Darren Carle
With its ‘no fail’ gameplay, your titular goat is pretty much invulnerable to all Goat Simulator has to throw at it; huge falls, car wrecks, massive explosions, Billy will pretty much pick himself up again and again. Ironic really as someone needs to put Goat Simulator out of its own misery.
Ultimate Chicken Horse is a great concept and what is presented here is well executed. Solo players may want to wait for online play – which wasn’t available at the time of writing – but if you have the potential to snag a few mates and their joypads over then it’s definitely worth investigating.
The Witness is at once beautiful, intricate and alluring whilst being obtuse, unsympathetic and draining. It's not for everyone and few will see all it has to offer. It can punish as much as it rewards. Yet there is little else like it in the field of games, or indeed anywhere else, and whilst these small blemishes may prevent The Witness from being an outright classic, it remains a peerless example of videogame form.
In aiming for a slightly different market with this Xbox port, Elite: Dangerous could have fallen foul. However, it's testament to how strong its many different facets are that you can play the game like you're Captain Kirk or Captain Solo and have it work either way.
Criticisms of an industry becoming reliant on dusting off classic titles may hold true overall, but on a case by case basis, Uncharted clearly proves that some games are more deserving than others.
Like The Blair Witch Project, Her Story seems likely to foster a wave of imitators, such is its relative technical ease. However, writer Sam Barlow has certainly set the bar high with his reimagining of what a full-motion video game can be. Whatever it ushers in, Her Story is changing perceptions of what a game can be in the here and now. Case closed.
As a rogue-like, it is, as we said, also left wanting – but as an overall package it presents a great challenge wrapped up in some pleasing aesthetics, with a classic 'one more game' mantra running through it.
At this midway point, Game of Thrones is showing much promise, enough to invest in a season pass if you're any kind of fan. It's been a steady drip-feed so far but The Sword in the Darkness feels like a dam ready to burst and with three more episodes to come there's plenty of room for it to flow.
The Fall is a compelling piece of storytelling in a medium that usually struggles to engage players beyond the surface spectacle. More importantly, it's a very good game in its own right but with both aspects combined it makes for a compelling case to dust off your Wii U pad.
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number has much to appreciate yet by comparison, the original game was perhaps a textbook example that, sometimes, less really is more.
Whilst not as immediate or as gripping as episode one, The Lost Lords wins out by keeping its various story threads warm and setting up the precarious pieces for what is looking to be a typically unpredictable story run.
You can see how good #IDARB could be, and almost certainly is right now for a select few, but the higher-end fun remains locked-off to the majority of players, at least for now.
The initial hours are a slog then, but for a game that requires months, maybe even years of play to get the most out of, that graft will be pretty small potatoes in the long run. Had Elite: Dangerous been published along traditional routes, such a steep learning curve would have probably been avoided by an industry that all-too-often likes to play things safe.
As with previous instalments, LBP3 can be seen as a game of two halves; the standard platform fare and the online community building. The former is certainly the series' best yet although if that's all you come for you'll probably feel short-changed in gaming time. The latter is as forward-thinking and inventive as ever and fans will relish the new features.
Sure, we may have seen much of what Alien: Isolation has to offer before, but never from this frightening perspective.
Underneath you'll find a serviceable and enjoyable escapade, if endless hacking and slashing are your things. It's been done better and it's been done worse for sure, yet coming with that Tri-Force stamp of approval, Zelda fans will likely have been hoping for a little bit more.
As a technological achievement, it's probably about as cutting-edge as console gaming gets right now, but as a straight ahead gaming experience, Destiny's component parts have been better done elsewhere, not least by Bungie themselves.
Another World feels almost perfect, but twenty years of game innovations have scuffed its veneer.
The Wolf Among Us has gone out with the bang the series deserves.
The simple premise and brevity of an individual play-through is a good concoction for brewing up that 'one more game' mantra and whilst your passion for it may be as fleeting as its title suggests, you're likely to have a good time whilst it lasts.