the plot is pretty well done, with a no-nonsense approach to the writing and cut-scenes that deliver the meaty drama without dragging on for too long or becoming cringe-y. It's not quite up there with the story-telling of The Last Of Us, but is better than average as it twists and turns through this grim devastated world. Its all backed up by solid performances from the cast.

If it has a downside, it's the scale of the game. Personally I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the difficulty level I played it on fed into that cycle of exploring for supplies to craft weapons and ammo, and doing quests to get xp, so that I had the necessary skills and weapons when the next intense story set-piece occurred.

It didn't feel samey to me, as there's a variety of mission designs and the randomness of the world means 90% of the time it can descend into utter pant-sh*tt*ng chaos. But I do love games that mix up stealth (especially when it actually, you know, works properly, as this game does), action and scavenging for resources, so 60 hours in this world (on the hard difficulty) was fine with me. I hungrily ate it up.

Obviously if you don't want 20+ hours (or more) of your time slinging a motorbike about and running over mutants / deer / wolves, or creeping about stabbing mutants in the back, or getting into gunfights with armed bandits, then your appreciation will differ.

For me, I thought it was great and absolutely worth the purchase. It looks decent, is quite impressive when you get to the point that huge numbers of enemies can be onscreen, and the controls / action / stealth are super slick. It certainly isn't original, but is the best version of all those things it is nicking, so I don't much care how familiar the premise or design is.

The end result has that X factor which made me want to keep playing it, and the story was sufficiently engaging to see it all through to the end. Happily it doesn't end on a cliffhanger for a sequel, so whilst it may not get any further entries due to a middling reception (that's not earned IMO), that's not something undermining this.

Good stuff!

This "game" has two issues: (1) It has a confusing message, rather than an actual, engaging narrative, and any merit has probably been butchered in the translation to English, and (2) It plays like a mind-numbingly boring load of old arse.

Like games such as Inside / Limbo, this is a surreal "experience" where trippy visuals and ambient soundscapes are meant to come together and at least provide some spectacle, or thought-provoking / wondrous scenes. And that's about it when it comes to the content / purpose of it, as it tries to justify its existence with some really crappy platforming and basic puzzles.

Often any attempts at being more game-y are undermined by poor fixed camera angles, and a level of performance that tanks far more than the mediocre graphics ought to. At times this was in the twenties for FPS, and yet it looks like cack and doesn't really have all that much on-screen to account for the naff performance.

It's a poorly optimised and unimpressive looking effort, with the dullest game-play I've encountered in a long old time. It starts from a position of mediocrity for its basic mechanics, and then pads it out with filler material, such as slow walking / slow-ass moving platforms / long stretches of nothing happening.

Maybe there's an intelligent message behind it. Something to do with our minds being warped by tv and media, as it's used for propaganda, or subjugation of the masses as they become docile sheep stuck in front of the gogglebox, or how fantasy can be an escape from harsh realities.

But it's buried under a slightly dubious translation, and serviced by a game that is neither visually provocative or inspired, and is incredibly dull to play. I don't think it's worth any money at all, and is much worse than things that are free. It runs like a diarrhoea sufferers ass, and best of all: it ends with a "to be continued", despite barely being worth the hour it took to "finish"

Never-mind them coming up with further adventures for something where I'm like "what the f**k? I don't even know what happened in this one, or even much care", but who knows? Maybe between now and then they'll learn not to make such dreary sh*te.

Hmm....well, this was...not a disappointment as such, but not quite to my tastes. I saw the trailer for this and thought it looked like a kooky little shooter. Er...it's certainly kooky, though I don't think they've realised it all that well when it comes to the shooting part.

What I didn't quite twig on when seeing this, is that you never get off the motorbike. Imagine if someone mixed the bullet-time of Max Payne, with the acrobatic gun-play of My Friend Pedro, the sort of "strategising" of Hotline Miami, and then decided that wasn't enough by itself, and that you really need to be doing all of this with the coordination of Benedict Foddy whilst riding a twitchy motorbike with a handling model like Trials Fusion.

Does that sound like fun? It doesn't sound like....er.....not fun, but from this being a negative review I'm sure you can figure it out. Boy, oh boy! Does this get tedious, and from the fairly short distances between check-points I get the impression the developers were aware how annoying it is.

The controls (on a joy-pad, at least), at their lowest settings for sensitivity, are both too twitchy for the motorbike, and too shonky for the shooting (even with auto-aim on). I can imagine this being perfectly fine on keyboard and mouse, but, hey! I don't play that way, and the alternative is pretty f*ck*ng irritating, with it really easy to kill yourself doing necessary moves on the bike.

You see, you can parry bullets with the bike, and you can only reload by doing a forward flip. So you have no bullets and must jump over somewhere to get any more, but oops! There isn't anywhere to do that, except by jumping over some bad guys, and you don't want to do that, for the obvious reason that they tend to shoot you whilst you are prone in the air.

So you really want to parry their bullets, except they refuse to shoot you until it's too late to do so, and you die. Between things not happening in the way that they seem designed specifically for, the clumsy controls where even auto-aim can't make it easier to target the enemy, some mechanics that are rather nonsensical and, again, clumsy, and I can't say I'm loving it so far.

And, by the way, this is only an hour into the game and I'm already finding the basic premise to be quite tedious. It looked interesting from the trailer, but having played it...it's not a "meh!" exactly, but teeters on the brink of being fun and making me want to smash my controller.

Unfortunately it just doesn't have that much appeal for me to keep wanting to come back to it, and overall is somewhat of a bizarre experience that needlessly complicates the art of shooting things without delivering a particularly compelling end product. As a shooter it feels awkward, as a Trials Fusion kind of thing it feels about right, but who the heck wants such fiddly controls and physics when the game isn't really designed in the same way.

This isn't about you getting a motorbike around a stunt course, and yet it plays that way when it comes to the handling and it's silly logic behind reloading. When it comes to the shooting, it doesn't mesh with these things. So while it can be fun shooting enemies, or parrying bullets, it feels utterly pish when you can't string those elements together because the enemy refuses to play ball.

By themselves these flaws are enough for me to be somewhat dubious about recommending it. When you add in a story that's probably quite good as a narrative, but is not written with much flair or to a particularly high standard (most likely from a bog-standard translation into English), and it all totals up to something far less compelling than I'd hoped for.

It's not bad, though playing on a controller is really unsatisfying, and the game-play feels a bit marmite-y to me. You'll either love it or hate it, and for me I think I'd have refunded it if it had been bought on steam.

Bramble The Mountain King is one of those hard games to describe, mainly because it's far more about atmosphere and outlandish spectacle, than it is about meaty game-play. It may also require some familiarity with Scandinavian folk-lore, as this covers quite a few things that seem to have no connection with each other and so just come over as filler encounters to pad out an otherwise pretty slim narrative.

A boy wakes up in the middle of the night and his sister is missing. For some reason the game doesn't explain, she has rather stupidly gone running off into a forest absolutely jam-packed with giant monsters that make no attempt to hide their existence, despite her seemingly being ignorant of them being real and quite unfriendly.

He sets out to find her, and once he catches up, they have a really nice old carefree time of it running about in the beautiful outskirts of the forest and playing hide and seek with some very cute gnomes.

Then a giant troll comes along, pops the poor little gnomes like they were adorable zits, and yoinks your sister into a bag so he can go feed her to the bramble king. Now, it's unclear why she was even out there in such a dangerous location in the first place, given that it took all of about 5 minutes walk to go from being in a tranquil gnome village and finding themselves in some serious sh*t.

To me the plot boiled down to: My sister is a free-spirited f*ck-wit, or some kind of mentally sub-normal thrill-seeker, who got into easily avoided trouble for no good reason at all, but hey! ho! Looks like you gotta go rescue the dozy muppet.

Along the way there are flesh-eating trolls and giants that allow for a large sense of scale in it's set-pieces, and some measure of dread. There are evil forest spirits, malevolent entities, and the dark twisted forms of dead babies. It's a magical mystery tour of that cultures most grim and gruesome tales, but the actual terror is fleeting, as it's never backed up by mechanics with much depth to go with the visual grandeur.

Back in the days of the playstation 2 it was impressive seeing the likes of God Of War 2 doing humongous menaces that would smash through environments as they tried to grab the tiny player character. And then again a console generation later on the xbox 360 when Batman Arkham Asylum had you tripping your head off under the scarecrows fear gas, in hallucinogenic sequences. Only, by then it was more about how they managed to get this absurdity into a relatively "normal" game, rather than being impressed by the scale.

Seeing it in 2023, albeit with glorious graphics and superb ambience, is somewhat weak given that there is very little difficulty or involvement backing up the spectacle. It's great that an indie studio can now produce titles that match 20 year old console titles, but not so great that they still can't beat 20 year old game-play, never-mind the fact that things like GOW / Spiderman are on pc with massive increases in both the action and the scale since then.

It's like "my first horror game for children" in terms of the tone and challenge, yet is pretty gory and disturbing when it comes to the content. Platforming is straight-forward, as are any puzzles, and it all just comes down to being engaged by the story and the visuals.

And, yes! It looks sublime and evocative when it comes to telling this grim fairy-tale, but at 5 hours length to complete and with few sequences that are anything more than a simplistic minute or two of tension that quickly dissipates, well, it's a bit hollow. The only time these sequences take more than two or three attempts to finish, is down to slightly awkward fixed camera angles and some poorly sign-posted things you need to do.

If you took a bit of the whimsy of Ico, then chucked in the scale of God Of War or King Kong, and then tried to mix that with Amnesia The Dark Descent (by quite literally nicking one of it's set-pieces and repeating it rather witlessly twice) you'd have some sense of the various things this is mashing together.

You can take inspiration from other games, but at least do it as good as them, or preferably even better. This does neither for about 95% of it's run-time. That Dark Descent set-piece that it cribs? It was in first-person and had you trying to wade through knee-high water as an invisible enemy chases you. It was intense and scary, precisely because the point of view limited what you could see.

You could briefly distract this enemy, and then the game would deliberately slow you down by making you have to turn a wheel to open a vertical door until you could get under. It knew how to terrify and how to turn the screw to sustain the tension.

The developers here, do not. They do it in third-person, which inherently weakens it's potency to begin with, and it then just goes nowhere after that. You can see the threat moving around under the surface, and you just run to the next safe spot. Repeat this about four times and you're done. Having done this underwhelming sequence once, they repeat it again later without any changes whatsoever.

It's probably more irritating for me because I played Moons Of Madness only a few weeks ago, and guess what set-piece it too is cribbing in an equally lame fashion...Yup!! The exact same one! Nor did I think it was any good when The Beast Inside nicked it and tediously repeated it, or Bloober Team with their dreary Blair Witch game.

The Evil Within did a pretty good job though, but the point is that I can reel off oodles of titles that are "inspired" by this idea and then only do a pish, cheapo knock-off when replicating it.

The one time that they do a genuinely good "boss" sequence it's still riffing on ICO and has maybe, I dunno, two whole minor differences between how that games final boss plays out. This is, what? 20 years later?

To some this will feel fresh, but to me it is stitched out of other games that were done better, and this folklore was explored in more frightening titles such as "Unforgiving: A northern hymn" / "Through the woods" / "Apsulov". It is visually stunning and incredibly well-realised when it comes to the presentation, but as a game? Well.....what's here is engaging enough to pass the time, and nothing more than that.

Every so often it does something creepy, every so often it does something where you're like "wow! indie games have come a long way technically". Yet, looking back at it, looking past the production values....it never succeeded in being pant-sh*ttingly scary, or ever sustained those moments of dread.

The reason why is that any stealth is basic, the chase scenes are too short and easy, any other type of challenge is pretty straightforward, and when they do find an average level of success it's just repeated again with minimal changes.

So, on the one hand: It's good if you're new to whatever you'd call this toothless "cinematic" kind of "action" and "horror", but on the other hand....it's a nothing-burger of a game in a nothing-burger genre. I love games like Limbo and Inside, and in some ways they are just as vapid as this when it comes to the game-play, so I do understand the appeal.

If anything it's the potential for this to have been a "proper" horror masterpiece, like Amnesia The Bunker, that makes it somewhat more disappointing. They do have game-play here, but it's done at such a low level as to be equivalent to crossing a 3d platformer for babies with a walking simulator "horror" experience.

I don't regret my time with it, or the money spent, but having finished it, ooh, I dunno, half an hour ago, I can't name one sequence where it blew me away beyond the artistic and technical side of it. At 5 hours for £25, and seemingly with little reason to replay it (such as a branching narrative, or things to discover) it's good enough for a recommended, but only just for certain players, and most definitely not recommended for action or horror seekers.

RAGE is a first-person shooter developed by ID software, the makers of DOOM and Quake. It was a release that saw them attempting to do two things they weren't really well known for, and that is story-telling and non-linear level design.

Set in a future earth that has been devastated by a comets impact, you play as one of the lucky few who made it to underground bunkers and was frozen in cryo-stasis to be revived at a later date. Which, the more astute of you might notice, is rather similar to the basic premise of the Fallout games.

I don't know if they actually advertised it as being anything even vaguely similar, but that was what many seemed to take from the games announcement. In their minds: This was ID doing an open-world looter shooter, RPG-esque type thang, that was going to be up there with the best immersive sims, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R / Fallout 3 / Fallout New Vegas etc etc

And, well....um...it's not that, not even close. This is ID being, well, ID, and doing what they know, but in a frame-work that's neither fish nor fowl when it comes to the substance, isn't particularly rewarding for exploration, and has a fairly mediocre linear narrative.

So, no! It's nothing like Fallout, if what you are looking for is to be able traipse around for hours finding tons of useless sh*te that you can't even carry, and oodles of "new" places that offer some interesting stories, or diversions, but have sh*te game-play. RAGE has really fun action, and a modicum of neat elements to it, but beyond that it's rather underwhelming.

If you like slick and brutal gun-play, then (none too surprisingly, considering who it comes from) this excels. With some smarter touches such as mild stealth, environmental kills, and item crafting, it has some signs of things they would later do in DOOM 2016, and it still has that fast tempo.

Bullet types, and new resources to build, compliment a selection of varied, visceral weapons. Enemy types have different behaviours and defining characteristics, and some guns or offensive devices are better suited than others. As an example: You have a device called a wing-stick, and this is basically a guided flying guillotine that will lop off an enemies head if they're not wearing armour. For fast, very agile enemies such as the mutants, it really helps taking them down compared to the guns where it's harder to hit them.

Basically: When you're in a fire-fight, and it's on a harder difficulty with the AI putting up a reasonably convincing challenge, this is fun and fairly tricky. Simple fun, but fun is...uh...fun. It's just if you want more than that, that this is a bit of a damp squib that goes beyond IDs comfort zone.

The story told here is pretty bare-bones and poorly communicated. Not in the sense that the writing is bad, but they set up a villainous faction as the overall enemy, and then do hardly anything to make them a known presence until literally 10 minutes before the game ends. By the time you even have some sense of who you're fighting, you'll see the end credits.

It has quests like an RPG experience, but these only provide resources and affect your progression through the narrative. They don't offer choice or moral dilemmas / risk and reward scenarios etc, just a reason to go someplace and shoot lots of people. It is essentially an arcade-y kind of Fallout, but even so it has very little of the depth or content of that game series.

Later games like Metro were more convincing as a carefully curated FPS experience with some depth, and for all that I think Fallout has been pretty boring, it is the King when it comes to post-apocalyptic exploration and 100 hour long slogs through a reactive world. RAGEs world only reacts to you when you put a bullet in it.

I can understand it being quite disappointing at £40, or whatever it cost back in the day, due to being fairly short and basic, but at £8, as it is now, it's an enjoyable experience if you know what you're getting. And that is some pretty straight-forward shooty-shooty-bang-bang.

Unfortunately it also has some mild technical issues running on modern hardware that further lessen any gloss it has, as occasionally this will chug quite badly in places if you run it in 64-bit mode. This will give better performance most of the time, but it will sometimes pause briefly when an enemy gets obliterated by explosives into a shower of gore. It also has vehicular combat in the "open-world" and this too has occasional drops when certain special effects are happening.

Most of the time it runs smoothly, but it's very noticeable during those times when it doesn't. At the end of the day: These blemishes and mis-steps don't make it a bad game, and I did enjoy it. But you can't really have the gun-play ID are known for, and marry that to a Fallout style experience. Which is why Fallout isn't a fun shooter, but is good at the rest, and why RAGE is a crap Fallout, but a fun FPS.

It's not DOOM levels of "rip and tear", but it's not a dumpster fire either. At least, if you go in with the correct level of expectation about what it is, and isn't.

'House of ashes' is set during the Iraq war, as an American squad of marines investigating weapons of mass destruction find more than they bargained for when they get trapped inside an ancient underground Sumerian temple. As all hell breaks loose they must face a vicious, otherworldly foe if they are to survive.

This is a hard game to review, as first of all it is an interactive adventure where most of the "action" is basic quick time events, and then there's the matter of whether this particular story grabs you. In that regard it is relatively scary and engaging, but I can imagine some people rolling their eyes at the places this goes to story-wise.

From the creators point of view they are "filling" out what would have otherwise been a somewhat slim tale, and giving a "fresh" take on mythology, which is fine. I can still see someone thinking the first half of this is awesome, yet maybe not appreciating the ending so much. Not because there's a drop in quality, but because it mashes together some anachronistic elements that they find are a step too far.

As I don't wish to go into spoiler territory it's tricky to express just how far apart this ends up from the opening premise, but I can guarantee it is going to be either wild or a bit silly depending on your tastes.

Whatever you might make of it, there's no denying this is incredibly cinematic at it's best, and has some good scares. It does a great job setting the scene and has characters / events that are quite compelling, with the capability to branch off the narrative according to things you do, or don't do.

From a cast of six characters I only managed to get one of them out alive, as I made wrong decisions or was too twitchy with the interactive challenges. There is the option to play through it again and see if you can do better, though I think once is enough for me.

It was fun and spooky, but these "games" are very bare-bones when it comes to that thing which to me defines "games", and that is..uh...having game-play. To be blunt: this doesn't have that much of it, and what's there is fairly simplistic to give the player some tactile involvement in what's happening.

It was never meant to be a title like Amnesia The Bunker, or other pant-sh*tting fright-fests such as Outlast or Alien Isolation, but on the other hand something like Beyond Two Souls (another choose your adventure type-thang) really strived to make these sequences far more interactive. Considering you're playing as marines who are armed, and that they set up behaviours for the monsters which would easily fit into stealth or combat sequences, well...you don't get any of that.

Everything goes on the pretty graphics (to be fair, they are stunning), the story, the performances (which are all good) and the "cinematography" that makes this feel like a full-on horror movie. It is what it is, yet doing "proper" game-play would have achieved two things:
(1) it would be flipping brilliant to have even just a little bit more to do for the player that brings a genuine fear-factor, and
(2) they could have made it last longer than the 5 hours it takes to finish.

Now I liked this, but I didn't pay full-price for it, nor did I buy it on sale either. I got it from Humble choice, so as far as value for money goes (what I paid for it, at least) it was a bargain for me. Whether I play it again or not isn't something I have to consider to get my moneys worth.

It's an intense experience, but it isn't an intense "game", and clearly it's not very long either. It has its moments of terror, and was decent throughout, though the devs final twist on the subject matter might be a step too far for some.

If you think you'll replay it, either to see all the narrative outcomes, or as a completionist determined to have all the characters survive, then it will have more worth to you. Otherwise, it's probably too short for the cost, albeit quite entertaining while it lasts.

The Darkest Tales is a metroidvania set in the mind of a girl who is being attacked by "demons" and you are her favourite childhood toy, bought to life by a fairy and tasked with saving her soul. Or something, I dunno, there's people saying this has a good story but considering the childish and cringe-worthy dialogue, that is delivered in squeaky childish voice-acting, I'm not really getting that vibe personally.

Even if this was the greatest game-play (sadly, it isn't) it would still be doing my head in with some overly long cut-scenes and a dark tone that just isn't matched by the standard of the writing. Which is distinctly tweenage in execution, with jokey "grumpy" banter between the bear and fairy that is as clumsy as the game-play can prove to be.

Ignoring the narrative, and focusing on how it handles and is designed, this unfortunately can be somewhat clunky on occasion. The controls are responsive, yet still feel a bit stiff for combat, and traversal sequences have some dubious execution. Such as them doing a chase scene with a fixed moving camera that tends to lead to more deaths than any of the obstacles you face.

It can very quickly outpace you and even though you're standing on a platform as it overtakes, you die. And the best thing about it? The better you get at moving through this sequence, the faster the camera automatically moves and you end up dying anyway. Go too slow? you die. Go too fast, you die. Get it just right, and congratulations! You get to spend about five to ten minutes without any checkpoints, further battling somewhat poor mechanics to finish it.

On paper it was sound, but in practice? Nope! They didn't get it right.

The game has a skill-tree, yet it lacks any meaningful progression beyond barely noticeable increases in damage or health, and any significant upgrades are all doled out through story progression. Combat is passable, but not a patch on the likes of Ori or Hollow Knight, and overall I don't think this comes anywhere near close to either of those titles for exciting challenges.

Though, having said that, I would say the combat, along with the graphics, are it's better aspects. On the other hand: There's still something off in the action, and the level design can be rather turgid, overly long and as it lacks a map can consequently be fairly tedious in places. In particular there's an underwater level that is mind-numbingly boring, and as it's around 7 hours or so into the game, I'm not super-hyped as I assume it heads into the end stretch.

If only the game played as beautifully as it looks, but, well, it doesn't. in fact, it would be nice if the game performed as well as it looks, but it doesn't and there were a couple of places that had pretty extreme slowdown. So yeah, it looks nice and generally runs...okay, and isn't awful on the game-play front, yet there's enough things bringing it down when compared to other better, similarly priced experiences. Of which I'd be here all day if I listed all the alternatives.

Most of the individual flaws aren't game-breaking, but added all together....with the story making me want to stab myself in the brain due to its twee execution, and game-play that can't match the best in a fairly saturated genre, this isn't a recommended. "Meh!" would be the most accurate response, but you know, you only get "good" or "bad", and "passable" is still closer to bad in my book, than it is to being good.

Why should you pay £20 for this? I guess if you're really bored, it will do. Or you like to hear annoying helium-voiced characters making sh*t jokes in a dark emo fairy-tale, then hurrah! You're in luck. Personally I found the latter to be deeply tedious and a bit too up itself, seeing as it seems to think its "deep" but is written with all the skill of a brain-damaged chimp.

Is this really dire? No. is it bloody amazing? No. Are there absolutely tons of similar games that are much better? Yes. There isn't much else to say about it.

[EDIT: Finished it....the final levels are tediously designed, with some poorly explained elements that really got on my nerves. The ending was in line with the rest of the story (i.e very twee), and sh*t all over the darker plot-points, making this all over the place tonally]