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This is a game written for people who have worked in a particular kind of game development. It's hard to applaud the jokes when it's unclear where the lines between reality and exaggeration lie - and this is a story whose shoots grow from lived experience. Far easier to applaud the game's core gameplay invention, which enlivens The Magic Circle at its heart, and a piece of design that, unlike Ishmael Gilder, will surely find a life beyond its game.
The assumption seems to be that most players won't have the desire or the stamina to play a full round - though in light of the limited number of courses, it may simply be a way to minimise repetition. Either way, EA Tiburon has produced a game hardly befitting a player of McIlroy's talents. The so-called "next generation of golf" looks uncomfortably similar to the last, and there's substantially less of it. Only the quality of the underlying game saves this from the ignominy of an Avoid sticker.
It gives me absolutely no pleasure to report any of this. Sitting at my PC, wearing a Godzilla t-shirt and surrounded by plastic models of the series' wonderful menagerie, I wanted so desperately for this to be the game to truly realise the character's potential in gaming. I wanted Crackdown with kaiju. Instead, I got...this. The only thing being crushed here is the dreams of every monster movie fan who ever picked up a joypad.
But it's also thrilling. While the game lacks certain finesse (it's infuriating when you mistime a trigger, for example, and must restart the stage and repeat the entire trap-laying process from scratch; a soft save of your layout would have been welcome) and eventually becomes repetitive, its humour, idiosyncrasy and constantly shifting tool-set makes cruelty into a virtue - in the video game's consequence-less reality, at least.
As it stands, Batgirl fans are likely to be the ones most disappointed by this offering. If you decide not to fork over cash for the ability to step into Bab's impractically-heeled Batsuit, know that you aren't missing much. That said, if all you want is a few extra scuffles and challenges in a new space with a new face, this will scratch that itch. Just think long and hard about how much you're willing to pay for the privilege.
There's XP beyond that, and the promise of a scramble up the leaderboards, but I don't think Rocket League genuinely needs these things to hook you and hold you. Aside from the compact drama of the five minute matches, this is one of those rare games where the simple act of throwing a car around an arena is enough to keep you at it. Newton would approve and so would Batman. What more would you want?
Such cuts mean that F1 2015's ultimately too slight, and too much of a compromise, to unreservedly recommend. It feels less like a reboot and more like a foundation for what's to come, when some of the features that have been excised will be slowly rolled back in. Still, if your passion for the sport hasn't been dimmed in recent months, you may well find that what's at the heart of F1 2015 can quite often outshine the real thing.
It feels weird to be saying this at a time when sequels are far too prevalent, but while Ronin has its moments of brilliance during its short campaign, it ultimately feels very much like a proof of concept for a more generous and balanced game yet to come.
Infinifactory's rich and thick appeal is in the nuts and screws of the manual labour. You may not enjoy many worker's rights here, in the employ of this sour-faced alien management team, but the job satisfaction? It's unrivalled.
All of which makes PlanetSide 2 a real outlier at a time when major console releases are either utterly broken or blandly efficient. This is a game with some fairly major problems, but the rewards are so unique, so thrilling and occasionally thought provoking that even dropped frames, obtuse direction and dumb players can't diminish it for long. This is a game that will not appeal to everyone. Many will fall by the wayside when it fails to play like a normal FPS in the long term. Others will drift away, wearied by the endless churn of battle. That's why the game's free-to-play status is a good thing - those players will have lost nothing for their trouble. For those who click with PlanetSide's cold relentless vision of mass warfare, it can easily become an ongoing obsession. The only way to find out is to sign up and see for yourself.
The experience is admittedly different to that of a well-constructed detective novel, or carefully charted HBO thriller, but the effects are similar. You are captivated, manipulated and spun around by the plot. Perhaps, in an era where filmmakers so keenly play with chronology, and regularly leave conclusions unwrapped, we are prepared for this kind of patchwork narrative, which leaves you, mostly, to draw your own conclusion of what really happened by the end. Or perhaps it would always have worked this well. Regardless, Her Story is a singular, unfamiliar work, essential viewing for both filmmakers and game designers.
The gameplay is good, and very often great, but we knew that already. It's a known quantity. As a Batman story, this is something else. It dares to tackle not just the surface details of the character, but explores his psyche. It portrays him as, frankly, kind of a dick and also as a man of unflinching honour. The Batman of Arkham Knight is a complex, contradictory figure, a hero with real depth and dimension, and we get to wear the iconic cowl for one last mind-boggling night of mayhem. Miss out on that? You must be joking.
A bad game, then? Not at all. Most of the time it's quite a good one. But Woolly World sails perilously close to a genuinely great game, and with little of its own to add, it can only ever feel diminished by the proximity.
As a lifelong fan of Fortean mystery and atmospheric adventures, Kholat is a game I really wanted to love, but it left me out in the cold in more ways than one.
Put like that it almost sounds sinister, like this was made by a committee of scientists in lab conditions. Really it's been made by people who understand the joy of play and, much more crucially, that it's not just about the numbers. In the end it doesn't matter that Heroes of the Storm has 37 heroes, and the competition has hundreds. It doesn't matter that it has more maps, or no items, or shorter games. It doesn't even matter how many players it has. All that matters is it's more fun.
There have been more shocking and provocative things portrayed in the biggest blockbuster games than you'll see and do in Hatred. Maybe that's the point. Maybe this is all a garbled commentary on how normalised extreme violence has become in gaming. If so, it'll take something better than this tedious, glitchy shooter to ram the point home.
It's those three minutes that really count, though, and it's there you'll find the genius and the joy of Splatoon. It's where you'll find a genre distilled, broken down and reassembled, with each piece snapping perfectly in place. It's where you'll find Nintendo charting new territory, and sharing with you the thrills of their own discovery. And it's where you'll find what happens when Mario's maker steps away from the comfort of the Mushroom Kingdom and tries something new: a true modern classic, and one of Nintendo's finest games in a generation.
Basically, the game asks a lot of you, and demands that you pay close attention to every decision you make. While that makes for a steep learning curve, requiring deep thought is hardly the worst sin a strategy game can commit. Slyly funny, satisfyingly deep and yet slick and simple to play, Massive Chalice is a huge return to form for a studio that is overdue a comeback.
The opportunity here was to bundle up the wild brilliance of Magicka and finally deliver a campaign that was as exciting and unpredictable and astonishing as the powers you have at your disposal. Maybe next time.
To its credit Stainless has recognised the scale of the problem and has assured players than it is working to get the game in a stable condition as soon as possible. Until a decent performance can be assured for all, however, or until it's recalled back into Early Access, we have to advise caution.