Recent reviews by inlimuniter

I was very (pleasantly) surprised to see the trailer for this game at The Game Awards 2022. It reminded me of those old mecha animes from the nineties, but with that dark vibe FromSoftware do so well in their games. I must admit I’m not a Armored Core aficionado. I have played them like a bit decades ago in the PS2 days but never in any kind of particularly serious or complete kind of way. In all honestly, I barely even remember what they were like to play, other than there being mechas and shooting stuff. But, I mean, I do quite like mecha and I liked the look of the vibe and art style they were going for here, and I’ve always enjoyed the challenging nature of FromSoftware’s games so thought I’d give this a try.

I know that FromSoftware games are not exactly famous for being the most advanced graphics wise, but I must admit I was a little disappointed with the visuals here. That’s not to say that it has ‘bad’ graphics. I mean it has its moments like in terms of the vistas, and the explosions and particle effects are quite nice at certain points, so are the animations and the speed of movement is impressive, as you’d expect, but it all just looks at bit lacking somehow, like the textures are all just a bit flat, and the model detail and environment detail is just kind of lacking.

The art style is good though, I mean, the mechas all look suitably cool in a kind of anime sci-fi in a palatable to western audiences kind of sense. The environments certainly have a dark and mysterious sci-fi vibe to them. You certainly do feel like you are on a strange alien world in the game.

I liked the menus and the kind of Metal Gear vibe for the messages in between missions. The UI is interesting in the game. I mean, it looks suitably robotic like, but is maybe a bit over the top and hard to read during more fast and frenetic moments.

The music is really great and a highlight of the game. The voice acting is really good. The stereotypical American Jarheads, the snotty corpo leaders, the grimy scrapper types, loved all the voice work, even if it was maybe a bit over the top at some points.

Performance was disappointingly not great. I did initially have awful performance, and basically had to disable EAC to get rid of stuttering and wild FPS variance. Doing that got me an average frame-rate of about 90fps, that occasionally would go up to 120 and very occasionally down to like 50fps. The downside is that doing this meant I couldn’t play the multiplayer part of the game. Load times were ok. I had no crashes or significant bugs.

You’re a mercenary of unspecified origins and you land in this planet of Rubicon with the assistance of your ‘handler’ Walter and assume the identity of Raven to conduct mercenary work for unspecified reasons on this planet. The planet is a source of ‘coral’, a volatile energy source with amazing potential to power humanity advancing technology. You team up with and fight against various interested entities, such as private corpo militaries, the local freedom fighter group and the local enforcement group.

You grow your mercenary reputation and things development and certain choices arise… I thought the story was decent, but not amazing. It’s all a bit metaphorical and lacks specificity a bit too much. It’s interesting the lore of the planet and the technology and the resource war going on, and the different mercenary and corporate characters and how they interact are interesting, but it just kind of felt to me like it needed a stronger character narrative. There is apparently multiple endings, maybe these explain things a bit more, maybe I’ll look into doing them at some future point, but I don’t know. Like I say, I thought the story was ok, it certainly has a vibe to it, and I enjoyed certain beats of it, but I wasn’t massively impressed by it.

At its core Amored Core VI is a third person shooter that emphasises dodging attacks and customising your mecha to maximise its power in terms of it’s damage output, ability to take and avoid damage and have energy efficiency.

It’s kind of Soulslike to a certain degree, particularly in its boss battles, some of which I did find mildly challenging, but noting akin to the hardest bosses in Dark Souls, Elden Ring or Sekiro. I mean, the thing about Armored Core VI is that beyond a bit of becoming familiar with it’s many button pressing controls and the attack patterns of trickier enemies, it’s really just about customizing your AC in the correct way to take down that tricky enemy. Do you need to maximise DPS? Will melee work well here? Is explosive damage going to hurt that well armoured enemy? Will energy weapons take down those annoying shields? It’s just mostly about that and managing energy for movement and cool-downs and ammo limits.

The game features a mission structure, which I actually kind of liked, but it does make it all feel a bit broken up narratively speaking. There are some larger environments to explore, with some branching paths and mild puzzles, but nothing huge, this a mostly linear game, the action is focused, which I think actually suits the game, but it does feel kind of retro and may disappoint some.

Well, I didn’t play the multiplayer part for the performance issues I stated early. It’s disappointing. I mean, I didn’t play the multiplayer in Dark Souls 3 for similar reasons, I didn’t really play much multiplayer in Elden Ring because I just don’t think it was very well implemented and I didn’t play it here at all. Whilst the single-player experience was my primary interesting in this game, I was keen to give the multiplayer part of the game a go. Maybe if a performance patch comes out it the future I might give it a go though.

It took me about 20 hours to complete a single play-through of the game, with doing the training and arena battles and lots of build tweaking and testing, which I think for a fast paced kind of game like this feels about right. There is new game+ and multiple ending, and collectable hidden battle logs.

It cost me £35.49 of an external reseller site, but cost £49.99 here on Steam. I mean, I think it was worth the cost for me, but if not super keen on mechas, or the sound of the gameplay, vibe or art style of the game, I would strongly suggest waiting for a sale.

I have some mixed feelings about Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. Visuals, performance, story and not being able to play the multiplayer part were certainly disappointing for me. I did mostly enjoy the gameplay though, quite a lot in fact. The music is amazing and the game does certainly have a vibe to it and an interesting art style that I enjoyed. I’d describe it as kind of unique actually. Whilst it may not be every bodies cup of tea, I’d really struggle to think of a better recent mecha game. For those reasons it gets a positive review from me.

• Visuals - 7.5/10
• Audio - 9/10
• Performance - 6.5/10
• Story - 7/10
• Gameplay - 8.5/10
• Multiplayer - 0/10
• Lasting Appeal - 7.5/10
• Price/Value for Money - 7.5/10

• Overall - 8/10

I feel almost duty-bound to write a review for Cyberpunk 2077. Like many gamers back in 2020 I saw the previews and promotions for this game leading up to its release. I saw that Keanu Reeves was in it. That it was CDPR’s next game after The Witcher 3, a game I really enjoyed. I thought very highly of said devs at the time and thought they could do no wrong. I had very high levels of anticipation. I didn’t preorder though, as I promised myself never to do that again after my experience with Arkham Knight.

So, the game was released. I saw all the reviews and the YouTube videos. I was disappointed but I decided just to not bother with it. I wasn’t really playing video games much at the time anyway, and seeing that this was supposedly released as an unfinished and glitchy mess hardly made me enthusiastic to bother with it. I mean, it just kinda served to reinforce some negative thoughts I had at the time about video games being on a downwards path theses days.

Alas though, times change, and my interest in video games returned. Having caught up on playing through a whole bunch of other games, and being spurred on by this apparently having received patches, and having watched one of my favourite streamers playing it a bit recently, and the Netflix show, I finally decided it was time to give Cyberpunk 2077 a chance.

From the moment you switch on Cyberpunk you are immediately assaulted by its vibrant and sensory overwhelming visual style. Everything is very bright, neon, high contrast and highly stylised, and everybody is very attractive in the world of Cyberpunk. If GTA and Deus Ex had a baby whilst listening to Daft Punk and watching Ghost in the Shell, it would look like Cyberpunk 2077. There is definitely a certain anime style but in a western way going on in game, and anime is frequently referenced in the music and the story/side missions. There’s even a Cyberpunk anime show on Netflix. I enjoyed the art style of the game a lot, but certainly it won’t appeal to everybody,

The pertinent question would be how did the game perform on my system? Well, pretty good actually. Average framerate was about 70fps and barely ever went below 60, on high settings 1080p. I mean, my system isn’t really up to running it in a nice way with RTX on. There is a FSR 2.0 mod, but I didn’t really care for how blurry it made things. Bit of a shame, but it still looks good without RTX, there’s still nice reflections and lighting effects and stuff like that. I mean, the character models, animations and scale and detail of the world is very impressive in the game.

It is certainly still a buggy game though. Frequent issues I encountered included the UI disappearing, it not registering key inputs, weird physics issues like cars flipping into the air for no reason, NPCs double spawning on top of each other, NPCs disappearing and reappearing, my character being stuck in weird falling over loops, you know, stuff like that. Most issues were either just kind of funny or moderately immersion bothering, or could be fixed by loading the last save. I’d say it works without issue maybe 80% of the time, but it was always a bit of a thing in the back of my mind whilst playing that something might glitch a bit. There was no glitches that completely ruined the game experience for me though.

The story is about a few things. Friendship and love. Corporate commoditisation of the human body and soul. People living in a world where cybernetic implants is an ordinary everyday thing. The spirit of rock and roll and music in general. Being a mercenary and the trouble that gets you into.

I’ve always really rated CDPR when it comes to dialogue and story telling in a mature way in video games. The Witcher games serve as great example of how to do that well in my opinion, and Cyberpunk 2077 is much the same. I must admit though that some of the characters and side stories here I did think were a bit lame or annoying. I also found the narrative a bit muddled and abrupt on occasions. There’s awful lot of choices you make during the course of playing through the game. Whilst it is generally well done, sometimes I just felt a bit like, the choices didn’t really matter or have a meaningful or satisfying conclusion.

Certainly the game does has some really amazing cinematic moments and really interesting characters, locations, scenarios and themes. Keanu Reeves’s character in particular is a standout performance.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a FPS Open-world Action RPG. There’s shooting stuff, hacking things, sneaking about, melee combat, lots of talking and choice making, grinding experience, looting weapons and equipment, inventory management, character attributes and skills upgrading, crafting and upgrading weapons and clothes, and a cybernetic enhancements system.

Whilst I played the game mostly in a just kind of shoot everybody that gets in my way sort of way, I liked how the game gives you a lot of options on how to approach missions. The gunplay is pretty satisfying, and the hacking, stealth and melee mechanics all work quite well.

I did find the looting in the game and the inventory management and how it links in with crafting and upgrading to be maybe a bit overly grindy and more fuss than I could really be bothered with.

There’s a lot of driving in the game. It’s not terrible, but I wouldn’t call it great neither. Almost all the cars feel like they are skidding about on ice, and lack fine control. It’s manageable to drive about the city though and the city is a nice place to drive about, but it could’ve been a more enjoyable aspect to the game with more refinement.

As previously mentioned, the talking part of the gameplay I thought was well done. Although one thing I wasn’t a fan of was the time limit it randomly sometimes gives you to pick a response.

You’ve got a sizeable main quest, maybe about 30 hours to get through in itself, that has about 4 different endings. Then you have multiple side quests which have a nicely done episodic feel, probably about 20-30 hours worth of that stuff. Then you have the gigs and the NCPD ‘scanner hustles’ which are way over plentiful, and felt like the definition of repetitive randomly scattered open world tasks stuff.

It’s a big open world to explore and there is plenty of stuff to do and find in it. Whilst the main story and side quests are certainly substantive content, it’s a shame in my opinion that they bulked up the content with what feels like lazy repetitive stuff. Honestly I could have lived with that being less, or not even there at all.

The game retails at full price for £50, but frequently goes on sale at £25, which is what I paid for it. I feel it was worth the sale price, but the full price of it is a bit excessive in my opinion considering its age.

So… Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game. If the art style, or themes or gameplay in anyway seems interesting to you then I would implore you to give it a chance, if you haven’t already. Whilst I appreciate I didn’t play it on release, and I do not think it is a good thing at all the state this game was released in, the irony to me is that the thing I found most disappointing about it was the grinding nature of some of the open world content and RPG mechanics. Although, these things did not stop me from enjoying the exciting and well written story, satisfying combat and sensory overload that is the visuals of this game.

• Visuals – 9.5/10
• Audio – 9/10
• Performance – 7/10
• Story – 9/10
• Gameplay – 8/10
• Lasting Appeal – 8/10
• Price/Value for Money – 7/10

• Overall – 8.5/10

I remember well when Marvel’s Spider-Man first came out on PS4 about 4 years ago, a work colleague of mine at the time, who was a huge Spider-Man fan got it straight away and spent a copious amount of time telling me how amazing it is. I do generally like Spider-Man, how can you not like Spider-Man? He’s in many ways the quintessential superhero, but he isn’t one of my favourite comic book characters. I’ve always found him a bit one-dimensional. He has his struggles, like he worries about those close to him and faces down scary super villains, but he’s essentially just a good guy who saves the day with some witty quips. I do think representations of him that emphasise his fun comic book character nature can be a lot of fun though, and so with this being released on PC now and it being a game I’ve heard many people speaking highly of I was keen to give it a try.

One of the things I found most impressive about this games visuals was the scale at which New York is represented. It isn’t quite perfectly accurate or completely realistic, but it has got to be the best effort I’ve seen in a videogame. There’s a very clean and consistent look to the visuals in Marvel’s Spider-Man. The art style is good, it all has a sci-fi comic book-ish but in the kind of real world sort of look to it. Much like how most MCU movies look. Though it does have it’s own thing going on too. The view distances, lighting effects, the ray tracing reflections in windows, floors and puddles, weather effects, the particle effects, animations, and textures are all really nicely done in the game. The only thing I would criticise is that it can all look a bit plain and predictable sometimes, like it sometimes lacks visual variety. The pedestrians and traffic could of been bit more varied and less robotic too.

Audio is good enough. It does have one song that plays over and over again as you swing about the city. It reminds me of a remixed version of The Avengers movie main theme. It’s an appropriate song, but after hearing it for the one hundredth time it kind of gets a bit old. The voice work is good. Peter Parker sounds like how you’d expect him to sound, with plenty of witty and emotional lines. Peter’s quips are delivered almost constantly, especially during combat, but also in phone conversations and cutscenes. Most of it is genuinely funny, but some of it didn’t quite hit the mark for me.

I was pleased that they unexpectedly included FSR 2.0 as an option in this game. I’m not usually a fan of using upscaling, but to run this with ray tracing and achieve a decent framerate it was necessary in my CPU limited situation. As far as upscaling goes, it looks ok. I could see some slight pixelation around edges of character models, and particularly on the hair of some of the characters with longer hair, but for the most part I wouldn’t really have known I wasn’t playing the game at native resolution. Getting an average framerate of around 70fps with most things on high and using ray tracing, with dips down to about 55fps and highs of about 110fps, I think the slight hit to image sharpness was worth it, and I do think that ray tracing works well in this game making it more visually interesting. I did experience a few crashes and it getting stuck on loading screens, not loading in environments properly, and some visual artefacts glitches. They weren’t that frequent though and most either just went away on their own or loading the last checkpoint solved the issue.

The story is good in many ways. I liked how I feels like a fun and not too serious comic book adventure. Spider-Man is very much Spider-Man here and the villains and side characters are mostly very much how they should be. Whilst it starts and ends very well, it does drag on a lot in the middle where it chooses to focus for about 60-70% of the game on a lesser-known Spider-Man villain, who in my opinion just isn’t all that interesting. It’s a bit of a shame as when the more well know and iconic villains appear there are some fantastic moments with them that are just so well done. More of those kind of moments would’ve been nice.

Spider-Man has a fair amount of interactions with friends, relatives and love interests in this game. Most of that I thought was pretty well done. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the characterisation of MJ in this game though. I didn’t hate it, but I’m not sure if I was all that into it either. In all honesty Peter Parker’s slightly villainous ex love interest steals the show when she appears in a way that MJ just doesn’t. That’s not to say that MJ and Peter don’t have some cute and endearing moments together though.

The gameplay features freeflow combat with a variety of gangster type guys, traversing about the city using Spider-Man’s web slinging and parkour abilities, playing stealth as Spider-Man, linear stealth sections as other characters, and cinematic boss battles which use the game’s freeflow combat and QTEs.

What’s really good about the gameplay is the incredibly fluid traversal system, it really does make you feel like Spider-Man. The boss battles are mostly pretty exciting and enjoyable experiences. The freeflow combat is pretty good. It feels a lot like a Batman Arkham game, although Spider-Man has his own set of appropriate moves and gadgets. The timing on getting the combos and on dodging I felt worked well like 90% of the time, but I did have some slight annoyances with it on occasions. I like the gadgets you can use a lot though, and combining them for interesting effects can be a lot of fun. What I would criticise the combat for is that the enemies you face can really be not all that interesting and start to lack variety after a while.

The linear stealth sections are the low point of the gameplay. They are full of instant fail points and just entirely too linear. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever played through in a game and you could argue they provide variety, but they just feel like something you have to get through to complete the game. There’s also some basic match the thing, and complete the maze type puzzles, they could've been something more interesting.

Similarly to Horizon Zero Dawn there is a lot of ‘open world’ content in this game. Marvel’s Spider-Man perhaps commits the sin of having just a bit too much repetitive content. It’s not that it’s bad content, but by the time you’ve beaten up your thousandth gangster type guy to shut down their very same looking hideouts, you might be left feeling that a bit less of that wouldn’t have hurt the game. You can’t say that you don’t get plenty of game for your money with these Sony ‘exclusives’, but in my opinion a more streamlined experience would’ve improved this game.

The price of the game is a source of some controversy, £50 for a remaster of a 4 year old PS4 game? I paid about £38 on an external site. I don’t lament the price I paid, and you could argue it’s a remaster with improved graphics and includes the DLC, but I do think the game’s price is a bit steep. If I had already bought and played it on PS4/5, there’s no way I’d have paid that much for it.

The strengths of Marvel’s Spider-Man are its fantastic traversal system, its impressive visuals and its cinematic moments. Its weaknesses are that the story drags in the middle and that its open world content becomes repetitive. Do I agree with my former work colleague that it’s an amazing game? Not quite. But it’s a good game in a lot of ways with some slightly disappointing flaws. No doubt though that what it does do well is provide the fun comic book like experience of being Spider-Man.

• Visuals – 9.5/10
• Audio – 7.5/10
• Performance – 8.8/10
• Story – 8.5/10
• Gameplay – 8/10
• Lasting Appeal – 7.8/10
• Price/Value for Money – 7.5/10

• Overall – 8.2/10

Even though I am certainly a big fan of FromSoftware games it took me a while to get around to playing Sekiro. For a few reasons, I guess I was put off a bit by the move towards a more linear action focused game, and although I do find it interesting, the whole kind of historical ninja/samurai looking theme wasn’t something I was necessarily overly immediately keen on neither. Also, even though it’s over three years old now, with it being published by Activision, it is still quite a pricey game too. But back in January with excitement due to the impending release of Elden Ring, and with the game on sale in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale, I thought I’d finally get around to giving it a go.

FromSoftware games are all about the art style, rather than them necessarily being the most technically advanced games around. Sekiro is good enough in a technical sense, but it is outstanding in an artistic sense. It’s a dark fantasy take on Sengoku period Japan. What’s really cool about it is that it manages to look fairly historically authentic, whilst also including unique and fantastical mythological creatures and locales. There’s a great variety to the locations and the enemies you face, with fantastic attention to detail, and amazing combat animations. It very effectively manages to be beautiful and poetic, whilst also being dark, disturbing and scary.

Sound effects are very satisfying, from the various different clinks of the swords, the squelch of landing a hit and the splatter of blood being flicked of your sword after executing an opponent. There is simply brilliant voice work and writing in Sekiro. The conversations you have with NPCs, to the things you can listen in on, to the taunts and grunts enemies say to you during fights, it all adds wonderfully to the sense of atmosphere and the themes of the game. The music is pretty good too, mostly subtle and atmospheric, occasionally more fast and loud during intense moment. Some NPCs play traditional Japanese music on things like flutes or a shamisen, this I thought was a wonderful touch.

Performance was pretty good for me. I did get some occasional minor frame drops here and there, down to like 55fps for a second or two very occasionally. It wouldn’t exactly stutter as it did this, but I could kind of see the frame pacing slow down. Certainly it was nothing that stopped me from enjoying the game though and your own mileage may vary on this.

You play as Wolf, a shinobi/ninja warrior. You are the personal bodyguard of the Devine Heir, Kuro, whose blood is the key to immortality due to his Dragon Heritage. It is set during the Sengoku period in Japanese history, it’s a fantasy take on a real period in history is which much fighting, war and change happened in Japan. The game is set in Ashina and features the Ashina clan, and other related entities, and their desires towards this immortal power.

The story is really great in my opinion. It’s really detailed in terms of lore, with lots of interesting characters and plenty of really well written and performed dialogue. It deals with interesting and meaningful themes, had funny, emotional, dramatic and scary moments, and it also allows for a fair amount of quite well implemented choice making, with there being four different endings depending on the choices you make. What I particularly liked was that to me it felt a lot like a really cool kind of 60s/70s martial arts movie, which melds really well with the nature of the gameplay and challenging nature of the game.

Sekiro is famed for its difficulty. The thing is, it’s just, different. I mean, I’ve played games a bit like it before, like say Bushido Blade, or Tenchu, or Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, or the various Souls games, but nothing that quite has the combinations of mechanics Sekiro has going on. It’s at once lightning fast and extremely intense, whilst also being methodical and rewarding you for thinking. You can level up certain statistics like vitality and posture and attack power, and gain skill points to learn skills which will help you, but due to the posture focused nature of fights, you can’t really just level up to power past a difficult enemy. You must simply learn the correct way to deal with the specific enemy you are facing. When to parry them, when to do a mikiri counter, when to jump over or away, or when you simply just attack and keep the pressure on the enemy. You also have various shinobi prosthetic tools to aid you in your fights, as well as various items, and the resurrection mechanics, that’ll give you a second or sometimes even a third chance in certain situations.

Sekiro is undoubtedly a punishing game, at times I found it infuriating and extremely challenging and genuinely felt like quitting on it, but I persevered with it, and it was in the end a rewarding experience for the effort I put in. By my fourth play-through of the game I felt like a badass ninja who could comfortably take on any challenger without a shed of fear. At the end of the day a large part of the reason I play games like this is for that sense of satisfaction in overcoming the struggle, in being able to master the game, I feel that Sekiro gave this to me in bucket loads.

If I could criticise the gameplay of Sekiro I would have to mention that the grapple hook mechanic and how it is used for navigating the game’s world can be a bit frustratingly unclear. I love how Sekiro has really cool upwards and downwards verticality to it’s world. I also love how it doesn’t hold your hand and point to the correct direction. However, on some occasions I did find that the correct direction was a bit ridiculously unclear and I got lost in a way that was more annoying than intriguing. Also, the famous FromSoftware camera that can’t see through objects or walls makes a return here, and this was often the most challenging enemy in the game.

There’s new game plus, in which the enemies get slightly more challenging, and four different endings, in which the game plays out slightly differently, with different boss fights and ending cinematics. It’s possible to play through the game in about 6-8 hours, or 50-60 hours depending on the ending you’re doing, your play style and skill level, or level of understanding the game’s mechanics and where to go. There’s plenty of collectable things, such as prayer beads or materials for the shinobi prosphetic upgrades. It’s also possible to make the game even harder for further challenge by playing charmless or ringing a demon bell, and there’s the Gauntlets of Strength challenges where you can fight a series of harder versions of bosses. I think the game gives a decent amount of content, it will depend of how good you are at the game and your desire to replay it for the different endings and bosses.

As I mentioned at the start of this review I’m not a huge fan of the price it retails for, do I think I got value for the money out of the £25 I paid for this on sale? Yes, 100%. Do I think that’s a fair sale price, or that the £50 it retails for when not on sale is a fair price for a three year old game? Absolutely not.

Well, as you might be able to discern, I absolutely loved this game and had a hell of a lot of fun with it. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s the most fun I’ve had playing a game in years, probably since my first experience with a FromSoftware game (the first Dark Souls) some 9 years ago now. It’s a three pronged attack; a great immersive story and atmosphere, brilliant art style and sound design, and brilliant brutally challenging yet wonderfully satisfying gameplay. Experiences like this are why I play video games.

• Visuals - 9.4/10
• Audio – 9.8/10
• Performance - 9.0/10
• Story - 9.7/10
• Gameplay – 9.7/10
• Lasting Appeal - 9.4/10
• Price/Value for Money - 8/10

• Overall – 9.7/10

Originally released over 5 years ago on PS4, Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that first came to my attention quite a while ago now. As a fan of the new Tomb Raider series games I heard it being discussed on forums as a similar game that I might like. Have to admit I had more than a bit of cynicism about this generic looking Sony Playstation exclusive open world game daring to be compared to my beloved Tomb Raider, but with Sony releasing some of their exclusives on PC now, and not really having anything else to play, I thought I’d give it a go and see what all the fuss is about...

Horizon Zero Dawn is in my opinion a very visually impressive game. The word ‘beautiful’ might even be appropriate here. It’s one of those games that’s just infinitely screenshoot-able. The attention to detail in the environments, particularly the vegetation I found particularly impressive. The ruined buildings, the tribal settlements, the robots you fight, are all very impressively modelled and animated. There’s really nice weather effects and particle effects. View distances are particularly impressive.

Character models are good, maybe slightly kind of cartoon-ish looking, like everybody is made out of plasticine or something, but not overly so. They are all impressively detailed and generally well animated. The voice work in the game is generally speaking good. There is an awful lot of it. It’s impressive the amount of voice work done for this game, and it’s mostly very well performed, although sometimes it is a bit mundane in my opinion and not as interesting as the game wants you to find it. Dialogue could have done with being more to the point sometimes in my opinion. However, the woman who voices Aloy delivers a very impressive performance, and there are definitely some great moments in the dialogue, with it being at times funny, inspirational, and emotional.

I was very happy with how this game performed on my system, I have heard people have had issues with it, but I never had any crashes and was able to get a consistent 60fps with most things set to ultra/high, apart from shadows/clouds/ambient occlusion on medium. It was entirely possible to get a higher framerate than that actually, but I personally preferred to play it with a locked framerate. Load times can be a bit long, especially the initial load in. I did have a slight AMD driver issue too, that made the vegetation glitch, but just rolling back to the driver that worked fixed that easily enough.

The story is basically a sci-fi tale of the consequences of human greed and mishandling advanced technology set in a post-apocalyptic tribal society. It focuses on the young orphaned woman Aloy and her personal journey to gain respect within this tribal world, to find out about her origins, and to uncover the secrets of the past society and why it disappeared. Personally I really enjoyed the story, yes it’s not exactly the most original story, it’s a bit like Mad Max, The Matrix, Terminator, Tomb Raider, Fallout, Mass Effect etc.. But I think it was genuinely done with a lot of care and attention to detail, and I do think it just about does enough to have its own sense of identity. It does take a while to get going, but once the detail of the game immerses you, I found myself very into what was going on, and genuinely excited and intrigued to play the game through to the end and find out how the story ends and all the little details of the lore and characters you meet.

The gameplay is split into running around talking to people doing quests, and fighting robots with bow and arrows, slings, traps etc. You also have a lot of looting, inventory management, crafting, upgrading and XP grinding with skills unlocks. It’s an action adventure game, but with RPG elements, which give the game a sense of progression. I really enjoyed the combat in the game, it’s very fluid and the robots are all really cool and fun to fight. There’s a healthy challenge there, and it’s interesting the different ways you can take them out, and the strategies you can devise. The stealth in the game works ok-ish, but isn’t particularly refined in my opinion, and ultimately I didn’t really use it very much. There’s also climbing and platforming, this is a bit hit and miss. Aloy can grab certain ledges but not others. It’s a huge open world game, but in truth you don't have complete freedom. Even what you can grab doesn’t always work properly, and I found myself falling to my death a lot without good reason.

Looting and inventory management can be more than a bit tiresome in the game, you have to loot a lot of stuff to have necessary resources for fighting, Aloy does a time consuming animation every time she picks something up, and has very limited inventory space for all this stuff, so you constantly have to scrap things, using an awkward to navigate inventory.

Talking to people is a big part of the gameplay in Horizon Zero Dawn. You have a Mass Effect style response wheel. There’s an impression of choice making given sometimes, like you can respond with your head, aggression or heart, and you get different responses from the NPCs, it’s fun, but it doesn’t really change anything in a meaningful way.

There is a lot of content in Horizon Zero Dawn, an awful lot in fact. Collecting figurines/artifacts, vantage points, bandit camps, datapoints, metal flowers, power cells, facepaints, multiple merchants with various outfits/weapons, multiple side quests/errands, corrupted zones, cauldrons, hunting grounds, tallnecks to climb. There’s a lengthy mainquest, and on top of that there’s The Frozen Wilds DLC which has it’s own mainquest and set of side quests and collectibles. One thing I can say of these Playstation exclusives which Sony have chosen to bring to PC is that you get your moneys worth in terms of having plenty of stuff to do in them. And it’s all quite interesting and worth doing content. Yeah, it is a bit generic, scattered, repetitive open world game tasks kind of stuff, but I do think in this game it is done with much care to attention to detail. It was all stuff that I enjoyed doing and which I felt was worth the time and effort to complete.

The standard price here on Steam is usually about £40, although it regularly goes on sale for about £20, and I’d say it’s definitely worth that price. I myself, picked it up for about £10 on an external key reseller site, and at that price it is absolutely fantastic value for money. 77 hours and I haven’t even really finished this game, there’s new game with harder difficulties modes I can do if I want to.

I had a lot of fun playing through Horizon Zero Dawn, more than I expected to actually. I don’t think it’s exactly the most best game ever or anything like that, but it’s just a good solid game with a nice meaty sci-fi story and world, and good solid fun fighting robots type gameplay. It’s biggest flaws are that looting and inventory management is unnecessarily cumbersome, and it’s a little bit unoriginal. I started this review by comparing it to Tomb Raider, there are similarities, both Aloy and Lara Croft are very attractive, strong, confident, likeable women. They shoot stuff with bows too. That’s about where the similarities end though. Horizon Zero Dawn does enough to set it’s own path and be a distinct new IP in the world of video games. Yes, people who like Tomb Raider will likely enjoy this game, but those who like good sci-fi or well produced open world games will also get a lot out of it too.

• Visuals - 9.8/10
• Audio - 8/10
• Performance - 9.2/10
• Story - 9.2/10
• Gameplay - 8/10
• Lasting Appeal - 9.5/10
• Price/Value for Money - 9.5/10

• Overall - 9/10

Control is a video game that absolutely goes out of its way to be a stylish, exciting and unique experience. In some ways it doesn't get everything right in terms of being an actually enjoyable game to play, but it definitely achieves its primary goals with aplomb.

Control has very impressive visuals. Facial details and animations are very on point here. Lighting effects and attention to detail in the environment are also extremely impressive. The Oldest House twists and morphs in front of your eyes, whilst all manner of interesting lighting and particle effects and creative enemies assaults you.

Audio is definitely one of the highlights of this game, as it usually is in a Remedy game. It has kind of indie electronic kind of music, and lots for weird and interesting sound effects and ambient sounds going on. The game is very atmospheric. The voice acting is good too. Not the best voice acting ever in a game, but good nonetheless.

Performance for me was pretty good, I did have to do a bit of fiddling about with a mod to make textures load in quicker, which worked to a certain degree. There's also weirdly no framerate cap selector, so I ended up using RTSS (RivaTuner Statistics Server) to cap it at 60fps as otherwise it would frequently jump between 80-27fps in a disorientating manner. With the framerate capped I got a pretty consistent 60fps with everything on high apart from ray tracing effects, which I didn't bother with. I did try using them, but I got maybe 25-40fps and it just didn't look all that much greater with them on anyway, so choose to just turn them off and prioritise a decent framerate.

Jesse Faden arrives one day at the FBC (the Federal Bureau of Control) headquartered in a mysterious building known as the Oldest House. In the past as a child, whilst playing in a rubbish dump in her home town of Ordinary, her and her brother chanced upon an Slide Projector that happened to be an OOP (Object of Power) which allowed them to visit alternate dimensions. In one of these dimensions Jesse was imbued with telekinetic and telepathic powers by an extra-dimensional entity of an unclear nature which Jesse now carries with her. She calls this entity Polaris, and it guides her to the FBC for an unknown but compelling reason. She soon finds out all is not right and the malevolent extra-dimensional entity the Hiss has taken over most of the workers of the FBC and it becomes her job to clean up the mess and uncover its mysteries.

I think Jesse is a really well done character. I'll be honest, it took me a little bit of time to warm to her, at first she comes across a bit harsh, unfriendly, and overly unusual. However, as you play through the game her personality really comes out. She's a really kind of cool, 'it ain't no big deal that I'm a badass with these amazing powers' kind of woman. All the characters in the game are all really well done actually. What I particularly liked was that the writing never felt dumbed-down and that the humour in the game was subtle.

The real selling point of Control is the powers Jesse has, and how you can use them in combat. She can levitate, do a ground smash from said levitation. She can create a shield out of rubble. She can dash about. She can telekinetically pick up rubble and hurl it at enemies. She can seize enemies and have them fight for her. Using the 'service weapon' she has various 'forms' of guns to shot and explode enemies with...

The combat is a lot of fun, especially using Jesse's various supernatural powers. It's like a big stylish power trip in that sense. However, unfortunately, the combat can be a very hit and miss experience. An awful lot goes on during combat, things explode all over the place, enemies spawn all over the place, there's lighting and particle effects everywhere. It's very easy to be going along having a merry old time and then somebody spawns just behind you out of camera and one shot kills you from nowhere. The abilities Jesse can use are tied to a energy meter and there's a cool down meter for the gun. It's very easy to get caught short and not be able to dash away from danger or shield yourself and just be left with no option but to watch yourself get killed. It really doesn't help that the game kind of has a pretty rubbish autosave/checkpoint system. I frequently found myself thrown to the other side of the building after dying. Whilst the game does have a fast travel system, the Oldest House is a disorientating labyrinth like place to navigate, and annoyingly the map overlays over the player in real time (it would of been better placed in a sub menu IMO) and there are no on screen objective markers or compass, and it can all become quite annoying sometimes. It's also a bit of a shame that the game's progression system is a bit of a grind and you only really get certain powers towards the end of the game, when it would have been really useful to have them from the start.

The game features quite a few side missions. Mostly they are interesting and enjoyable experiences. Although some are a bit baffling. I really could have done without having to spend half an hour walking around looking for plants to talk to, or having to find several different well hidden little ID cards in a confusing warehouse tower. The Alan Wake and the Foundation DLC content that comes with the Ultimate Edition are a decent bit of extra content to the main story and provide the game with a healthy extension to the length of its main story. As a big fan of Alan Wake I particularly enjoyed that part and really liked the way they managed to incorporate light mechanics and seamlessly merge the worlds of Control and Alan Wake.

Control cost me £7.99 from a reseller site. I mean, you can't argue with that price. I would question how likely I am to ever go back to this game and it isn't the longest game ever, but I do think the game is the right kind of length for the sort of game it is.

Control definitely has its flaws. It's one of those 'your mileage may vary' kind of games. Some may call it's flaws endearingly stubbornly old school, some may call them just plain dated and annoying. For me it was somewhere between the two. What it is though, is an extremely unique and engrossing experience, that when it is fun is one hell of a lot of fun, with massive amounts of style.

• Visuals - 9.5/10
• Audio - 9.5/10
• Performance - 8/10
• Story - 9/10
• Gameplay - 7.5/10
• Lasting Appeal - 8/10
• Price/Value for Money - 9/10

• Overall - 8.9/10

It’s hard for me to fully sum up my feelings about Elden Ring. In many ways I consider FromSoftware’s output over the last decade (especially the first Dark Souls) the shining example of games as art, made by people who love games for those who love games. However whilst I really, really enjoyed most parts of Elden Ring, in some ways I found it occasionally very annoying and a bit inconsistent.

I think Elden Ring is yet another very good example of games as art. In fact I might go so far as to say that in those terms it’s the best famed director Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware have done so far. It’s just an incredibly beautiful, dark but characterful fantasy world, full of secrets and interesting characters and creative enemies ripe for the player to explore and experience. Everything feels thoughtfully placed in this world. There’s no nebulously scattered repeated tasks or generic enemies that feel like they are just there for the sake of it.

Whilst Elden Ring is an ‘open world’ game one cannot simply select a destination and ride in a straight line to this objective. The environment is carefully and intricately designed, it’s puzzle must be solved to navigate properly and uncover it’s secrets. All of this is seamlessly combined with multiple intricately designed large maze like ‘legacy dungeons' which remind of classic more linear Souls series titles in a most satisfying manner. The game is just so full of atmosphere, mystery and character. It really is a masterclass in open world design and implementation. It puts most other open world games to shame in my opinion and in those terms sets a new benchmark of quality.

As you would expect the music is brilliant in the game. The sound effects of the swords and spells and similar thing are excellent too. The voice acting is really good too. Particularly Margit. There are some very iconic lines and performances in this game that will undoubtedly be endlessly meme’d by gamers for a long time.

The performance of this game must be mentioned. It is not the best PC port ever to be honest. There’s no ultrawide screen option, there’s a 60fps lock and limited graphical options. For me I got what I would describe as acceptable but not great performance. It would slightly stutter for me occasionally in a random and unpredictable manner. It could be fine for hours then suddenly just start. Sometimes it would just suddenly freeze completely and I’d have to manually exit the game and close it down and reopen it to continue playing. This happened to me about 10 times in about 110 hours of gameplay, so if you do the maths, not that often, but still more times than I’d like. There’s also been some cloudsave issues, multiplayer connection issues, and controller issues for many users, and some with high end machines can’t even get this game to run at all. I count myself lucky that the game was mostly playable for me, but I do not excuse the business practice of shoddy ports like this. This is far from being FromSoftware’s first release on PC.

I did find the story of Elden Ring a bit disappointingly similar to previous games if I’m being truthful. Don’t get me wrong, as far as I’m concerned no other dev in videogames does the whole dark fantasy style, with ambient lore and the right kind of look and vibe as well as FromSoftware does it, and the story does have some very cool characters and moments. It just felt too familiar to what they’ve already done before to me. Whilst I really got into the lore of the Dark Souls games and Sekiro, I pretty much just played through this game, enjoyed it for what it was then moved on.

The well known action RPG classic Souls series gameplay features here with some quality of life upgrades (the map, jumping, the steed) and some expanded features (ashes of war skills), and some new features (spirit summons). Dodge rolling (or shielding) then carefully getting in your attacks or using spells, incantations, or ashes of war abilities against hordes of enemies or big powerful godlike bosses is the order of the day here.

Souls series games are all about overcoming adversity by learning and playing carefully, intelligently or skilfully. The challenge is hard but fair. I have to say though in Elden Ring I felt that some boss fights, and I emphasize the word ‘some’ here, were mechanically silly and more annoying than challenging. Full of AoE spam, one shot kills, teleporting around, huge amounts of HP, with little or no chance for the player to breathe or attack. Now, one can counteract these shenanigans with your own powerful aids in the aforementioned ashes of war powers or spirit summons, or so on... All’s fair in love and war as the saying goes. But, sometimes I just felt a bit like the gameplay trivialises itself in a bit of a silly and unfortunate manner. A satisfying sense of victory previous FromSoftware games are so famous for was sometimes absent for me.

Nevertheless the game is mostly extremely fun to play. These occasionally silly moments did not spoil the experience overall for me. I feel like FromSoftware pushed the spectacle to the max in Elden Ring, and that is certainly there in spades, but on occasion they just went a bit over the top and dropped the ball on creating a consistent experience.

To be fair though, I think what Elden Ring does do well is give you a lot of options. Ultimately it’s up to you how easy or hard you make this game on yourself. One cannot deny how this game has opened up the Soulslike genre to a wider audience. Overall I do think this is a good thing, but it does come with its downsides.

There’s a multiplayer aspect to this game. I played a bit of it in co-op versus bosses. I enjoyed what I did play of it but as it is only really active when the player chooses for it to be I didn’t really engage with it as much as I did in past Souls series games. I think I got invaded once. The text communication and other player shadows and blood pools are there, and theses are enjoyable as always. They add nicely to the atmosphere and sense of common experience.

Elden Ring is a game which one could spend a very long time playing. I mean, it is a huge world to explore, with many different enemies and bosses and secret locations and items and side quests. And you can play-through it multiple times in NG+ to your hearts content. To be honest though I personally played-through this game once, got half way though NG+ then lost interest. The thing for me personally is that it’s almost like it takes a bit too long to play-through multiple times, and to be honest I just can’t really be bothered. I definitely respect the amount of content there is in this game though.

I paid £41.99 to buy this from GMG. It cost £49.99 on Steam or £64.99 for the Deluxe, which has the digital artbook and soundtrack. It has also started going on sale recently. I mean, the game is definitely worth the asking price. There’s no micro-transactions, no key part of the game sectioned off and sold separately as DLC, no ridiculous premium editions.

So… Would I recommend Elden Ring? Yes. But I do feel put through the wringer a bit by it. It’s an intense, atmospheric and beautiful experience that sometimes annoyed the hell out of me. It is however 110% worthy of playing for it’s exceptional open world design and for it’s atmosphere and art style.

• Visuals - 9.7/10
• Audio - 9.8/10
• Performance - 6/10
• Story - 8.5/10
• Gameplay - 8.5/10
• Multiplayer - 5/10
• Lasting Appeal - 9.5/10
• Price/Value for Money - 9.5/10

• Overall - 9.3/10

The attention to detail and sense of immersion in an open world game in Red Dead Redemption 2 is nothing short of being an amazing modern technical marvel.

I definitely can say that Red Dead Redemption 2 is certainly one of the most visually impressive games I've played. It's full of impressively detailed and individually unique NPC's, all with great well written voice acting. There's plenty of beautiful scenery and wildlife, and impressively detailed towns and cities.

Performance is good. I got a good steady 60fps on a mixture of high/ultra some medium settings. There is a very detailed set of graphics options in the menu and you can scale this to work decently on a range of hardware. So thumbs up there... Rockstar Launcher though. I mean it's just unnecessary, isn't it? DRM on DRM. I can't say it necessarily hurt my performance, but it just adds more load time to a game that already takes quite a long time to load.

To be honest, the first 20-30 hours of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I was kind of disappointed. I really liked the first game, what I particularly liked about that was that it wasn't necessarily a typical cowboy outlaw yarn. You were pretty much just a kid forced into a bad situation and then you work your way out of it and take your very satisfying revenge. When first playing Red Dead Redemption 2, you could be forgiven for thinking that you are just some kind of miserable old crooked geezer, who hangs out with a bunch of lowlifes and whose main interests in life are robbing, murdering and pushing away anything good or honest in his life. But this is exactly what is so good about the story, it gets you to know the characters and the world, feel familiar with them, then it cleverly subverts these expectations, without being overly preachy about it. The redemption in this game is not just about killing some one who dones you wrong, it's about growing as a person and trying to live life in a good way in a world which is cruel, selfish and unfair.

What's good about Red Dead Redemption 2 is also in many ways it's flaw. There is just so much detail in this game. You can brush your horse, feed it, give it medicine. You can feed yourself, give yourself medicine, smoke, drink. You have multiple weapons with various customisable options. You can hitch your horse, you have to take your long arm weapons off your horse after hitching it in order to use it whilst wondering around. You have a stamina meter, a stamina core, a health core, a health meter, a dead eye core, a dead eye meter. The same meters go for your horse too, of course. There's endless stranger missions and random encounters. NPC's also remember you and there's a degree of choice making. There's shops, shows, barbers, gunsmiths, tailors... The list goes on. It creates an extremely technically impressive experience. But Red Dead Redemption 2 is a videogame, and playing it can feel like too much of a chore sometimes, especially when you like trip over a tiny rock and get eaten by an alligator, or spend like 5 minutes trying to hitch your horse.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has an online mode. I didn't play it, and I doubt I ever will. I bought this to play the single player story driven experience. I am perhaps a bit put off by my experience of GTA Online too, which whilst I might have initially had some fun on years ago, I just feel has become Rockstar's sell virtual money cash cow nonsense. Fortunately I didn't impede on the singleplayer experience in this game, so it's not that big a deal.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is quite a long game. It took me about 80 hours to playthrough whilst doing the majority of the side content, but not completely 100%'ing it. There is undoubtedly a good amount of content in this game, though some of the stuff it wants you to do to do everything in the game I’m not entirely sure if I’ll ever really get around to it.

The game costs £59.99 on Steam for the standard edition and £89.99 for the Ultimate Edition, which includes outfits and some boosts and stuff. I think the game does have online micro-transactions too.. I mean, I paid £27.49 whilst it was on sale a while ago, and it does regularly go on sale for around that price. It’s very hard to find the game online for cheaper on reseller sites, especially the Steam version. Frankly, the pricing of this game does annoy me a bit. Sure it’s a high quality game with plenty of content, but the game originally came out on consoles six years ago in 2018, yet they still price this game as if it came out a few months ago.

So I guess the acid test is would I recommend Red Dead Redemption 2? Yes, but do be prepared for a long haul experience. It's not a particularly happy ride either, but does overall have a positive and meaningful message. I do think in some ways Red Dead Redemption 2 suffers from prequelitis. It does however deal with that as well as it can, but can be annoying is some ways (there are some characters you really want to see dead, but it never happens because of plot armour). Overall though the game is 100% worth playing just for seeing the technical marvel it is. Just please Rockstar, stop messing about with online multiplayer MMO virtual money selling cash cow nonsense in the future and focus on making great story driven single-player games instead.

• Visuals - 9.8/10
• Audio - 8.2/10
• Performance - 9.5/10
• Story - 9.4/10
• Gameplay – 8.5/10
• Multiplayer - N/A (didn't play that part of the game)
• Lasting Appeal - 9/10
• Price/Value for Money - 7/10

• Overall - 9.4/10

Never having owned a PS4, I've always been a mixture of being somewhat curious and sceptical about God of War. I'm really into fantasy and mythology, especially Norse mythology, so definitely an interest there, but whilst I do enjoy story driven games I'm always a bit sceptical of overly mainstream/cinematic video games...

I have to say though God of War is great. What it does well, in my opinion, is manage to be a highly polished AAA title whilst avoiding most of the pitfalls that tend to hold those type of titles back these days. There's no DLC, no premium editions, no micro-transactions, no unnecessary forced in multiplayer mode in a single-player game. It's accessible, it's exciting, it's relatable (with the father/son dynamic), and most of all it's, mostly, a lot of fun.

The visuals are really good. I'm not going to say it's the best visuals I've ever seen in a game, but they are consistently impressive, with a great attention to detail and an impressive art style that suitably portrays a magical icy cold Norse world.

The voice acting is exceptional, as you'd expect, and all the sound effects on the weapons and ambient sounds are all really well done. The music is really good, it creates the right kind of atmosphere and frames the cinematic and combat moments appropriately, although it is maybe a tad forgettable.

Performance is ok, I mostly get 60fps on high/ultra at 1080p running it on a RX 6600 XT, i7 6700K, 16GB 3000mhz RAM. It does dip into the 40fps range occasionally and stutter slightly from time to time, especially in the game's big central lake area... But generally it run's well enough for me. It has a decent enough set of scalable settings for those on lower end or higher end systems, which is nice to see. Only real criticism of the visuals for me is that details in the distance can be a bit overly blurry sometimes.

Story, lore and characters are the strength of God of War in my opinion. There is some really well performed and written voice acting and cinematic scenes in this game. It's kinda like if an MCU movie (especially Thor) was combined with the dark Norse world of the TV show Vikings, and perhaps with a light touch of the dark fantasy world and gameplay of Dark Souls. I particularly like the dynamic between Kratos and Atreus, with the themes of family, legacy and truth, and how it progresses through the story. One could call it unoriginal or manipulative, and I wouldn't disagree, but it is in my opinion well done and a lot of fun, and adds an emotional touch to a game that could easily just be about mindless violence and action.

The gameplay is solid. I particularly like the whole Leviathan axe thing in the game, throwing it about at enemies and using it to solve puzzles, and the runic attacks are a lot of fun. The game has light RPG elements which allow a degree of character customisability. It's a superficial system in many ways, I think quite deliberately so, but adds a decent sense of progression to the game. The puzzles in the game are good enough, mostly fun enough, but can get a bit irritating and repetitive after the fiftieth throw your axe at this hidden object thing. The bosses in the game are good fun experiences, especially the Valkyries, which can be quite challenging. Some of the main story line bosses could've perhaps done with being a tad more challenging though.

There's running around collecting relics, loot and lore, with light Tomb Raider-esq climbing/exploring for completionists, which I thought was done ok, it gives the game more length without over staying it's welcome. GMGOW difficulty and NG+ exists for those who want more challenge, personally I played the game on normal and that was fine for me.

The game cost me £28.99 from a reseller site, which I think is a perfectly fair price for the game and represents good value for money. I played the game for about 64 hours and ended up 100%'ing it, I could go back to play it again on the hardest difficulty one day, but it's unlikely I'd bother. I feel like I got the experience I wanted out of the game to be honest.

So yeah, bring on more Playstation exclusives to the world of PC, if that is something Sony want to do. The game does end on a bit of a sequel bait, and honestly, I wouldn't mind playing God of War Ragnarök. But it's very unlikely I'd buy a PS5 to do so, especially not at scalper prices. It's up to Sony though. I mean, exclusivity is in my opinion something that only benefits the company that owns the game, it doesn't benefit the customer, so less of it is good in my opinion. Sony is a company that I've always been a bit cynical about, but ending the exclusivity on this title and Horizon Zero Dawn has put them up in my estimations. I understand they are not doing it as a favour, but as more of an advert, but never-less them putting even more of an end to viewing their games as platform selling exclusives and more as content which they want to make available to as many gamers as possible would put them up even further in my estimations.

• Visuals - 9.2/10
• Audio - 9.5/10
• Performance - 9/10
• Story - 9.7/10
• Gameplay - 8.5/10
• Lasting Appeal - 8.5/10
• Price/Value for Money - 8.5/10

• Overall - 9.3/10

Rise of the Tomb Raider improves on its predecessor in almost every way. Tomb Raider's evolution from a third-person adventure/platform/puzzle game to a slickly produced third-person action shooter with less focus on platforming and puzzles continues here.

This is one the prettiest games I've ever played. The facial and body animations are simply amazing. The reflections, textures, lighting effects and details in the environments are stunning. This is a very high requirement game and as such requires a high-end computer if you want to run it at the highest settings and high resolutions. That being said Nixxes made sure to include a very good range of scalable settings. I can run the game on my quite old system[imgur.com] at mostly high settings and get a very consistent 30fps, 25-45fps if I unlock the framerate. One of the main things affecting framerate and performance in this game is texture quality and if you want to run it on very high textures and get 60fps you need a fast 6GB VRAM card, coupled with a modern CPU and a good amount of fast RAM. Although I have no problem running the game with medium textures which my 2GB VRAM can handle just fine. I would complain about not being able to get 60fps (even lowering settings to the lowest possible settings doesn't really get me a consistent 60fps), but my CPU is just not up to the task so I can't complain really.

There is an uncanny feeling to it at times. You almost get the feeling of being there next to the people in the game as if it was real to a degree that few other games manage to achieve. Little details such as the footprints you leave in the snow, the way Lara fixes her hair and brushes her hand against walls as she passes them, her breath in the cold Siberian air condensing and Lara's little facial twitches and expressions are just incredible.

Sound effects are mostly great. The voice acting from Camilla Luddington is particularly good. She does a great job of delivering Lara's lines with subtlety and emotion. All the bad guys and other characters are quite well voiced too, although some of the writing of the dialogue could be better and is often quite stereotypical.

It would be remiss of me to not mention some issues. The AA options in the game are not the best and it is hard to get a nice sharp image. There is some slightly ugly issues with textures/objects loading in on distant objects and reflections on water in the distance can look blurry sometimes. Some of the NPCs are not so nicely modelled. Also, there are a good few bugs and glitches that I encountered, not so much that it broke the experience for me, but they are there. I've heard mixed things about how this runs for those with high end systems trying to push the settings to the max, some seem to be able to get a consistent 60fps others seem to suffer from occasional drops.

The visuals are this game's strength, but I found it to be a highly enjoyable game to play. Although the game is not exactly the hardest game ever made. In fact, it's mostly rather easy, even on the highest difficulty mode. That's not to say there is no challenge at all. But if you are looking for a highly challenging difficult game then you may be disappointed.

I do enjoy how they have refined Lara's movement set. They brought back the abilities to run, dive and swim underwater from the older games. Stealth mechanics have been built upon. You can sneak around and watch the enemy in survival instinct to see who is being watched by another bad guy and carefully take out isolated bad guys one at a time. Or you can carefully sneak behind enemies and stab them in the neck or jump on them from up high.

Shooting and killing people is largely the same, I enjoyed it in the last game and I enjoy it here. It's not the most complex gameplay in the world but it is a lot of fun. You have a good deal of options to dispose of bad guys this time. You can blow them up with grenade arrows, you can poison them, you can set traps on corpses, you can craft makeshift Molotov’s or bombs on the go and burn or blow up bad guys to your hearts content.

There is platforming and puzzle solving, along with finding stuff and upgrading things, to go along with this. You get 9 optional challenge tombs, along with a few extra secret ones. They are definitely an improvement on the ones in 2013 Tomb Raider. They are bigger and a fair bit more challenging to solve. Although they are still not the most challenging puzzles ever made and they don't take a massive amount of time to solve. It's a good step in the right direction, but I would like to see these puzzles being brought into the main story line and not put as optional side things. There is some environmental puzzles to solve to get through the main story line but more would have been welcome.

About the stereotypical dialogue and writing. I particularly found the main bad guy, Konstantin, to be frequently quite laughable. He's your typical angry guy who wants power and has a personal army of stereotypical bad guys helping him. There's a mystical power type storyline going on here. Lara wants to find it because she wants to prove that her father wasn't a fool chasing after fairy tales, the bad guys want it because they are bad guys. There is a bit of soap opera with Lara's personal relationship with one of the baddies and a whole personal betrayal thing is going on.

I liked Lara's character in this game. I felt that she was very like-able. She's a strong, intelligent, confident but relatable woman on a personal mission to prove something that matters to her. It's just a shame that everybody else around her in this story is so stereotypical and lacking depth. But I felt as I played the game I cared about Lara and what she is doing. The story may be a bit lame but it is done with a lot of style and is a fun ride.

You get Score Attack, Chapter Replay/Elite and Remnant Resistance modes as part of the standard game and you get Endurance Mode, Baba Yaga and Cold Darkness Awakens as season pass/individually purchasable DLC modes. Score Attack and Endurance modes are the highlights of these for me. In Score Attack mode you can replay through the missions from the main game with an arcade like score meter and you compete against yourself or friends to try and get the best score possible. You can use up to five cards which you unlock with currency earned from playing the main game. These allow you to make the run either easier or harder. You can have enemies with more armour, or have only one life, or you can change your equipment and so on. Endurance Mode is like a survival mode in an open-ended environment where you have to survive for as long as possible.

These modes are a lot of fun and give the game a lot more lasting appeal if you enjoy them. Endurance Mode is particularly enjoyable and can be quite challenging. It's a bit of a shame that they don't allow you to alter the main game like you can these modes as that would have made it much more challenging, dynamic and lasting in appeal.

Baba Yaga is overpriced for what it is, only really offering 1-2 hours of gameplay, maybe 4-5 if you really stretch it. I enjoyed it whilst it lasted, but it's really nothing special and I feel likewise about Cold Darkness Awakened.

I like the new Tomb Raider games a lot and am a big fan of this new Lara, I think she's wonderful. But I am also a big fan of old school Lara and do miss her and the way those games were made. It's a little bit of a shame that they don't offer something more substantial to old school Tomb Raider fans such as a skin of old school Lara. More challenge, integrated puzzles, customizability, and deeper story/writing would have been nice. But overall this is a great game, I enjoyed it a lot and highly recommend it.