The addictive one-more-game hook, the chance to prove your smarter than your favourite team’s manager and a mind-blowing database that’s still utilised by many professionals in the real-life footballing world. If that doesn’t tell you anything, nothing will. But if you’re only interested in knowing if it’s worth upgrading from last year’s version, then the answer is a resounding yes.
In essence, this is the same Battlefield you’ve being playing for a while except that it has remembered what it does best and ran with it more often than not. The risk of taking on a World War I scenario has been tackled excellently within the single-player and multiplayer modes, leaving a refreshing experience that sees Battlefield return to its absolute best. Throughout the entire time I’ve been playing Battlefield 1, the series’ arch rival didn’t come into my mind once – and that’s probably the biggest compliment I could pay it. Battlefield is once again comfortable in its own skin, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.
SIVA aside, it’s these frustrations that plague the game. Misplaced repetition, an unbalanced loot-drop system, weapon buffs, weapon nerfs, patches, hotfixes – the truth is Destiny is an on-going experiment that Bungie is still trying to tweak and perfect. Even when the story has you staring down from high up with your Ghost companion at where you first began two years ago, it feels as though there’s too many gaps and holes that haven’t quite fitted together as originally intended. Ultimately though, here is a game that demands you come back to it no matter how long you’ve been away. When you finally get that gun you’ve been waiting forever for, beat a raid with your friends or stumble across a post on reddit that someone has found a secret entrance with strange markings on… then it’s on, and you won’t look back.
Overall, RunGunJumpGun plays the role of the franticly enjoyable 2D scroller well. Narrative is non-existing ultimately, but weirdly cool in that Hotline Miami kind of way, where blithering randomness manages to feel like expertly deployed story-telling. The parts where the game excels is in the way it forces you to multi-task forward thinking and twitch reaction and if you make it through a passage there’s a huge feeling of reward for your pain-staking perseverance. It won’t be everyone’s bag, but you won’t want to let its simplicity beat you – human nature dictates that.