About 10 years ago I spent a summer obsessed with a Quake 3 mod called Western Quake 3. For 6 weeks I spent most waking hours shooting down cowboys on speeding trains and in one street towns. The bots were of questionable skill but that didn’t matter to me, I just loved using a revolver and the sounds and the world. Since then I’ve craved more wild west in my games. Gun tried it’s best and wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good. Red Dead is the obvious option and whilst an amazing game and story, it just wasn’t quite “Wild West” enough, it was set late in the era where people, as hard as it is to believe, had become more civilized and industry and cities were taking over the plains and deserts. Well now we have Hard West, a game that tries to bring strategy to a normally chaotic scenario.

Hard West from CreativeForge Games takes many of its cues from XCOM and more recently Shadowrun Returns. You from an isometric view must control your team and take out the enemies or complete objectives in a turn based manner. If combat arises you must consider cover and fields of view, each location you can choose for your character to go to gives you a full, empty or half full shield to show how much cover you are going to be provided with. With limited actions available to you and your team you must consider each step with great depth before confirming if you’re hoping to survive.

Tying all of Hard West together is a series of stories, some featuring the same cast of characters others having players come and go for a short time. All featuring the same dross, person makes deal with someone they shouldn’t have, person trying to survive in harrowing conditions or someone looking for someone; all featuring some aspect of supernatural encounters. A major issue is that each story is a reset for all abilities, items and cards collected. Sometimes this makes sense, you’re a different character, but in the situation where I was carrying a character from the first to the second chapter I was intensely frustrated at just losing the awesome guns and cards I had assigned.

Whilst at its core Hard West is a straight turn based shooter where basic tactics will get you through there are numerous quite fascinating concepts added to the product to give it a slightly different edge to many other games in its style. Firstly there are playing cards, each one provides a buff, but if you assign them to your team members in an order that matches a poker hand you will get an even bigger buff. This provides a great risk reward in terms of buff management and occasionally means you have to change how you were directing a character before. On top of the cards there’s also a consistent character status. If a character gets shot in the back in one mission they will for the next few have a reduced movement range due to their spine being screwed. However, if you keep them alive with this curse of reduced speed and spine then they’ll get over it and get a bonus to aiming as their upper body will be steadier. Finally during combat you have luck, starting at 100% each time someone shoots at you and misses your luck goes down meaning if you don’t deal with that opponent or run away you’ll inevitably get a bullet in your cheek.

The basics of gameplay can be a lot of fun, combat is as deep as you want it to be, if you’re tactically minded you could get a lot out of Hard West. Each character gets two action points, either both for movement or one for movement and one for shooting. Frustratingly firing your gun always ends your turn, as such there’s no fire a shot then run for better cover. Also factor in reloading taking an action and you really need to be playing a few turns in advance. All of it can be greatly satisfying when everything comes together successfully. On the flip side when the opponent seems to get special treatment you can’t help but want to punch the game in the face repeatedly. Opponents are granted attacks of opportunity if you pass close by but the player is not, opponents go invisible when out of line of sight but they always know where the player is hiding. Things like this remind you it’s a game and pulls you out of the experience.

I had numerous technical problems getting Hard West going, according to their Steam Forum I’m not alone. Repeated hard crashes on launch and on many occasions the game bugged out on me. For example I found a point in a mission where I was saving someone from cannibals that if I got the prisoner to stand in a particular space at the end of their turn the game wouldn’t progress and I was forced to restart the mission losing 30 minutes of progress each time.

In terms of design the game hits all the notes its reaching for. The sound and general aesthetic of the world really will draw you in and the droll tones of the narrator fit perfectly with the atmosphere, it’s just a shame that more often than not what he’s saying is a load of old toss. The story is tied together with choose your own adventure optional dialogues, not exactly needed or wanted from the majority of players I have to assume.

When you’re playing Hard West it’s easy to lose 5 hours of your day in one stretch. The game has the potential to be really deep if you want to go down that path but with progress being taken away at the end of each story there seems little reason to go out of your way to explore or really become attached to characters other than viewing them as a resource. Hard West creates a fascinating world and system for you to use, but then snatches it away just when you’re wanting to deep dive into it. Adding a skirmish mode or having a longer story campaign with the same characters and progress would add so much to the player experience. Rather than letting the playing find the shiny whilst panning for gold, you’re left with 8 stories worth of blue balls.

Robin Hood has always troubled me as a character, his persona in the past 50 years of media has always been a little bit ‘goody two shoes’. Between Disney, general folk lore, films and 90% of the BBC dramatization he’s always been pushed as a holier than thou martyr who’s only real sacrifice has been that he has to live in the woods, other than that his life always seems pretty grand. The closest the character has been to interesting is more unusual retellings with characters like DC comic’s Green Arrow (and the excellent Arrow TV series) and weirdly the 90’s children’s TV classic Maid Marian and her Merry Men, which portrayed Robin as a slightly dense and arrogant fool. Now I have a new retelling to add to the list, Volume the new game from Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell. Volume was first released back in August 2015 PS4, OS X and PC but saw a pretty hefty delay for its Vita version.

Mike Bithell’s first release was a game that at first glance was the most simple puzzle platformer featuring character design that seemed barely past the proof of concept stage, a series of quadrilateral shapes. Minutes into Thomas Was Alone you realised that you were playing something special, not necessarily for the gameplay which became somewhat repetitive by the final act, but instead you saw Mike Bithell’s unsung strengths; tone, writing and atmosphere. Without a doubt Thomas Was Alone, a story that became about shapes learning about life and society from the perspective of accidental AI, wouldn’t have been what it was without Danny Wallace’s excellent narration and David Housden’s soundtrack which even now is on rotation in my music playlists. Thankfully Bithell has been intelligent with his staffing for Volume bringing back Wallace and Housden to a his latest release.

Volume sees you play as Locksley, a future interpretation of Robin Hood, as he broadcasts his thieving of virtual representations of the homes and offices of the evil elite of Britain. Aided on his heist streams to the public is Alan, an AI created by Gisborne Industries, voiced by Danny Wallace. With a series of gadgets and most importantly your eyes and some patience you must play through many games of hide and seek with security guards and make it to the exit of each level whilst picking up the treasure. The story paints this Locksley in a futuristic state of rebellion, he’s showing the people how to hit the elite where it hurts and take back their land one robbery at a time. It’s hard at first not to look at this as something very close to a Metal Gear VR missions, the game requires you to hug walls, hide in shadows and be permanently vigilant of vision cones emanating from all the enemies and security devices that Gisborne and his cohorts have in place.

Locksley is voiced by Charlie McDonnell, a Youtuber that is popular with the youth, so I’m told. When I first heard of this casting I can’t help but admit I was sceptical, but the meta nature of one of Youtube’s biggest stars playing this voice of the people and streaming crime is such a clever move by Bithell that you can’t help but admire the cojones to go with such a play. It helps that Charlie McDonnell’s voice fits so perfectly, the role was made for him both in terms of character but also script that it means you believe that this whole scenario could play out in such a way. Not a reluctant hero, but a hero that has no choice but do what he has to.

The game is broken up into maps, short puzzles/levels that will take a few minutes to complete. The 100 minimalist isometric scenarios are each centred around a myriad of Britain, and Gisborne Industries’, worst. The Banker, The Soldier, The Actress are all people you must show the people how to take from. The world that Bithell has created is deep and interesting for its creation and bastardisation of the lore that we are all so familiar with, but then we hit Volume’s biggest problem, the conflict between game and story.

Every level features a leader board of completion times, the game is made with speed in mind and it doesn’t necessarily penalise you for slow times it does make a big deal out of the whole speed run concept that you are always trying to do the most efficient run. The problem comes with the voice over work by Charlie and Danny, especially in early levels. Even at a leisurely pace the audio wouldn’t finish before I reached the exit so I would just have to stand there and wait for the story to complete before I walk into the column of light. I remember having a similar issue with Thomas Was Alone, my desperation for more story led to the pacing to be caught out. I don’t want less story from Bithell, this is an underrated talent of his, I just need there to be more consideration to the length of speech in each level.

With two games under his belt Mike Bithell is already on the verge of becoming the video game equivalent of an auteur, themes are starting to appear and thanks to his seemingly close-knit team he has created games that have a focus on shapes and an attention to design that is to be admired. With the start of each level the world forms around you with triangles falling into places creating the land. The enemies are built with further triangular designs that come together like armour on an invisible body.

With a myriad of gadgets that help Locksley on his journey through crime and rebellion it’s easy to feel like there’s only ever one solution to the puzzle, it’s not often there’s room for improvisation or experimentation. As soon as your given your gadget in a level you know that this must be how you do what you need to do. The exceptions come with the user-created levels but this is a minefield of quality. If you were to look at the latest releases of levels you’ll see about 100 named aosfbnaogiubogna or 1 -2 -3 etc and then a level that is a straight line complete in 2 seconds puzzle. Thankfully Bithell has created staff picks that mean him and his team of moderators can at least pull away some of the gems and feature them for the masses.

At its heart Volume is a conflicted game, it wants to be a world heavy with lore and story that you learn from Danny Wallace’s, Charlie McDonnell’s, Jim Sterling’s and Andy Serkis’ stellar performances, but it also wants to be a fast stealth game. It struggles to find the balance and often one is going to be sacrificed for the other. As a game it’s an amazingly designed experience that has a feel of its own that is perfect for the Vita’s pick up and play mentality. As a story Volume is equally as impressive with a real cast of characters you want to learn more about especially the seemingly innocuous at first glance e-mails you pick up. I just wish more than everything these two elements gelled together better.

There are some things you can learn and some things you need natural talent. For me I’ve always looked enviously at people who play piano, can do parkour and paint Warhammer figures. These traits can be taught but you need to have the coordination to be able to create what you mind pictures. Unfortunately I have a shake to my hands and an issue with getting my extremities to do what I ask. When I’ve tried painting tabletop figures they come out blobby and mainly one colour, I then go to a GamesWorkshop and see the amazingly intricate designs in their windows and resent the people inside. I picked up a copy of Blood Bowl, the table top game, cheap online a couple of years back, I wanted to play Warhammer but the rules and space required were too much. I thought Blood Bowl was an easy middle step, unfortunately it turns out the manual is about the size of the yellow pages. Thankfully years later Cyanide Studios created a digital version of Blood Bowl and now Blood Bowl 2.

At its most base level Blood Bowl is a game of American Football set in the Warhammer universe. Two teams of varying races; orcs, elves, humans, beasts, dwarves, all vie for victory to try to score the most goals, whilst at the same time keeping as much of their team alive. A game is two halves each broken down into 8 turns, that’s right, this is a turn based sports game. Keeping true to its tabletop origins Blood Bowl 2 limits the amount of actions and time you have to complete the actions each turn. Every player can be moved a set distance each turn but only one player can move and attack, though others can attack if they start by an opponent. Very quickly you’ll learn what the limitations are, you’ll also learn to never click off a player until you’re completely done because much like chess, once you’ve let go of a piece that’s it. Being British and not really into sports I can only assume that this game is quite close to American football and Rugby in its own way, although I doubt the real games feature the sounds of dice rolling as much as Blood Bowl.

Pretty much every action has a percentage chance of completion, e.g. a pass from one player to another requires a virtual behind the scenes dice roll for the throw, but also another separate roll for the catch. A lot of your time in a turn will be spent working out whether it’s worth the risk for a 33% and 57% chance at throw and catch. Rain, distance and opponents all come into the equation as to whether you’ll succeed. The problem is that certain races just seem to be screwed from the start. Playing as the Orcs I had numerous matches where just picking up the ball from the floor with no enemies around gave me a 57% chance of succeeding, with different players attempting I still only succeeded once in 12 tries. Pushing yourself to run a bit further or just running past an opponent and dodging their attack all require some rolling to happen in the back end. Not seeing how close you were to succeeding makes it a lot tougher to know whether it’s ever worth trying again.

There is the option of creating your own teams and building a line up to suit yourself but in exhibition matches and multiplayer it’s often simpler to just pick a race and choose their best team. Each team is made up of players with strengths a weaknesses, the Orcs have a big troll-esque creature who is great at pure brutish strength but also is so dumb it just won’t react at times. On the flip side the Orcs have a goblin player who is incredibly fast and can run great distances, just don’t expect him to be good at anything else. On the rare occasion my goblin would pick up the damn ball I sent him straight over to my troll. It turns out that small players can be thrown by large creatures meaning I could just told my player, with ball, right over my opponents defensive line.

Aesthetically Blood Bowl 2 is fascinating, there is obviously a source material it follows but it’s managed to create a really interesting representation of the world, the arenas especially are grand affairs with a huge level of detail put into the stands. Player animations for the attacks look great and brutal. Normally you’ll be wanting to have the zoom pulled right out to see what’s going on all over the field of play but when an attack is going to end in an injury the camera flies into to show you a head stomp or clothesline up close. The audio however is just there, it’s neither good nor bad, it just exists. As with all sports games there’s the pre-cut nearly related commentary, given by a troll and a vampire, which sometimes can be witty but mostly is just a distraction from your turn time running down.

Blood Bowl 2’s biggest issue is its UI. On all menus and especially in game the text is horrendously small and illogically placed. This comes into play mostly on attack rolls, 2 floating dice appear above the players involved in an attack and show what the potential outcome is on 2 dice, you as the attacker get to choose which outcome you want, be it push or knock down etc. unfortunately there are a number of variations of these and so its often best to read it’s associated text before making your call. More often than not however the default view would leave some other text floating over the dice. I on numerous occasions couldn’t see the dice for a giant “OK?” blocking my view.

Blood Bowl 2 isn’t a game that explains itself well, the tutorial gives you the basics but with each team, and player within each team, having their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses it’s impossible to know what half your team does. The amount of times I asked a player to perform an action and they flat-out refused is mind-boggling. Blood Bowl 2 almost seems to expect you to have played the physical board game and know that inside and out.

Blood Bowl 2 isn’t a perfect game, there are some major HUD and UI design issues where it’s hard to tell what on earth is going on, you also are expected to remember a lot of rules with very little on-screen help or time. Thankfully though, when you look beyond those issues, you are treated to a surprise gem. Blood Bowl 2 has such an amazing depth both in terms of its rule set and gameplay but also the strategy required of you to get through a half, let alone a full match. The story mode is lacking but that’s not where the fun is at. Get yourself online or, even better, on a couch with a friend and you will be cursing and cheering every play whether it’s yours or your opponents. Blood Bowl 2 is a sports game for people who don’t like sports, it’s bloody, it’s clever, it’s funny and more than anything it’s fun – once you accept the fact the dice hate you.

I dread being invited to parties, as someone who hasn’t had a drink in a few years it’s often a struggle to tolerate the people, the noise and the general tiredness that comes from being expected to stay out. Some of this is down to me just getting older but mostly it’s because I’m an anti-social grump who doesn’t like humans. This just meant that the pitch for Party Hard sold me instantly; a guy is awoken by a loud party next door and goes crazy and murders everyone. What’s not to like?

From a top down perspective you must guide your little pixel man through various parties and social gatherings murdering everyone in attendance, mostly you’ll rely on your trusty sharp knife to take people out with a quick stab, but for better efficiency you must go around poisoning food, starting fires, setting explosives and starting cars to speed over groups of party goers. All the while you must be hiding bodies lest you want an attendee to spot the corpse and call the police, if you’re spotted over a body when it’s found then you’re ear marked for the police instantly and must outrun them. Outrunning the police isn’t actually an option as they move faster than you, instead you must just be awkward and jump through windows and round objects until the police just give up, each time they’re called though their tolerance for your crap decreases leading to tougher escapes.

Party Hard suffers from many issues that hold it back from being a must play game. Firstly the sheer lack of help from the game; this is a tough game, it took me dozens of attempts to get past the first level. You’re given a brief tutorial on the buttons, but not what the game expects or needs from you or how you are to achieve the goal. Once you finally work out the requirements to finish a level you then have to contend with random level elements but also randomly generated events. Most egregious of these was when after many attempts I was down to my last 3 people of 56 on a level that needed to be “dealt with”, at which point a Jason Voorhees knock off turned up and killed me, I couldn’t attack him, I couldn’t hide and he moved faster than me. Things like this make it hard to define Party Hard, the game paints itself almost like a stealth puzzle game, but with the traps changing every run you can’t work out tactics, instead every run has to be a blind perfect run; this is not always conducive to fun. The music in the game starts off being really cool retro new wave synth affair that is nice for setting the mood, the unfortunate part is the each level features a single song, as such it just loops and loops and loops until you can’t stand any note featured, it grates to an amazing level that makes you wonder if this game is actually an experiment to see how much the player can take.

There can’t be any denial that Hotline Miami in one form or another was an inspiration for Party Hard, whether it’s the neon 80’s, the violence or the confusing story elements. Unfortunately Party Hard hasn’t realised one of Hotline Miami’s strongest points, the instant restart. When you’re brutally taken out in Hotline Miami it’s easy to think “oh one more try” when you just press one button straight away and you’re back in the action. With Party Hard you must sit through a cop carrying your body to the police car and then a GTA 1 style BUSTED or DEAD appear on the screen, then a short loading point before you get another shot at wiping every one out. When you have to wait to retry it’s a lot easier to get the video game equivalent of self-intervention and realise you need to stop playing for a bit.

Party Hard is a conflicted game, it wants the extreme speed aspects of something like Hotline Miami but also a slow-paced puzzle game where you must consider all steps and winging it generally won’t work out well. Throw into the mix the random level set up and random game elements like a drug bust happening mid-level and all in all you’ve got a stressful experience. I haven’t sworn at a video game as much as I have with Party Hard, the levels of anxiety brought out were mostly unpleasant. I want to use this as praise for the game but in reality it was frustration rather than tension. I’ve gone to YouTube and watched people ace levels in no time so there is obviously a learning curve and an attainable skill level, but the steps you have to go through to get there are akin to a child learning Dark Souls. There’s fun jokes, the humour is there and the random elements can be entertaining when they’re not being detrimental to your run. The game requires a certain mind-set, a mind-set I worry that the majority of players are going to really struggle to get into. It’s a game I want to return to and get better at, but randomness does not make this an easy prospect. If there was difficulty setting then this would be an instant recommendation for me. The game is like a top down Hitman game where experimentation with items and traps can be a joy to discover but without a bit more freedom to learn and experiment the game is hamstringing itself and pulling away from the audience.

As someone who reviews games I’m often hung by my own words. Something that rattled me the wrong way in one game is actually a blessing in another. Recently I took issue with Party Hard’s attempt at bring puzzle/stealth mechanics to a genre that it just didn’t work with, and here we are a couple of weeks later and Super Hot is bringing puzzles to the first person action game, and it’s awesome.

I first heard of Super Hot when a browser version of a couple of levels first appeared online and garnered some love on Twitter. It was an intriguing demo featuring the base mechanics. The player is in a stark white room or other location and red enemies run at you to take you down. I say run, but really they didn’t move, until I did. Super Hot has a number of mechanics going for it but it’s main is that time only moves when you do. If an enemy shoots their gun their bullet barely moves, until you take a step in any direction or perform an action, at which point time moves at normal speed. This does give you time to react to impending doom, but also makes you realise that when staring down a bullet you have nowhere to go but just wait for the impending extra orifice you’re going to receive.

Each level drops you into scene with no context, a car rushing towards you in an alley, a bar full of people don’t like you or an office is about to get messy. Each scenario generally just requires you to finish off all the enemies, nothing more, nothing less. On the face of it killing 10 red goons to finish a level is quite simple, but when they all rush you and everything is in slow motion it’s easy to forget to look behind you for rogue bullets.

Everything about this game oozes style, From the almost Mirror’s Edge levels of white and red, to the combat and even the end of each scene featuring a voice over just repeating “SUPER…HOT….SUPER….HOT….SUPER….HOT” until you move on. As well as the voice over you are also treated to a replay of your run through the level at normal speed, everything about it just screams out that this is a well-choreographed fight scene, when in reality you fluked your way through a subway station with people trying to off you.

Most levels start with you unarmed, you must scrounge a weapon, be it a melee or ranged weapon, or you must brave a charge at an enemy to punch them or steal their gun. This leads to some wonderful sequences of picking up a bottle for example, whipping at an enemy, catching their gun out of the air, shooting another enemy before finishing off the now unarmed first opponent. In real-time it looks beautiful and in slow motion you just feel like the ultimate badass. At any point when a weapon is out of ammo the player automatically lobs it across the room as the screen fills up with the words NO AMMO, a similar thing happens when you’ve completed a scene, each time I couldn’t help but find myself saying out loud “fuck it” as I chuck the piece of metal around like my character is having a tantrum.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is the story, and that’s mainly because it’s the most insane element of this already odd game. Without going into too much detail, you’re presented with an old DoS style interface and an option for SuperHot.exe, through an in-game chat messenger you are told by a friend that there is a new game that is being leaked online and from there it goes weird. There’s also an IRC chat where you watch various NPC’s talk about “the game”, girls and ragging on ‘noobs’ in the chat room. This conversation between 15 odd characters goes on for nearly 20 minutes, just white text on a background, but man did it grip me in a twisted voyeuristic way. It seems like the game didn’t need a story but the one it went with really does work well and is full of surprising elements that lack explanation, but don’t necessarily need it for it to be enjoyable.

There’s no doubt that Super Hot ran a real risk of having style over substance with it’s amazing visuals and concept, but thankfully the game is able to back up its pitch with a really satisfying action puzzle game. Working out where to run, what weapon to use and who the priority enemy is gives you a sense of accomplishment that is only rivaled by finally nailing a puzzle in the Portal series. The game is a bit easy at times but always fun, that is until you reach the last 2 scenes where I hit a brick wall in progress, story wise it was great but for gameplay it became an arduous task as it started to feel like there was only one correct solution as opposed to me free-flowing my violence into the game successfully. Going into Super Hot you’re never quite sure what to expect, even after reading something like this piece, it will still surprise. With its action, it’s visuals, it’s crazy story and the cohesion of all of these elements into pure style you can’t help but smile and want to really break bottles over people’s heads really slowly in real life, over and over and over again whilst screaming “SUPER…HOT…SUPER…HOT…SUPER…HOT”.

It’s hard to be a sequel to a game, it’s harder to be a sequel to a game that is clearly so inspired by others that it becomes a meta game to scream out where certain mechanics came from. The saving grace for The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II is that its writing, story and setting are all so interesting that you do get pulled in and will want to see how it plays out.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II starts with Van Helsing moments after defeating the big boss of the first game, you’ve lost your equipment and are trapped an underground lair. Working your way through with basic attack to kill the swarms of enemies you are trying to make your way to the surface to see what state your country is in. The primary focus of the early sections of the first game were traditional fantasy locations and monstrous enemies that Universal Pictures would love to have again. Towards the end of the game Van Helsing moves to metropolis hub of Borgova, the capital of Borgovia, where you are introduced to more industrial and technological enemies, steampunk creatures and robots chase you down the streets.

Van Helsing II is clearly inspired by Diablo 3 and other Action RPG games that push more for direct control and fluidity over the complications of most straight RPG games. From an isometric perspective you, playing as Abraham Van Helsing (Van Helsing’s son), and a Russian ghost called Lady Katarina you must use your specialism in melee, guns and magic to take out various classic and new monsters. After killing the mad scientist in the first game there is a power vacuum that the military looks to capitalise on and take over Borgovia. Joining the resistance you will do missions for various rebels in the hope of gaining power, control and new helpers on your goal to free the country, or at least that’s what i assume the mission is, the game kind of skips over a lot of motivation and almost does a Chekhov’s Gun principle where you join the resistance, simple because it is there.

The first couple of hours of the game see you trudge your way through some underground systems before joining the frontline resistance. This is an awful experience from start to finish; mediocre objectives that are barely made clear anywhere tarnishes what is probably supposed to be an epic fight. “Defend the front line” is not a concise objective, I ran around for 5-10 minutes just killing random enemies I found, none of whom had come to the front line yet, instead I just did it until the game had become as bored as I was and it decided to throw some XP my way. The opening location of the industrial city centre doesn’t look all to impressive for a game that doesn’t need to worry about fully creating buildings as you can’t rotate the camera. Rather than it being city streets and narrow alley ways it’s all pathways hovering high above a city below that I would much rather be in.

Once you push through the slog of an opening you get sent into some sewer prisons which again just don’t take advantage of the game’s engine or story setting. Thankfully once you get by the monotonous start you’ll be treated to a couple of hours doing missions on top of a snowy mountain top looking for a thunder-god to help you in your rebellion, this was where the game finally grabbed me, running through trees to cause choke points, aiming down cliffs and over rivers and generally loving the look of the world all meaning I got that great and yet rare thing in games, immersion. Unfortunately that can only last so long before I was returned to the city to mess around in some more tunnels. With your various cool powers and skills you mow down waves of enemies with various items flying to the floor ready to be looted. Very quickly this game becomes a Clicker game where you are just there to make the numbers go higher, but as with all clicker games, man does is it satisfying to get that ding of a level up.

Speaking of number games, the worst introduction to this series is the “send people off to do missions” sub game from the Assassin’s Creed series. An impenetrable UI cripples what is already a tedious affair of sending some captains off to attempt to do missions that sound quite fun sometimes but instead you decide to micromanage between various murderings that you fill your day job up with. There is a similar sub game with a Chimera that you take on as a pet, but thankfully that has the decency to only take 5 minutes and he will give you crap when he comes back.

The game does feature multiplayer but for some unfathomable reason you are limited to only playing with people on your friends list. The game also limits multiplayer to people who are at the same point in the story as you, which is fine and makes sense, but to not be able to at least experience the multiplayer due to no local and the restrictive online limitations means the majority of people are going to see this as a solely single player game.

Van Helsing does welcome new players to the series quite well and the movement from PC to Console has been more than successful. Although nowhere near as accessible as Diablo 3 or other action RPGs the Goth Noir setting and writing is incredibly strong if you can look past the game’s desperate need to be funny and full of pop culture. If you can brute force and push your way through the unforgivably slow opening couple of hours of the game you are then released into some great looking locations with interesting set pieces, locations and stories. Mechanics are obviously inspired by other games but with a couple of exceptions they are well implemented. If you’re looking for something a little bit tougher than Diablo or something that leans into its story and decisions more than a lot of Action RPG’s then you can’t go wrong with The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II, just be prepared to use your intuition and don’t expect anyone or anything to hold you hand for support.

The Simpsons have a lot to answer for in modern culture generally, but one element has bugged me for the past near 20 years. There’s an episode where Bart ends up in France, he’s staying with some evil men but has no concept of the language so struggles to stick up for himself when in a tough situation. Until through complete immersion he just picks up French fluently and is able to alert the police to the men. Despite this being clearly a farcical extreme example I often wonder how much you can learn something through pure immersion and blind insistence. Well it seems only right to test this theory with something that is renowned as a complicated topic; Rocket Science. NASA haven’t answered my calls since “the incident”, so instead I’m going to use the newly released PS4 version of Kerbal Space Program to learn about astrophysics, orbital patterns, the concept of weight to thrust ratio and at what speed someone will explode at when impacting the ground.

Kerbal Space Program has been knocking around for a few years now starting in a general alpha through the developer’s website and then hitting up Steam Green Light, before finally being finished this past year. The concept is simple if you look at it from far enough away; Kerbals (little green fella’s) have started a space program and it’s up to you to get them off the planet. To do this you must put together rockets to get them into orbit or further afield. This involves dealing with the command pods where the Kerbals sit, fuel tanks, fuel lines, engines, wings/fins, various paraphernalia for research and many other elements; oh and don’t forget a parachute. All in all it’s a lot to pick up and you really need to nail the execution, one fin being slightly off-center can cause your entire rocket to become a bit spiny, then a bit fally, and then a bit explodey.

Having captured the heart of so many fans and youtubers/twitchers over the past years Kerbal Space Program has finally been ported to console. And that’s where I need to make something clear in this review, there are two aspects to how to view this new release, one as a game in itself and another as a port of a PC game. In one of these Kerbal Space Program nails it, in the other, well it’s a painful experience for the player.

A trend with many releases recently has been font use, fashion over function has been a long time issue for game’s user interface but recently games like Witcher, Rocket League and now Kerbal Space Program have all taken the biscuit. I bought a 50 inch TV lately because of problems seeing text on the TV and it solved the problem for most games, but Kerbal Space Program has chosen a text that is so thin and small that it makes it painful to read. If you want to go through the tutorials, and trust me you need to, you’ll have to read quite a lot before you’re let loose on a warehouse to build your first rocket. When I had to sit a couple of feet away from my TV to be able to comprehend the mound of text it really is an issue.

The user interface issues don’t stop there however; there’s an option to choose your own flag to plant should you manage to make it to the Mun (the Kerban moon). There are many options to choose from but when scrolling through the options the scroll bar on the right goes down as does the selector but the window doesn’t, the selector is clearly moving around but scrolling never happens. If you decide to choose one of the few that are appearing on the screen there is no series of button presses that will allow you to get to the accept button to choose it, instead you just have to back out with the default option. Should you be ok with overlooking this error in UI you then have to put up with using a cursor on a console controller (the default is actually a motion control). When scrolling through various engines you need to be able to move through them quickly to read the stats, there you’ll have two problems, one the horrible text choice rears its head again and then you have to move a horrible cursor around as opposed to just pressing left and right on the d-pad. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was a grey bar over the left side of the screen blocking a handful of tabs, I honestly have no idea what these tabs were for as at no point could I get the cursor to choose them because of this opaque bar. These are all clear issues that should have been picked up well before release.

There are other issues with the controls when you finally get around to take off but those seem to be a game concept where there are a lot of buttons needed so a modifier button must be held down to change the effect of a face button. It’s all very confusing but acceptable. This game isn’t supposed to be easy, you’re literally dealing with rocket science here, building is half the battle but then you need to be able to fly the bastard as well. Once in space you will change the view to a solar overview granting you oddly satisfying orbital trajectories and a hundred different stats and meters knocking around if you opt for full information. It can all be quite overwhelming, but once you see how numbers react after certain actions you can weirdly start to understand what’s going on.

Graphically and audibly not much has changed from the PC version, a lot of people will take issue with the simplicity of the graphics, especially on your home planet where it’s just a big green blob with some blue on it, but there’s something about when you manage to hit Space, everything slows down, the starts are beautiful and some great chill out music kicks in. It’s all rather gorgeous and that’s lucky, because more often than not I’ve run out of fuel by this point and that Kerbal isn’t going anywhere apart from round and round the green and blue marble.

There’s a few modes to keep you occupied including a campaign of sorts where you must juggle the business and the science side of space travel. It’s all rather clever but ultimately painful due to the aforementioned text issues that plague the game. My personal enjoyment just came from spending hours building, failing, learning and improving repeatedly until my rocket got that little bit further each time in the sandbox mode.

As I mentioned before we must break down this critique into the game itself and the port. As a game Kerbal Space Program is a complicated joy, there’s a lot to learn and master and the game almost is intentional in its lack of help in you doing so but none the less perseverance will pay off. The excitement of a rocket making it to orbit without any deaths is something to be celebrated and enjoyed, and even when things to go wrong you still feel like a god when a Kerbal jumps from a rocket to survival or a parachute pops just in time for a relatively safe landing. The game is hamstrung on PS4 however, there are so many painful aspects to its port. A cursor is rarely acceptable on a console and when the windows you’re manipulating don’t work to start with frustration will kick in repeatedly. Especially as inconsistently you can use the D-pad and other times you are required to use a cursor. These are all issues that can, and probably will, be fixed in patches but as a first experience of Kerbal Space Program it is frustrating to see it done so sloppily and confusingly. To come back to my earlier Simpsons learning French example there is a chance you could learn quite a bit from Kerbal Space Program; but unfortunately, on the PS4, the French guidebook is being held 50 feet away and in size 10 font by someone who doesn’t like you.

Nostalgia is probably the biggest double-edged sword of gaming opinion. A screenshot or description of a new game can flood you mind with memories of childhood and a snapshot of time where you just had fun with games and issues like framerate were far from your mind. A lot of developers will feed on this intentionally or otherwise. On first look at images for Obliteracers you may think it’s Micromachines or a kart racer, it has elements of both, there’s no denying that, but those comparisons don’t do Obliteracers justice.

More than a kart racer Obliteracers is a rollercoaster where you just try to hang onto the track. The camera is locked to a certain position and pans around the track at a steady pace, it’s your job as the racer to just not to drop off the bottom of the screen. On the face of it that seems like a simple task, but instead you have up to 15 other racers there all crashing into you and making it hard to drive straight let alone maintain speed.

Where Obliteracers does match it’s kart racing inspiration is the weapons, drive over orbs to pick up weapons and get a weapon; homing missiles, straight bullets, mines, side flame throwers and oil slicks are all at your disposal in this violent racer. After putting many hours into Obliteracers there is one weapon that I can honestly say I still have no idea what it does. That aside all the weapons feel powerful and require some level of skill to use.

Obliteracers isn’t really a racer it’s more of a survival game. Incredibly rarely is being in first place actually helpful in Obliteracers, if you’re in first you do get the choice of weapons, but you also get a huge crosshairs on your back for everyone from position 2 right through to 16. Instead we found that staying near the front and just taking advantage of others was a safer strategy. The reason I bring this up is not for me leet pro tips but instead to show there is something deeper about the game that to be honest the look of Obliteracers doesn’t even seem to realise.

There’s a few different game modes but most of them fall into be the last car standing or get points for kills. Coming first means nothing, kills mean everything. This concept is fascinating, it changes how you expect to play this game instantly, you’ll want to push to the front, grab weapons and slam your brakes to get back in the pack to cause damage all whilst trying to maintain speed to not get disqualified or lose control of your car off a high ledge.

Aesthetically Obliteracers is much like every other kart racer over the past couple of decades, here’s a bunch of off brand comedic wacky characters that you race around areas like ‘future sky city New York’, ‘desert island’ and ‘transport ship’. None of these will make you spray your drink in a classic sitcom spit take. The levels are reasonably well designed but there’s just isn’t a hook on this aspect for you to scream “YES! That’s why this is special”.

Obliteracers is at its best when you embrace the madness. There is a beautiful chaos to a 16 racer game, cars flying off in every direction and weapons being used as often as possible. In most kart racers and other such games your only real tactic is killing to get to 1^st place, in Obliteracers your tactic is more nuanced, you’re going play by-play trying to just survive but also eek out some point from knocking opponents out of the round. The chaos sets Obliteracers apart, it makes it something more than ‘just another kart racer’ or something that is purely playing off gamers nostalgia for ‘them good old days’. Instead it takes that inspiration and pushes it further, making it something new, different and a hell of a lot of fun.

A trailer can make or break a game, it can make you drool at the mouth (like Dead Island’s launch trailer a few years ago) or it can make you just give up on any concept of a good game (see Sonic Boom, Mighty Number 9 and any other number of nostalgia trip releases). We Happy Few already had some heavy buzz around it just from some screenshots and short videos shown a couple of years ago. But it was the E3 presentation from developer Compulsion Games this year that made the wider public sit up and say ‘wow’.

Set in an alternative history 1960’s in England We Happy Few smashes together many literary concepts into one brutally unsettling dystopian past where the public take Joy, a pill that makes the bleak distressing world a bright, happy and colourful place where nothing bad ever happens. You play as Arthur Hastings a gentleman who spends his days censoring the newspapers to keep his happy town happy. The start of the game sees you remembering…something.

This early access/ preview build is all about managing people’s expectations. After E3 hype for the game grew wheels and hopped on a track to become a train people’s ideas of what the game was seemed to leap away into fantasy. With only screenshots and the video at E3 there really wasn’t much indicator of what the game is. We had known it was a first person game, but unlike many people’s thoughts from the story driven video, this is not Bioshock.

Instead We Happy Few is actually a first person survival game; much like the definition of an RPG is “do numbers come off enemies when I hit them?” survival games have “do I need to arse about finding water to keep going?”. Health, hunger, thirst, tiredness and sickness all have meters at the top of the screen that crawl down as you move around the town of Wellington Wells. These meters are the first exposure to We Happy Few’s list of worries at this stage. They drop at a brutal rate basically meaning that if you spend more than a moment considering a quest you’ll already be behind on your babysitting duty of care for your character.

At its simplest We Happy Few is a Survival, mission based game with stealth and puzzle elements. When you first start the game you have the option of it being perma-death or not, it defaults to being perma-death, trust me when I say this is not the way to play this game, as soon as you get stuck in the loop of desperately needing water and food you won’t get enjoyment from the threat of failure, instead the stresses of issues with an early build of the game become more apparent and irritating.

As you emerge from the underground bunker you call home you are presented with a quaint British village, everything is kind of crappy and the people don’t look good. Your starter quest is a vague “escape” but quickly you’ll start picking up random quests as you walk past various scenarios around you. Your first real roadblock isn’t the enemies or the world, instead it’s the UI which is some of the most convoluted I’ve had to deal with since Gran Turismo 5. No icon for any of your items is clear enough meaning as you’re trying to find some food to save yourself from starving you’ll repeatedly try to swallow a rock. The map is equally confusing with its lack of real quest tracking and the compass at the top of the screen does little to aide you in finding your way around the town.

What caught most people’s attention is quite simply the design of the game, with its 60’s inspired psychedelia in little Britain it certainly is an original style and something to be praised greatly. To overcome the horrific past that I’m still not entirely sure about the whole town takes Joy, a pill that makes everything happy, if the locals notice you not on your pills, either through violence or theft or other such crimes, you’ll be declared a downer and everyone will turn on you in an instant, at which point you must run or fight, neither of which is a particularly easy option. If you decide to take some Joy that you find lying around you will be treated to not only a happy town but also the happiest first person stroll you have ever experienced.

The build you can buy now on Xbox One is alpha, and by that I mean true alpha, not a demo like EA seems to believe they are. There are audio issues, graphical issues, gameplay issues and issue issues. The core concept is there, and what is there is sometimes enjoyable, just don’t go in expecting this to be a fully fleshed out, or balanced experience. A few patches down the line I’m sure this will be super fun even before full release, but as it currently stands this is a sparse game with a number of anchors holding it back. As with any preview you have to look at its’ potential not completely as it is now, this has the chance to take survival games to their next evolution, a deeper, more varied and lore filled experience; but that’s just its’ potential, we’ll have to see if Compulsion Games follows through with the momentum they’ve gained from their E3 hype.

There’s a concept, or trope, in horror films called “the Spring-loaded Cat”. Picture a film where a character is searching a dark and scary building, they hear a noise, they walk up to a door, trembling as they reach for the handle, the soundtrack is building, they finally open the door and….oh, it’s just a tossing cat knocking around because it’s a nob. The Spring-loaded Cat comes from those scenes in films where the tension, the fear, and the souring string music builds to an absolute peak, before being explained away by a moggy on a mission. This cheap ploy is often predictable in its nature, so often have we seen it we know what to expect, you then get the evolution where it was a double bluff and the cat relieves tension of the audience before a psychopathic killer is behind the protagonist of the scene. Fear, relief and then shock repeat, the way to any good manipulation of an audience in horror, something Bloober Team have put to use in their first person horror masterpiece Layers of Fear.

For the past five years I’ve avoided most first person horror games, not because I jump easily or have a slightly paranoid over active imagination, but instead I don’t want to accidentally become a Youtuber and film myself playing that stuff in the dark.

Layers of Fear at first glance seemed like any other horror game of the past few years, here’s a creepy location that is decrepit and in need of a permanently stationed cleaner, now run. But instead this isn’t a traditional game, I’m not one of those douches that says Gone Home isn’t a game, but instead it just doesn’t follow traditional gameplay mechanics, it almost feels like more of an experience. In Layers of Fear you must wander around a house and discover the story of a father who paints, suffers from alcoholism and to be blunt is as mad  as a hatter. His wife is disfigured in a fire and her face is scared as if she has a permanent grimace and his daughter is caught in the middle of this chaotic relationship and household.

Through the course of the game you wander from room to room and things just get weird. At first it’s just doors closing suddenly but then progresses into screams, upside down rooms, melting furniture and possessed dolls. At no point can you truly die, instead at certain points if you don’t run or avoid a situation you end up somewhere house. The game advertises itself as changing based on your choices, but realistically those choices are “left or right door” on the most part. Due to the nature of how the game is it seems like in each chapter you will see the same rooms as another player, but maybe in a different order. The game does feature puzzles but they’re few and far between and more often than not are just a case of finding a specific item in a room or find the number for this combination lock. The original game mostly disseminated its story through notes and letters that you would find in the thousands of cupboards and draws, this was completely optional, but if you’re yet to play it I must encourage you to find these items, they flesh the story out to an amazing degree and explain some wonderful little touches to gameplay. Early on you really are not sure who you are. As a player in a first person game you are obviously ‘someone’, you’re talking, you’re interacting with the world. It’s only through the notes and letters and a receipt for a prosthetic leg did it truly become clear what was going on with the players avatar in the game.

Inheritance is the first piece of DLC for Layers of Fear, it picks up the story of the bastard Rubik’s Cube house owned by the mad painter. This time it’s over a decade after the events of the main game and you’re playing as the daughter of the abusive father and crazy disfigured mother. She has memories of the events but is looking for more.

Layers of Fear had a lot of handholding, at times it felt like an on rails game as you were being clearly led from one room to the next, objects in the way, doors being locked or disappearing, all coming together to giving the illusion of a big world but in reality there was a prime path. Inheritance suffers from the same issue but turns it to its benefit, rather than giving the illusion of choice it uses it to give more focus on story that isn’t found on scraps of paper like adult magazines discarded next to railway lines. Inheritance is a cleaner more honed in experience where there is a clear thread and tale to experience. It doesn’t have the meat of the main game but the alternative perspective to the main game’s characters really does add to the world.

Graphically both Layers of Fear and Inheritance have a strong aesthetic that doesn’t over rely on a room being dark as the way to make something. You can see what’s going on and interact with a lot of it to really feel like you’re exploring the world and minds of these various sociopaths.

Both games use shock as a ploy to create horror, but the master stroke is to make the player on edge not through the jumping, or the fear of jumping, but the elements around that. The scariest thing I’ve seen a horror film was the original Japanese release of The Ring, there’s an image on the actual video of a man stood in a stream with a bag on his head, there’s nothing shocking or offensive about the image, but there was something about it that just cut me deep. The jumps didn’t bother me, Sadako didn’t bother me, just that bastard with the sheet on his head. Something doesn’t have to be loud or sudden to be scary of Inheritance knows that, it plays with perspective and normality to an extent where just some crayon on a wall can make you feel uneasy. It’s worth noting I played through the main game and the DLC with my horror obsessed girlfriend, she was sucked into the world and the game, scared for long periods and one occasion was caused to cry in fear because of a chest in an attic filled with screaming vibrating baby dolls.

Inheritance is short, you can get through it in a couple of hours at a leisurely pace, but for story it is a must for anyone who played through Layers of Fear, the horror and gameplay takes a back seat in my mind but an expansion on that messed up house is fascinating. I’ve avoided going into detail about elements of the DLC as with it being so story focussed anything I say would be spoiler territory. As with the main game there are a number of endings based on your play style but the first ending I got was the perfect conclusion to the story, the perspective of a girl with an alcoholic father and the realisation of what drove him to that is something that may not be real but it was a satisfying conclusion to a tremendous story driven experience.

Post-secondary school I knew I didn’t want to do A-Levels, partially down to me being awful at exams but also just wanting to get out of that building. Instead I went to college and then university each time building on my want to get into media in one form or another. Film making was my biggest interest for many years, the problem was that meant I had to hang out with other people who were into films. There’s nothing worse than being able to smell your own and disliking their jumped up opinions. There’s me talking about how much I enjoy the films of Jackie Chan and they’re banging on about a Brazilian documentary they saw about a deaf fisherman. What irked me more than anything however was their unjustified love of the films of Guy Ritchie. Modern day me loves a Guy Ritchie film, the Sherlock Holmes films and The Man From Uncle were absolute joys, but 15 years ago, no chance. We were still in the after effects of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Revolver was around the corner and people were getting on the hype train. It was style over substance and much like my fellow students only liking certain films because they were subtitled there seemed to be a certain ponceyness to liking Lock Stock because the actors all spoke funny to our middle class west country ears.

Jump to modern-day and I’m playing Filthy Lucre, a game so dripping with East End accents and cockney gangsters that it may as well as had jellied eels and a severed piece of Chaz and Dave as a pre-order bonus. Filthy Lucre at its base is an isometric stealth/action game where you are tasked with getting into a heavily guarded location and either nicking, blowing up or just being a slightly violent nuisance. Filthy Lucre wears its inspirations quite openly, from the East End gangster movies to its Hotline Miami and Metal Gear Solid video game brethren. I absolutely loved Mike Bithell’s Volume last year, a game that does so much with its basic concept without over complicating things, with the exception of Volume’s story. Filthy Lucre feels like a welcome next step from Mike Bithell’s seed in Volume. A leaning towards realism with graphics and design and an evolution of the concept and tools to hand.

Filthy Lucre gets you to break into Scrap Yards, Water Works, Penthouses, Mansions and finally a Bank. Each location has 3 levels within, the variations asking you to complete a different main objective each time, and steal various other secondary objectives. You’re being asked to do all of this by Ronnie, a man who is in a pissing contest with Harry Carter another geriatric gangster. Harry has cleaned Ronnie out and stolen all of his possessions, you as Ronnie’s only grunt must complete his collection of useless tatt that happens to be gold to keep him happy and not knee capping you. To aide you in your heists you can take two weapons and two pieces of equipment in with you. Generally speaking after the first level you know who you are and how you play so you’ll know if you’re going in with a shotgun and frag grenades or a few knives and something to take out electronics.

All the locations are patrolled by various guards and technology like cameras and turrets. To get past them you have 3 options of play style, and to me personally this is where the game shines. The first option is all out violence. With your heavy machine gun pistol and shotgun you can just stroll in and make everyone questions their days plans. It’s a messy choice and you stand a high chance of dying, on top of that if you get a little bit ‘too noticeable’ then the off brand SWAT come flying into deal with you. The second option for infiltration is to ghost your way through a level, channelling Solid Snake you hide in shadows, sneak round corners in perfect time with a guard on patrol and you generally only punch people in the back of the head rather than make them a little bit faster with bullet sized speed holes.

The final option is the one I use the most. The game features wonderfully implemented local co-op which I have been taking full advantage of and absolutely loving. The third option for entry to a mix of option one and two, in essence you go in stealthy, covering each other, checking your corners and being frugal with bullets and your items. That is until you get spotted or your attention wanders, at which point it’s a case of unloading your ammo into everyone but your partner. Despite being surprisingly stealthy there was barely a level I left where every single person wasn’t dead or unconscious. This is mainly because every level contains a very well hidden secret item that gets you a large amount of money and XP and is worth hunting down, I found it a lot easier to hunt if I wasn’t disturbed by all those people breathing.

Graphically and musically Filthy Lucre isn’t going to be setting the world on fire, it all functions perfectly well apart from occasional frame rate jankiness but none of it forces you to sit up and take notice. The gameplay however stands out for me, especially in co-op, Filthy Lucre is a wonderful puzzle game full of consideration and cause and effect. It may sound like a negative but for someone who likes to plan things out, I took great pleasure in sitting behind a box for 90 seconds at a time working out the perfect timing to wander out and clock an underpaid guard only to forget that a CCTV camera that pans over his corpse hadn’t been switched off yet. In co-op you get the fun of just one of the players getting spotted and used as bait for the other to come out and deal with the imposing patroller. All of these moments make you forget that the East End thing is a little heavy-handed and that the UI is a bit clunky, especially when choosing a level from the map. All of these things are overlooked when you and a partner are carrying a duffel bag each and legging it to your escape van with alarms going off and bullets flying all around you. Filthy Lucre is a good single player game that offers a nice amount of replay-ability and progression, but where this game excels, where it becomes great for me, is in the co-op. The beautiful chaos of Hotline Miami with the tactical co-op nature of Payday, Filthy Lucre is a joy.

It’s difficulty to remain consistent when you’ve written as many reviews as I have. An opinion I state in one may be contradicted 6 months later, and there’s a simple reason for that, I’m human. My opinions change and evolve and my experiences over time shape my interests and wants from gaming and other aspects of my life. I’ve praised and damned games over my years of writing for their difficulty. Some games are difficult because of bad balancing, others are difficult to draw out a short game or force the player to require skill, and others are difficult for their sense of nostalgia. Rive falls into the latter, mostly, when you boot it up your only option is hard mode, that’s it. Says a lot really.

To define Rive is difficult. On the face of it Rive is a platformer, but it has sections and elements inspired by Asteroids or Dodonpachi and finally there are very small hints to games like Metroid in there. All of this is topped off with a self-aware meta humour poking fun at pop culture where ever possible, see: Austin Powers references in the death screen.

In Rive you are a salvager looking to pull apart a massive ship. Unfortunately said ship is filled to the brim with robots who lean on the dickhead side of AI. In massive swarms robots will fly at you. With one stick on the controller you’ll move around and with the other you can spray fire you somewhat weak machine gun. As the game progresses you can spend scrap you pick up from dead enemies to get special attacks ranging from mass missiles to a weird ricochet shot.

Rive is a tough game, it’s set pieces and boss fights are all designed to see you die. The checkpoint system is generous but that won’t help you kill the 150 enemies flying at you repeatedly. There are only two ways to beat Rive, trial and error or luck. Rarely will even the quickest reactions be able to get you through a particular area, you need to know the path or know the enemy routine to be able to start shooting before they turn up. Early on traps are obvious, you’ll see a falling metal pillar well before it comes down but later on in the game it almost becomes unfair. You’re forced into arduous and tricky situations that you may somehow get through by the skin of your teeth only for Rive to take great pleasure in spewing enemies directly onto your little walker bot from a pipe hidden into the scenery. Situations like this aren’t rare and there are a number of sequences where something like lava is chasing you through air vents and you have no choice but attempt, die, rinse and repeat until you know the only route through the maze that doesn’t end in molten death.

Graphically Rive ticks all the boxes you would hope with a game like this, explosions are satisfying and debris is sent flying everywhere at a high rate like a fireworks party at a scrapyard. There are occasions where large numbers of enemies will come at you from all angles requiring you to react quickly to clear house, thankfully this is aided by a framerate that holds up consistently with no jankyness. There are some specialty sections where you get to fly around and cause chaos, these sections are few and far between but are great fun making you wish for more.

Overall Rive will test you, but it’s a test you can’t prepare for will only get through by failing many times and trying a different multiple choice option each time. For those times when you do nail a chase section without failing you will feel great, it was a challenge, but it was do-able. All Rive really needs for me to recommend it more is to be consistent with it’s difficulty. There’s a difference between challenging and unfair and Rive struggles to fall on the right side of that line. When Rive plays fair and you stand a chance it’s a charming platformer with some clever mechanics and fun action sequences, but when it is in one of ‘those’ moods it’ll suck the joy out of the experience leaving you frustrated and seeing the same section for an extended period of your short time on this planet.

Coming into a game series part way through is always an uphill struggle. It reminds me of being at parties growing up and trying to side step into a circle of people and join their conversation only to realise every time I say something it has been said before and I just have no understanding or place in this social situation. Jumping into Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star on PS4 has much the same feelings for me, I want to understand and be involved because there’s clearly something cool happening here, but I just seem to stare blankly as everyone talks near my general direction.

Released on PS4 and Vita; Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star is at this stage an unknown number in this anime brawler series. Having not touched any others it comes as no surprise that I was a little lost at the start of this game. Outside of video games anime is a real passion of mine, but I know how impenetrable it can be as an interest. For example after my recent trip to Japan I saw how huge One Piece is, on my return I’ve been knocking through that with my partner and we’ve only scratched the surface despite being 168 episodes in. If I tried to explain the plot I could just say Pirates, and if I tried to explain Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star I could just say ‘the moon is a computer that people war over with their subconscious’ AI’ but even then I feel like it’s a complicated affair.

The game starts after the Holy Grail War, which was a huge battle to determine who laid claim to the moon computer, which grants wishes. Saber, our lead lady at first, has a ring, the Regalia, and with it she is the big badass of the land. Unfortunately she’s not the only one with a ring and this is the main thrust of the story. You control Saber (and others) in battle, somehow being a mute persona of someone’s subconscious means you get to be her ‘master’. And once you have your head around those ‘basics’ you’re ready to go, oh wait no, have some text first.

It’s not uncommon in Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star for you to have to sit through 20 minutes of dialogue. This isn’t always a bad thing, the writing is incredibly strong, despite a lot of fluffiness and a wonderfully silly love angle for a number of your interactions. The reason I take issue with this is because the main action of the game is so cool and so much fun. The game clearly takes it’s inspirations from games like Dynasty Warriors and the other ‘…Warriors’ games. A map made up of a number of areas is presented before you, each time with a different theme; be it Kyoto style shrines, gritty industrial area or just a floating heavenly castlescape. In each section of the map, connected by flying roads, you are greeted by hundreds of enemies that you must hack and slash your way through sending bodies everywhere and easily giving you the opportunity for a many thousand hit combo as you just sweep through them 20 at a time. Your task is to control as many areas as possible reaching the target before your opponent. To lay claim you must use your heavy and light attacks, sprinkled with specials and other abilities to mow down the horde to encourage the spawning of an Enforcer, once enough Enforcers are disposed of you own the area and can move on. When this high intensity battle is over you are returned to text, a lot of text. It just leads to some real pacing issues as you try to work out if this is a visual novel with some combat or a 3rd person brawler with some visual novel elements.

A lot of the game is balancing the map, looking at the point value of each area and which of your claimed areas are getting retaken by the enemy. Very early in the game you learn that sometimes you just have to ditch the fight you’re in for the greater good of saving an old location or taking out something like a Plant that will cover nearby locations with more new enemies. It becomes quite a juggling act and can require a lot of attention for a 25 minute level, especially when the boss of each level (generally a girl in a weird outfit) decides to start giving you grief. Unfortunately these boss fights aren’t as epic as you would hope, instead they normally become you just hammering buttons and doing damage until they raise their shield at which point you wait 2 seconds for them to lower it before cracking back on.

You are given the option to swap out your ‘Slave’ to one of the supporting cast but after doing it a couple of times I realised that, especially in the first story arc, you are better off just knocking through with Saber and spamming her sweeping sword attacks. This is all not to say there isn’t skill required, button mashing will work to an extent but you won’t build many combos or special meter to drop your big moves for the bosses.

The game has a great artistic style, the anime gives a wonderfully eccentric epic style to the onslaught of combat and out of battle the long conversation sections are at least perked up by some great character portraits. The voice work is in Japanese but the translation process to English has done the job of making this game as cohesive as you could hope it to be considering its source plot. Unfortunately there’s some text in the middle of fights, and reading subtitles while keeping your combo going is nigh on impossible.

In my many years of writing at this stage I know there’s certain phrases you shouldn’t use in a review, ‘Fans of the series/genre will enjoy this’ is a big no no. However, sometimes, just sometimes it fits too perfectly. If you’re reading this you likely know about the whole world of the Fate/ series and are fine with the concept of a brawler mixed in with what is basically a visual novel dating sim. If you’re not, but this has piqued your interest I would suggest read wiki’s, watch Youtube and get as much help as you can before stepping into this. With its various main stories and crazy number of side characters and side stories you will find there is a surprising amount of depth to this. The fighting is incredibly fun, the frame rate stays smooth throughout just adding to the badass feel of the action and if you can stand to read an essay with each character the story does open up and explain itself a couple of hours in, but you need to be dedicated and stick with it, just try not to mumble and shuffle away like I do at parties.

In my pointless endeavour to become an adult my fiancé and I got a rescue cat at the tail end of 2016. We named her Miku and she can be an ungodly nightmare 90% of the time trashing my house. But every so often when she’s worn herself out and she lies down on the carpet stretching her body out and hiding her limbs I see how cute she is and all is forgiven. Rain World is so close to being that feeling in game form, something that is wonderful to look at during it’s quiet periods but a stressful experience outside of that. Slugcat, your avatar in the world of Rain World, is unbelievably cute and everything is so beautiful, but when the rest of the game is just an elongated raspberry being blown in your face is it even possible to look past the flaws?

Rain World is a 2D platform survival game where you must traverse an oddly industrial, but uninhabited by humans, region to try to reunite with your family of slugcats. When you first load the game two things will occur to you, the first is that this may be one of the most impressively designed games in a long time. Pixel games have fallen somewhat out of fashion but the physics and art on Slugcat and other creatures is truly impressive, and with the backgrounds being reminiscent of detailed Amiga games from the 90’s there’s nothing to do but sit in awe. The second thing that will occur to new players is that you’ll have no clue what you’re doing.

The tutorial is along the lines of a couple of screens that will indicate that you can power jump and how to pick up food and weapons to throw but outside of that you’re left to your own devices. It’s as if you are left to house sit for someone but when you walk into the house there is a note from the owner backwards and in Japanese, the cutlery is taped to the ceiling and the walls are on fire. There’s something about learning a world’s rules and restrictions yourself, the latest Zelda has shown that can be a joy; a loose objective and an environment that is unfamiliar. But when you aren’t even entirely sure of the buttons or what the HUD means you kind of start to glaze over in the first 20 minutes of playing. Hours and hours in and I still can’t say with confidence what the majority of the screen is telling me.

In my time playing there have been patches that have addressed some issues with my early experiences but straight off the bat this game has one fatal flaw, it’s borderline unfair. Now in the week or two this has been out I’ve seen the alpha gamers have taken to the internet to spout off their usual ‘Git Gud’ attitude whenever anyone has anything negative to say about difficulty but that doesn’t apply to Rain World’s issues. Hard games can be fun, difficulty can cause frustration but also the highest levels of satisfaction in a game, with Rain World difficulty causes boredom. A large mechanic in the game is to collect at least four pieces of each in game day to be able to fill your stomach enough to hibernate in set checkpoint areas. The hibernation pods are hidden around the world and easy to miss if you don’t notice that the usual three white dots to indicate access to the next area is replaced by a small white rectangle. The game saves when you hibernate allowing you to return to this point whenever you die, the problem is these areas are incredibly few and far between. This means that should you die after exploring for 20 minutes you will be sent back to the last hibernation with your map reset and with nothing to show for that time apart from another run through that area to where you last died which makes the whole experience, quite simply, boring.

Death is waiting for you on every screen, whether it’s the random assortment of enemies that are procedurally placed on each run or the impending down pour that each storm brings. If you’re not back in a hibernation area when the rain starts you are simply dead. Another common cause of death is unwieldy controls that don’t react the way you input. When jumping for a ledge or pole only to not grab or for slugcat to not move in a direction you have selected when an enemy is approaching, it just feels like the game is out to get you. I heard talk of hundreds of different screens being designed for Rain World, and I’m sure each are beautifully designed, but the game almost seems proud of the fact that the vast majority of players are not going to see them.

Going back to the ‘Git Gud’ mentality we can look at other difficult games and see there’s a couple of ways to handle different skill requirements. Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy, Spelunky and other games of that ilk all did a fantastic job of having a quick death turn around. When dying hitting one button instantly took you back to the start of that screen meaning that you never felt like you were failing, you were just experimenting until you found the successful solution. Dark Souls tells the player nothing but it follows a logic you can understand, it had unfair moments where you could be jumped on or trapped but if you were extremely slow, cautious and boring you could pre-empt those issues. None of this seems possible in Rain World.

Rain World struggles to capitalise on its first impressions. Awe of its beauty and potential exploration is quickly outweighed by some cack-handed platforming and a reliance on trial and error where the error just wastes the players time and patience. With patches to fix this the game has potential to be a classic that could form a strong cult following, but as it stands I struggle to recommend this to anyone except to see the art.

There’s something fascinating about the concept of fear. Emotions on a base level can be mostly hidden from others. But fear is something so instinctual that it’s nigh on impossible to conceal, it’s primal and raw, it’s a binary emotion. Video games on the most part have taken their inspiration from films in terms of how it presents horror and fear by implementing the cheapest of fear tactics in media, the jump scare. Well here comes Outlast 2, the king of the jump scare and the queen of Youtubers scream montages.

Outlast preys on a simple concept, the player’s lack of senses. Games can only really access two of the five senses a player has, sight and sound. You can’t feel the air on your skin or smell the putrid flesh littered around you and you can’t taste the smoke in the air; you can only see and hear. Outlast’s main gimmick is removing one of these senses, your sight. With only your night vision camera for company, in Outlast you play a cameraman who’s helicopter has crashed in the arse crack of nowhere America and your reporter (also your wife) has been taken by some people who subscribe to a religion, and in the game’s logic that means they must be insane.

Honestly, I don’t subscribe to any faith myself but as an overly sensitive social justice warrior it’s hard not to see an issue with the fact that there are three religions covered and represented in this game, and literally all of them are made up of murderers. There seems to be a subconscious, or maybe conscious, bias from the game’s writers to just make religion the bad guy here. Don’t get me wrong, that’s mostly fine as a story arc and there has to be a bad guy somewhere, but man, it’s just not very subtle about it.

You as the protagonist decide to venture out into the woods and find your missing partner. To start with the Christian’s have her, and then some heretics ( psuedo-Pagans) nab her and then basically you’re wandering around trying to stumble upon your lady. The game does a great job of giving you an objective of go from point A to point B and then make the most convoluted route possible. It’s genuinely impressive how confusing an amazingly linear game can be in terms of direction of travel.

The moment to moment gameplay of Outlast 2 is quite repetitive, you’ll enter a camp or building and one of three things will happen; you’ll either have to avoid the stumbling religious nuts, run away from a religious nut who can spot you no matter what and insta-kill you or you’ll be scavenging and looking for bandages to heal up any mishaps that have befallen you or grabbing batteries to keep your one way to see the world going, your camera.

The camera is actually a fascinating mechanic in Outlast 2. You’ll need it to be able to see as 95% of the game is in areas best described as “dark as hell”. The batteries do last a fair while but as soon as they start to run low you’ll be getting a flickery image that when it does show is so out of focus it does start to hurt my eyes. The camera does take some suspension of disbelief, if this was a third person game you’ll see that in some cutscenes your character is just holding the camera up at completely illogical times and in cutscenes that have the player getting punched the fist always comes right into the lens.

The main reason people will be wanting to play Outlast 2 is down to the series reputation as a scarefest. And I can confirm, yes, I jumped during Outlast 2. But honestly, that’s not the horror you should be looking for in Outlast 2. There’s a few moments in Outlast 2 that have stuck with me days after I completed it. I can’t go into a their details as to be honest it’s worth experiencing the ride yourself. But in the opening 30 minutes there’s a set piece that got me to a level I don’t usually feel with horror. All horror tastes are personal but in Outlast 2 occasionally they justify the world and the game in a way that is comforting to know thought went into. Talking about the player’s senses before I mentioned the inability to touch the world around you, but in Outlast 2 you do have control, you can choose where to walk and what to hide under. Early in the game you’re ambushed by various people and two of them pin you down to the ground, you’ve lost you ability to move and you can’t control the situation, all you can do is watch as someone goes over to your wife and straddles her creepily. There’s something to being restrained and having an inability to do anything that really struck me and unsettled me throughout this scene. The same concept is replicated a couple of times later in the game and it works, it really works.

It’s hard to say that Outlast 2 looks amazing, graphically when there’s light it does a good job, in fact there’s a few scenes in a school that look damn close to photo realistic, but when the rest of the game is near pitch black or occasionally through a green hazy night vision camera it’s a tough thing to compliment. Also the frame rate takes a battering during larger vista scenes in the mountains of America but on the most part the PS4 version on a non Pro model handled things fine.

The main thing this boils down to is ‘if you’re not a youtuber will you enjoy this game?’ and to be honest, yes. There’s a lot to mock about the game and the series, as I have been doing. But there’s no denying, it was an intense experience from start to finish for the 8 hour run.The jump scares can be incredibly predictable and the story goes…places. I would love to spoil so much about this game as around act two Outlast 2 just seems to throw its hands up in the air and say ‘fuck it’ whilst huffing glue and drinking vodka but obviously I wouldn’t want to ruin the experience. And that’s what this game is, it’s an experience, there isn’t much ‘game’ here, sure you occasionally have a puzzle like ‘find this crank to turn this wheel’, but really you’re just going from point a to point b looking for the next bit of horror to give you a jump, a hit of adrenaline and then for the calm come down after fear has struck. Much like reviews, fear is subjective, but Outlast 2 does at least try, and occasionally it will make you look into your webcam and scream.

Everyone deals with the horror genre in different ways, for some they just open themselves up to the world get immersed in the setting. My friend Beth assigns names to everyone, good or bad, and greets them when they appear “Hello Garry!” as a monster leaps at her in Resident Evil. I myself become even more jaded and cynical than usual. After years of watching horror films and playing games in the genre I’ve learned to spot when the jump is coming. Like a drum and bass fanatic I wait for the drop and can call it to the beat in any scary experience. Perception plays on this by taking away a key feature of most games, your sight.

Clearly ripping on Ben Afleck’s Daredevil film (as everyone should because it’s actually quite good) you take the role of Cassie, a blind woman who using echo location can get an outline of the world around her. Whether it’s ambient surroundings like a radio, TV or crappy heating system or by tapping her cane on the floor you can reclaim some vision of the world and rather than just be met with pitch black you instead get a blue outline showing you tables and boxes and ghostly figures. The crux of the game is based around a mansion you make your way to after having recurring nightmares featuring it. The setup is a little confusing, you get told that this is the house of your nightmares and you’ve travelled across the country to get there leaving your boyfriend behind as this is ‘something you have to do’. Not exactly the most justifiable cause I’ve ever heard.

Once inside you must guide Cassie around the mansion as best you can to find out what happened there and why it’s haunting your dreams. The opening chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the game, the house is in disrepair and between occupants currently, as you tap your cane you must navigate your surroundings finding clues explaining what happened between a pregnant woman and her doctor husband. You’re given snippets of story as you wander around, seeing ghostly memories play out scenes in front of you and reading letters and other things. The house for no apparent reason at first rearranges itself from room to room causing a mild inconvenience rather than something more sinister.

The reading element is all achieved through Cassie’s mobile phone with it’s text to speech app. This mechanic works to justify why everything in the world isn’t an audio recording. The problem is that this means you will many times in each chapter find yourself just waiting for some audio to finish before you can put down the bottle of pills and carry on with your journey. Later in the game I was horrendously stuck in a section where it turns out I was meant to return to a box that was locked and interact with it a second time, at this second interaction Cassie phones a service for blind people where they can send a picture to a fully sighted person and get the picture described. Mostly this is handed to you on a plate and this actually became a relative high point for me as the things you’re sending the poor man on the other end become more and more horrific including police corpses blocking drains in a flooded crawlspace.

Mostly the game just sees you walking from point A to B, interacting with something to read a horrific new detail of the chapter’s story and then move to point C. As I wandered around chapter 1 and chapter 2 I kept seeing places I could hide, I would sometimes just hop into the chest or cupboard to see what happens but at no point was I in danger, it took a couple of hours for me to hit the end of chapter 2 where I was finally shown that there was an entity in the house hunting me down. My understanding is this is down to how many times you tap your cane, if you go over board on it your just encouraging a creature to come and get you. With this not being explained at any point I was just trying to role play the game and not be an arse tapping away like a Morse Code enthusiast.

With its main crux of horror coming from the lack of vision I spent a large amount of time playing the game wondering why it wasn’t in VR. Keeping the real world player’s vision impaired as well as the characters would have done wonders to the immersion in the game. I know it’s uncouth to play backseat designer but the echo-location doesn’t seem like quite enough of a gimmick to push this game into people’s wish lists on Steam. Adding VR functionality could have made this something really special.

Perception is at its core a solid bit of fun. It owes a lot to Gone Home but doesn’t quite hit the same nuanced script or voice cast, instead you have a slightly confused story of a blind time traveler experiencing almost a horror anthology all set in the same house. Whether it’s over possessive doctor husbands or a lonely World War 2 woman or a somewhat mad scientist with evil gun-toting dolls you are bouncing from time to time experiencing what ‘the house’ has done to its residents. The game is clever in its portrayal of suffering with being blind. It’s frustrating to an unnerving level and not something you would wish upon anyone. Perception does a lot with a little, it wants to be up there with games like Gone Home, Firewatch and Amnesia, you’re merely a player in someone else’s story and unable to truly defend yourself. Does it reach those heady heights? No, unfortunately not, with some elements just not feeling polished enough and the game feeling like a chore in places it doesn’t stand on the shoulders of those giants. It does do a lot with a little though, it keeps you unnerved throughout with its constant dwindling of vision, its jump scares and a series of individual stories that will creep you out, I just wish it had that little something extra to push it into being great.

It was just over a year ago I finally got to get my hands on the full version of Super Hot once it hit consoles. Instantly I was in love, the game changed how I viewed FPS’ on a base level making me think of them more as a puzzle. I enter a room and dance from one partner to another picking them off in the most efficient way possible. Well Super Hot has yet again made a leap from PC to Console, this time in the form of Virtual Reality, out now on Sony’s PSVR.

It’s quite an obvious move in retrospect to bring Super Hot to VR, forcing the player to think even more about their own movement than in the original game, holding perfectly still whilst also trying to survey the scene. For the unaware Super Hot’s biggest sell is its time manipulation in a first person perspective. As the tag line says; ‘Time Only Moves When You Do’. In PSVR when you move your hands, controlled by the Move Controllers, you move time forward causing enemies, and their bullets to come closer to you. You must survey your surroundings, grab any weapons and react with as little movement as possible all the while making sure a rogue bullet isn’t going to clip you.

Each section features one area, be it an office type location, back alleys or an airport. Each time you’re plopped into an action scene already in progress and you must grab the weapon conveniently within reach and dispatch your red polygonal foes. Once cleared you move onto another part of the location generally within view of the chaos of your last scene of destruction. This is a neat way of getting around the lack of traversal in Super Hot VR, no longer are you running from one room to the next, instead you must react to each snippet in turn. The problem here is that if you fail the final part of 4 parts you must replay the first 3 again. Not the end of the world for a game that is so fun but the frustration does grow on some of the later levels where the difficulty ramps up to an amazing degree.

PSVR is limited in a number of ways, although a great piece of tech that’s affordable for many it does lack the graphical prowess of its PC brethren, thankfully Super Hot has maintained its sparse and crisp aesthetic from the previous game meaning that the lack of power in the PSVR is at no time noticeable. With its simplistic colour system, white = scenery, red = enemy and black = weapon you don’t need to be spending a long time working out whats going on as you’re dropped head first into an action filled moment.

As much as I love Super Hot VR it’s carried over a number of issues that were present in the first game. The main issue being that there always feels like a ‘correct answer’ to each scenario. I appreciate I can’t have it both ways and describe the game as a puzzle but also bemoan its linearity. But with its leaning towards action it feels at odds with itself when you must trial and error your way through certain missions. The other huge issue with Super Hot VR is the idea that your head is so much bigger than your vision. The first game suffered from this and now it’s in VR it’s even more noticeable. As you’re ducking down or leaning left to avoid an oncoming bullet and in reality it would have gone a foot wide of you it feels weird for it to count as a hit. Essentially you need to play assuming you have a head the size of a beach ball, which is obviously silly.

Finally there’s one key problem with this port of Superhot VR from PC. The tracking is some of the most troublesome I’ve had since owning a PSVR. Despite all other games I play being fine with my quite empty and quite sizeable living room Superhot VR on PSVR deems it too small at the most random of occasions, whether day or night my hands in-game will drift away from me, normally this would be an inconvenience in most games but as this glitch causes time to move and you to not have a weapon to defend yourself any more it is down right infuriating. This feels like something that should be fixable in a patch (coming from a non-developer) but the sheer number of times it happened to me makes me think this can’t be an issue just effecting me.

When a game is released in VR you often should ask yourself ‘should this be in VR?’. Super Hot VR adds something that the original game missed and that’s immersion. There’s no two ways about it, you feel like a badass leaning like Neo dodging bullets and whipping an ashtray in someone’s face to clear a level. It’s all a joy on many levels. From design to gameplay Super Hot VR knocks it out of the park. There seems some features missing from the original like the awesome real-time replay after completely a level and the story doesn’t seem quite the same gripping surrealist nightmare like the original. Niggles aside, Super Hot VR is a pleasure to play, making you feel like a god whilst being fun at the same time, there’s no doubt that this is a must buy for anyone with a PSVR and a key release in keeping the PSVR a viable bit of hardware.

Greek legends have always interested me. It’s like comic book lore but has some legitimacy behind it. You talk about the origins of Wolverine and people will judge you but you talk about the origins of Prometheus and you get a degree in Classics. It’s a rich well that media has dipped it’s toe into occasionally (see Disney and God of War) but really there is so much more to enjoy if you look past some of the more ‘silly’ bits.

Theseus especially is a fascinating tale about a son trying to prove his worth to a father who wants a strong manly man for a child, he sets challenges for Theseus that he flies through getting stronger each time. Due to a political assassination, people of Athens are being sent to Crete to be sacrificed to a Minotaur that lives in a labyrinth. After watching this play out for a few years Theseus decides he should go use his manly manliness to go off the minotaur and show off to everyone how ripped he is. It’s basically buff boy does good but with a bummer of an ending involving putting the wrong sail on his ship.

With VR still being in its infancy it’s getting harder and harder to know what standards are going to be set and where everything is going. A key part of this is working out when something is an ‘experience’ and when it is a ‘game’. I appreciate this is nitpicking and it really doesn’t matter as long as you’re having fun but at the same time it sets an expectation. With the incredibly vague trailers released before launch for Theseus no one knew what the game was, and it didn’t feel like it was in a ‘ooh ahh surprise’ way, it just seemed confused. And that’s what Theseus is to me, a product that confuses the player and itself. It’s a cat staring in the mirror not sure what it’s looking at and what impact it’s actually having as it takes a swipe.

Theseus is not the first 3rd person game to take a punt at VR, but at least it does something interesting with the camera. In each room you are poised to view the action from a corner like a voyeuristic security camera or something akin to a moving resident evil 1 perspective. From this vantage point you must guide Theseus through the labyrinth with the goal of defeating the minotaur. Along the way you must combat other inhabitants of the maze and navigate the ledges of the decrepit structure.

Unfortunately none of the above actually poses a threat at any point. This is why I suspect this is more experience than game, at no point does Theseus test you or push any requirement from the player other than to be there and to witness things. When you are introduced to combat you’ll miss the parts without. It’s a clunky affair with wonky animations that don’t flow and a general malaise to the whole affair, it’s something to get through, not something to pursue. Everything in this game takes a year to do, the pace is slow, there’s no two ways about it. You can’t help but zone out as you spend far too long just walking from one side of the room to another. All in all you’ll be lucky to get a couple of hours of gameplay out of this, it’s short. There are hidden elements to the game that lead to multiple endings but in a testament to my skill and potentially my interest I didn’t come across a single hidden element during my time with Theseus.

If you go into Theseus with the right mindset there is some interest to be had, the hints of story and atmosphere produced are wonderful. Every interaction with the Minotaur is great and makes for some tense experiences, but outside of these blips you are just playing a quite average 3rd person action game that is being shown on technology that it doesn’t require. The most impact the game had on me was through infuriating tracking issues that plagued my entire playthrough. Each room I went in my default position was to be facing the corner like I was simulating the end of Blair Witch Project. I played 75% of the game sat in my chair facing the opposite direction just so I could see some of the action going on. Graphically and in terms of sound Theseus is up there with the some of the best on PSVR, the attention to detail is awesome and the shininess of everything really works well to set the stage for the game, it’s just a shame that the level of care and attention that went into the presentation didn’t make it as far as the gameplay. As an ‘experience’ this product is really quite interesting and has some cool atmospheric moments, but as a game this is somewhat lacklustre and doesn’t reach the heights of a must own for PSVR.

I’m a sucker for local multiplayer games. There’s something about enjoying a cool moment with someone physically next to you, or goading someone who can see the venom in your eyes or finally swearing at the face of someone who may just be better than you. Nidhogg 2 is the epitome of this action, a game where in a brutal tug of war you must duel your way across a map to be the first to get eaten by your opponent’s giant worm.

In Nidhogg 2 you must traverse a number of screens with an infinite number of spawning opponents coming at you one at a time. Your opponent must kill you and then move momentum in the opposite direction. With jumps and rolls players can traverse the screens with relative ease except for the occasional trap like a fall to the death or a floor based meat grinder. With Nidhogg 2 the series has moved past its humble beginnings of rapiers for fencing and now has a small arsenal for the players to duel with. In one on one combat the two players can spawn with a rapier, broadsword, dagger, fists and bow and arrow. Each has its benefits and hindrances, the dagger is very short-range but if you take advantage of the weapon throwing feature it will go at a crazy pace. Alternatively the bow and arrow gives you the advantage of range but the opponent can reflect the arrow right back at you with a well-placed weapon. The new weapons are interesting, they give some variety to what could be a simple experience with the first game, the problem is that it doesn’t seem balanced yet. The bow and arrow gives the opponent so much time to react you may as well just whip the thing at their heads to at least disarm them, and yourself.

Nidhogg 2 on the face of it seems like a simple game, and it is, but like any good beat’em up there is depth if you go looking for it. Although yes you can just run past your opponent to start pushing screens over you may want to consider doing a dive kick first to knock a weapon out of their hands so that they can’t throw something whilst you run away (bravely), your opponent might then want to consider not chasing you as you’ll run at the same speed but instead running away (bravely) to cause themselves to respawn closer to you to get a quick kill in and change the momentum of the game. It’s easy to be fooled by the simplistic explanations of the game and the graphics to think this is just a throwaway experience but there are so many strategies and ideas at play in Nidhogg 2 that you can’t help but respect it.

There’s a myriad of rules you can turn on and off in Nidhogg 2 including the ability to remove certain weapons you are not a fan of. All of these can be enjoyable to play around with, especially if you’re looking for a bit of Nidhogg classic action. Whilst none of these rules are particularly ground-breaking I do highly recommend boomerang weapons as a real shakeup to what you would expect. There is player customisation, allowing you to pick colours and clothing for your character but to be honest you’ll be dead or sprinting 90% of the time so there isn’t too much point putting effort into this section of the game.

The first Nidhogg was an homage to 8-bit, a barebones pixel masterpiece that had fluid animation and action. You did your best to get across the map without your yellow or orange blood spraying out like a Lone Wolf and Cub film extra. When Nidhogg 2 was first announced there was a quite sizable backlash to the change in direction for animation. Gone was the sleek pixel 8-bit homage, and instead we now have almost 16-bit inspired work. For me personally I did prefer the original games style somewhat more but that is not to say that an evolution of the art hasn’t got some merits. The 10 stages offered in Nidhogg 2 are all featuring great design and artwork. Each stage is offering up something different for the players some are relatively flat affairs whilst others feature raised floating platforms or, my personal favourite, the forest stage with its tall grass you can crouch in causing no end of trouble for your opponent.

Nidhogg 2 is a large departure from the first game in many ways and it makes me wonder, if there is a next game, whether is going to be like another console generation jump taking us into the early areas of polygonal 3d games. The heavy bass soundtrack and the art work well, it’s crass and somewhat blunt in it’s presentation but that matches the new gameplay with players getting stamped on by an opponent with a mohawk and blood spewing out. The first game was sleek and like a ballet of slicing, Nidhogg 2 is more like a brick to the face. There is online multiplayer and tournament settings in Nidhogg 2 and all of those should be explored and used, but if you really want to enjoy Nidhogg 2 on a base level, get a friend over and sit next to each other on the couch, there is nothing purer or more fun than that.

I’ve always loved the concept of cyberpunk as a theme, between Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Dredd and games like Syndicate and Shadowrunner I’ve become obsessed with neon lights and wires hanging out of everything whilst rain pours down on a night-time street. Getting my fix of this genre is getting harder and harder though. Games dabble with it about once a year but never as deep as I would like it. It always just feels like a setting rather than a theme, platformers and niche simulators that could be set in any location just get dumped into Cyberpunk worlds so as to justify a soundtrack. Thankfully every so often a game like Observer comes along to scratch the deep itch so good that I’m already crying out for more.

Observer sees you take the role of Daniel Lazarski, a detective working for a corporation that basically runs the world. Set in 2084 Krakow, Lazarski is on the hunt for his estranged son who has been AWOL for a while until a phone call from him leads Lazarski to an apartment block on the wrong side of town. Upon finding an unidetifiable body in his son’s apartment he must work out where his son is and what trouble he has gotten into. On entering the less than salubrious apartment building a lockdown is triggered and shutters fall on all entrances and exits causing the inhabitants of the dive to fear another outbreak of the Neophage, a virus that has already wiped out many thousands of augmented people around the world. Just the mention of Augments in a game gets me off so Observer from the get go ticks many of my cyber punk boxes.

To progress with the case of the random dead body and your missing son you must explore every inch of the housing and speak to its inhabitants to find out what is going on. The vast majority of this is done through interacting with people’s vidcom units on their front doors. Rather than beautiful HD video chats you are instead presented unsettling close up flashes of the occupants face and static interrupts the chat. Some people are happy to talk to you and will drip feed you stories, others are upset to be pulled away from their futuristic escapist televisions. You are given snapshots of characters, from the person genuinely worried for the safety of their neighbours to others who are screaming at their children. There are basic interaction choices that normally boil down to Lazarski either being a dick of being not as much of a dick. It’s hard not to revel in the fact that Lazarski is voiced by Rutger Hauer, someone who’s career is pretty much defined by his role in Blade Runner. His voice will tremble your speakers as his deep baritone questions various people with perfect delivery.

Lazarski has a number of augments himself, as you walk into any room or corridor you are encouraged to switch on one of two special view modes he has, Electronic or Biological. With each you are presented the world in a red or green filter that highlights things of interest and when said things are scanned you get a deeper understanding of what has happened in this area. Although there is no combat in this game there is a real sense of unease about every single element. Despite knowing an apartment is empty you will still feel anxious as you explore it as the various buzzes of electronics and the heavy bass of the atmospheric soundtrack play out.

Observer’s biggest success is the design of its world. The Environments have so many little touches and beautiful design to them. It’s an old brick communist designed building as you would expect to see anywhere today, but inside, the parquet floor is covered in rubbish and the walls are lined with advertising screens and cables hang everywhere. TVs in the corners of hallways show flickering images and all of this comes together to produce an amazing thing, a fantasy world you believe.

As you move around the various locations in Observer you are sometimes required to break out Lazarski’s other augment, a jack he can rather ungracefully stab into people to see their memories and dreams. His living and dead hosts play out scenes to him in a nightmarish display of snapshots of life and false reality. The first victim you observe shows you his life up to that point, his crimes and his time in prison. As you wander through these memories you are also subjected to random crows flying at you and walkways made of glass in a world of black prisms that is just there to make the player more and more uneasy with each step. The industrial soundtrack comes into its own in these sections just cementing the world and its themes and style.

Observer is billed as a horror, and this is another one of those situations where you realise how subjective these genres are. The game thankfully doesn’t rely too heavily on jump scares and instead plays off drip feeding the concept of fear into the player through the unknown. An inhabitant of the a flat early on describes some weird sounds he heard the night before, later another mentions the sounds off handedly. It’s easy to start expecting something to happen from this and start letting your mind get away from you. The game becomes horror without the horror and more lets the player scare themselves with little touches like making doors open at the speed a player chooses to build the tension and unease. All of this is let down with a couple of insta-fail chase sequences later in the game but looking past that it maintains the tension throughout.

It’s hard not to see Bloober Team’s previous game Layers of Fear under the surface of Observer, there’s many similar mechanics at play and there are parts which feel more like an experience than game. But honestly I’m fine with that, as grim and as unforgiving the setting of 2084 Krakow is I just want to see every strewn soda can, every dangling wire and every static filled TV. Blade Runner is obviously the main inspiration here, but Observer stands on the shoulders of giants, it wears its inspirations on its sleeves and doesn’t shy away from using them. And this works to its credit, the world is familiar and distant all at once. It speaks of where we may be going as a civilisation locked away in our homes not wanting to leave virtual reality for reality and being afraid of every noise or news item. A corporation becoming a super power with espionage and manipulation is happening already. Every element of Observer speaks to a truth that we may not be dealing with now but the time is coming. If Cyberpunk doesn’t speak to you then Observer may be a tough sell, it’s a game where you walk around and open doors, pick up some stuff and then walk through another door. If you want you can read the perfectly detailed newspaper snippets on people’s computers or look at photos for further information on everything. To me though, this game’s world makes me want to experience more of it, there are some issues with pacing and set pieces later in the game but for something to digest and lose yourself to I find it harder to recommend a more immersive experience than Observer.