Dealspwn's Reviews
Bravely Default dares to refresh the classic Final Fantasy formula with quiet yet confident innovations across the board, resulting in one of the best JRPGs of 2013 and a fitting end to a barnstorming year for Nintendo's handheld.
At £10-£13 for a six hour campaign and additional challenge maps, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is an absolute steal. The stealth options aren't quite as reliable as last time, but the core shooting experience is incredibly fun with meaty weapons, a ramped up pace and enjoyably over-the-top characters.
A simulator with soul, Project CARS strips the bloat out of the racing genre to focus on what truly matters: the cars, handling, tracks and exhilaration of real driving. Sensational weather effects and impressive visuals make it well worth the wait.
Consider Mortal Kombat X your first essential fighting game of the new generation of consoles. It's best enjoyed with local friends thanks to the easily memorised combos and buckets of gory X-Ray moves and finishers. The story and lengthy Tower options will pad out the single-player experience, but the online match ups are reserved for the more hardcore player.
Stealth Inc 2 is another magnificently frustrating bastard of pure stealth, brutal platforming and satisfying puzzles with a sadistic sense of humour. Though the new features and gadgets come with a few drawbacks, they ultimately expand on the gameplay experience in imaginative new ways, while exploration and content creation bulk out the challenge rooms into a cohesive package.
You'll need three forgiving friends and a silly sense of humour to make the most of Magicka 2. It's an utterly sensational cooperative romp that refines the series' superb spellcasting into hilarious yet surprisingly tactical chaos.
Ride is one of the best bike racing games in years and is much more appealing than the dry offerings of Moto GP or SBK. The bikes are fantastically detailed and there are enough handling options to appeal to any race fan. Moving most events to new road circuits was a great idea too for those of you bored with the Moto GP calendar.
Borderlands: The Handsome Collection gives a truly magnificent game and its fun if flawed sequel a new lick of paint... and gives us an excuse to play them through again.
This final episode was shorter than we were expecting and leaves more questions than answers. Some bad habits crept back in too as the horror atmosphere from earlier in the season has been replaced with backs-to-the-wall action. As an overall package though, the episodic take on Resident Evil has been a success. At half the price of a regular game release, the value for money is excellent. A nine-hour campaign, co-op options and a deep Raid mode make this an essential buy for Resident Evil fans.
Despite the incredibly frustrating platforming, it's impossible to deny that this really is the Definitive Edition of a classic melee-action title. Newbies can enjoy the slickest version on the market, packed with all the DLC. Returning hardcore fans will find a serious challenge in the extra difficulties and hardcore modifiers. All that fuss over a haircut seems pretty stupid now.
Come on you apes! You wanna live forever?
Dragon Ball Xenoverse captures the brutal thrill of soaring aerial anime battles better than practically any game I've ever played, all while allowing us to genuinely enter the Dragon Ball universe as our own character by participating in key canonical events and crazy 'what if?' scenarios.
Even if the mechanisms of this game seem a little dated now, we're reminded how the story and its characters are timeless in their good humour and quality, and in that respect, this Remaster should hold almost as much joy for newcomers as it does for returning fans.
Loadout lets you create the ridiculous bespoke boomstick of your wildest dreams, but is far from a one-trick pony. Manic old-school shooting, tight map design and a superb in-house engine make for a seriously impressive F2P effort that surpasses any number of full-priced downloads.
Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris is a superb cooperative puzzler, pacey shooter and a rip-roaring adventure. The replayable campaign is a bit too short to make the most of the abundance of loot, but it's a blast while it lasts especially in local co-op.
Akiba's Trip is one of the most pleasant surprises of the year. What was marketed as shameful fanservice is actually an anarchic, innovative, big-hearted and even-handed love letter to all things Otaku and geeky, propped up by stunning localisation and a great cast of characters, and that makes up for a fair few clumsy shortcomings with its uninhibited cheeky sense of fun.
Though lazily framed and under-scripted, Far Cry 4 is a gorgeous, systems-oriented playground that provides endless hours of entertainment. And exploding elephants.
LittleBigPlanet 3 is an impressive game, stuffed with more imagination than ever before, and presented in a manner that makes user creation supremely accessible even as the toolset deepens. Though the Adventure mode is sadly short-lived, and the platform differences are fairly negligible, LBP 3 will surely prove to be a must-have game for PlayStation or series newcomers this winter.
So, 2014. Is this the year that the double-jump finally found its regular place in the first person shooter? It's certainly been the 'in thing' this year, as has a general boot up the arse of the FPS genre. How does COD stack up against Destiny and Titanfall though? Ignore the internet trolls, posers and haters, you can enjoy them all. In this reviewer's eyes though, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has been the complete package. A star filled, explosion-packed blockbuster smash of a campaign mode with a set of stellar multiplayer modes where Kill Confirmed and the new ball-based sport, Uplink, are set to become new favourites. Both the campaign and multiplayer owe a huge debt to the exoskeleton, which has proven to be the ultimate catalyst in pushing Call of Duty back to the top this year. Your move, Far Cry 4.
Shadow Warrior is still as savagely brutal, tough, slick and satisfying as ever, but its riotous gameplay has only matured with age. The console version is a great new opportunity to savour the joys of exploring huge levels, finding secrets and annihilating entire armies of ravening demons with ridiculous firepower.