Stefan L's Reviews
Destiny is far from a perfect game, with flaws quite clearly apparent in the storytelling and the repetitive formula, but it's also a game that can quite easily keep you coming back for more time and again, especially if you play with friends. It's a shame that some of the ideas in the Vault of Glass Raid couldn't trickle down into the earlier stages, for more variety and intellectual challenge, but it does at least point to an exciting future for the game.
Velocity 2X delivers another dose of pitch perfect shoot 'em up gameplay, but refuses the rest on the laurels of its predecessor. Taking Kai out of her Quarp Jet opens up whole other avenues for the gameplay that only gets better and better as you progress, with every other part of the game lavished with further polish and refinement. I can only think to echo the sentiment and the score that we awarded the original.
CounterSpy was a game that caught many people's eye with it art style and Cold War setting, but it's great to see that it also has the gameplay to back it up. The mixture of side scrolling stealth with the cover-based 3D shooting is quite an ingenious one, but simple enough that when combined with the randomly generated levels, you can hop into the game for a few minutes and, ignoring a few flaws, find yourself staying for an hour.
However, it's let down by certain graphical limitations and a general lack of polish to the presentation. The PlayStation 4 version is very much a transitional release, importantly getting a game out on the new console before starting to refine it over the next few years.
Add to this the strengths of the world that has been created, Darren Korb's soundtrack, the charm of Ashley Barrett's voice, and the clever story that unfolds, and Transistor is a near essential game to own on PS4.
Splitting Ground Zeroes back into a separate release was always going to be contentious. Thankfully, there is a lot more gameplay and depth than the early reports of the main mission's length suggested and it's full of potential for exploration, fan service and Kojima's particular brand of hackneyed allegories. Unfortunately, there is still too little primary content to justify the £29.99 price tag or even the £19.99 digital pricing for PS3/360, so I can't recommend this to anyone but a die hard MGS fan.
Tearaway is the kind of game that the PS Vita has demanded since launch, something crafted and tailored to its form and its capabilities, but rather than feeling forced, creating an easy sense of wonder fun and inventiveness. Continuing Media Molecule’s push to unleashing our creativity, it also features a story, a world and creations which delight at every turn, no matter how old you are.
Call of Duty: Ghosts does a good job on all accounts. The single player eventually goes in a direction which I liked and enjoyed, while the multiplayer holds onto what it does best, with a few tweaks to the formula. It even manages to straddle the generational divide quite well, even though the current machines suffer badly in comparison. However, it is generally more of the same, and really doesn't push itself hard enough to overhaul and redefine what Call of Duty can be.