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Unmechanical Extended meets its ambition: the designers fully explore the potential of the template and do so with elegance. But perhaps, in the new context of the newer consoles, that ambition wasn't quite enough. This is a slight, simple, often delightful game that displays moment-to-moment ingenuity but which now obviously lacks a broader conceit to bring its ideas together.
As a follow up to Dead Island, Dying Light represents an improvement on the technical front, but has lost some of its knockabout charm in the process. It shares its predecessors pace and shape, as things start on a relative high as you explore into the game's systems, but then tail off the hours tick by. Dying Light mixes up Techland's own recipe to enjoyable effect, but can't fully disguise its regurgitated flavour.
Havoc's a very decent package overall. As part one of the Season Pass, this is a strong chunk of content for the sharpest COD in years. It mixes fan service with proper map design, and gives those still addicted to that ADS snap more reason than ever to keeping plugging away towards that next prestige.
One of the delights of settling down to a turn-based tactical RPG is poking around to understand how its systems combine and then utilising those systems in imaginative and tactically satisfying ways. In this regard, Blackguards 2 delivers. Eventually. The writing and presentation are serviceable rather than spectacular but there's a decent level of scope for customisation and engaging combat if you can push past its trudging opening hours. Cassia and co's deep-seated issues and baggage make them an entertaining bunch and while they won't set your world alight, they eventually prove capable of providing many hours of surprisingly amiable companionship.
Definitely be careful of rose-tinted memories. The puzzles and its relatively early peak can't and shouldn't be ignored. Nor though can everything that it does right, from its sheer heart and creative polish, to the genius of its ideas and characters. Even when it stumbles, it stands as a fine reminder of why LucasArts at its prime was seen as the industry at its best, and few other adventures have deservedly gathered so much affection. It was an instant classic back in 1998. It's still very much a journey worth taking today, albeit ideally with a walkthrough.
When I play #IDARB, I don't feel like I'm trusted. Hashbombs are a neat idea, but they come when someone else wants them to. Playing with others is amazing, but #IDARB doesn't help me out if I don't have quite that many friends available. Instead, it's watchable. It can be hard for the untrained eye to grasp everything that's going on in Smash, but #IDARB is easy, it's digestible. Unfortunately, that means that for all it gets right, #IDARB can be a lot more fun to watch than it is to play.
Nevertheless, Citizens of Earth succeeds in rediscovering something of the ingenuity of 1990s JRPGs in its playful twists on genre cliches. And as a kooky and inventive contemporary re-imagining of the Super Nintendo-era role-player, this, like its protagonist's campaign, is but a near miss.
Nevertheless, Spencer Mansion ultimately fails as a locale because of its implausibility. It is a place that has been designed in service to the designer's puzzles, rather than vice-versa and, for this reason, feels fake and contrived, characteristics that undermine the horror rather than heighten it. As a product of a unique moment in the medium's technological evolution, Resident Evil HD is a fascinating place to revisit. But for many contemporary visitors it will be an unpleasant stay, not because the game's inhabitants are unusually hostile, or because its idiosyncrasies are unfashionable, but because its formative designs have simply been bettered.
For all the things Gat Out Of Hell could or ideally would do though, it's important to remember what it is - a standalone expansion. Go in remembering that, and knowing about the lack of missions, and it's a pleasant surprise how much it at least tries to offer within its limits. Just don't expect it to be a sequel, or even a full slice of Saints Row 4 at its best.
Even without turning to those updates and additions, there's enough to celebrate. You could put any car on any track and lose yourself in the simulation for hours, squinting through sun caught in the smeared perspex windscreen of a Z4 GT as it sets over Spa and you pick out entry, apex and exit points, or pawing an Elise this way and that through the swerves of Magione. Assetto Corsa's laser focus on the driving experience works wonders - and when it comes to replicating that simple, brilliant pleasure, there's no other game right now that does it better.
They say time heals all wounds, but free DLC can't hurt either. Dead Kings offers much for those still enamoured by the series, and its offering as a freebie is a fine gesture to anyone left aggrieved by last year's failings. Still, time will tell whether it - or what Ubisoft has planned next - can convince those who have been put off by the series' longer sense of stasis.
As it stands, Warhammer Quest falls somewhere between offering a compelling experience for brand new players and delivering the heady hit of nostalgia that old hands crave. It's worth a look, but it's hard to recommend this PC version over its tablet counterpart.
Perhaps aiming to satisfy a younger audience, Treasure Tracker prefers to drop in a colourful boss-fight or format-breaking set-piece than to push the puzzle designs as hard as they can go. Solving most of these levels is more a matter of following your nose than exercising your brain. Captain Toad also doesn't achieve as reliably perfect a synthesis of puzzle and platforming as Game Boy Donkey Kong did, occasionally failing to fully scratch either itch - though at other times it finds something truly original in the space between them. And there is always that moment when you load up a new level and spin it, beholding another perfect microcosm, made just for you. 18 years on from Super Mario 64, Nintendo's designers are still going further in their exploration of the third dimension than almost anyone else.
There's a lot of balancing to be done in the long term, then, and the big hurdle for new players will be getting up to speed without losing interest in those stodgy early hours. The mid-point, where everything coalesces, is so liberating, so brilliant in its scope and possibility, that it's hard to be too upset about these wrinkles. For all its frustrations, you'll spend much longer in the sweet spot than you spend getting there. Elite: Dangerous demands much, but repays your devotion many times over.
This is an excellent expansion, then, one that complements the main game while gracefully underlining what exactly it was that made that Forza Horizon 2 so enticing in the first place. The price-tag may seem as steep as one of Storm Island's vertiginous jumps, but if you had any fun with Horizon 2 whatsoever, go with it - it'll send you soaring into another worthwhile playground stuffed with little delights.
Elegy for a Dead World makes good on its title: it offers us dead worlds, filled with the debris of imagined and vanished civilizations. Through the game's scenes you walk alone, under the dread emptiness of outer space, all that harrowing solitude. And yet, as you write and send that writing out into the ether in search of a reader, you may well find contact and connection. If others read your work, your observations, your story, your sense and if they find truth or solace in your words, here is a framework designed to let you know, in turn, that you are not alone. In this sense, it is truly a game about humans' desire to write.
The Dark Below feels like an early misstep for Destiny
Lumino City is an interesting design sketch, then, but the real building work is yet to be done.
It's a game that requires and occasionally enforces patience, but like all great road trips it's about the journey, not the destination.
The Temple of Osiris is a welcome throwback, and for the five or six hours it took me to barrel through the campaign, the rest of the world blinked away as the sands swept in and the ancient machinery started to turn. As with Osiris, I'm not sure Lara's reassemblage has gone entirely to plan, but the spirit remains intact - and the spirit is still strangely powerful.