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For those looking for a dedicated simulation racer where you can spend hours tuning and practising to get the best out of the car and yourself, Gran Turismo 7 will no doubt appeal. But I don't think it's for racing game enthusiasts, it's for racing enthusiasts.
Just like Ubisoft's mega-hit franchise, Horizon Forbidden West has a lot of the right ingredients but it's let down by the pitfalls of AAA game design.
The Dying Light 2 storyline is fairly average. The game introduces choice-based dialogues that add a little more flair to the story but unfortunately, not enough. Aiden is made to run back and forth in the city doing the dirty work for the factions, who do not seem to give away information even after gaining trust. Seems like a way to stretch the game out. Thankfully, the characters in Dying Light 2 Stay Human are quite good and you get to meet a ton of them during quests. Some characters stay for a while, and some are just there for a single section of the story.
Rather than a new Uncharted game then, what's more likely (unfortunately) is a PS5 version of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, the PS4 remaster of the first three Uncharted PS3 titles. A studio like Naughty Dog shouldn't be ground down into churning remasters of its old games — it should be looking ahead to new entries or new IP. But this is just the world we live in.
Rainbow Six Extraction is clearly not for most casual gamers. In fact, I would go so far to say that it feels like it's built for hardcore players only. Unless Ubisoft plans to massively tweak difficulty settings and play styles in the near future, Rainbow Six Extraction could end up being one of those titles that get lost between the couch cushions.
Overall, Thunder Tier One is a fun game to spend some time with your friends and not rage quit, while also having some brainstorming sessions over your next plan of attack.
All of this is precisely why Call of Duty: Vanguard is a missed opportunity for Sledgehammer Games, Treyarch, and Activision. The game suffers from an uncomfortable contradiction: the campaign and its visual cues favour newbies, while its multiplayer and its cranked-up pace is a veteran extravaganza. The single-player campaign is also unsatisfyingly short, while Zombies barely qualifies as a full game mode.
By ditching the campaign mode in Battlefield 2042, EA Dice has made the game a tiny bit more confusing and difficult for new players trying to get into the franchise. Veterans and die-hard (pun-intended) lovers of Battlefield will love it for the way it stays true to the gameplay of the older titles. The chaos of the 128-strong lobby isn't something I look forward to whenever I start the game, and I feel that may be true for most players.
Playground Games can offer up an iterative experience and rake in the money, because Forza Horizon 5 is in a world of its own. It's wonderful, but it's also sad.
[Far Cry 6] is happy in its groove, delivering a fun and immersive Latin American experience, an open world sandbox you can mess around in, and giving you the tools to do what you want. Better yet, it lets you enjoy all of that with a friend.
But even if EA does get its head out of the pile of gold, it's got troubles on the pitch too. FIFA doesn't feel like football anymore to me. To be fair, it never really was — thanks to pitch size, pace dominance, and all that — but now it just seems to be going away from the sport it claims to represent each year. Maybe a new challenger can shake things up. We badly need it.
Ultimately, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a by-the-numbers 3D action-adventure game. It might look like a modern Zelda game but doesn't play like one. It's largely just a series of arena-based combat routines, stitched together by long stretches of traversal, and cutscenes that are well-designed but feel like a forgotten Hollywood B-movie. Too often, Kena: Bridge of Spirits reminds you of better games you've played and that it's borrowing from — which is not a good sign. There's no harm in learning from others, it's certainly well made, but it's lacking in originality. There's little personality to Kena: Bridge of Spirits, for it's adopting the sheen of others. For a debut title, this is undoubtedly a good effort — but I fear Ember Labs have played it too safe.
It's been a polished experience otherwise, yet again proving that games are better delayed than rushed. Psychonauts 2 has faced a long uphill battle, but its release is proof that some battles are worth the slog.
Skate City takes being casual a little too seriously. If you have the money to spare, but don't wish to splurge on an Apple TV, you can fire up Skate City on a big screen with its release on consoles and PC later this week. You'll probably enjoy the relaxing visuals with some lo-fi music playing in the background. If it were up to me, I'd just boot up Tony Hawk's Underground 2 instead.
When it all comes together, Outriders can be good fun. The gunplay felt a little stilted and laboured to me early on, but I've found it to be really satisfying at times, especially when you empty a volcanic-charged cartridge into an enemy's head — and they plop to the ground. And Outriders keeps you on your toes as you're constantly balancing various elements: where to find cover, dodging grenades, when to jump back out, who to target first, how to maximise your powers, and working with your squad. Outriders was built with co-op in mind and that's when it comes alive. It's nice to have a friend to lean on, and that goes for Outriders too, as they can help revive you. In fact, some of our most intense conversations have come out of debating when it's a good time to attempt to revive someone.
The era of the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X has arrived, but Cyberpunk 2077 is currently running on those next-gen platforms via backwards compatibility. A true next-gen update isn't due until sometime in 2021. That means CD Projekt Red developed a game for three platforms, and it's running on an acceptable level on just one (PC), provided you have the hardware. That is just plain ridiculous.
For all the deserved flak coming Immortals Fenyx Rising's way for delivering a brazen Zelda clone, the Ubisoft game deserves some praise for executing most of the ideas well — and even adding to them.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla is too much of the same thing, and it's not nearly engaging enough.
If the sticker price isn't a concern, in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, you'll find a game that is lacking in originality but thankfully built on a solid core that needs a few tweaks. It's a successful expansion of Insomniac's Spider-Man universe, but it's a new paragraph, rather than a new chapter. Hopefully it will give us the latter next time around. And though it's also good for representation, it still has a ways to go. (Though the game wasn't anything special, Marvel's Avengers gave us a Muslim-American lead in Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel.) Hopefully we can get Spider-Gwen from Insomniac next, or a Spider-Verse game, though given the lack of setup, either seems unlikely. For now, Miles continues his upward trajectory. He walked in 2018, so he could fly in 2020.
Watch Dogs: Legion lacks a soul. It's also a passive game, since there's no active push-and-pull. Albion took over London, and now you push them out one borough at a time.