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Provided all you want is the chance to shoot decomposing Nazis in the face hundreds of times over, you can't really fault Zombie Army Trilogy for delivering on the crude grindhouse pleasures implicit in its title. It's also hard not to wish the game didn't do more to deviate from its amusing but repetitive blood-soaked trajectory.
With space battles now more spectacular than even the evergreen Eve Online, and with far less effort required to enjoy them, this sees two excellent games restored. While in a past it was tricky to argue a decisive case for either of the Homeworld games for greatest RTS of all time, now they've been forever merged, updated and supplemented with the original games, the collection is indispensable.
OlliOlli2 remains very faithful to the template its forbearer set, down to the additional Spot and Daily Grind additional modes that focus attention on deliberately brief scoring challenges. Cautious as its updates initially seem, it is another superb twitch game, obsessed with the currencies of difficulty, speed and score. Best of all, it manages to capture so much of the movement and feel of skateboarding without ostracising players who have never touched a board in real life.
It's a few minor tweaks away from something special, and the same applies to Screamride as a whole. While there's nothing in Frontier's latest to make your stomach churn - with the possible exception of its honkingly awful dubstep soundtrack - there's not quite enough here to get your pulse racing either.
But this is really a game for a subset of an already small audience. It's hard to see total newcomers, or fans of hardcore strategy, won over by Empires' strategy-management RPG blend, in much the same way that you wouldn't expect fighting game specialists to be entranced by the Musou combat system. It's a strange compromise really, yet somehow it manages to work. As such, it's certainly worth a spin, perhaps with the upcoming F2P version, if only to get a taste of the Musou series' most complex and thoughtful offshoot.
For now it's a game with a lot to offer, though mostly for players willing to meet its ambitions halfway. I can't help feeling that we'll see this speech mechanic refined and put to even better use somewhere down the line.
These are intriguing times for gods in games. If the collapse of Peter Molyneux's Project Godus is an apocalyptic turn of events for the genre Populous gave life to, a new breed of "god sim" is on the march - one that seeks not to portray a god but to mechanically enact the uncertainties that make us wonder if deities exist. Breath of Life is a remarkable contribution to this highly select field. Its strength is that it looks at the same predicaments as Portal and Bioshock from a compelling angle, unburdened by lore, but it doesn't quite have the spark to be breathtaking.
Dead or Alive: Last Round doesn't have the contortionist special moves required to master its Street Fighter rival, making this the more immediately accessible game by some margin. But neither does it have the mascots of Capcom's stable (it's telling, perhaps, that the most recognisable characters here are borrowed from Ninja Gaiden and Virtua Fighter). But at its deeper levels, it's an equally engaging and challenging proposition as its rivals, a quick tempo test of dexterity and reaction that, at its best, transcends the mildly grotty aspects for which it is best known.
Total War: Attila is undoubtedly a welcome addition to this 15-year-old franchise and it's a relief to find it stable at launch, but there is clearly room for further optimisation. It's a credit to The Creative Assembly that it is still experimenting and tweaking its systems to achieve the right balance of complexity and challenge, even if a few too many of its concepts fall the wrong side of the frustration/satisfaction divide for a little too long. Still, you need only be mindful of the advertised difficulty level of each of the factions in order to triumph and, through extended play, the excitement suggested by all that early potential does, eventually, come to fruition.
The Order: 1886 isn't a disaster, nor is it a particularly good game. It's a hollow diversion, entertaining but outmoded and caught somewhere between a medium it repeatedly fumbles and one it fails to effectively embrace.
It's been a while, but Arc System Works picks a ripe moment to revive the heavy metal fighter that gave the studio its start. Guilty Gear Xrd is a vibrant, expertly handled return for Sol Badguy and company, with updated mechanics that should help wean newcomers onto its aggressive style of play, while appeasing the old guard with new options. It's among the PS4's best presented games to date, and a real highlight of the series.
Ultra's label insinuates that this is the ultimate realisation of Housemarque's original vision. In truth, it's little more than a re-skin, and the seasoning of novelties adds little of enduring substance. Instead, the original remains a classic. Its somewhat sterile charms are undiminished by time, and so space cadets will find much to love here, in the bustle of a perennial galactic rush hour. Veterans, however, need not apply. Whether that's testament to Housemarque's delivery of an original that could not be improved by tampering, or its new custodian's lack of vision, is another question.
This is a shooter with ambition, designed with skill and craft, and rich with tactical possibility. If it had the punch and physical feedback of some of its less-intelligent genre mates, Evolve could have been a classic. As it is, we'll have to do with a monster with plenty of bark, but not quite enough bite.
Instead, there's disaster and disappointment at nearly every turn. With a team that wanted to put the effort in, that had the time or the money to build on this, we might have had an interesting game. Every time I was able to sail to a new island or port, I found myself excited. I wanted to probe around and see what wonders the locale held, but every single time my curiosity was met with tedium and mediocrity. I want to think that my eagerness to explore was a sign that there's something interesting about this setting and this world, but now I think I may have been projecting my own hopes onto a broken, buggy lump.
It may have its minor frustrations but there's nothing here that really spoils what is an otherwise delightful and endlessly surprising game. It won't be for everyone, especially those who are unwilling to meet the game halfway and learn through trial and error, but those who welcome its open-ended challenge will find that a long stretch inside proves surprisingly enjoyable.
Free from the claustrophobic Fordism that increasingly robs series like Assassin's Creed of their sense of wonder, this is a game that's taken shape at its own pace, and that has been allowed to find its own voice. Pick a point to aim for and jump. Jump!
Bigger, better and more accessible than ever before - this will be the Monster Hunter to convert newcomers and keep the faithful happy, too.
The most melancholy, complex and troublesome Zelda gets a lavish restoration that leaves its strange and stubborn heart untouched.
'The sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,' reads Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, from which the game takes its name and setting. It already knows that you will take up the challenge and bravely attempt to measure these caverns. The better question, and the one that Sunless Sea asks in countless ways is: how?
If it played just a little tighter, Apotheon would be brushing up against greatness. As it stands, it's stunning to look at and a pleasure to play, and what flaws it does have can be easily overlooked by anyone looking for something smart and stylish.