f you want a better time, make a paper airplane out of your money and see how far down the street it can travel after you’ve thrown it out of the window.
There’s slightly more fun on the cards when playing in co-op mode with a friend, as some of the game’s downsides can be easily counteracted with brute force by duos. If you’re a super-fan of Kevin Smith’s work, you can bump the score by a couple of points. However, as just another game floating in a sea of alternative investments, Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl – Arcade Edition can easily be avoided.
While it has some good ideas that are well-intentioned and will surely provide some entertainment to die-hards, NASCAR Heat 3 is missing all those things and, in the wider scheme of racing games, is still several laps behind.
When all is said and done, the handful of people sitting in the middle of the Venn diagram marked "doesn't own a PC" and "wants a hardcore train simulation" still deserve a game that isn't buggy, runs well, respects their time as a user, and one that provides more for their money than this one does. On the upside, the trains are so detailed here that if anything happens to the driver on my local route during my commute, I'm pretty confident that I could take over and nobody would be late for work. I can't promise strudel, though.
Beyond the addictive, puzzle-like challenge of hitting those high scores, there's a fantastic sense of speed here. When you're belting around in the F1 car, just scraping past trucks and getting through minuscule gaps in the traffic, things feel suitably rewarding. It's just such a kick in the airbags that for every time that feeling reveals itself, there are two more times when you'll be frustrated by one of Danger Zone 2's bugs or general inconsistencies.
But that feeling only lasts until you're accelerating out of the final corner like you've done sixty times without issue in this event and your bike decides for no reason at all to rear up like freakin' Seabiscuit, throwing you to the ground an inch from the finishing line. At that point, the promising feeling drips away, and you start to think that given this is the 15th racing game Milestone has released on PS4 in four years, we could be in for a real treat when they slow down and actually finish one.
When you're doing the same and cruising downhill through the beautiful countryside or fighting and clawing to get your wheels in front at the top of a grueling climb, Le Tour De France 2018 is enjoyable stuff. But outside of those times, it's yet another buggy and undercooked update for a title that had fallen off the pace a few iterations ago.
Jurassic World Evolution is – in many ways – the game that you make it. Fans of the franchise will jump for joy as they stumble across the classic original movie skins for the ranger jeeps while Dr. Ian Malcolm explains his theory on the meaning of life in a voiceover. They'll be so happy that a lot of the flaws can and will be overlooked by those people. For those who maybe only have a passing interest, there's still a solid and overly addictive game to be found, but they'll have to look past a fair few missed steps.
What we can be sure of though, is that Codemasters has at least put together a great foundation on which to build. They've promised that as well as that ranked mode, new content and features will roll out to players going forward and if they make the right steps, Onrush could end up being an absolutely huge deal. At launch though, it serves as a great taste of what could be, even if it could go with just a little bit more fuel in the tank.
If only that last "generally" weren't needed, it would be right up there with the best of them.
The ideas on show in AO International Tennis do suggest that with the bugs ironed out and a little more development time put into livening things up a bit in career mode, it could be a contender. The stamina and timing systems are enough to differentiate the game from the slew of tennis titles that have come before it and are undoubtedly good ideas. Ultimately though, the poor execution and the cracks in the gameplay cause this wildcard entry to fall well short of being a grand slam effort.
This doesn't mean that all is lost for lone adventurers, however. With a debt being owed to Castle Crashers and Adventure Time in terms of both humor and visual style, The Adventure Pals has enough going on to keep you interested during the slightly more repetitive sections of play. Had it packed more of a challenge – even if it was optional – The Adventure Pals would be running close to the front of the indie platforming pack. Though the final product doesn't quite get there, it's still plenty enjoyable, especially in co-op.
There's a lot to like about the approach that's been taken with Regalia. The developers have taken a good story premise and weaved it into a game involving world building, classic text adventures, dungeon crawling, crafting, and social bond-building, as well as all the other fripperies you'd expect to find outside of the field of battle. The problem is that none of those strands are as fully formed as they'd need to be to be able to call the game a real success in any one area.
Players who ran through the game on PlayStation 3 or elsewhere will be put off by the lack of meaningful upgrades, and that's entirely understandable. The problem is that nothing here really adds to what already existed. The saving grace is that things haven't gone the other way, either. Burnout Paradise holds up, and if nothing else, you can now experience one of the top arcade franchises in the business on your PlayStation 4.
Even with the structure of the Olympic events being lacking, there's still more than enough content here to justify the asking price. The Become a Legend campaign will take a few hours to get through, then there are all the traditional Steep-styled challenges, Mountain Stories, and the like that take place in the new Japanese and South Korean mountains. There's certainly plenty to do in Road to the Olympics, and that's before you even consider the number of times you'll find yourself perched at the starting gates on the downhill course, getting ready to try to beat your best time just for yucks.
Road Rage feels very, very much like a bad Steam game that was plucked from obscurity by an overly-optimistic publisher. It fails on every single level and in the end, it isn't even so bad that it's funny. It's just bad.
The Sims 4 is a relatively solid console port that provides the tools for players to create pretty much any scenario of which they could think. It won't be for everyone, but those drawn to the idea will get hours upon hours of play for their money.
The camera problems do threaten to take this off-road game into a ditch, but you'll likely come back and persevere with MudRunner far more generously and readily than you would expect. Providing a reason why driving at a glacial pace through the game's muddy tracks is so gloriously satisfying is as tricky as trying to explain why another episode of Ice Road Truckers always seems like a good idea. There's absolutely no doubt that it isn't perfect, and that more patient players will get more out of this than those with a shorter fuse, but it's impressive how such a relatively simple concept can provide so many hours of entertainment.
Hidden Agenda is a gritty and intriguing experience that should entertain up to six players for about the length of the average movie. It isn't without its flaws though, and most likely won't be something you'll play more than once.
The sad fact is that this is a simple shooting gallery without the things that would make a simple shooting gallery enjoyable.